This lecture was delivered at the Idea of Belonging Conference in Coimbatore on 5, 6 October, 2024

As a trained historian, I have spent my life working in the heritage field while continuing to write books on history. When I was in school, heritage was not a significant part of the curriculum. Today, however, it has become an essential aspect of education. While working with The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), I have observed that schools not only have heritage clubs now but also incorporate heritage discussions into various subjects. In some cases, the term is even overused.

Heritage is often discussed at an esoteric level––separated into tangible and intangible heritage. This includes a wide range of things: old buildings, craft traditions, folk medicines, rituals, customs, performing arts etc. Therefore, the field of heritage is quite wide but at the same time it is vaguely defined.

This brings us to an important question: What is Indian heritage? How do we study it? The India we conceptualize today is the modern nation defined by our Constitution. Logically then we should be studying the history and heritage of all lands and people who are subsumed within the boundaries of what we understand as India today. If ‘Indian’ heritage encompasses all of this, there is a lot of complexity in what constitutes heritage. Indian history after all is not singular, rather comprises different regions, languages and different kinds of people coming together; it is an accident of history, or rather a process of long historical development that today we exist as India and form part of its heritage. Those who study history realize this––what we understand as India is a consequence of so many different events of the past; we did not always exist as one nation.

To privilege any particular Indianness then becomes very ahistorical. For example, people often think of certain texts like the Vedas and Puranas when talking of ‘Indian’ heritage. They seldom consider animistic beliefs of tribal peoples as ‘Indian’ heritage. Do we really take into account the whole diversity of people and regions when defining our heritage? We also tend to think of the ancient past as the real, most authentic source of our heritage. In the process we forget that the history of every period in our collective pasts is what has made us what we are today as a nation. We should not privilege the ancient past.

I will look at some of the components we study when we discuss heritage. One of those things is built heritage like monuments. The study of monuments and their heritage is highly organized and institutionalized––the Archaeological Survey of India, different state departments of archaeology––bring the protection of monuments under their purview. This falls under tangible heritage––you can see it, you can feel it, it is easy to quantify. We have monuments from different eras of history and that makes it easy for us to appreciate what has been passed down to us as our heritage.

Often when we look at monuments, an element of bias clouds us––monuments only tell us about a very narrow class of people of our past like powerful rulers, rich and influential merchants who may have commissioned temples, mosques and palaces. If we only read that as heritage then we are missing out on large parts of our past. I speak from my experience in Delhi, a city whose heritage I am very familiar with. When we look at historic neighbourhoods––ones not that ancient but lived-in neighbourhoods––they are very tangible and provide rare insight into how people live, adapt to space at different points in time and how some of these ways of life have been passed on to the populations living there as components of a living heritage.

Shahjahanabad, which is popularly known as ‘Old Delhi’, is one of these historic neighbourhoods. It was built in the seventeenth century. Much of its layout and many of its buildings still survive from the Mughal period. It has very narrow lanes because at the time people did not use motorized transport; people got around on foot and having a small, compact city with no wide roads created a city where people could go from one place to another easily. When we go to Shahjahanabad now, many people get the impression that it is congested because they see these narrow lanes and houses built close together. We must remember however that there is no gap between the houses but there is open space––in the courtyards inside or on the terraces. Often residents communicate with neighbours across the terraces. You also find that in front of each house there are little seats where people can sit and talk. These were and are spaces of interaction. So, when you enter a place like Shahjahanabad––and I am sure there are comparable cities and towns––you can see that the layout of the city promotes a particular style of living where you interact with your neighbours closely, where streets are not simply conduits for traffic, but also a shared public space.

Shahjahanabad is an example of how certain kinds of street plans and certain kinds of houses foster distinct ways of life. They prompt us also to think of what lessons we can learn from them. Are our modern flats designed so that we shut ourselves in with very little interaction with the outdoors? Does our neighbourhood have sufficient public spaces where we can interact with our neighbours? Is our neighbourhood walkable? Heritage neighbourhoods can perhaps help us design for better ways of life in the future too. if you have heritage neighborhoods in your city, it is a good idea to go and try and study them to understand what they tell us about our heritage and different ways of living.

