Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2002, volume 20, pages 693 ^ 717

DOI:10.1068/d343

Subjects of heritage in urban southern India

Mary Hancock
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3210, USA;
e-mail: hancock@anth.ucsb.edu
Received 22 June 2001; in revised form 21 Feburary 2002

Abstract. In this paper I deal with a recent effort, conducted jointly by corporate and voluntary
bodies, to create a themed cultural environment in Chennai (formerly Madras), the capital city of
the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. This project, not yet completed, fuses craft center with
architectural reconstruction, and is the work of upper-caste, globally connected elites. The site,
Dakshina Chitra, envisions southern Indian culture and history in ways that are tied to consumerism
and to elite perceptions of regional and national heritage. This effort departs from and poses a
critique of the versions of culture, history, and identity that have been inscribed by the state in urban
public space during the second half of the 20th centuryöthe statues, monuments, and memorials that
celebrate Tamil ethnicity as promulgated in the Dravidianist sociopolitical movement. This move-
ment, which originated in the late 19th century, provided a platform for anticolonial and subaltern
social movements. It continues in the hands of the political parties who have controlled, at different
times, the government of Tamil Nadu since 1967. The competing discourses on heritage posed by
these different projects are indicative of political, economic, and cultural transformations associated
with liberalization that are now reconfiguring the relations between state and society in southern
India. The constructions of locality and history that became visible during the anticolonial struggle of
the first half of the 20th century are being challenged by alternative formulations as heritage becomes
a marketable good and consumption becomes a vehicle of political participation. With this case I
consider the ways that themed urban environments serve not only as indices of the changing political
economy, but also as markers of changes in the cultural mediation of political subjectivity.

1 Introduction: old cities, new cultures

A seminar entitled `Old cities, new cultures' was held on 29 March 2000 at the British
Council Library in Chennai (formerly Madras), the capital of the southern Indian state
of Tamil Nadu. Presenters, who included museum and arts administrators, journalists,
performers, educators, and preservationists from India and the United Kingdom,
reiterated the by now widely circulated notion that entire cities can be packaged
as tourist destinations with themed environments consisting of refurbished public
and commercial spaces and planned events such as festivals and walking tours.
Such themed spaces present selective accounts of local, regional, and/or national
histories through carefully wrought montages of visual images, narratives, and built
environments. These accounts, usually framed as `heritage', celebrate and advertise
the culturally distinctive, but always safe, comprehensible, and consumable, experi-
ences that urban encounters can offer. Over the past three decades, the marking and
marketing of urban heritage have become parts of a global industry. Heritage entre-
preneurship underwrites privatized modes of cultural production and supplements
increasingly impoverished programs of state-sponsored urban development. During
the Chennai seminar, both the Edinburgh Festival and Glasgow's designation as UK
City of Architecture and Design were discussed as exemplary cases. Participants might
just as easily have pointed to Boston's Fanueil Hall or New York City's South Street
694 M Hancock

Seaport to name only two among many well-publicized examples of this sort of
refurbishment.(1)
Those assembled were optimistic about transferring the aforementioned models of
heritage entrepreneurship to India, and some identified comparable, albeit nascent,
ventures already in place in Chennai and in other Indian cities. The efforts of com-
mercial developers and arts-marketing groups to designate an arts and shopping
district near the commercial center of Mumbai were described by one presenter.
Another speaker suggested that the annual festival in Chennai of Carnatic music and
dance, held since the late 1920s (when it was inaugurated by upper-caste supporters of
Gandhian nationalism), might provide a node for establishing a comparable urban arts
district.(2) Still others insisted that Chennai was in need of an Urban Arts Commission,
like those in New Delhi and Bangalore, to ensure that the cultural and financial values
of heritage ventures were recognized within the frameworks of municipal planning and
governance. The seminar, however, was meant to showcase one local effort in partic-
ular, a museum and cultural center named Dakshina Chitra, located in the southern
suburbs of Chennai. It was Dakshina Chitra, through its auxiliary the Friends of
Dakshina Chitra, which had jointly sponsored `Old cities, new cultures' with the British
Council, and among the presenters was the director of Dakshina Chitra, Dr Deborah
Thiagarajan. Dakshina Chitra represents regional culture and history in an open-air
setting, and uses recreated artifacts and buildings. Like the other cases discussed at the
seminar, it is an environment in which education and commodity consumption are
tightly interwoven. In this paper I take as my subject the competing theaters of
memory in Chennai, considering Dakshina Chitra as a symptom of the changing,
and at times contradictory, values accorded `heritage' in postcolonial India (compare
Crang and Travlou, 2001; Greenough, 1995).
Dakshina Chitra, which targets upper-class, cosmopolitan audiences, was formally
opened in late 1996, and comprises reconstructed buildings typical of 19th-century
vernacular architecture, as well as an amphitheatre, seminar rooms, and a gift shop.
It differs sharply from the other, colonial-era museum in the city, the Government
Museum, situated near the government and financial districts of central Chennai.
There, galleries house glass-cased architectural features, bronze and stone figures,
and miniatures ösignifiers of the past civilizational achievements of the region.
At Dakshina Chitra, on-site craft demonstrations and folk performances are among
the regular offerings of the museum. The everyday life of a not-so-distant past is the
principal concern of the center, whose Sanskrit name is glossed as `a vision of the south'.
The museum represents southern India as a rural, agrarian, and predominantly Hindu
society whose different castes, sects, and status groups make up a functional, organic
whole and whose relation to its environment is adaptive, rather than exploitative.
Wealthy and quite modest homes are depicted and craft production is treated as the
social and economic glue of the community: the agency of cultural continuity, functional
interdependence, and ecological sustainability. Though the anticolonial nationalism of
Mohandas Gandhi is not explicitly invoked at Dakshina Chitra, the center's recreated
rural world resonates with the popular imagery of Gandhism. Gandhi envisioned inde-
pendent India as a polity not based on the Eurowestern nation-state but rooted in
the self-sufficient `village republics' that he considered indigenous to the South Asian
subcontinent (1997 [1909]). Central to this vision were the small-scale settlements and
craft-based economic institutions of the sorts that Dakshina Chitra presents as emblems
(1)See Cohen (2000) for a recent guide to such projects.
(2)Carnatic vocal and instrumental music is a style associated with devotionalism and has been
popularized and maintained enthusiastically, though not exclusively, by upper-caste performers and
scholars (Pesch, 1999, pages 9 ^ 20).
Subjects of heritage in urban South India 695

of southern Indian history. Though Gandhian nationalism has had limited effects on the
economic and social policies of India's postcolonial government, the imagery and key
words of Gandhism are frequently invoked by elected officials and by government
institutions to characterize their own nationalist commitments and valuesöparticularly
in discourses on the management and representation of India's rural communities. The
vision of southern India expressed in Dakshina Chitra draws liberally on these same
values and images.
The narrative of the region's past represented at Dakshina Chitra, tinged as it is
with Gandhian nationalism, stands in sharp contrast to the pasts conveyed in the array
of public memory projects, near the urban core of Chennai, which have been
sponsored by the Tamil Nadu state government since the early 1970s, following the
rise to power of a regionalist party. These projects consist largely of memorials and
statues honoring non-Brahman leaders of the regionally based, linguistic and ethnic
identity movement that coalesced in the early 20th century. The movement, to which
regionalist parties trace their origin, is termed Dravidian, paralleling the classification
of Tamil within southern India's Dravidian family of languages (Barnett, 1976;
Irschick, 1969). This language family is thought to predate the arrival of Indo-Aryan
languages (Sanskrit and its relatives) on the subcontinent, and has therefore served as
an emblem of the region's populist and, at times, anti-Brahmanical, sociopolitical
movements, which had been framed in sharp opposition to Gandhi's Indian nation-
alism and its largely upper-caste supporters. Central to Dravidianist discourses is an
historical narrative that claims non-Brahman castes (sometimes, but not always,
including Dalits) to be the descendents of the region's original, Tamil-speaking inhab-
itants. Brahmans, on the other hand, are described as the descendents of the invaders
of the region and as the beneficiaries and executors of the dominant ideologies of
Hinduism and caste. Outfitted with this narrative, Dravidianist leaders, who by and
large represent elite non-Brahmans, put themselves forward as patrons, protectors, and
spokespersons for poor and non-Brahman communities.(3) Leaders have historically
relied on popular cultural media, such as film, music, drama, oration, ritual practice,
and, more recently, television, as well as on legislative measures requiring the use of
literary Tamil in a variety of public settings (Irschick, 1969; Presler, 1987; Ramaswamy,
1997).(4) Contemporaneous with the recent rise of Dravidianist political power, the
urban landscapes of Tamil Nadu have also been Dravidianized. Memorials, statues,
and other public sites have multiplied in Chennai since 1967, when the first of a
succession of Dravidianist political parties came to power in the state.
The account of the local presented at Dakshina Chitra thus differs in both form
and content from the Dravidianist narrative. The latter relies on a vocabulary of Tamil
words, gestures, and images, and addresses a Tamil citizen-subject. The spaces and
practices of Dravidianist public memory convey implicit and explicit claims about
the importance of embodied ways of knowing and identifying with local pasts (that
is, through language), and about the body politic that is constituted by such knowledge.

