What makes a place 'qualify' as heritage in the first place?

In the last column we looked at what heritage conservation is and why it has an important role to play in society but what makes a place qualify as ‘heritage’ in the first place? Or rather why are only certain sites or places given the tag of ‘heritage’? How did we decide any one place was better than the other and hence worthy of conservation? On what basis did we make this choice? Choice of any sort automatically implies that some sort of selection was made and what helps us make this selection is the concept of ‘value’ and ‘significance’.

The term ‘value’ has different shades of meaning but we can take it to mean a particular positive characteristic or quality of a place, one that makes the place desirable. In turn this place becomes significant if this desirable quality or value is considered important.

For example Cubbon Park. It was originally laid out to separate the Old city of Bangalore or Pettah to its south from the newly developed Cantonment to its north and was planned in a particular manner such that public buildings like the Archaeological Museum and Attara Kutcheri would surround the central parkland. Moreover, these buildings were not randomly scattered around the park but laid out on a planned axis along an avenue of trees in order to enhance the visual impact. Thus while the park may be valuable today as a large green open space it is significant not just because it is a large park but because it played an important role in Bangalore’s history and is representative of a particular kind of planning.

However the idea of significance of cultural sites is not a recent one, especially in the West. As far back as the Classical age, Roman architects, thinkers and philosophers were taking care to preserve and study the remains of Greek buildings in order to understand the principles behind them. In fact, by the 17th century in England the idea of a ‘Grand Tour’, i.e. A visit to places of antiquity like Italy and Greece to study the remains there, took firm root and became a compulsory part of a gentleman’s education. It was believed that no gentleman’s education was complete unless he had made such a tour!

In contrast, India has generally had a more casual attitude towards history and heritage excepting those few structures that were intended to be commemorative or celebratory, like the Taj Mahal or Vidhana Soudha. These are ‘intentional monuments’ so to speak. i.e. they were consciously built in order to make a statement (be it of everlasting love or power) and with the idea that they would last forever!

In fact, Alois Riegl, an Austrian theorist, suggested just such a measurement of value in the early 20th century. He said that ‘monuments’ could be of two types, the intentional ones with commemorative value and the unintentional ones, which become important over time and use. The American archaeologist Lipe (1974) built on Rigel’s work and suggested that all cultural sites and resources could be assigned four basic values,

Associative - ability of the site to serve as a tangible link to the past i.e. The value a community places on its past for whatever reason whether as a reminder of a person, an event, a place … Taking an example from Bangalore we can say that the four Kempegowda towers are significant through a process of association. While it may be debatable if the present towers are the original structures and also whether they were intended to be city boundary markers in the first place, over time the powerful idea of a visionary ruler with the forethought to erect four towers to define the limit of a city took hold and thus the towers became significant and worthy of conservation and not because they are a unique and fantastic piece of architecture (The towers are protected monuments).

Informational - as a source of information about the past, i.e. research value. Can the site teach us something about the past? Ways of life? Systems of construction? Materials used? For example large sites like Hampi can give us an idea of how historical cities were planned, ways of life during the Vijayanagar times while small ones like Tipu’s Armoury in City Market. Bangalore can tell us something about the importance given to defence at that time. It gives us an idea of the need for an arsenal store and the kind of construction systems available at that time to build such a structure.

Aesthetic - appealing to the aesthetic sense of the observer, this is highly subjective and is also influenced by the observer’s culture. It is never truer for this category than that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. However, as we are attracted to beautiful things by nature, this category is still considered.

Finally economic – defined as utilitarian value i.e. does the site have the potential to be used? Can it attract tourists? Can it be re-used in some way? The previous three are more abstract concepts while economic is as practical as it gets.

Most of today’s protected monuments and sites were assigned values (and hence significance) which evolved out of Lipe’s categories above, thus gradually transforming them into ‘heritage’. However, is any one category of value more important than the others such that it takes precedence in deciding the site is worthy of conservation? Lets look into this next.