IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section A

Abstract

South Asia has historically been a complex theatre of political upheavals, with its long history of foreign invasions, regime shifts and several partitions. Among other things, this has resulted in the co-existence of diverse ethno-religious creeds, their cultural mores being manifest in the consecration of ritualised places of worship. In the realm of Cultural Studies, such places are in themselves a rich tapestry of heritage sites, with tangible multicultural implications. While heritage sites like Muinuddin Chisti’s mausoleum in Ajmer exemplify syncretic community life, others like the Somnath Temple in Gujarat have witnessed repeated acts of vandalism in the Middle Ages. Such animosity is hardly explainable only as religious intolerance; it is rather the intangible aspects of such heritage spaces, the defiling of which connotes the hegemonising of power structures that matters. In more recent times, the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, India; the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan; or Hindu temples in Pakistan and Bangladesh decry an overt principle of ‘competitive sharing’ (Hayden et al., 2016) that ruptures the body politic of nations based on religious contestations. While destruction is a nuanced act with multiple ramifications for nation states; the appropriation and reuse of such heritage sites subvert their original significations, thereby interrogating definitions of multiculturalism and national identity. This paper will attempt to study the ambivalence that surrounds the dyad of multicultural heritage and religious contestations in contemporary South Asia, and the ways in which it gives rise to conflictual national identities.