What does Heritage mean for tourism? How much are the two joined together, one enabling the other? Has the energy been explored enough to tap into each other’s might? In this conversation, we have Sanjeev Sanyal, Member, PM’s Economic Affairs Policy Council and author, historian; Aman Nath, hotelier, historian and chairman, Neemrana Hotels; Shruti Poddar, conservationist, founder, Ramgarh Foundation; moderating the discussion is Kishore Singh, critic, art historian and author.
Kishore Singh: What constitutes heritage. What does heritage mean? We’ve seen the word tossed around in some of the earlier sessions today. We’ve used the terms heritage, culture, sometimes interchangeably, etc. But from each of you, I’d like very quick responses in terms of trying to understand what heritage actually means and translates into.
Shruti Poddar: From my understanding, heritage is all that comes to us from the past, very simply. Today, we might have a narrow understanding of it as built heritage, things that we see, old monuments, et cetera, but if we go deeper, it’s not just that, it’s also not just the arts, not just dance and music, but also the social order of the past, how people coexisted together, the writings, the languages that we are losing, the scripts that we are losing. There’s a whole lot of knowledge, which I would call heritage, which is being lost because when we define heritage in institutions, in government, in the past, there hasn’t been enough attention to that which created what we built. Our technologies, building technologies, so many technologies of the past, so many sciences of the past, they’re all heritage. Also, how we live together, our value systems, the way of speaking, the way of addressing people, what comes from the past is very quickly being replaced by modern ideas, imported from the West. So, a lot comes into heritage.
Kishore Singh: And a lot doesn’t, actually, because that is an argumentative space. I’m going to jump in very quickly on that. Not everything that comes in from the past is necessarily heritage. We do need to make a difference. Not everything. I mean a house that my great-grandfather might have owned, let’s say in a village in Rajasthan, may qualify as a property that was created at a certain point of time representing a certain age and period, but does it necessarily mean the heritage, etc., that we are talking about, in terms of whether material or built heritage. Sanjeev, would you also like to give us a sense of what heritage is defined as?
Sanjeev Sanyal: So, I will agree and disagree. So obviously what we consider heritage is what we inherited. So, it can be built spaces, it can be soft cultural things, it can also be natural landscapes by the way. First of all, not everything we inherited is worth or even possible to keep, to conserve or even meaningfully to do so. And I am a big believer, although I write books on history and a big enthusiast for conservation and so on, I do believe that we also need to embrace modernity and we can’t be sentimental about the past. In any case, we have a very limited agenda here. We are not, this is not a culture ministry discussion, this is a tourism-oriented discussion. So, what does heritage mean in the context, in the narrow context of tourism. And in here, let’s be clear, tourism is ultimately an economic and commercial activity. What is the role that we have for heritage here? Not in terms of any other reason, social or sentimental reason we have, just from pure law, let me say that in this context the most important thing that matters is storytelling. And in a sense, these buildings, the culture, the soft culture, are backdrops and props to that storytelling as part of a product we create to sell to whoever it is that we are selling this to. So let me say one thing here, it is very important to be conscious of this point about storytelling.
One of the problems is that we have come a long way by the way in the last 20-30 years in terms of at least thinking about our heritage. We are doing a much better job than we used to, we are much more enthusiastic about for example our religious rituals and so on than maybe a generation ago used to be. But in the narrow context of tourism let me say, we need to sell this and be conscious of selling a storyline. In order to illustrate my point, let me show how we do it badly, then you will understand. Now, Rajasthan is all about forts and palaces, that’s the storyline we are selling. It’s about a story of honour and sort of indomitable spirit of fighting against foreign invasions and so on. That’s the storyline you are trying to sell. But you actually go to the palaces in Rajasthan, one of the things you will find along the walls you will see very proudly displayed photographs of former Maharajas hanging out with the princes in shikar. I am sorry, it completely kills the storyline. After having lectured everybody about Maharana Pratap and his spirit, the actual photographs you have on the wall is how you actually bent your knee. You see, so therefore it is very important to understand the story that we are selling. Never mind that here I am not getting into the historicity of it.
