To preserve heritage is to participate in the future

On a March morning in 2001, Mullah Mohammad Omar's Taliban government in Kandahar dispatched dynamite, artillery, and aircraft ordnance to the Bamiyan Valley, 230 kilometres north-west of Kabul. Two standing Buddhas, carved in 507 and 554 CE into the sandstone cliffs of Hindu Kush, had survived 1,500 years of weather, Mongol invasion, and Soviet occupation. They did not survive 25 minutes of ideology. On the day the second Buddha fell, Pierre Lafrance, France's ambassador at large, said: 'It is not the statues we mourn; it is what we mourn ourselves becoming.' Three thousand kilometres east, on 19 June 2024, the Nalanda Mahavihara, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016, saw the inauguration of a revived Nalanda University on a 455-acre campus. Heritage is not the past clinging to us; it is us clinging to a coherent self. To preserve it is to plant memory for the unborn.

The case begins with civilisational continuity. India has 43 UNESCO World Heritage Sites as of 2024, the sixth-largest national tally; the Charaideo Moidams in Assam were inscribed in July 2024, joining the Hoysala temples (2023), the Dholavira Harappan city (2021), and the Jaipur walled city (2019). The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, set up in 2001 by CSIR and the Ministry of AYUSH, has documented 2.5 lakh Ayurvedic, Unani, Siddha, and Sowa-Rigpa formulations and has, as of 2024, succeeded in withdrawing 270 patent applications filed by foreign claimants over turmeric, neem, basmati, and ashwagandha. The Geographical Indications Registry has tagged 540 goods, from Banarasi Saree to Pochampally Ikat to Sohrai painting to Madhubani art. Each GI tag is a vote of confidence in the future of the past.

Heritage is also an economic engine, contributing approximately five per cent to India's GDP through tourism and cultural industries, according to Ministry of Tourism estimates. The PRASAD scheme, launched in 2015 to develop pilgrimage circuits, has covered Ayodhya, Varanasi, Madurai, Tirupati, and other sites. The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, inaugurated on 13 December 2021, restored the riverside grandeur of Banaras with linkage to the Ganga ghats. UNESCO's Creative Cities Network has added Gwalior as a City of Music (2023) and Kozhikode as a City of Literature (2023), joining Jaipur (Crafts and Folk Art, 2015), Varanasi (Music, 2015), Chennai (Music, 2017), Mumbai (Film, 2019), and Hyderabad (Gastronomy, 2019). The Adopt-a-Heritage Scheme has secured corporate funding for monument upkeep at sites like the Red Fort and Sun Temple, Konark.

The deepest case for heritage, however, is ecological. India's tribal communities have, for centuries, evolved agronomic systems that the Anthropocene now belatedly recognises. The Apatani agriculture of Ziro Valley in Arunachal Pradesh combines wet-rice and pisciculture without external inputs and was designated a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS) by the FAO in 2024. Goa's Khazan agriculture, a system of saline-tolerant rice cultivation in tidal estuaries, was nominated in 2023. Nagaland's Zabo system of integrated forestry-aquaculture-livestock has been a GIAHS since 2008. Meghalaya's sacred groves, the law kyntang, conserve over 75 biodiversity-rich forest patches under customary law. The Forest Rights Act of 2006 brought 23.2 lakh tribal households into the legal scaffolding of forest custodianship; over 22 lakh community rights have been recognised so far. Indigenous wisdom is not folklore; it is the operational manual for the climate-vulnerable century.

Heritage of language is the least visible but most fragile. UNESCO's Atlas of Endangered Languages lists 197 Indian languages as endangered, the highest of any country. The People's Linguistic Survey of India, coordinated by Ganesh Devy between 2010 and 2013, documented 780 living languages, of which 220 had become extinct in the preceding fifty years. The Bhasha Sangam initiative under Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat and the Three Language Formula of NEP 2020 are corrective steps. The Sahitya Akademi's translation programme and the National Translation Mission, since 2008, have begun building bridges across Indian literatures. Each Bhili, Bhojpuri, Konkani, Khasi, Tulu, or Gondi conversation preserved is a manuscript saved from the fire.

An honest essay must concede that heritage can ossify. Untouchability, jauhar, sati, child marriage, dowry, and devadasi exploitation were 'heritage' too. Raja Ram Mohan Roy's struggle culminated in Lord William Bentinck's Sati Regulation of 4 December 1829. Bhimrao Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste, drafted in 1936, indicted the very civilisational continuity that custodians celebrate. The Hindu Code Bills of the 1950s, the Special Marriage Act of 1954, the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act of 2006, and the Triple Talaq Act of 2019 are each a refusal of 'heritage' that imprisoned. Selective preservation is the discipline of choosing the heritage that liberates from the heritage that imprisons. Modernity itself, in this sense, is now part of India's heritage.

The future of heritage is therefore a politics, not a panegyric. The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act of 1958 has been amended to clarify the 100-metre prohibited zone, but enforcement is weak; over 50 protected monuments have gone missing from the ASI's inventory, as the CAG noted in 2022. The Antiquities and Art Treasures Act of 1972 needs digital teeth to combat trafficking; the 2024 return of 297 antiquities by the United States Government, including the Annapurna idol from Varanasi, is a beginning. The proposed Underwater Heritage Act, suggested by the Ministry of Culture in 2024 to protect submerged Dwarka, Kannur, and Tamil Nadu coast wrecks, awaits notification. Heritage budgets, at less than 0.4 per cent of central expenditure, remain symbolic.

Octavio Paz, who was Mexico's ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968, wrote in In Light of India: 'India is a museum where all artefacts are alive.' To curate that museum well is not nostalgia; it is statecraft. The visitor wants the tomb of Humayun standing on the day she arrives in Delhi; the Apatani farmer wants the right to terrace his ancestral field without bureaucratic harassment; the Sohrai woman of Hazaribagh wants her clay-wash pigment to remain hers; the unborn citizen of 2075 wants a country whose past is intelligible and whose languages are still alive. A nation that does not know its grandmother will not recognise its grandchildren. To preserve heritage rightly is to participate, knowingly, in the writing of the future. The chisel of memory is in our hands; what the next century looks like depends on what we choose to keep, what we choose to repair, and what we, at last, choose to outgrow.