(3) There are longstanding conflicts between the Dravidianist leadership and the formerly untouch-
able Dalit communities. Dravidianist political leaders have, on numerous occasions, sought to
enroll Dalits within their populist causes (with the strongest alliance effected in the context of
E V Ramasamy Naicker's self-respect movement) but have generally failed to address the struc-
tural inequalities, systemic violence, and stigmatization that affect Dalits (Geetha and Rajadurai,
1998; Pandian, 1998).
(4) A government order issued in 1999 requiring that primary education be exclusively conducted in

Tamil was consistent with these strategies. The order was opposed by the state's English-speaking
minority as well as by lower-class and working-class Tamil-speakers and was subsequently over-
turned by the state's high court. See, The Hindu (2000a); (2000b, page 1); Tinatanti (2000a).
696 M Hancock

They are meant to be social spaces in which the imagined Dravidian community
is visually mediated and, during political ceremony and in the informal settings of
everyday visits, its genealogy of struggle recalled.
Dakshina Chitra is framed to be understandable to an English-speaking global
audience familiar with transcultural discourses of `heritage' and with Eurowestern
conventions of historiography and museology. The founder and director of the museum
has described its goal as ``the preservation and promotion of the cultures of the diverse
peoples of South India ... through their homes and lifestyles and the material cultures
used primarily within these homes'' (Thiagarajan, no date, page 1). Thiagarajan com-
pares the recreated spaces in Dakshina Chitra to those of open-air, living history
museums in the United States, but notes that, unlike those sites, Dakshina Chitra lacks
first-person interpretive techniques. Indeed, she suggests that the use of theatrical
methods of site interpretation might not be appropriate, given that the central goal
of the museum is to instill in Indian visitors an appreciation for existing craft and
performance traditions that, without protection, will be lost because of industrializa-
tion and urban expansion (page 2). The approach to cultural conservation at Dakshina
Chitra is consistent with that pursued by ecomuseums, which treat cultural knowl-
edge and artifacts as the means to cultivate and assert community identity (Davis,
1999; Rivie©re, 1985). The key difference is that Dakshina Chitra is meant as a mirror
for Indians, themselves, to glimpse the not-yet-lost (and so not-yet-longed-for) mate-
rial world of their parents' and grandparents' generations. In India the template and
closest precursor of Dakshina Chitra is the National Handicrafts and Handlooms
Museum in New Delhi, popularly known as the Indian Crafts Museum. The
Crafts Museum, managed by the central government, was originally founded in
1956, but was expanded and reorganized in the mid-1980s. It curates representative
craft products, conserves craft techniques, and facilitates the marketing of crafts
to urban consumers (Greenough, 1995). A unique and controversial feature of the
Crafts Museum is the fact that it houses, for temporary periods, craft producers who
are recruited from all over India to conduct on-site demonstrations for visitors. The
mission of the Craft Museum is framed by the official nationalism of the post-
colonial Indian state; accordingly, it represents India as a mosaic of distinct regional
cultures and languages, for which crafts and performing arts serve as emblems.
Dakshina Chitra, in contradistinction, transposes the mosaic imagery of the nation
to a regional stage, where it seeks to encapsulate the diversity and common threads
of southern India.
Why are the claims of Dakshina Chitra on regional culture and history note-
worthy? In a postcolonial city of 5.6 million, where poverty levels surpass 30%, the
museum has been criticized as a touristic indulgence. Moreover, such efforts
are associated with an elite whose authority to represent the region and its past
has been contested over the past century. This site, however, is representative of
a wider set of emerging cultural projects, engaged ostensibly with heritage
and oriented to consumer markets, which are products of and contributions to
changing cityscapes in the globalizing Third World. Dakshina Chitra and other
similar projects in southern Asia, which include Disney-style sites, craft villages,
historic homes and palaces, and urban heritage precincts, provide opportunities
for the production and consumption of cultural knowledge and commodities
that traffic in selective genealogies of the present and so participate in cultural
politics of identity (Greenough, 1995; Kwok et al, 1999; Ramusack, 1995; Teo
and Yeoh, 1997; Yeoh, 2000; compare Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998; Sorkin, 1992;
Zukin, 1991). They comment on the social landscape of the cities that they
adjoin or lie within, sometimes by presenting images of what the cities should be
Subjects of heritage in urban South India 697

or once were and, at other times, by reminding viewers of the city's rural Other. They
furnish visitors and museum workers with opportunities to know and to experience
regional pasts through a variety of consumerist transactions.
In Eurowestern contexts, themed environments comparable to Dakshina Chitra
have been hailed as the means for jump-starting the cultural and economic life of
inner cities in the wake of deindustrialization. Indeed, the European presenters at the
Chennai seminar emphasized this capacity in their discussions of cultural conservation
in Glasgow (Scotland) and Bradford (England). The contexts of the Third World are
quite different. Indian ventures such as Dakshina Chitra depend, directly and
indirectly, on economic liberalization, which accelerated in the wake of structural
adjustment.(5) In Chennai this transition has not entailed significant deindustrializa-
tion; rather, it has involved industrial and service-sector expansion, greater volatility
in markets for capital, basic goods, and services, and an increasingly speculative real-
estate market (MMDA, 1995). Since the mid-1980s, Chennai's urban landscape has
been increasingly impacted by these economic changes, with accelerating rates of
infrastructure development, inner-city `gentrification', slum clearance and relocation,
and suburbanization. Consumption of cultural products and services has expanded,
fueled in part by elite anxiety about cultural `homogenization' in the wake of greater
engagement with global capitalism but also by growth of domestic and international
tourism.
In this paper I consider the conditions that have made Dakshina Chitra both
thinkable and possible, and explore the cultural politics that are enacted on its terrain.
What narratives of identity and history does it embrace, defer, or displace? And what
modes of cultural citizenship does it solicit or foreclose? In section 2, I describe the
competing representations of locality and its heritage made at Dakshina Chitra and on
the streets of Chennai. In section 3, I shift to the translocal processes and institutions
in which these representations have emerged. I examine the political and economic
conditions of heritage entrepreneurship in Chennai, focusing on the effects of liberal-
ization. With this case I consider the ways that sites of public memory serve as markers
of shifting debates on the terms and territorial imaginaries of cultural citizenship in
postcolonial India.

(5)The global political and economic forces that have become more visible over the past decade are
not wholly new phenomena. Chennai, like Mumbai and Calcutta, was consolidated as a `world
city' under European colonialism in the late 17th century and served subsequently as a regional
center for commerce, transportation, manufacture, and administration (King, 1990). The city's
industrial and social landscape, situated at the periphery of industrial capitalism, was thus etched
by imperialism. The initial liberalization measures, taken by India's central government in 1991,
were structural adjustments made in response to pressure exerted by international lenders, follow-
ing a sharp drop in India's foreign exchange reserves and the resultant balance of payments crisis.
These measures involved deregulation and delicensing of industrial and trade ventures (service,
information technology, and real-estate sectors were targeted for expansion), recalibrating the
exchange rate to international money markets, removing import/export quotas. Subsequent meas-
ures have focused on financial and capital markets, including limited privatization of the banking
sector, expansion of foreign exchange markets, and establishment of the Securities Exchange Board
of India (Krishnamurty et al, 1996).
698 M Hancock