Purely storytelling needs to be understood by us because a lot of that storytelling has to be modernized and told in a different way. If you go to Aman’s properties, his properties which are actually modern to a large extent are actually doing the storytelling. So we need to be, for the purposes of tourism, since we are not here, this is not the place to have a discussion about the historical or cultural authenticity of it, but about the experience that let me say that we need to be much more conscious about the storytelling.
Kishore Singh: I am going to ask you over there, you are saying that our stories need to be told by people who are creating these experiences from a certain heritage perspective.
Sanjeev Sanyal: No, first of all we need to be conscious that this is what we do. That is what I wanted to ask. We are not even conscious that we are storytelling.
Kishore Singh: Are we all required to be storytellers to understand our own heritage?
Sanjeev Sanyal: Not everybody, if you happen to be a pilot in an aircraft, that’s also part of your supply chain of your tourism industry, but the pilot doesn’t have to be conscious. But the people here who are probably got a significant number who are, running hotels and those, there has to be at least some part of the tourism industry that is consciously storytelling.
Kishore Singh: As consumers of heritage, should we also not participate in the activity?
Sanjeev Sanyal: Yes, you are. You participate in it. Participating doesn’t preclude you from storytelling. In fact, that is what allows the storytelling. But I am just telling you there has to be some consciousness about it. Today we are not conscious as to what the product is.
Kishore Singh: Aman, first thoughts?
Aman Nath: I agree totally with what you’ve said. I think that even a pilot should be involved in the storytelling. If you’re flying over Kumbhalgarh and he says to you, the Great Wall of China comes first, but here is the second Great Wall in the world.
It creates a desire for you to visit Kumbhalgarh. So, I think the whole of India can be involved in storytelling. And we are a ready-made set. Wherever you drop somebody, you know, if Fellini made a film, he had to, get to circus and get to this. I think if you look at Raghu Rai’s pictures, or if you go to Benaras, go to Old Delhi, you set up a camera anywhere for 24 hours, and if you edit it, there’s a ready-made film. India is a continuous film, where the medieval and modern coexist. They’re telling stories, they’re talking about how we coexist. So, we have to make people conscious.
But the problem, I think, is that because we are colonized people, we’re aspirationally still wrong, which is unfortunate. Because when we were children, which is one generation before you, we had complexes. When we met an American student at the American school, we used to think they were special. They had better cars. They had better clothes. They had old Levi’s jeans or whatever. But during our lifetime, we’ve dealt with it. And we became equal. But we didn’t feel in any way inferior to them because we speak better English than the Americans, we think in a different way and so on. So, once we have got through with it, what bothers me if you want to say is that the younger generation is going aspirationally wrong.
They are still aspiring to be the people who colonized us. Whereas it’s been established by people like you, and so many others, if you’re interested in reading, learning, even from the WhatsApp University, discounting some of its rubbish. How much we learn of our culture, our superiority, our strength, that the youth should be talking about it and talking to the world in a language where they come to us, looking, saying, wow, they are coming.
Sanjeev Sanyal: Let me defend those who are now in their teens and the twenties, they are hungry for the storytelling. We are not giving them enough.
Kishore Singh: I would agree to a huge extent. We are not telling great stories, we are not great storytellers, but I also believe, I think a point was made in the last session that school children who are taken into museums, etc., for example, are told, don’t look left, don’t look right, don’t touch anything, don’t speak, etc. That is our consumption of our heritage and culture, unfortunately. It’s an institutional correction that we have to put into place.
Aman Nath: Let’s take one example, the Mona Lisa. Let’s say that none of us had heard about the whole story about the theft of the painting, the this, the that, the legend, the price, all that. And it was hanging here just with other portraits. Nobody would look at it. Nobody would look at it. She’s a very ordinary 16th century roly poly sort of woman. She’s not chiseled, sexy, or anything that you can’t get your eyes off. But you’ve got queues of people, Japanese, Indians, everybody’s waiting to get to that point to make a picture. It’s only storytelling. So, you made such a myth about something, somebody attacked it and they put a non-bulletproof thing about it, so the more it enters the public domain, the more people want to see it.
