This book was born from a simple but urgent observation: in contemporary India, the past is everywhere, and it is anything but quiet.
It blares from political podiums and election manifestos. It flickers across cinema screens and smartphone displays. It fuels billion-dollar tourism campaigns and galvanizes social movements. It is invoked in courtrooms over disputed land and whispered in homes where grandmothers teach fading recipes to distracted grandchildren. Heritage—that complex weave of what we choose to remember, preserve, and celebrate from yesterday—has erupted from the archives and archaeology departments to become a central, and often contentious, force in our public life.
Heritage in Modern India: Memory, Materiality, and the Politics of the Past is an attempt to map this turbulent and fascinating terrain. It is written from the conviction that to understand India today—its politics, its culture wars, its aspirations, and its anxieties—we must grapple with how it engages with its own history. This is not a book only for historians, architects, or conservationists. It is for anyone curious about the forces shaping our national identity, our cities, our environment, and our conversations with each other.
The journey through these pages moves from the theoretical to the tangible, from the ancient to the digital, from state policy to kitchen-table knowledge. We begin by unpacking the very idea of “heritage,” revealing it not as a neutral inheritance but as a deliberate process of selection, shaped by power and perspective. We then explore its twin manifestations: the monumental, those stone-and-mortar testaments that dominate our skylines and history textbooks, and the intangible, the living traditions of craft, cuisine, performance, and ritual that animate everyday life.
The book’s core argument is that these two realms are inextricably linked and are undergoing a profound transformation. Globalization, technology, and mass media have thrown open the gates of heritage, democratizing it in exhilarating ways while also unleashing new forms of commodification and conflict. Simultaneously, long-marginalized communities—Dalits, Adivasis, women, religious minorities—are forcefully asserting their right to their own pasts, challenging the monolithic narratives that have dominated for too long. Heritage is no longer a settled canon; it is a lively, often raucous, debate.