2 Southern Indian memoryscapes

2.1 The artisanal worlds of Dakshina Chitra
Dakshina Chitra is an outdoor museum, operated by the Madras Craft Foundation,
comprising houses and other structures deemed typical of the vernacular architecture
of southern India.(6) The buildings are clustered into groups, each meant to represent
one of the region's four states: Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh.
As of May 2000, the sections representing Kerala and Tamil Nadu had been com-
pleted, the Karnataka section was close to completion, and the Andhra Pradesh
exhibit was still being planned. Dakshina Chitra shares many of the features of
living history museums elsewhereöit employs `in-situ' representational conventions
to recreate the material and social environments of the past, but exerts cognitive
control with `in context' strategies, such as labels, audiovisual guides, and catalogues,
in order to furnish visitors with interpretive principles (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1991,
pages 388 ^ 390).
The museum simulates an absent real, though it does so by recombining material
residues of that real. The real south India to which it lays claim is an agrarian,
artisanal society, albeit one embedded within a larger mercantile network. Since 1984,
the Madras Craft Foundation, under Thiagarajan's leadership, has been involved in an
ambitious project of researching in-situ examples of vernacular architecture and, in
some cases, in purchasing and arranging for them to be disassembled and rebuilt at
Dakshina Chitra (Thiagarajan, 1999; no date). By 2000, the museum grounds con-
tained seven buildings that were reassemblies of 19th-century originals and four that
were newly built copies of vernacular housing. All of the buildings are furnished with
original and reproduced articles appropriate both to the region in which they are
situated on the museum grounds and to the social status of the original or presumed
occupants of the house. Some have adjacent galleries with exhibitions that provide
contextual information, though there are also informational plaques and exhibitions
inside houses. The museum thus achieves the effect of rural reality with what Michael
Sorkin (1992, page 226) has termed a ``creative geography''öa montage of different
space ^ times through which visitors trace a path. The disjunctions among the exhibi-
tions are sutured visually, with shared design elements and images, and conceptually
with narratives that emphasize the craft-based division of labor and attribute an
`environmentalist' consciousness to premodern society in southern India.
2.2 Visualizing the past
Dakshina Chitra's representation of the rural past of southern India is meant as an
instructive and nostalgia-infused contrast with the urban present of Chennai. Its
orientation video and exhibition spaces are critical parts of this endeavor.

(6)I visited the museum six times, once in 1996 when I was accompanied by the site architect, and
five other times in 1999 and 2000. On two of the latter occasions I was accompanied by staff
members. On a third occasion I hired a private guide through a commercial travel agency and on
the fourth and fifth visits I was accompanied by a guide affiliated with an agency that specialized
in alternative cultural tourism. Unless specified otherwise, the information about Dakshina Chitra
was gathered during these site visits and through interviews with the museum's director,
Dr Deborah Thiagarajan, and with other staff members. Museum visitors were interviewed (with
semistructured interview formats) on site during my third, fourth, and fifth visits. Visitation at this
museum is low, however, and I spoke with a total of only fourteen visitors. The comments from
such a limited sample cannot be assumed to be representative and I have not included them in the
data on which this paper is based. As the museum did not systematically collect visitor responses,
those sorts of data were unavailable as well. The museum's website (www.dakshinachitra.org) was
consulted, as were listings about Dakshina Chitra found on other websites and guidebooks.
Subjects of heritage in urban South India 699

The orientation video, A Vision of the South (Rajeswari Communications, 1997),

uses English subtitles and voice-over to introduce the region and its `traditions' for an
English-speaking audience. Its segments include ``A day in a South Indian home'',
``Harmony with nature'', depicting the annual Hindu festival cycle, and ``Cycle of
life'', presenting the individual life cycle as bracketed by Sanskritic Hindu ritual.
Running through these segments are visual elements meant to contrast the `now' of
modernity and city life with the `then' of tradition and village life: reconstructed
buildings at Dakshina Chitra serve as sets for most of the `then' scenes, whereas the
world of `now' is set in contemporary Chennai. In scenes shot on the museum grounds,
actors are shown pursuing tasks deemed typical of premodern village life ömeals are
prepared and eaten, and life-cycle rituals performed. Life is shown bounded by familial
and ritual concerns, even as villagers' incipient nationalism and awareness of their
place in Britain's colonial empire are signaled with visual devices such as newspaper
headlines. Scenes depicting the present day are filled with images that connote the
rapid pace of urban existence and its degraded quality of life: exhaust-spewing cars and
scooters, department stores, and garbage-filled streets are the emblems of modernity.
There are, however, subtle continuities between the space ^ times of modernity and
tradition that the video represents. Scenes shot at the museum and in Chennai's streets,
temples, and homes, for example, use the same actors, thereby establishing visual
continuity. Gradual fade-ins and fade-outs diminish the difference between spatiotem-
poral contexts of the staged events of the museum and the naturalistic images shot on
location in the city.(7) The video thus intimates that there can be fluidity between past
and present, village and cityöa claim that for some viewers is even more persuasive
because of the personal memories and desires that it may draw forth. Urban Hindus,
especially from orthodox families, make a point of returning to their ancestral villages
for the performance of certain life-cycle rituals, and the museum visit offers a con-
venient (and secularized) reenactment of such a return to the space and time of
childhood and familial intimacy. The continuities between city and countryside are
interrupted, in the video, with a recurring image of a deserted village home, though
the mourning that this invites is quickly resolved with the images that follow. For each
time the visual assertion of the loss of traditional lifeways is made, it is immediately
followed with images of staged events at Dakshina Chitra, demonstrating that
although traditions may have been lost in the real world they persist within the
museum's precincts. Indeed, such images are not merely metaphors for the museum's
work; they remind viewers of the actual work of retrieving and reconstructing rural
buildings that the museum has undertaken.
The use of fade-in and fade-out techniques is also intended to demonstrate that the
pastö`tradition'öcontinues to be lived in some 20th-century lives. The video depicts
present-day Brahmans as leading lives that are infused by cultural sensibilities of the
past. The visual images that encode southern Indian cultureöVedic ritual, a vegetarian
diet, the sacred threadöare evocative of Brahmanic ways of life. Everyday southern
Indian life is shown as permeated by Hindu sensibilities and practices; Brahmans
are presented as intellectual, cultural, and ritual leaders in society. In the video the
Brahmans' longstanding and contested claims to be exponents of southern Indian culture
are reiterated and naturalized (Hancock, 1998; 1999, pages 47 ^ 52, 62 ^ 67). And, by
introducing non-Brahmans in the roles of craft producers, it portrays caste relations as
governed by functional, integrative, and unconflicted interdependence (Thiagarajan, no
date, page 6). Last, as has become more popular in recent years, it outfits traditional life

(7) I thank A Srivathsan for calling my attention to the use of this technique.
700 M Hancock

with an environmentalist message. Southern Indian culture is shown and described as

part of nature.(8) The opening images of ocean and mountain are accompanied by a voice-
over recitation of passages from the Rg Veda confirming the inseparability of humans
from nature; the reliance on natural foodstuffs and agricultural techniques is asserted in
``A day in a South Indian home''; and ``Harmony with nature'' out-lines the natural
cyclicity of temple and domestic ritual. Contemporary environmentalism is thus outfitted
with indigenous (and implicitly Hindu and Brahmanic) roots.
Similar continuities between past and present, nature and culture, are reiterated in
the museum's outdoor exhibitions. Textual and visual references to the ecological
sustainability of premodern lifeways are spread throughout the museum. For example,
architectural styles and house furnishings are described in terms of their adaptation to
local ecosystems. The most integrated presentation of these principles is in a gallery
attached to one of the rebuilt houses. Its exhibition is organized into five sections based
on the metaphoric landscapes according to which classical Tamil poetry is typologized:
forests, mountains, cultivated fields, seashore, and desert waste (Ramanujan, 1985,
pages 236 ^ 246). In poetics, each region is associated with certain plants, deities,
seasons, and kinds of love. In the gallery, each landscape depiction combines references
to classical poetry, ecology, and human modes of subsistence öby using poetic excerpts,
samples of agrarian tools and handicrafts, and enlarged photographs of landscapes,
buildings, and their inhabitants. A seamlessly adaptive cultural whole is thus presented.
2.3 Laboring for the past
The craft-based economy is easily invoked within the museum's discourse on premodern
environmentalism. Craft is represented as a form of labor that, by contrast with indus-
trial wage-labor, is not exploitative and has less deleterious effects on the environment. It
is promoted with the same moral urgency as environmentalism and endowed with value
that is at once functional, environmentally appropriate, and aesthetic. In the space of the
museum, visitors can see handicrafts, tools, and raw materials exhibited in their contexts
of production and use; they can also witness craftspersons at work. Such work, however,
is selectively represented, with pottery, weaving, and, occasionally, glass blowing favored
over masonry, carpentry, or leatherwork.
Artisans are employed by the museum to demonstrate their work for the visiting
public and to work behind the scenes in housebuilding. Most are hired in connection
with special projects or sales, though a few are members of the museum's regular staff
and they are expected to engage in on-site craft production. The latter has been a central,
if controversial, part of the museum's operations. Since opening in 1996 it has catered to
urban tastes for handicrafts and for what the global consumer market glosses as `indig-
enous' styles of architecture and design, with information about craft production and
with retail sales of handicrafts. The museum's promotional material asserts that it hopes
to improve the living and working conditions of southern India's craft producers by
enlarging the markets, in India and abroad, for the goods they produce. In fact, it has
been proven more difficult to support craft production than it has been to cultivate
urban markets for craft products.
Craft products and techniques are important parts of the relations that the museum
seeks to establish with its urban clientele, as the following can illustrate. Lecture
demonstrations dealing with craft techniques are common weekend events at Dakshina
Chitra, and, in December 1999, I attended a lecture on indigo dying. The proprietor of