Another important aspect is food heritage. I do not specialize in this but would like to mention it in passing. We can always assume there is a lot of diversity i.e. there is no one Indian way of eating or a singular ‘Indian’ food heritage. We take so many things for granted as Indian––potatoes, chillies, tomatoes. They never entered our cuisine till the fifteenth or the sixteenth century! Tea drinking became really popular in the 1930s, not earlier. Can you imagine what people would consume before that? In North India, people would consume milk beverages, sharbat and other drinks. Coffee was an elite drink in North India. Only the rich would drink it because it was imported. It began to be grown in South India in the seventeenth century. Coffee-drinking thus was an older and a more elite practice than tea-drinking.

The British began planting tea in India to benefit their trade and began to export tea planted in India. However, when the Great Depression happened in 1929 and had massive ramifications on the international tea market in the 1930s, the British set up the tea board to sell tea to Indians. Hence tea-drinking became popular in India. Newspaper advertisements would popularize how to drink tea, when to drink tea, that it was fashionable to drink tea. Sales people would go from village to village distributing tea, teaching villagers how to brew tea and tea-drinking boomed. Can you imagine that something we take for granted like chai was part of such an elaborate history!

We adopt new things then adapt them. I live in Delhi, a city where the momo, a Tibetan dumpling, has become the most popular street food. Throughout culture, we have been open to new ideas and adopted different practices from those who visited or settled in our country. Take for example the Indian samosa which was adapted from the Central Asian one or even grilled meats, to which we added different spices to make kebabs.

This process of adoption and adaptation continues. In Delhi we have a substantial Afghan community. Many who left their homes in the last few years fled Afghanistan under difficult circumstances. They have made Delhi their home. They brought their cuisine along with them and now there are Afghan restaurants in Delhi. Delhiites enjoy Afghan food. So, our heritage is something that is taking shape even now.

Crafts are another part of our heritage. However, often crafts are presented in a limited way, focusing on esoteric aspects such as their intricacy, beauty and age. This is what is emphasized in a state’s cultural heritage website. The emphasis is usually on how ancient a craft is, reinforcing the idea that older is better, while newer crafts receive little recognition. What often gets overlooked is the people behind these traditions—the artisans, their livelihoods and their histories as transmitters of the craft––these rarely take center stage in discussions on heritage.

Moreover, as certain craft traditions decline, much of the discourse revolves around lamenting the younger generation’s reluctance to continue them. Why do we expect them to keep carrying on the same craft? The solutions proposed tend to focus on rekindling their interest rather than addressing the broader socio-economic factors influencing this shift. What does craft education look like today? We respect the final finished material of the process––the woven textile––but do we look at how that knowledge is transmitted? Is there at all an institutionalized method of transmitting that craft? Do we respect craft education? If I were to learn a craft, is there an institution I could go to? These are aspects we need to look at more closely.

There is a long tradition of Ikat-weaving in different parts of India––from Gujarat in the west to Odisha in the east. In the Ikat-weaving process, the yarn is dyed before it is woven. The warp is the long part of the cloth and the weft are the cross-threads. Weaving happens with interlacing a set of long threads with short threads. Because the yard is dyed beforehand, the pattern emerges after they have been woven together.

This is a very complex method of patterning cloth. Though Ikat is an important craft in India, it is also practiced in various parts of the world, including Central Asia, Uzbekistan etc. Similar craft traditions can also be found in Southeast Asia, South America and regions like Siam. Teaching Ikat as a craft tradition that is not simply limited to the social location of India can open up so many frontiers of interactions, whilst also appreciating a part of Indian heritage.

Another example of intangible heritage includes performative traditions and language. We have mother tongues but the sheer diversity of languages in India is such that we may not share the same mother tongue even in this room. Most of us are bilingual and in this room we are linked through English. English is today very much an Indian language too. English is a link-language in India and a language that dominates higher education and administration. The reason why English assumed such a position was because of our history of colonialism. However, English was not the first such link-language. Our history tells us that link-languages were required before colonialism too. The link-language before English was Farsi (Persian). Before English, Farsi was the language of administration, higher education and culture in many parts of India. Very few people could call Farsi their mother tongue, just like few people can call English their mother tongue. The elite in many parts of India once used Farsi to communicate across regions and to carry our administrations. Interestingly, a number of ‘Hindu’ religious texts in the eighteenth century were also written in Farsi.

When Farsi was replaced by English, we stopped using it for administrative purposes and then it stopped being taught. You would ask, ‘But what good is Farsi now? It won’t help secure a job or open avenues in higher education like English does.’ But it is part of our heritage. As a historian I understand that if we do not make an effort to learn Farsi, a large part of our history would remain inaccessible to us.