Kishore Singh: Our institutions have some brilliant art, the National Gallery of Modern Art, which I visit so often, there’s outstanding art over there and I can venture that very many people do not from the tourism industry actually come across. If we make it central activity, you know, like the French, they make such a big thing about it. Their policy is that if you bring in French art to France, you know, they welcome it here.
Sanjeev Sanyal: I mean Michelin Star restaurants is a great example of storytelling. I’ve rarely eaten such bad food. But I mean, easily Rajinder Dhaba beats every Michelin star I’ve eaten in. But the hoo-ha about it, a large plate with a small pea on it. I mean, it’s just incredible.
Aman Nath: It’s the emperor’s new clothes actually, you know, we are supposed to fall in line and say, God, you don’t know this, you don’t know that.
Shruti Poddar: Just talking about storytelling, agreeing with him, Ramgarh Shekhawati, that entire region which I’ve taken up twelve years ago, nobody knew about that town. And I had an exhibition called Ramgarh Shekhawati Past, Present and Future. It was the first time that the Rajasthan government heard about that town.
Aman Nath: No, no, that’s not true. I went there in 1977, I wrote a book but the Rajasthan government was saying, “wahan toh kuch hai nahi, wahan toh kya dekhenge log”. I took so many people to Ramgarh myself.
Shruti Poddar: I’m making a different point. What I’m saying is when I went 12 years ago, most people had heard, when we spoke about Shekhawati, it meant Mandawa or Navalgarh and so on. Today, only, I’m just talking about storytelling. So of course, the veteran, Aman, we have all learned from him. But it was only storytelling and not about forts, but about wall paintings, about the herbs.
Sanjeev Sanyal: Look, you can market anything with a good story and yet our best stories are not even told. By the way, if you go to Haldighati, which has got probably one of the best stories of resistance anywhere on the planet. You go over there is actually, the government has put a two-lane highway through the Ghati. Now you can therefore no longer make out what it was about the Haldighati that made it such a choke point any longer and this is crazy, right? And we do this repeatedly over and over again, that’s what the point is because we are not conscious of the fact that we are telling a story. It’s not about getting fast to the other side
Kishore Singh: So well, our neighborhoods here in this very city, which is, I mean, it’s been compared with Rome for the number of monuments, et cetera, perhaps very many more than Rome, et cetera, that we have here, are getting swallowed up by neighborhoods. They’re being encroached on. Again, is that because we lack a sense of history, a sense of heritage?
Shruti Poddar: So I’ll begin with me. For the first time I went there, it was 50 degrees centigrade, 12 years ago. And when I went there, I was living in the UK at that time, but when I went there, the kind of heritage I saw there, the kind of wall paintings and the intensity within two kilometers of wall paintings, I have never seen such a thing in the entire world. This town, which had the highest per capita income in the world, which had such an intensity of heritage and art, was completely unknown and ignored. And so, I took it upon myself as a tourist first, but also as a stakeholder who wanted to find a land of heritage.
Aman Nath: Let’s discuss what I’m saying is that when people come there now, many people have visited it. What is it that one thing when they say, wow, we’ve never seen this before. We experienced it. Yeah, because I talked about it as an open-air art gallery. And if you look at Pompeii and the frescoes, you know the statistics of Shekhawati that will interest you. Shekhawati is one seventh of Rajasthan. It is roughly the size of the valley of the Loire in France. And the valley of the Loire alone gets more tourists than the whole of India. I mean, that tells the whole story in itself.
Shruti Poddar: In a cluster of two kilometers, we have 100 havelis with wall paintings on the walls and inside the havelis and on their ceilings, secret rooms, rang mahals and a kilometer across you have a forest with the second highest population of chinkara deer in the country. Within the city we have a living rasayan shala, so perfect place for wellness tourism. All these things attract a person to Shekhawati.