(8)
The subtle assertion of the video that environmentalism was a hallmark of premodern southern
Indian culture bespeaks the desire, evident among some nongovernmental organizations and
environmental historians, to uncover an indigenous (often Hindu) genealogy for modern environ-
mentalist concerns (Kalam, 1996; Rao, 1994; Sitaraman, 1994).
Subjects of heritage in urban South India 701

a Chennai hand-loom boutique (a member of one of the leading industrialist families

in Chennai) had been invited to explain the process by which indigo pigments were
produced and by which cloth was dyed. The lecture coincided with special exhibition-
cum-sales of indigo fabric and ready-made clothing at Dakshina Chitra's gift shop, and
at her boutique, and several other city boutiques. About forty women, whose ages
ranged from late teens to sixties, attended. Most were Indian, but a few European
women (associated with foreign consulates) were also present. All were exquisitely
dressed in saris or churidar sets(9) of fashionable hand-loomed, vegetable-dyed mate-
rial. Near the seminar site, a small gallery displayed a donated collection of indigo
clothing, representing a variety of regional designs and styles. A closer look at the
labels revealed not only the provenance of the object, but its current owner and its
market value. Not surprisingly, the owners of the clothes were among the attendees
and organizers of the seminar. Before the seminar concluded, visitors were reminded
that Dakshina Chitra would feature another special event in a few weeks time. An
indigo vat, for processing the pigment, was to be built and, once pigment had been
prepared, people would be able to come to the museum for a special interactive
exhibition or demonstration at which they could watch cloth being dipped and, for
an extra fee, dye fabrics themselves. Events like these, as well as handicraft sales and
dance and music performances, are regular parts of the museum's repertoire. Through
these events Dakshina Chitra cultivates elite patronage, while shaping consumer tastes
and linking handicraft consumption to class status.
Dakshina Chitra has been more effective in enlarging the market for handicrafts
than in changing the working conditions of craft production. The impact of museum-
ization on processes of craft production has thus far been varied. Like the Indian
Crafts Museum in New Delhi, Dakshina Chitra was initially envisioned as a living
craft community, in which knowledge and skills could be developed and taught; there
were plans to house families of craftspersons on site and to exhibit and sell their work.
The museum's administration, however, was able to recruit only one family to live on
siteöa difficulty that reveals the contradictions of the museum's craft-conservation
mission. Some criticisms came from regional craftspersons (and their advocates), who
resisted the museum's efforts at conservation because it would have isolated them,
geographically, from their extended families and communities. Some were wary of
the potentially objectifying experience of being `on display'. A different (and somewhat
romanticized) objection came from providers of alternative cultural tourism who con-
tended that the museum objectified craft, by taking craft production out of networks of
`use-value' production and inserting it into exchange transactions in which efficiency,
time-discipline, and quality control were paramount. An historian, who had been
consulted by the museum in the mid-1990s, told me that he had refused to assist
them in gathering information about craft communities because he did not think that
the intervention of the museum in their community life would have offered any signif-
icant or lasting benefits. As a result of these difficulties the museum's administration
abandoned the idea of recreating a craft community on its grounds, but has remained
optimistic about the beneficial effects of marketing crafts. The director of the museum
has argued that upper-class consumption of craft should be encouraged because elite
patronage is necessary as confirmation of the monetary and social value of craft
products. In her analysis, this will support craft-based livelihood and will enhance
the respect accorded such work (Thiagarajan, 1999, page 3).

(9) Churidars are three-piece outfits comprising loose trousers, a long overshirt, and a matching

shawl worn across the top of the body.

702 M Hancock

The craftspersons themselves are also eager to participate in some of the economic
opportunities that museum work offers. Employment by the museum increases crafts-
persons' class mobility, though it complicates their status in other ways öespecially as
they negotiate the distance (physical and social) between the world of the museum and
that of their home communities. Those craftspersons on staff in 1999 and 2000 were
paid monthly salaries of Rs 4000 ^ 5000 and received retirement and health benefits as
well as paid leave.(10) The only resident artisan, a potter, lived on site with his son,
daughter-in-law, and grandchild, but periodically visited his home village where his
wife, other children, and extended family dwelled. He asserted that he was pleased by
the chance to work for the `company' (which was English) because it enabled him to
produce `modern' (Tamil, navina) goods by experimenting with a greater range of styles
and designs than would have been possible in his village. Though the regularity of
income and benefits was desirable, he acknowledged that museum work did pose certain
risks for the life he continued to lead in his village. As an hereditary potter, he was also a
priest and was bound to return for festivals in order to reconfirm and maintain that
status, for his own sake and for the welfare of his family. Another craftsperson, a weaver,
commuted daily from a nearby village. He told me that, although he had been trained to
weave saris and running fabric for clothing, his output for the museum consisted of
table linens, handkerchiefs, and so forth, which were used at museum functions. He said
that his skill exceeded the limited demands made by the museum and, unlike the potter,
he was frustrated by the limited opportunities for innovation or artistry that museum
work afforded.
All the craftspersons involved in the programs at Dakshina Chitra had been produc-
ing for a market economy prior to their encounter with the museum. This is a result in
large part of efforts of the central government to train and employ craftspersons, who
constitute a significant segment of India's rural population (Cable et al, 1986). The opera-
tions of Dakshina Chitra have benefited from the support for crafts marketing afforded
by such programs. The central government subvenes the costs that craftspersons incur
traveling to the `craft melas' (exhibition sales) at the museum and has assisted in some
costs of reconstruction and curation. The marketing of craft, therefore, does not
radically depart from the relations of exchange in which craftspersons are already
embedded. It is apparent, though, that the museum, like the Indian state, seeks to
gain access to and sustain craft products ö which can complement and `Indianize'
modernity ö rather than to the socially embedded ways of producing those objects.
2.4 Building the past
The commitment of the museum to craft is made explicit in its exhibition spaces and in
its advertising; it is alluded to implicitly in its recombinant buildings and in the layout
of the museum grounds. The salvage and reuse of old building stock by the museum
accord with the principles of conservation architecture, though these strategies are also
meant to impart aesthetic pleasure and to allow for practical needs of visitor circula-
tion. This can, however, undermine the museum's stated mission of craft conservation.
An architect critical of Dakshina Chitra was quick to point out to me that, although
buildings look traditional, they had not been built in traditional ways. Tile roofs were
underlain by plastic sheeting, the cardinal orientations of houses have been aligned to
facilitate visitor traffic rather than in accordance with vernacular style, some of the
reconstructed dwellings lacked kitchens, and some architectural details are alleged to
have been misplaced in the newer structures.

(10)In 1999 and 2000 the exchange rate was about Rs 45 to US $1. Craftspersons received slightly
less than half of the salaries paid to supervisory staff, but four times the amount earned by grounds
staff and housekeeping staff.
Subjects of heritage in urban South India 703