We fail to realize how important Farsi is to many modern languages we speak in India today. I can personally attest to at least two of the languages which I am conversant in have taken much of their vocabulary from Farsi. One of these is Urdu. This language developed in the Delhi region and contained words not only from Farsi, but Punjabi, Turki, etc. Its base however was rooted in the region. Interestingly, what we today see as ‘Hindi’ was not separate from Urdu till well into the nineteenth century. But that is another story. Bangla (Bengali) is the other language I know which has much of its basic vocabulary borrowed from Farsi; and in fact this is the case with several other modern Indian languages. This is because Farsi was the link-language at the time these languages were developing into their modern forms.

Our histories are very complex and they have played an important role in shaping what we understand as heritage today. These were some thoughts on how we teach heritage and how we can encourage the study of Indian heritage as a living practice––studying performance traditions, food heritage or crafts. Often people ask, ‘How ancient is the tradition?’ I would answer that it does not really matter how ancient a tradition is; to me, it is important to ensure that the stories of people who have been underrepresented within our societies are incorporated in our teaching of heritage. And therefore, it is very important not to privilege a singular nationalist Indian narrative of a tradition that has purportedly come down to us in an unbroken fashion. There is in fact no one tradition; there are plural traditions that have continuously been evolving at many different levels. There are many little traditions––small areas, small communities of people whose histories should be an integral portion of what we teach and study as heritage.

Question and Answer Session

Audience Member 1: You mentioned how the Vedas and the Puranas are texts privileged over others. However, when we speak about that time period, it is important to realize that for ancient India, we have no other contemporary literary work besides these texts. The Vedas were composed around 5000 years ago and comprise the sole literary records; the Indus Valley seals remain undeciphered.

Swapna Liddle: From the point of view of the study of history, they are very important but when we study heritage, we are looking at the present and those aspects which we think were in our past and influence what we are today. Texts like the Puranas and Vedas have little impact on the diversity that makes us who we are today. I am not discounting their historical importance.

Audience Member 2: You claimed that earlier there was no geographical entity like India. but the Puranas clearly demarcate India––the land south of the Himalayas, north of the rivers; from where the Indus river flows in the west to the Brahmaputra in the east. So ma'am, they have given a clear geographical demarcation of our country, mentioning Ravana's Lanka and differentiating between the north and south.

SL: There are many books by historians that discuss this issue in depth and many debates exist among historians on the subject. I was in Bhubaneswar a few days ago where I came across an ancient inscription called the Kharavela inscription. Kings those days advertised their contributions through the prashasti (inscription). The inscription mentions how King Kharavela of the Kalinga kingdom sent armies to conquer ‘Bhartavarsha’—an area in the north and therefore outside Kalinga, which is in modern Odisha. When we talk about land, there are so many different overlapping geographies. Asia and Europe are geographically understood as continental entities but they don't have much impact on national boundaries.

Audience Member 3: We have different versions of the Ramayana in different languages––Tamil Ramayana, Valmiki’s Ramayana, Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas––so didn’t everybody have some sense of the Ramayana? 

You said that Farsi should be an essential tongue and that those who love history must learn Farsi. Similarly, we should also learn Sanskrit, which is the most ancient language.

SL: The percolation of the Ramayana is about the spreading of a Brahmanical culture that happened over time but the existence of many Ramayanas doesn't mean that everybody participates in its re-writing. The people who talk about these epics themselves appreciate how local cultures often percolate into them. There is a lot more diversity than one can fathom.

Sanskrit carried its stories wherever it was spread but that's true of every other linguistic culture. Wherever Persian spread, certain kinds of Persianate imagery and tales were part of its linguistic inheritance. Wherever English spread in the nineteenth century in India, the tales of Shakespeare also spread. It is just that we did not attribute any religious quality to Shakespearean text.

Sanskrit is within the school education curriculum and is studied by many in India. On the other hand, only historians of medieval India study Farsi. We have lost one particular language, which would have told us a lot about our modern Indian languages.

Audience Member 4: My great-grandfather was a British collector officer and I learned from my father that he used to write Farsi in the Kaithi script but Farsi had its own script. Why did the British records have Kaithi as their script?