Kishore Singh: Fair enough, I think we know particularities of places etc. some that have been discovered, some that are being discovered, some that ASI is simply keeping under mounds and cloaks etc. because it doesn’t have the wherewithal to support anything. How does, because we cannot expect other than regulation, the government to do anything, how does the private sector, one, take care of this kind of built heritage? The other, which matters greatly to me, is the sense of material heritage that none of us talk about. And material heritage can be anything from memories to objects to, of course, textiles, food, music, dance, performances. We, I mean, again, it’s been talked about. We go into Vienna and we will go and attend a Mozart concert.
We will see a Broadway show in New York. We will likely go to an Opera in Paris, et cetera. But we don’t have a single music theatre when we come to a city like Delhi or Bombay, anywhere. Where is all of this? We know that there is a dynamic spirit, that there are institutions, music is alive, dance is alive, all of this is happening. But why is it not being integrated in any sense into the tourism experience? And who is responsible for putting this together?
Aman Nath: I think it’s beginning now. I think this government is making you very conscious of it. And different generations are getting interested.
Shruti Poddar: So we have ourselves integrated it. Because when I went to Shekhawati, I realized after a year or so that the low-lying fruit was tourism. So, I immediately contacted the government. I started hospitality, though I was not a hospitality person, because that’s a requisite for tourism.
So I bought a haveli, built a hotel. Then I said, how do I get the world here? S,o I started a festival there in 2016, now we are on to our 10th year. Even during COVID, I didn’t stop the festival. So and it showcases the built heritage, it showcases the music, not just from Rajasthan but from all over India, it showcases dance, it showcases theatre, it showcases everything.
Aman Nath: You know, we’re talking of France as the world leader in tourism. Do you know which year it was when André Malraux said, let’s make Paris, the sitting room of the world? 1959. We are today becoming conscious of that, but it’s never too late and because when India puts his energy together, we are infinitely brighter have so many ideas. So I think you have to value the people who do the work, you know, people who are, rather than invent a government person who will go and do that thing, there are so many people doing extraordinary things, the government has to pinpoint, empower them.
Sanjeev Sanyal: No, no, government doesn’t have to do this. I am against government intervention.
Kishore Singh: But it has to create the regulatory framework.
Sanjeev Sanyal: No it doesn’t. Some general regulatory framework which it has done. Please do not divert their attention to these kinds of things. I am telling you why, because this is not a problem by the way only in tourism. India for some great reason, we still have this socialist idea which we still love.
Kishore Singh: No, not asking for the government to solve. I am not saying that at all.
Aman Nath: I said there are people doing fantastic work in many fields, you know somebody should fund them, give them status, position.
Sanjeev Sanyal: Let the private sector do it. Why do you need to give them position? I am against this. In every sector, nothing to do with tourism only. Once the direction of the conversation goes here, it leads to we need to have some sort of a national board and we must put some good retired IAS officer to run it. You got to be kidding me. I mean, absolutely, the person who couldn’t do anything till 60 suddenly becomes competent after 60.
Kishore Singh: And I think we have examples of that. Mehrangarh Fort in Rajasthan is run far better than a government facility.
Sanjeev Sanyal: By definition. By definition, if we did find that great, talented retired IAS officer, we need him for RBI governorship, SEBI, all kinds of things. You won’t get it for the tourism board.
Kishore Singh: I think the idea is we need regulatory frameworks and then the private sector has to take over everywhere.
Shruti Poddar: So my question here is, I’m absolutely in agreement with him, it is us the private sector who have taken up all these initiatives and we are doing it with private funding and sponsorship but when our tourists come and if we go on and on and on with the nagar palika and they don’t clean the drains in front of our havelis, they put the kuda daan in front of our havelis…
Sanjeev Sanyal: No, no, so we are a democracy, you can figure that out and force them. But you see the reason we end up here is you invite them in. You invite them in by doing the following thing, let us, somehow the culture must be promoted, this festival must be promoted. No, culture and festivals do not need to be promoted by the government, they are not capable of running these things. Certainly not in this country, probably not even in the world.