The spatial relations among buildings and between regional clusters also engender
contradictions. There are topographical distinctions among regions, but, unlike the states
to which they refer, the museum's different sectors have unmarked boundaries. Each `state'
is connected to the others by footpaths, though the museum gives no instructions about
the order in which visitors should proceed through these spaces.Visitors may also, uninten-
tionally and unknowingly, move among different regions, blurring the differences between
Tamil areas and others. This and the English mediation of the museum contrast sharply
with the Dravidianist commitment, especially in promulgating the use of literary Tamil,
to the delineation and consolidation of the Tamilness of its land and people.
The museum's spatial and architectural representations of the ecological and cultural
differences among the regions of southern India are the product of a conceptual plan
submitted by the architect, Laurie Baker (Thiagarajan, 1999, pages 6 ^ 10). Inspired by his
association with Mohandas Gandhi in the 1940s, Baker has had a long career in India as
an architect and builder. He is based now in Kerala (the state bordering Tamil Nadu to
the west), and his work, which relies on local materials, environmental adaptability, and
cost-effectiveness, reflects his commitment to Gandhian self-sufficiency and limited con-
sumption (Bhatia, 1991, pages 3 ^ 17). Baker's principles are encoded in a distinctive style
featuring exposed brick exteriors, central courtyards, and tiled roofs. Though this style has
recently become popular among affluent city dwellers, it continues to be used in the
design of housing for the rural poor by Baker-influenced firms. This is in keeping with
Baker's position that all architecture, regardless of client, should be cost-effective.
Dakshina Chitra endorses and incorporates Baker's approach, albeit selectively. Its
public buildings, including its residential quarters, were designed and built in accor-
dance with Baker's original plan by the site architect, an engineer who had trained with
Baker (Thiagarajan, 1999, page 11). The decision to retain and reconstruct existing
buildings, relying on local craft knowledge, was influenced by Baker's emphasis on
the conservation of skills and building stock. The construction process, however,
departed from the approach that Baker advocates. For Baker, the mode of work is
inextricable from its conceptual and critical interventions (Bhatia, 1991, pages 25 ^ 29).
Encoded in the rubric of cost-effectiveness is the notion that construction is done by
and for those who reside in and use the space; cost-effective work also takes a critical
stance vis-a©-vis the conventional status differences between architects and actual
builders. Baker advises that the architect generates a conceptual plan which he or
she then brings to fruition as built form by working with builders and modifying as
needed, making the end result a materialization of a series of interactions rather than
an objectification of the architect's idea.
At Dakshina Chitra, Baker's aesthetic is retained, but the mode of construction
and its audiences differ. Museum administrators cite reasons of efficiency and cost
control, because the dialogic relation between architect and builders advocated by
Baker usually results in longer construction times than are typical in conventional
work. The exclusive use of local materials cannot be adhered to at a site on which a
range of vernaculars are represented. This reflects the conservation strategies of the
museum, as well as the stated need for modern compromises (for example, plastic
sheeting) to improve the durability and longevity of structures. The disassembly, trans-
port, and reassembly of a building are profound dis-locations in the construction
process, which necessarily contravene the commitment to local materials. Finally,
though the representation of rural life by the museum acknowledges the existence of
poverty, past and present, its patrons and audiences are not the rural poor. The images
of poverty presented in the exhibitions at the museum serve as emblems of a vaguely
Gandhian nationalism in their allusions to the moral value of self-sufficiency. In turn,
with its handicraft sales, the museum makes the values and emblems of Gandhism
704 M Hancock

available to urban consumersöin the form of what might be described, ironically, as

`swadeshi chic'.
2.5 Dravidianist Chennai
Contrasting with the style of living history at Dakshina Chitra are the commemorative
projects undertaken by the government of Tamil Nadu. The leaders of the state have
inscribed its distinctive ethnic and linguistic identity in the built environment of
Chennai through changes of place names and by the erection of statues and memorials.
The sites celebrate those deemed to have protected Tamil and its people, though they
are meant also as expressions of the Dravidianist critique of both European colonial-
ism and Gandhian nationalism. In 1967 the name of the state, Madras (a holdover
from British colonial rule), was changed to Tamil Nadu, a Tamil phrase that means,
literally, the homeland of Tamils. In 1996, after a twenty-three-year period during which
municipal elections had been suspended, a Dravidianist party, the DMK, regained
control over government of the capital city of the state, and changed the official
name of the city from Madras to Chennai. (Though Chennai had long served as the
Tamil name of the city, Madras was the name used internationally and by India's
central government.) The new name was selected to commemorate Chennappa Nayak,
a member of an 18th-century royal family, deemed by DMK leaders to be the true
founder of the city. Similarly, all of the Dravidianist parties who have held power
during the past forty years have regularly renamed its streets and neighborhoods
with terms that refer to Tamil political leaders, mythicohistorical figures, and scholars,
as well as to those rural sitesösuch as the birthplaces of political leadersöthat loom
large in Dravidianism's narration of its own genealogy (Srivathsan, 1998).
Interventions in the built environment have been made throughout the city, though
their densest concentration is along Marina Drive, a thoroughfare that runs for several
kilometers along the city's seafront. In the late 17th century, the British East India
Company erected Fort St George at the northern edge of what became Marina Drive;
the Fort later served the seat of the provincial colonial government and, after inde-
pendence, became headquarters for the Tamil Nadu state assembly and executive
offices (Muthiah, 1999, pages 149 ^ 150). Its association with colonial power meant
that it was a focal site for anticolonial rallies and demonstrations from the early years
of the 20th century; it now is the preferred site for state ceremony, such as party rallies
and parades (Geetha and Rajadurai, 1998, pages 494 ^ 498; Srivathsan, 1998).
The Marina has thus been an important stage for embodied enactments and material
representations of Dravidianist identity. This work has rested less on the removal of the
architectural traces of colonialism and more on the resignification of space by renaming
places and erecting commemorative statuary and monuments (Srivathsan, 1998, pages
63 ^ 68). These strategies, which were decried by Dravidianist leaders during the colonial
era, employ a modernist logic in which the city's theaters of memory, comprising didactic
and monumental spaces, are meant to remind the populace that their collective ethnic
identity was shaped by past struggles for political autonomy and to provide stages on
which that state may continue to assert its own legitimacy. In connection with its hosting
of the second World Tamil Conference in 1968, the ruling DMK erected statues along
Marina Drive to honor ten figures associated with the protection and advancement of
the Tamil. Among those commemorated was Tiruvalluvar, an early scholar and moralist
who authored a set of verses, the Tirukkural.(11) Shortly, thereafter, work on a larger
(11)Little is known of Tiruvalluvar's life and this ambiguity allows him to be claimed and differently
defined by competing interests. Tiruvalluvar is regarded by many Hindus as a saint and there are
a number of temples erected for his worship, though his iconography and caste associations differ
in these varying contexts. The rationalist and anti-Brahmanical DMK depicts him visually and
verbally as a Tamil scholar, without religious associations (Srivathsan, 1998, pages 74 ^ 75).
Subjects of heritage in urban South India 705

memorial, the Valluvar Kottam, was begun (see below). The Tirukkural is revered by
Dravidianist thinkers as a counter-discourse to the moral writings of Sanskritic Hindu-
ism and Tiruvalluvar is treated as an apical Tamil thinker and icon of Dravidianist
identity.
More recent political leaders are also acknowledged on this promenade. Along the
stretch of Marina Drive, running north of the statues, there are two lavish outdoor
memorials where the samadhis (tombs) of two former chief ministers of Tamil Nadu,
C Annadurai and M G Ramachandran, are found. The samadhis sit at the center of
shrine-like rotundas, which are flanked by manicured lawns and gardens. Massive
archways, decorated with party insignia and carvings of mythicohistorical figures,
create the interfaces between the memorial grounds and the street. These free-admission
sites are at once educative, patriotic, and recreational; they are heavily trafficked public
spaces, with uses that include school outings, family picnics, and romantic liaisons.
The architects and builders of these sites are hereditary craftspersons whose train-
ing is supported currently by the Tamil Nadu government at state-managed training
institutes, the largest being the Government College of Sculpture at Mamallapuram,
about fifty kilometers south of Chennai. The principles on which their work is based
pertain to orientation, proportion, scale, and material and are derived from a body of
classical texts known as Vastu Shastra (Chakrabarti, 1999, pages 1 ^ 18). Work on
the memorials falls within the normal ambit of sculptors' and architect/builders'
present-day undertakings. They are responsible for the construction and renovation
of government-managed temples, commemorative sites, and office buildings and, under
DMK rule, some were employed to `indigenize' existing structures by adding facades
and design details derived from southern Indian temple architecture. These crafts-
persons also accept private commissions ömostly in connection with temple building
and stone carving, though because of the common belief that adherence to these
principles will ensure amity, prosperity, and divine blessings, it has become increasingly
common for `Vastu consultants' to offer their services as private consultants for
industrial and residential design (Chakrabarti, 1999, pages 22 ^ 34).
M Karunanidhi, the DMK party leader who served as the state's Chief Minister
during the early 1970s, the early 1990s, and from 1996 to 2001 has been responsible
for the state's commission of many of these sites. He authorized the memorial for
Annadurai and has also carved a deeper genealogy for himself and his party with
additional monuments to Tivuvalluvar.(12) In the early 1970s he initiated the con-
struction of Valluvar Kottam, a memorial to Tiruvalluvar that adopts many of the
architectural features of southern Indian temple architecture, including its placement of
a stone figure of Tiruvalluvar, reminiscent of a temple-deity image, in a sanctum atop a
(12)Karunanidhi, who is also a screenwriter and poet, has laid the groundwork for his own spatial
hagiography by popularizing Tamil epics and folktales associated with his own ancestral home.
He has authored screenplays and songs for films about that place, situating a retelling of a Tamil
epic, Cilappatikašram, there. His screenplay was written to emphasize the epic's portrayal of
Tamil character in the epic: ``Tamil entrepreneurship, grace and romance, Tamil women's grit and
determination to fight injustice, chastity of Tamil women, and the uprightness of Tamil kings''
(Srivathsan, 1998, page 69). Karunanidhi has also been responsible for monuments to the charac-
ters of the epic, including its female protagonist, Kannaki, whose depiction among the Marina Drive
statue row is related to her appropriation by the DMK as a symbol of Dravidian womanhood
(Srivathsan, 1998, pages 68 ^ 72). Finally, Karunanidhi, has worked assiduously for over three decades
to forge an association between himself and the early Tamil moralist, Tiruvalluvar. His speeches,
during most of his political career, have been laden with acknowledgements of his devotion to
Tiruvalluvar (Pinto, 1999; Tinatanti 2000b). In the 2001 elections, Karunanidhi's DMK party was
voted out of office and, in a backhanded attestation of the political significance of his memorial-
ization of Tiruvalluvar, the Tiruvalluvar statue on the Marina was removed from public view and
allegedly placed in a workshop at the Government Museum for repair (The Hindu 2001).
706 M Hancock

