Amna Mawaz Khan
Nations, imagined[1] as they may be, are engendered into reality by nationalism.[2] This ‘idee de force’[3] is built upon an invented tradition, writes Hugh Trevor-Roper in the book chapter, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland.”[4] Regarding economic history, Roper’s reference to the replacement of the “fantastic” pioneer by a more “pedestrian” entrepreneur resounds with nationalist discourse that turns to atavism and glorification of a golden age. In order for a collective identification with this notion to occur, we see the creation of a specific narrative that draws upon memorialization using specific cultural artefacts.
Memorializing the National
An early propagator of a modern society, Jean-Paul Rabaut de St. Etienne, was heavily inspired by the Church and called for an infallible means of transmitting, constantly and immediately, to all the French at once, the same uniform ideas.[5][6] Beyond framing the realm of the nation, is the added tier of “memorializing,” as Professor Juneja opines.
The process of memorializing, denotes the ways in which successive generations of people are held to share common representations—kollektives/kulturelles Gedächtnis— of the past that have been canonized by a range of places, media, and practices: museums; intellectual production; emblems; heritage sites; commemorative festivals; and individuals, real and mythical.[7]
“Narrations around nations”[8] are built, like that of a secular India and a Muslim Pakistan at the time of the traumatic Partition of 1947. Plural histories of a community, become a singular history of a nation, simultaneously intertwining with a mythical story – thereby forming ‘heritage.’
It is no wonder that the development of art history corresponded to that of nation-building, and became a sort of pedagogical tool to impart citizens the knowledge to interpret the meaning of the vast bodies of objects and images that were displayed and selected to form the identification of the nation state. A result of this was that ‘style’ and its categorization was linked to one geographical site.[9] Gandharan art, which as an example of pre modern, efficacious flow, is characterized by transculturality.[10] Nevertheless, the way it underwent different forms of interpretation by different actors with differing agency over time.
Claims of Various Types
The desire to build upon the Hellenist-influenced period while excavating and researching over Gandharan artefacts by “western” archaeologists[11] indicates to colonialism being rife with senescence. This normative attribution helped to stabilize and justify the implicit and often explicit features of colonial rule.
In a parallel but not unconnected vein, art critics of the time such as Ananda Coomaraswamy, gave voice to the claims for a more popular anti-colonial, elitist nationalist movement. His article, “The Indian Origin of the Buddha Image” identified the excavations at Mathura to be more ‘classical’ form of the Buddha image.[12]
As we see, the divide is much beyond mere emic and etic lines. Claims based on civilizational uniqueness, and subsequent identification with the nation is an entanglement of transcultural relationships. As Bracey suggests, there was no unified western consensus upon Gandharan art, and Coomaraswamy was more a part of the bohemian circle than flag-toting nationalist.
In post-independent Pakistan, Gandharan excavations – to name a few, Taxila, Manthal, Tilla Jogiyan, Takht-i-Bahi – constitute an uneasy national heritage status. It is key to note, that apart from these and sites of Mughal architecture, most other monuments revered by the state to be national heritage have been constructed after the formation of Pakistan.
In 2001, when the Taliban destroyed the 5th century Bamiyan Buddhas, the international community and associated media were extremely affected, bearing the glaring similar obsessiveness for icons among both iconoclasts and iconophiles.[13]
After switching scales, the positionality of the Bamiyan Buddhas within Hazara folklore is key to the self-identification of the living residents of the Bamiyan valley. A display of this can be found at the 20-year-commemoration of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. An organizer, Zahra Hussaini, states “…March 11th is the date when the Taliban destroyed not only the Buddhas of Bamiyan but also the civilization, history, art and culture of this land.”[14]
In the entanglement of heritage and nationalist discourse, it is clear to see that the nation is only one ‘imagined community’ among many other ways of asserting both exclusive and overlapping identities, through what Appadurai terms as mythologies[15], especially in the production and consumption of heritage. Cultural heritage has social, mental and material aspects, and is linked to the transcultural understanding of asymmetrical transfer, translation, exchange and hybridization.