SL: Many of these administrative decisions were influenced by the locals; the British were only a handful compared to their subjects. The bureaucracy was manned extensively by Indians and local practices developed depending on that. It is not just the case for the British but also for the Mughals––it was convenient for people from different language backgrounds to continue to learn Farsi as a common idiom.

Audience Member 5: You mentioned how much of the food touted as Indian cuisine, actually is the result of foreign contact and assimilation of recipes of other cultures that have been adapted to become ‘Indian.’ Is there anything consumed today that may truly be called Indian then? Secondly, you mentioned how Farsi slowly disappeared from India. Latin, mainly used for the sciences, too gradually disappeared. Do you think English may gradually disappear too? 

SL: The food that we eat today has come from many different places and one should not get too hung up on what was originally Indian food. Of course from the point of view of history it is interesting to study what were eating habits of different people in different parts of the country in different periods

About the tenure of the English language––those who understand geopolitics a little better than me would be able to speculate about that. We may conjecture that today we live in a world where English has become so dominant that we cannot contemplate it disappearing altogether.

Audience Member 6: India is home to one of the oldest civilizations and there were several empires and several rulers of our country. After Partition in particular, we lost so much––even heritage. How do we decide how much heritage has been lost during the period in which we don't know about?

SL: Over time, we lose many things. When we deal with heritage, we concentrate on things that have come down to us. For instance, when I started talking about Farsi I was referring to its importance in understanding our past. Not everyone has to read Farsi first-hand. As long as historians are reading Farsi and understanding the past, that is good enough. But at least we should be appreciative of the fact that many modern languages have Farsi in them.

We lose things over time. I don't think we should blame it on things like the Partition. History comprises migrations, wars and conquests and the writing of history is affected when these events occur. There is so much that goes into the making of a culture or of a civilization, as you refer to it. You might say that us speaking English today somehow makes us less Indian. What is our solution? Do we bring back Sanskrit as a language of communication? Is that practical? And why can't we say that English is as much our language as anybody else’s; we get to decide how we speak it, how it develops and we are not beholden to anybody else to tell us what English is. It is changing and that is a part of history. A lot of things get lost on the way but it just depends on you, what you think is important to retrieve.

Audience Member 7: How do pandemics and wars affect the heritage of a country or the world? And with social media trends constantly evolving, how do they impact our heritage?

Swapna: Heritage evolves slowly over time but events like wars can have a profound and immediate impact. For example, the Second World War significantly reshaped global history, including redrawing national boundaries. In its aftermath, the British Empire disintegrated, leading to the independence of many countries — India being one of them.

On a more direct level, conflicts can lead to the physical destruction of heritage. In Afghanistan, for instance, the Bamiyan Buddhas—representing the region’s Buddhist past—were destroyed because they were deemed un-Islamic. Acts like these are not just about destruction; they’re attempts to erase diverse historical narratives. When built heritage is demolished, it’s a way of denying that a particular culture or history ever existed.

This kind of political erasure has serious implications for how heritage is preserved, represented and remembered. What we’re witnessing today in places like Israel and Gaza is another example—there are ongoing efforts to rewrite or suppress the histories and identities of the people living there.

Audience Member 8: India is considered one of the oldest civilizations, with the Indus Valley Civilization dating back around 2700 years. When the Greeks and later the Europeans arrived, they named the country ‘India’ based on the Indus Valley Civilization. Recently, in September 2024, Port Blair was renamed Sri Vijaya Puram to remove the colonial blemish. In the same vein, do you think India should be renamed Bharat?

SL: Claiming that India is the oldest is questionable—there are many ancient civilizations like the Sumerian, Egyptian and others. I think we shouldn’t get too hung up on antiquity. If you look at the world as a whole, we’re not the oldest civilization.

More importantly, I’m personally not in favour of renaming places because names are part of our history. Let me give you a simple example from Delhi. There is a small locality called Hauz Rani. A while ago, someone sent a letter to the government proposing that certain names of Persian origin be changed. Many places in Delhi do have Persian names and Hauz Rani was one of those suggested for renaming. But I said—if you change the name of Hauz Rani, you lose something valuable. We may not know exactly who it was named after but the locality played a role during the Indian freedom movement. A major satyagraha took place in the village of Hauz Rani and that moment is part of its historical identity. It’s a small village otherwise with no other particularly notable historical significance. But this association with Satyagraha is documented in official government records. If the name is changed, future generations may not even realize that such an important movement happened there.