massive concrete replica of a temple processional cart. The Kottam has served as a site
for major party functions, including Karunanidhi's most recent swearing-in ceremony
(Srivathsan, 1998, pages 74 ^ 76). At the time of the erection of Kottam, Karunanidhi
also authorized a memorial to Tiruvalluvar at Kanyakumari. This site, located at the
southern tip of Tamil Nadu, is the southernmost point of the subcontinent, and is often
used as a symbolic referent for India's territorial sovereignty. Karunanidhi's move
symbolically claims the place for Tamil, rather than Indian, national imaginary. The
statue and associated sites were unveiled on 1 January 2000, to bring in a new millen-
nium. A new holiday, Tiruvalluvar Day (14 January), was declared and scheduled to
coincide with the third day of the Tamil harvest festival, Ponkal, a holiday that the
DMK had, in the 1960s, appropriated for the observance of Tamil nationalism; prizes
were announced for schoolchildren who learned the Tirukkural (Tinatanti 1999; 2000c).
As well as being stages for political ceremony, the above-mentioned sites are highlights
of the Tamil Nadu tourism department's popular city tour, currently offered twice daily
all year round.
The sites and strategies of nomination, together, reproduce the visual and material
iconography of Dravidianness öemphasizing its mediation through territorial and
bodily signifiers. The ruling parties of the state have produced these signifiers to frame
the visual spectacle of state power. The figures represented in these spaces are claimed
as ancestors, patrons, and protectors of the Tamil body-politic by party leaders. The
imagined community of Dravidian South India is thus mapped on the streets and
public sites of Chennai. Unlike other postcolonial cities, these strategies have not
entailed the removal of references to the colonial past, but, instead, the insertion of
spaces and bodies associated with Tamil Nadu's rural past into its urban present.
Though the southern India celebrated by both Dakshina Chitra and Dravidianists is
rural, the Tamil homeland is defined in populist terms. It is permeated with a memory
of upper-caste oppression, rather than interdependence among castes, and with collec-
tive identity formed through use of and emotional attachment to the Tamil mother
tongueöan assertion that is downplayed at the English-mediated Dakshina Chitra.

3 Political economies of heritage

The founding of Dakshina Chitra and the debates about its mission and politics
of representation are situated within a broader set of competing discourses, each of
which seeks to delineate, manage, and make hegemonic their respective genealogies
of the present. Such projects entail not only the creation of `heritage', but also the
inventorying of sites and events that mark its loss. In India the discourses and practices
associated with heritage have grown in number, diversity, and contentiousness
during the past two decades (Appadurai and Breckenridge, 1992; Chattopadhyay, 2000;
Greenough, 1995; Hancock, 2001; Prakash, 1997; Ramusack, 1995; van der Veer, 1994).
Much of the recent public debate has accompanied the escalation of both nation-
alist and regionalist movements, though claims on the past in the domains of
museum representation, consumption, and cultural performance are also related to
the liberalization of the political economy.(13)
(13)As the Indian state has invited foreign national investment in Indian industry and accelerated
the privatization of the economy, both Indian and Hindu nationalisms as well as competing,
regionally based identity movements have gained ground (Rajagopal, 2000). Though contradictory
at one level, these forces are also mutually dependent. Although regionalist and nationalist
groups have staged spectacles meant to dramatize the dangers to cultural autonomy and heritage-
consciousness by homogenizing global culture (for example, protests at McDonald's restaurants, the
protest about the 1996 Miss World contest in Bangalore), the same groups have aggressively sought
government deregulation and increased levels of foreign aid and investment, with the goal of
increasing national and regional economic outputs. A full review of these debates is beyond the
Subjects of heritage in urban South India 707

With liberalization has come increased competition among Indian cities and
states to attract investment, especially in services (including tourism), information
technology, and export processing (Shaw, 1999). The benefits of economic deregu-
lationöespecially in poverty alleviation, the elimination of wage disparities, and
employment growthöare disputed in India as they are elsewhere.(14) Most analysts,
however, agree that the outcomes of liberalization, whether beneficial or deleterious,
are state specific.(15) Tamil Nadu, already one of the more industrialized and urbanized
states, with higher literacy levels and more developed telecommunications and trans-
portation networks, has attracted more public and private investment than other,
less industrialized states. Accordingly, Tamil Nadu has shown high levels of growth
in industrial output (including in the service sector) and wages. (16) Chennai and its
environs, as the largest and most developed urban center in the state, account for a
significant portion of this growth.(17)
Since the mid-1990s, the Chennai Municipal Development Authority (CMDA), the
Corporation of Chennai (the municipal governing body of the city), and the state
government of Tamil Nadu have allied with the private corporate sector in advocating
even higher rates of industrial growth. Proposals have been advanced to create special
industrial estates and finance centers, decentralized business districts, and micro-
enterprise programs, though the greatest hopes for growth have been placed in the IT

(13) continued
scope of the present paper, but their existence is indicative of the ways that Hindu nationalism has
upped the stakes in the past and, as a symptom of a larger grappling with postcoloniality, spurred
efforts to rethink and reevaluate the past of the nation and its regional and ethnic communities
(Basu and Kohli, 1998).
(14) There is considerable dispute about statistical significance of both post-1991 economic growth

(measured as GDP) and tertiary-sector expansion. Though increases are noted, economists differ
about whether these are significant accelerations vis-a©-vis rates in the prior decades and about
whether growth has reduced poverty levels (Nagaraj, 2000). Advocates of the Washington Consensus
argue that free-market conditions are optimal for poverty alleviation (Bhagwati, 2001),
although critics note that wage disparities have grown, that poverty levels, if measured using
nutritional criteria, have grown, that wage employment in the unorganized sector has increased
but it has decreased in the organized sector, and that, overall, wage levels have increased unevenly,
with advantage going to those already employed in the formal sector (Nagaraj, 2000; see also World
Bank, 2000). Even analysts who favor liberalization observe that growth has benefited urban areas,
richer states, and property owners (Bajpai and Radjou, 2000a; 2000b; Bajpai and Sachs, 2000).
(15) This is a result of the fact that, with liberalization, states, which already differed from each

other in terms of key socioeconomic indicators and levels of industrialization and infrastructure
development, acquired more autonomy in economic policymaking and implementation, which led,
in turn, to wider disparities.
(16) Analysts emphasize the preparedness of the stateöits relatively high literacy rates, teledensity,

and use of personal computers; its commitment to computer science at high-school level; its
growing numbers of Internet community centers in rural and urban areas (Bajpai and Radjou,
2000b). In 1999 levels of investment in the state were the highest in India, with government
investment in industry about 9% of the total (Sekhar and Bidarkar, 1999; Shaw, 1999). Currently,
Tamil Nadu accounts for 11% of India's industrial output and contributes 15% of the country's
exports and a significant proportion of the state's output is in the IT (information technology)
sector: in 1999, Tamil Nadu contributed 15% of the country's software exports (valued at US $300
million) (Bajpai and Radjou, 2000b).
(17) During the 1990s, domestic, foreign, and multinational corporations, including Phillips Ltd,

Sony, Hyundai, Hindustan Motors, and Mahindra Ford, as well as a number of software develop-
ment firms (Pentafour, Alcatel, EDS, IBM, Infosys, and Wipro) opened production sites and
offices in or just outside Chennai (Bajpai and Radjou, 2000b). Chennai also has a large and
growing services sector, accounting for over 40% of the total organized sector employment
(MMDA, 1995, pages 36 ^ 49; The Times Research Foundation, 1991, page 12).
708 M Hancock