Kishore Singh: Some of our greatest festivals are actually privately handled. They are being done very well. And that’s absolutely fine.
Sanjeev Sanyal: First of all, I have an ideological problem with the government involved in anything other than basic administration. Let’s as a people force them to do basic administration. My problem is, this conversation will start here, in two steps you will all be demanding a tourist board for this country, New South Wales you found one which works very well. This is a very slippery slope. I am just pointing this out to you because all these conversations end up here. This is not just for tourism, this is civil aviation, they will have the same conversation in textiles, and very quickly everybody loves Ashoka the Great. But the most important thing to remember about Ashoka the Great is that the Mauryan Empire collapsed under him.
Kishore Singh: Aman, I am going to come into you to ask. We have talked about various components of what we understand to be culture and heritage etc. We see that the tourism platform in India takes cognizance more of the built heritage rather than the rest of our material heritage. What is it that we need to do to get their attention into our world of crafts, handicrafts, textiles, food, music, performances, etc.?
Aman Nath: So let’s take the Jaipur Literary Festival. This was an idea which, between private sector and government, which is a great combination incidentally. Both people, even at one moment, come together. There was Himachal Som and there was, Anokhi and Namita and all this. So they asked 50 authors to come to Ashok Hotel to do a fantastic program called At Home in the World, it was about Indian writers writing in English and they said that about 80% of them refused to come. So they were very surprised, so we met them and we said, I think they didn’t want to come to the Ashok Hotel.
For that same reason, it’s a kind of block, you know, the same old, so let’s do it at Neemrana. And then we had a problem because we had 50 rooms and 50 authors said yes. So, it’s triggered that off and they realized what they were sitting on and it had to grow and they said, let’s call it the Jaipur Neemrana Festival so that we started at Neemrana because people will come from Delhi, take it to Jaipur and bring it back.
But the idea became so big it became the world’s biggest festival. So, I think in every field, in dance, there’s a Khajuraho festival, which is government sponsored, but if one passionate person comes into it, or a group of passionate people all over India, then I think India will take off.
Kishore Singh:I totally agree, and I think a lot of that strength has to come from within India. It’s the India and the Indians who need to actually first buy into and consume these products. I think that moment has come. The world will follow.
Aman Nath: The follow up of this is that we recall that we are a great nation. We’re not that fallen nation which everybody walked over. And internationally also, now we’ve overtaken the economy of England and the colonizing nations. So, we don’t have to be embarrassed or ashamed of anything. Our airports are better than the whole world.
Kishore Singh: Sanjeev, I will ask you, in terms of, let’s say, a lot of our architecture, etc., the scope of looking at, for example, step wells, etc., etc., falls between the center, the state, the Archaeological Survey of India. But if we want to see a revival of a step well to actually show how it functioned and how it can in today’s environment actually be used and become useful, etc. Who becomes that custodian?
Sanjeev Sanyal: So obviously there is a bunch of things that will be in the national monuments. Now there obviously the government has to be a part of that because they own it. And there the archaeological survey, I am not a great fan of it as you know. First of all, we need to be clear what is it that we want to preserve. I have written extensively on what I am going to talk about. We first of all need to change our list of national monuments and it is true of the states as well but national monuments. We have 3695 national monuments. Let me tell you a little bit about them. All of these monuments were either inherited from the colonial government or from the princely states. We have added no more than a couple of dozen of them after independence. I actually on the request of the Honorable Prime Minister did a review of the national monuments. You will be amused to know that there are several dozen that the ASI has lost, they don’t even know where they are. Of the others there are several hundred that are random graves of colonial era officials, I am not talking about Victoria Memorial or something major, these are PWD engineers in Nagaland and stuff like that. By the way a non-monument, there was a statue to a East India Company brigadier who sacked Delhi in Kashmiri Gate which was a national monument and in the 1960s that statue was sent off to his village in Ireland, the guy’s name is John Nicholson. That empty space continued to be a national monument. I got it removed last year in July. Is this the Nicholson Cemetery? No, the cemetery is also a national monument, but his missing statue is also a national monument. That cemetery also I am getting it removed. So, first of all we need to be clear what we want to preserve, that is why I made that point. The state can pay attention to a few things and do a good job of it. Even in that, because they tend to be very large monuments, the government should just focus on the really most important.