Names carry the memory of these associations. They preserve the continuity of history. Yes, our past is complex and fractured but calling our country ‘India’ doesn’t diminish the fact that we are an independent nation, capable of defining our own identity, present and future.

Audience Member 9: As a Carnatic music enthusiast, I cannot understand why people associate classical music with the ancient past and popular music with the modern present. Why is it that Bollywood music has come to shape India, while classical music has been left behind and not afforded the respect it deserves. Why do many members of society feel alienated from classical music––I was the first person in my family to learn classical music. Why does this lapse exist? Why isn’t there enough interest in classical music?

SL: Firstly, I must admit that I know little about music, largely due to my own ignorance. However, I can make two points: Firstly, I disagree that there is a lack of respect. In fact, I think there is a theoretical level of respect. The lapse lies in the connection we feel towards classical music. Has classical music become a fossilized reminder of the past or has it continued to evolve? Is it meaningful to people’s concerns today? Are there people working towards making it meaningful? A tradition is respected only when it keeps itself relevant to the people. That is when more people would engage with it and practice it. Popular music is relevant and a lot of people can actually understand it unlike classical music. Only a few people could access classical music and this was by design.

Audience Member 10: There was a reason why only a small number of people historically had access to Sanskrit, religious texts in the Hindu tradition and classical art forms.

Speaking from personal experience, I’m a girl from a Muslim background who wanted to learn Bharatanatyam. But my teacher treated me poorly because she believed I shouldn’t be learning it—that Bharatanatyam was reserved for a specific heritage, for the upper castes alone. This experience made me question: what other heritages can I access? Why am I privileging one kind of heritage over my own? Why didn’t I learn Mappila paattu when I was younger? Why did I gravitate towards Bharatanatyam?

There seems to be a hierarchy where certain art forms are considered more worthy of being taught and preserved. We create ‘traditions’ out of them, while the ones passed down by our own ancestors are often given less importance. So, the question of heritage isn’t just about culture—it’s also about who gets to decide which traditions matter more.

Audience Member 11: There are so many epics, like the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Are they true stories that actually happened or were they told mainly to preserve and pass on culture and heritage to future generations?

Swapna: That’s a complex debate and perhaps beyond the scope of this discussion. But what we do know is that these were creative works, written in specific historical contexts. Over time, they were adopted and adapted by those in power—such as rulers—who used them to reinforce their own authority, sometimes even to assert divinity.

So yes, they are historical in the sense that they were composed in the past but they were primarily imaginative and literary texts to begin with.

Audience Member 12: Whenever we talk about heritage, we often do a lot of research and explore various historical sources online. In doing so, we notice a recurring tendency to compare one part of heritage against another. As you mentioned—whether it's Urdu versus Hindi, or Farsi versus Sanskrit—there's a persistent push to pit one narrative against another. This discourse also tends to remain focused on North India.

For instance, we often see the Mughal Empire being compared to ancient Indian empires, primarily because we’re still following the historical framework introduced by the British. According to that model, the ancient period is Hindu, the medieval period is Muslim and the modern era, under British rule, is portrayed as having brought prosperity and modernity to India.

This reductive division persists when we try to contrast Mughal heritage, like the Qutub Minar, with Hindu sites. In doing so, we overlook the vast and diverse heritage across the subcontinent. For example, during the 12th century, there were powerful dynasties like the Cholas, Hoysalas, and Kakatiyas. Even in the medieval period, there was the Vijayanagara Empire, ruled by Hindus.

It feels like we're overly fixated on the history of Delhi and its surrounding regions, ignoring the rich heritage of other parts of the country from the same period. We don’t need to go all the way back to ancient times to compare heritage with that of the Mughals—there were contemporary Hindu kingdoms as well.

Do you think this preoccupation exists? And should the education system focus more on teaching the regional histories of different areas, instead of centering mostly on the North?

SL: The British devised this Hindu, Muslim, British framework because they had an agenda––to project themselves as those who brought ‘modernity’ to India and freed the people from the ‘dark’ ages of ‘tyrannical’ rule.

I think we are very hung up on empires. We have this idea of India based on the map of India today and project those impressions on the past. When one starts studying empires and privileges the ones which cover most of what we understand as India today––like the Mughals whose territories spanned from the north to the Deccan––we privilege certain larger empires over more regional histories. Since many of these empires had Delhi as their capital or focal point, it also lends a bias towards North India.