Mary Elizabeth Hancock. The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. xi + 277 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-35223-1.

Reviewed by Saloni Mathur (University of California - Los Angeles)
Published on H-Asia (May, 2009)
Commissioned by Sumit Guha (The University of Texas at Austin)

Preservation in South India

What does something as seemingly innocuous as a “heritage house” in Chennai have to do with the global economic processes of neoliberal capitalism? Mary Elizabeth Hancock’s recent book, The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai, offers a far-reaching set of responses to this question without forsaking the paradoxes and contradictions that makes this subject a difficult one. Hancock, a self-described “historically minded anthropologist,” does not view this relationship through the reductive lenses of economic determinism. Instead, she connects the phenomenon of a heritage house to the patterns of rural-urban migration, which left such houses vacant in the first place; to the desire to re-signify them as part of a South Indian national past; and to tourism’s gendered labor pool, or, more precisely, the educated, underemployed young women who tend to work in such heritage houses. In other words, Hancock’s analysis of the vexed subject of heritage mobilizes multiple economies of knowledge, industry, and cultural memory in the service of our understanding. “This polysemy,” she states, “as it is mediated spatially and in narrative, is my point of departure” (p. 15). The result is a fascinating account of Chennai’s fashioning of itself into a “heritage-conscious cityscape,” involving historical districts, museums, parks, historic houses, and memorials to the past, in part to create a recognizable brand as a destination for investment and travel (p.12). For Hancock, these public memory sites and spaces reveal the entanglements of India’s contradictory desires, goals, and images at this crucial juncture of economic globalization.

Hancock’s book is full of ethnographic vignettes that also ground her theoretical abstractions in the concrete, lived experiences of Chennai, a megacity of almost five million people, and its surrounding areas. The book opens, for example, by recalling the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, and the painful coincidence that Hancock had just finished writing about Chennai’s Marina Beach memorials when the force of the wave crashed down on those very sites. Although the subject is “cultural heritage,” the term, for Hancock, glosses a wide “array of objects, knowledges and practices” that can in turn be monumental, historicist, nostalgic, or commercial and leisurely (p. 83). Historical consciousness in Chennai has taken two primary forms, she argues: Dravidianism or Tamil cultural nationalism, but these are increasingly joined by the proliferation of dalit history, Hindu nationalism, and good old colonial nostalgia. In this way, the book represents a refreshing turn away from a conventional art historical treatment, with its tendency to valorize the cultural object, and toward an understanding of how and why a given object comes to be valued. This is not a study that offers a history of the present, but a study about “how histories are made and made effective in social and cultural life” (p. 16, emphasis in original). Drawing unapologetically from visual studies, museum studies, development and urban planning, oral histories, architectural history, colonial/postcolonial studies, and macro structural approaches, the book explores “the making of the past ... in the present conjuncture of neoliberal globalization” and the “state’s institutional investments in spaces of public memory” (pp. 2, 3). At times, the multiplicity of different discourses and literatures is difficult for the reader to assimilate, and a degree of repetition is one result. However, this courageous interdisciplinarity is also one of the great strengths of the book, which is overall, in my opinion, a major contribution to an underexamined field.

The chapters explore different kinds of heritage sites, beginning with Chennai’s urban core and proceeding outward, much like the business of urbanization and sprawl that has transformed the cultural landscape under study. Part 1 looks at the urban center, and part 2 examines what the South Indian literary scholar A. K. Ramanujan called the “rurban” landscape, a recurrent trope in Tamil literature referring to urban centers that are “continuous with the countryside” and that have expanded significantly as a result of the economic restructuring of the 1990s (p. 13). Hancock adds to these spatial parameters the temporal coordinates, from “Madras to Chennai,” indicating the different identities and territorial imaginaries that the 1996 name change from “Madras” (the colonial port established by the East India Company) to “Chennai” (the vernacular form linked to nationalist agendas) entailed. Her interest in the role of “statecraft” in the activities of heritage, and the forms of what she calls the “curatorial state,” defined by its apparatus for “extracting, cataloguing, and displaying the past,” is a thread that runs through the entire analysis (p. 22). Here, Hancock’s debt to the work of another “historically minded anthropologist,” Bernard Cohn, is clear; but her application of such categories to the twenty-first century also raises another question: what is the relationship between “statecraft” and “stagecraft,” for instance, defined elsewhere as the British claim to Madras as a “stage to accommodate and mediate European modernity” (p. 34)? Her response in chapter 2  is to present the longue duree through a series of historical snapshots, beginning in 1639 and ending in 1996, which are intended to represent different discursive moments in the city’s career of self-representation. However, there are a great many steps from the precolonial to the neoliberal, and her attempt to “chart the major developments and turning points” in Chennai’s formation in a single chapter runs up against the perhaps inescapable hazards of reduction inherent in the snapshot approach (p. 55). 