(information technology) sector.(18) And, following recommendations of India's Eighth

Planning Commission, the CMDA has advocated that Chennai be made a gateway for
tourists, noting that this would entail conservation and development of heritage zones
as well as other tourist attractions (MMDA, 1995, pages 47 ^ 49; Nath, 1994).
The economic growth of the state is supported by and in turn contributes to
urbanization. Tamil Nadu is the second most urbanized state in India, and Chennai's
infrastructure underwent growth and refurbishment during the 1990s, with interna-
tional aid and private investment augmenting expenditures by state and national
agencies.(19) The city's real-estate market has grown exponentially, resulting in intensi-
fication of inner-city development öwith the erection of multistoreyed office and
residential structures and decreased plot sizes öand suburban expansion. Chennai's
high-growth areas lie in its southern and western sections and suburbs.(20) Higher
income populations are concentrated in residential enclaves within these growth zones
and new industrial developments, including fish hatcheries, IT parks, shopping centers,
chemical processing plants, and automotive and electronic assembly units, have been
initiated or are being planned. It is in the suburbanizing southern fringe that Dakshina
Chitra as well as a host of other new leisure sites (theme parks, restaurants, theaters)
and luxury resorts have been built during the past fifteen years.
To accommodate this growth, the Tamil Nadu government has allowed Chennai to
relax development control rules for preferred industries and offer tax benefits to
foreign and domestic investors (CMDA, 2001; MMDA, 1995, pages 133 ^ 143). These
measures have had significant and, for many deleterious, environmental and social
impacts. There is a more visible, and some would argue larger, middle class, with
denser global connections öespecially with India's far-flung nonresident Indian com-
munityöbut the rate of poverty reduction has not increased (The Hindu 1999). And,
with urban and industrial growth, environmental degradation also continues, including
the pressing problem of a rapidly dropping water table. Much of the new construction
along the artery south of the city, where Dakshina Chitra and other leisure sites are
located, has taken place in a coastal zone where new development had been and
continues to be officially prohibited under environmental impact regulations. Lawsuits
have been brought against these illegal structures and, though litigation is pending,
there is little sign that such growth will abate or be reversed (Equations, 1997, pages
34 ^ 47; Jairaj and Mehta, 1999).
Industrial development in Chennai has also entailed forced and preferential reloca-
tion. In many inner-city neighborhoods middle-class and upper-class homeowners have
taken advantage of skyrocketing real-estate values and sold their one-storied and
two-storied houses to developers, who have put up flat complexes (MMDA, 1995,
pages 128 ^ 133). High-income housing schemes in southern and southwestern suburbs
have resulted in privileged enclaves, including high-security and gated communities.
The southern reaches of Chennai, including the contested coastal zone, have seen
increased numbers of gated `farms'öweekend estates for the wealthy. By contrast,
forced displacements of poor communities from inner-city neighborhoods have
accelerated because many sites which are favored for inner-city industrial and
infrastructural development are in areas with existing tenement slums, hutments,
(18) Since 1997 the state's government has published a comprehensive IT policy and established an

IT department. Three software technology parks are to be completed in Chennai.

(19) The city saw the development of an extensive metropolitan commuter rail system, a new

power plant, and private hotels; streets and major arteries were widened, over twenty overpasses
constructed, the storm drain network expanded, and the city's river-canal system desilted.
(20) There, sizes of holdings and medium-to-low densities allow for both new building and

redevelopment (MMDA, 1995, pages 11 ^ 12).

Subjects of heritage in urban South India 709

and pavement dwellings. Following the examples set by Delhi, Mumbai, and
Calcutta, city and state authorities in Tamil Nadu have sought to demolish Chennai's
slums and relocate communities to the city's outskirts.(21) The city's western fringes,
where chemical plants, car and car ancillary factories, and export processing
campuses are found, have been slated as sites for slum relocationö a move that
will ensure pools of unskilled and semiskilled labor.
The popular rubric under which both inner-city development and slum relocation
have been pursued has been the call of the municipality for a `clean Chennai, green
Chennai'. This, again, follows the example of centrally funded programs in other Indian
metropolitan centers and, as they have, it too dovetails with elite conservationist efforts.
City and state agencies have undertaken slum demolitions, pavement clearing, and
removals of squatter settlementsöall as `cleaning' exercises. In his 1996 election cam-
paign, the city's mayor, M K Stalin (the son of then Chief Minister, Karunanidhi),
promised to make Chennai a clean, Singapore-like city. Once he was in office, the city's
newspapers bore regular visual reminders of the progress of Chennai toward this goal,
with photographs of earth-moving machinery demolishing huts and collecting garbage
(The Hindu 1996a; 1996b; 1996c; 1996d; 1997). Shortly thereafter the city entered into
negotiations with a Singapore-based company for privatized waste collection and
disposalöputatively a cheaper and more efficient option than the existing public
conservancy system. All of this, besides being a means to trim municipal expenditures
and enhance the attractiveness of the city to investors, was meant to enable residents
themselves to see the city differently: to see Chennai with the eyes of the global investors
and tourist consumers that the city's government and business leaders hoped to lure to
the `gateway of south India'.
3.1 Heritage entrepreneurship
As much as development and Singapore-like efficiency are desired by those who
govern and invest in the city, the associated alterations of the urban landscape have
sparked popular anxiety about the loss of cultural autonomy and its material legacy.
There has been criticism of the roles that urban development and mass media have
played in erasing the material relics of the past, as well as in diminishing residents'
knowledge of and attachments to those relics. At the same time, the greater value
accorded tourism as an avenue for development reflects a perception that the marketing
of heritage offers a means of preserving and enhancing the value and visibility of the
endangered residues of the past. Museums such as Dakshina Chitra, memorials honor-
ing Tamil heroes, visual reminders of the antiquity and nobility of Tamil language, and
political ceremony that invokes a glorious past all furnish palpable reminders of those
attachments, as well as occasions for their enactment.
The conservation and marketing of heritage have grown since the late 1980s, as India's
central and state governments have sought to deregulate and enhance revenues from
tourism. India's national Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC) has invited cooper-
ative `public ^ private' partnerships in tourism endeavors, in the hope that revenues from
tourism will allow the coupling of cultural conservation and economic development
(ITDC, 1989; Shankar, 2000). And, in fact, since the mid-1990s, tourism has grown with
(21)There have been some successes, but a number of communities displaced by such development
efforts have attempted to resist relocation, arguing that removing them from places of work,
education, and leisure amounts to a violation of human rights (The Hindu 2000c; 2000d; 2000e;
2000f; 2000g). Despite protest, however, relocation efforts have not abated and are likely to gain
ground. Frequently, officials use regulations banning `encroachment' as the legal means to oust
these communities. By contrast, encroachments by middle-class and upper-class property owners,
businesses, and political party affiliates have also become more common, though they are only
occasionally subject to removal efforts.
710 M Hancock

international tourist arrivals steadily increasing since 1998, though at rates lower than
anticipated (Phadnis, 2000; Shankar, 2000). Private entrepreneurs now compete with state
agencies to obtain a larger share of the lucrative international tourist market, with
ventures that include `heritage homes', craft boutiques, luxury and ecotourism resorts,
and alternative styles of cultural tourism (see, for example, Discover India 1996). Dakshina
Chitra falls into this category, with attractions meant to appeal to global elites. Dravidian
sites, on the other hand, rely on the patronage of the government of Tamil Nadu and
are intended, primarily, to invite the appreciation of those who identify as Tamils.
State-run agencies have expanded their offerings, as well, though they have sought
the portion of the tourist market that comprises ethnic Tamils residing abroad in
Southeast Asia and Australia and middle-class Indian citizens on holiday. The num-
bers of tours offered by state agencies with these visitors in mind include Dravidianist
commemorative sites and have expanded to incorporate new leisure sites. The range of
Hindu religious sites included within state tourism circuits has also expanded in recent
years, suggesting that they may not be immune to the influence of Hindu nationalism.
Since 1996, contemporaneous with the electoral successes of the Hindu nationalist party,
the number of pilgrimage-style tours on offer more than doubled in order to cater to
tourists from India's diaspora, as well as to middle-class Indian citizens on holiday.
Contemporaneous with the push to increase tourism revenues, which is associated
with liberalization, a legal-bureaucratic infrastructure for defining and managing
India's heritage has taken shape; in turn, the discourses and institutions that make
up that infrastructure have become prominent parts of elite sociocultural life in urban
India. The state-sponsored heritage infrastructure in India comprises legislative and
administrative measures, such as state-level `heritage acts' and municipal-development
control rules, as well as agencies, committees, and commissions that work in conjunc-
tion with voluntary agencies. Newsletters, magazines, and websites, the majority of
which are English-language, mediate these discourses for the public. A national orga-
nization dedicated to heritage preservation, the Indian National Trust for Art and
Cultural Heritage, INTACH, was formed in 1984.(22) INTACH's regional chapters,
including the Chennai-based Tamil Nadu branch, have continued conservation efforts
with support of private membership, mostly drawn from India's English-speaking,
urban elite.(23) The Chennai chapter, with about one hundred members, has sponsored
activities such as `heritage-awareness' poster contests; it has also authored proposals
for the conservation of historic buildings and precincts in the city and has participated
in a campaign, still underway, to introduce a state-level heritage act in Tamil Nadu.
Dakshina Chitra was originally administered as an INTACH project through a local
nonprofit organization, the Madras Craft Foundation. It is not longer formally tied to
INTACH, though it shares with INTACH a common base of support and patronage.