As a social, mental and material construct, heritage in the postcolonial discourse acquired a new status after the 1972 UNESCO adoption of the Recommendation concerning the Protection at National Level, of the Cultural and Natural Heritage, whereby the recognition of “parts of the cultural or natural heritage (that) are of outstanding interest and therefore need to be preserved as part of the world heritage of mankind as a whole…”[16]
As Michael Falser suggests,
The strategies remain unchanged: mapping and cataloguing, listing, classifying and selecting, protecting and preserving, (over)restoring and reconstructing (to the point of destruction), reinventing or decontextualizing or both, enshrining and exhibiting, representing and promoting, commodifying and exploiting.[17]
We see that in the ‘handling’ of cultural heritage as a social and mental construct, there is a significant amount of manipulation in order to display its ‘representative’ character, using the help of material culture. The handlers, be they hegemonic international institutions, foreign and local colonizing powers, elite or subaltern actors clamoring for representation, rely upon laboratories of memory.[18] Thereby this epistemological isolation of specific material culture – whether in its physical construction, re-selection or even its destruction – evokes an emotional connection to a “shared” idea of belonging.
References:
[1] Benedict Andersen, Imagined Communities, (London & New York: Verso Books rev. and ext. ed, 2016)
[2] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism,(London: Basil Blackwell, 1983),55.
[3] Quote attributed to Hans Kohn, “The Idea of Nationalism” (1924) by Joachim Kurtz “Asserting Uniqueness – Nations and Nationalism in Asia and Europe” ((Introduction to Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, November 29, 2022)
[4] Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm & Terence O. Ranger (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15-41.
[5] Joachim Kurtz “Asserting Uniqueness – Nations and Nationalism in Asia and Europe” (Introduction to Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, November 29, 2022)
[6] Monica Juneja “How Nations Imagine Themselves — The Politics of Cultural Heritage” (Introduction to Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, November 29, 2022)
[7] Monica Juneja, “Architectural Memory between Representation and Practice: Rethinking Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire,” in Memory, History, and Colonialism Engaging with Pierre Nora in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts, ed. Indra Sengupta (London: German Historical Institute, 2009), 11
[8] Homi Bhabha, Introduction in “Nations and Narrations” ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge,1990) 1-7.
[9] Monica Juneja, “Beyond Influence — Conceptualizing Transcultural Visual Relationships,” (Introduction to Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, December 13, 2022)
[10] Ibid.
[11] Robert Bracey, “The Gandharan Problem” in Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity: Histories of Art and Religion from India to Ireland, ed. Jaś Elsner (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 27-50.
[12] Monica Juneja, “Beyond Influence — Conceptualizing Transcultural Visual Relationships,” (Introduction to Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, December 13, 2022)
[13] Monica Juneja, “Beyond Influence — Conceptualizing Transcultural Visual Relationships,” (Introduction to Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, December 13, 2022)
[14] South China Morning Post (@southchinamorningpost), “3D Bamiyan Buddha marks 20th anniversary of Taliban’s destruction in Afghanistan.” YouTube, March 11, 2021.
[15] Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities of Social Things , ed. Arjun Appadurai, (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 3-58
[16] “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage,” UNESCO World Heritage Convention, accessed 17 February, 2023.
[17] Michael Falser, “Cultural Heritage as Civilizing Mission: Methodological Considerations” in Cultural Heritage as Civilizing Mission: From Decay to Recovery, [Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Cultural Heritage and the Temples of Angkor (Chair of Global Art History, Heidelberg University, 8–10 May 2011)] ed. Michael Falser (Heidelberg: Springer International Publishing, 2015),1-21
[18] Monica Juneja, quoting Pierre Nora, “How Nations Imagine Themselves — The Politics of Cultural Heritage” (Introduction to Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, December 7, 2022)