The chapters that follow, by contrast, are more substantive, and reflect a Geertzian “thick description” of specific case studies. Here we encounter a diverse range of concrete heritage practices, from a day-long bus tour of ancient Pallava sites, to the devotional logic of the MGR Memorial (commemorating M. G. Ramachandran, the former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu and film star who is revered throughout the region), to the colonial taxonomies of the Government Museum of Madras, founded by the British in the 1890s. Later chapters add to the complexity of this picture by including the phenomenon of preserving temples as cultural heritage, usually spearheaded by private associations in collaboration with the state. Temple conservation in India today is shot through with the politics of Hindutva, as Hancock notes, but it is also not reducible to it. After navigating a complex minefield of concerns in relation to the conservation of Chennai’s Marundeswarar Temple in the 1990s by the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), Hancock argues for a view of the discourse around temples and heritage as “a particular unfolding of the secular imaginary, with its ragged edges and irresolvable contradictions” (p. 118). 

Another chapter investigates tourism’s cultural economies, attending to tour guides, travel agents, curators, and the phenomenon of “pilgrimage tours” and architectural heritage tours within the wider context of the branding of Chennai as “the gateway to South India.” Here, and elsewhere, I found Hancock’s attention to the bureaucracies of heritage in India (like INTACH or the Indian Tourism Development Corporation [ITDC]) particularly instructive, because they are, in spite of their relatively short existence, somewhat invisible and normalized into the landscape. Similarly, her chapter on the Dakshina Chitra museological complex advances our understanding of the repackaging of “craft” in significant ways, in part because she traces Dakshina Chitra’s own origins in 1997 to the same forces--deregulation, privatization, and decentralization--at work in the transformation of the Chennai-Mamallapuram corridor where this museum-cum-craft heritage complex is located (p. 152). Although Dakshina Chitra denounces the term “museum,” the site operates, in Hancock’s view, according to the taxonomic logic of the collection through its mix of vernacular architectural structures, exhibition galleries, and indoor/outdoor performance spaces. But Hancock turns her eye on its entire environment of visual immersion environment, including videos, Web sites, and other visual technologies that mediate the visitor’s experience, as well as its business operations. Significant here is her sharp analysis of Dakshina Chitra’s trendy gift shop, situated as part of the wider professionalization of approaches to handicraft sales and marketing, and part of Dakshina Chitra’s explicit goal of expanding the participation of rural artisans in a neoliberal economy. Tellingly, the center’s educational director was hired by the Taj Group to operate the craft shop at its central Chennai property, an emblem of what Hancock memorably refers to as “swadeshi [culturally national] chic” (p. 168). In the end, the “pros” of a cultural space like Dakshina Chitra (secularist, historicist, interventionist, and innovative) are weighed against the cons (authenticating, authoritative, sanitizing, and “rural real”) to create an uneven ethical terrain for Hancock.

The final chapter sustains this ethical imperative, and the discomfort that comes with a lack of resolution, by turning to alternative forms of cultural memory on the social and physical margins of Chennai, in the village of Kuthambakkam, a so-called model village featuring an experimental mixed-caste housing project. Here, Hancock asks: “how do these renderings of the past compare to other templates for heritage,” such as Dakshina Chitra or other such projects (p. 182)? She links, in other words, the issues of culture and heritage to questions of dalit political mobilization, and “how pastness may be harnessed to the cultivation of political voice” (p. 202). Hancock ends, therefore, on the big picture problem of the relationship of conservation and heritage to the poor and marginal constituencies of modern India, a dynamic that she identifies elegantly as the “dialectical relations between heritage projects and capitalism’s creative destruction” (p. 206).

It has now been almost twenty years since Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge first ventured that “museums are good to think” at the beginning of India’s neoliberal turn.[1] To my mind, Hancock’s book represents the fullest exploration of the meaning of such a critical project, one that both updates and raises the intellectual bar considerably. But the neoliberal present is of course a moving target, almost impossible to pin down as it continually unfolds. By keeping its eye on systemic processes and paradoxes, and blending theoretical acumen with solid research, this book is nevertheless a formidable effort at comprehending the industries of cultural heritage in India as they confront and negotiate our contemporary world.

Note

[1]. Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, "Museums Are Good to Think: Heritage on View in India," in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, ed. Ivan Karp (Washington DC: The Smithsonian Press, 1992).

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Citation: Saloni Mathur. Review of Hancock, Mary Elizabeth, The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai. H-Asia, H-Net Reviews. May, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24615

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