Aman Nath: But there is good news from your government because the UP government and the MP government, they have delisted many of the state monuments and they put them to tender and we are now beginning work on the fort of Jhansi for instance.
Sanjeev Sanyal: So that is what I was going to come to, that the very biggest monuments I think may be Taj Mahal cannot be privatized, but there is plenty that we can be privatized. And in addition to that there is plenty of stuff that is generally lying around. Government does not own the bulk of the heritage of the country, is not in government hands even though the big monuments are. For example, since we are talking about Shekhawati, Shekhawati as a whole place is scattered. Alsisar, my god the town of Alsisar is unbelievable, but only that main palace is beautiful, but the rest of the place is just falling apart. So really the private sector needs to get its act together.
Aman Nath: I have worked a lot on that, the problem is in Shekhawati, let’s say the Jhunjhunwala come
from Alsisar. One haveli belongs to 140 people, so nobody can take charge of it and if they have a meeting, there is a rich Jhunjhunwala, there is a poor Jhunjhunwala, the rich one says I will buy you, he says who are you to buy me, so it just gets into the mess that it is.
Shruti Poddar: But let me tell you, Jhunjhunwala’s have restored their havelis. Things have changed in the last 10 years. A lot of private initiative is coming in, not just for reviving the havelis and building hotels, but also CSR for reviving the Johars, you know, the other monuments, et cetera. What I do think, and which is again happening now, is that we have sensitized the culture ministry. They are thinking of airports in Shekhawati which is missing. A lot of people want to come but they don’t want to drive four hours from Jaipur. So we have to look at that kind of infrastructure to encourage.
Aman Nath: In 1980 it was about to happen that there was going to be an airport in Jhunjhunu.
Shruti Poddar: Now it’s happening now.
Kishore Singh: So one last question for all of you. If there was just one initiative in terms of heritage that you would propose to the world of tourism in India, what would it be?
Shruti Poddar: I would encourage every person living in a metro to come back to the grassroots and see what was left behind and see if they want to do something with it.
Sanjeev Sanyal: Every state in India has an amazing story, in fact every district will have an amazing story. A few parts of India have finally begun to do some story telling. I gave the example of Rajasthan, even though I was criticizing the fact of the matter, they have at least begun to tell some story. If you are thinking about really spectacular forts, actually the spectacular forts in India are not in Rajasthan. They are far more spectacular forts in Madhya Pradesh and perhaps the most spectacular in Maharashtra. These sea forts, Shivaji Sea forts are unbelievable. So, you know there are other states that begin to tell the story and telling the story is not just about having some vague pride in the matter. I mean, Maharashtra is very, very proud of Shivaji, but the condition of the Maratha forts is abysmal. Similarly, Bengalis are quite rightly very proud of their culture, but the old terracotta temples of Bengal, except for one or two places, they are all rotting. This business of storytelling has to be taken very seriously across the country.
Aman Nath: I think the word district is very important because how many districts are there in India? I think that if every district had one project which was taken over by private sector to demonstrate how an element or feature can become a centre. What we do, we’ve done 32 projects in 18 states, which is a lot for individuals to do against the current. But we do it, and then it becomes demonstrative, and more and more and more people do it. So I think that it has to be done on a much bigger scale so that we can make something out of nothing all over India.
Every backyard we have something. So, I think pride in ourselves and waking up dead places, putting life into them for mainstream revenue earners, for seeing that people don’t migrate from villages to the cities and all the plus points that you can when you develop small places in India.
Kishore Singh: So yes, grassroots; storytelling, initiative, again, with a sense of ownership. I think there we have some talking points emerging from this session.
