Barun Roy: Whose heritage?

ASIA FILE

The Sun Temple in Konark is dying, thanks to large-scale encroachments and land invasions.

I shouldn't have revisited Konark, that too on the day of the Chandrabhaga festival. I had gone to Puri (another disaster, with shanty shops eating up the beaches) after a lapse of 45 years and thought it would be a good idea to go to Konark again to relive memories of an earlier visit four and a half decades ago.

The experience was shattering. Forty-five years ago, a group of us had spent the night at the then forlorn temple, sleeping in the only accommodation that was available "" the thatched shanty of a lonely tea vendor. Early next morning we had trudged through a dense forest of casuarinas to the beach, which was wide, bare, raw and beautiful. Back in the temple, there was nobody to distract us as we savoured the beauty of the awesome 13th century edifice and its wonderful reliefs and sculptures.

Forty-five years later, the forest of casuarinas was all but gone, exposing the temple even more to the corroding wind from the sea. A highway passes within half a mile of it. From the road, the temple looked lost behind a wall of ad hoc, new construction. Shops stood shoulder-to-shoulder lining the temple approach and selling crudely crafted souvenirs, plastic toys, snacks, soft drinks and bottled water "" the typical approach to places of pilgrimage that one is so used to see in India. I emerged from it only to be engulfed by a swirling sea of humanity. The Chandrabhaga celebrants were everywhere, in the temple courtyard and all around it. They swarmed and milled and burnt fires to cook and left their litter all over the place. Some brought glass bangles and stuff like that to sell. It was a pitiable sight, to say the least.

Time, I fully understand, couldn't possibly have stood where it was 45 years ago, even in India where things move so slowly that they don't appear to move at all. Development has to take place, to be sure. Jungles have to be cleared, roads have to be built, shopping has to exist, and houses have to be constructed. But we are talking here of a monument of great national importance, one that Unesco has acknowledged as a world heritage. Is this the way to treat something that's part of our cultural history and pride, abusing its sanctity, bringing it down to the level of the ordinary, and reducing the whole thing to a joke? There was nothing like a buffer zone at Konark that's a must for any heritage preservation, nor was there the scantiest regard for the role of setting that gives a heritage monument its physical, visual, spiritual, and cultural dignity "" skylines, sightlines, and distance from new public or private development that can enhance or ruin its look.

I didn't expect to see the famed Sun Temple reduced to a picnic ground. The highway needn't have been built so close to it. The casuarinas should have been preserved and, indeed, reinforced to ward off the corrosive wind. Shops should have been banned from its neighbourhood to give it the respect it deserves. I can well imagine what happens during the weeklong annual Konark festivals, when special illuminations and flashy decorations transform the place into a fantasy, complete with all kinds of dancing, crafts fairs and gourmet food stalls representing the various Indian states.

That the Sun Temple is fragile is an accepted fact. Only two of the 22 temples that made up the original complex exist today and even these are not in the best of state. With the kind of invasion and encroachment that I saw on the day of the Chandrabhaga mela and that happens during the so-called annual tourism festivals, Konark isn't going to last much longer.

But who cares? Not the ministry of culture. Not the Archaeological Survey of India. We think dancing and music are the only ways to attract tourists and making a thing commonplace is to make it popular. To our pedestrian way of thinking, heritage has no special meaning. It's something ancient that just happens to exist in our midst and for which we can't be held accountable. Maybe that's why there are no more than 10,000 protected heritage properties to show for India "" unbelievable, for an ancient country like ours "" while even tiny UK has 500,000 such properties protected by law. There are over a million listed heritage sites in the US. China, ruled for almost as long by Communists as India has been independent, boasts some 70,000 protected cultural heritage sites. In Xian alone, there are 2,944 registered sites, of which 34 are national monuments, including the famous Tomb of Qin Shihnag, whose terracotta warriors and horses have been called the eighth wonder of the world.

If Konark ever was a wonder, we don't think it is any more.