(22) INTACH was founded as a private body, but received central government funding initially

(Menon et al, 1988). The founding of INTACH in 1984 followed the national government's creation,
in 1977, of a Department of Culture, initially under the authority of the Ministry of Education,
Social Welfare and Culture, to preserve and market crafts and performance styles associated with
India's different regions (Ministry of Education, Social Welfare and Culture, 1978). In 1984, the
central government highlighted and sought to incorporate, under a single national banner, India's
cultural and ethnic diversity by sponsoring regional festivals as well as a New Delhi based event,
Lok Utsav (a six-day festival of traditional arts), coordinated by the Department of Culture
(Department of Culture, 1986). Contemporaneous with these festivals were a series of international
exhibitions, Festivals of India, staged in cooperation with North American and Western European
museums, with India's Department of Culture as the liaison agency (Kurin, 1991).
(23) Moreover, allied organizations and periodicals, such as Madras Musings and Adayar Times,

have launched their own smaller scale heritage-awareness programs (for example, soliciting and
publishing local oral histories) and regularly publicize local INTACH projects.
Subjects of heritage in urban South India 711

Dakshina Chitra, therefore, is best understood as part of a network of heritage

production ventures in Chennai, profit oriented as well as nonprofit oriented, that
derive from transregional and, in some instances, transnational linkages. Such linkages
respond to and are parts of the changing political economy. Its global orientation and
legibility of Dakshina Chitra sets it apart from Dravidianist public memory projects,
which cultivate local audiences and political subjects. The transnationalism of Dakshina
Chitra's projects and audiences is apparent in its operations, patronage, and visitation.
First, consider its administration and funding sources. The director of the museum is
a US citizen who has lived in Tamil Nadu since the early 1970s. Most other members of
the upper-level, managerial and educational staff are Tamil, but are part of the region's
globally connected elite.(24) Like educated, nationalist elites of the late 19th century, and
in some cases their actual descendents, most have lived, worked, or been schooled abroad
or elsewhere in India. They are literate in both English and Tamil, and some speak other
regional languages. Second, because visitation is low (about 30 000 people between 1997
and 2000), Dakshina Chitra is reliant on the private corporate sector (multinational and
domestic), on private foundations, especially the Ford Foundation, and on individual
donations.(25) It secures this support through focused solicitation, grant writing, and
extensive translocal advertising. Until 2001, the museum's website served as a gateway
for the museum's audience and potential donors, furnishing virtual tours, handicraft
sales, and donation opportunities. Dakshina Chitra also receives state funds, though the
level of support from India's central government contrasts sharply with that furnished by
the Tamil Nadu state government, reflecting the different values accorded the museum in
their respective ideological projects. Through the Development Commissioner for Handi-
crafts, the central government has awarded regular grants to Dakshina Chitra for its craft
education and marketing operations. By contrast, Tamil Nadu's state government has
shown little interest in Dakshina Chitra. It allowed the museum to lease the govern-
ment-held land on which its building complex sits, but has offered little else in support
of museum activities, reflecting the contested nature of the museum's version of southern
Indian culture and its transnationally influenced style of operation.

(24) Like other large institutions (state and private), as well as most middle-class and upper-class
homes, the museum employs low-status workers for housecleaning, gardening, and other grounds
work. Their pay is comparable with what they would receive if employed in one of those other
contexts, though they receive benefits and paid leave from the museum. Like the craftspersons,
though, housekeepers are signs of `authenticity', according to the director of Dakshina Chitra,
because they treat the exhibition homes as actual homes. The housekeepers draw košlams (rice-flour
designs) at the thresholds, decorate the houses with flowers, and light oil lamps, all of which are
marks of auspiciousness and hospitality that Hindu women are expected to perform throughout
India. They are also de facto guidesö pointing out artifacts of interest and explaining the materials
and uses of some house areas. Their comments are derived from analogies based on their own lives,
combined with information given by museum educational staff. They speak in Tamil, adding a
discursive layer that is absent or attenuated in other parts of the predominantly English-language
museum space. The director had initially wanted them to wear clothing appropriate to the region
and occupants of the houses in which they work, but that was resisted because of the cultural
significance of clothing. Colors and styles encode marital status, religion, and caste, and the women,
advised by their husbands, refused to compromise their own cultural identity and status by adopting
the markers of another identityöeven if that identity were of higher status than their own.
(25) In early 2000 the American Express Corporation donated Rs 10 lakhs (1 000 000 rupeesö

about $20 000) and Konica and other corporations have contributed by furnishing signage and
advertising. A large textile gallery was set up with support from India's Co-Optex Handloom
Corporation. Dakshina Chitra has taken advantage of the Ford Foundation's funding initiatives
in its Media, Culture, Arts programöover the past decade, it has secured US $50 000 in seed
money and US $250 000 in stabilization funds (Ford Foundation, 1999).
712 M Hancock

The exhibitionary modes of the museum, which rely on templates drawn from
metropolitan museums in India and abroad, make its projects legible within global heri-
tage discourses. It is, for the most part, an English-mediated space, its bilingual signage
and labeling, and Tamil-speaking staff (the craftspersons, housekeepers, gardeners, and
drivers) notwithstanding. Its layout is familiar to most of its foreign visitorsöwith a gift
shop and orientation area at the entry, a snack bar occupying a buffer space between the
entrance region and the major exhibition and performance spaces. As in newer types
of museums and cultural centers throughout the world, there are continuities between its
curatorial and commercial components: it has a well-stocked gift shop from which visitors
can select handcrafted goods of the sort displayed in the houses; cassettes of its orien-
tation video program are available for purchase, and the museum grounds can be hired
by outside parties for benefits and other events, such as weddings and banquets. The
museum is thus premised unabashedly on consumerist hopes, sharing with pro-liberal-
ization businesspersons and analysts the expectation that, by enhancing economic
growth, a free-market economy will revitalize local cultural production and conservation.
Finally, the ways in which the translocal processes involved in the founding of the
museum and in its ongoing operations participate in Chennai's political economy and
class formations are apparent in its visitation. Though the museum facilitates school
group visitation, including by public-school children, most of the visitors to and
supporters of the museum are part of a foreign or local elite and it is to their tastes
that Dakshina Chitra's exhibitions, sale items, and performances correspond. Casual
and low-income visitors are discouraged by Dakshina Chitra's entry fee of Rs 50 and
its location, about thirty kilometers from the southernmost divisions of Chennai.(26)
That distance and the lengthy access road between the museum and the highway
ensure that most visitors travel to the site by car, access to which continues to be
limited to the higher income groups who constitute the target market of the museum.
The elite market of the museum is also evident in the ways that Dakshina Chitra is
publicized. It has quickly become a prominent node on a circuit of leisure travel and
consumption that, in and around Chennai, connects five-star hotels, upscale boutiques,
and art galleries. A standard tour package offered by private travel agents for affluent
clients includes Dakshina Chitra, the ancient temple complexes at Kanchipuram and
Mamallapuram, and an overnight stay at a resort managed by the five-star Taj Group, a
hotel, restaurant, and resort conglomerate.(27) In 2000 a special `Introduction to South
Indian culture' overnight stay was introduced and was offered at a cost of Rs 1000 per
person. And, negotiations were ongoing with the Taj Group to allow them to run a
restaurant on the museum grounds. By contrast, government tourism bypasses Dakshina
Chitra. No tours offered by the state tourism development corporation make stops there,
despite its location along a regular tour-bus route.
The translocal mediation of heritage at Dakshina Chitra, though not determinative
of the ways that memory is represented, institutionalized, and debated, nevertheless
constitutes a horizon on which heritage discourses take shape and are, in turn,
deployed in everyday action. In these circumstances, it is inevitable that consumption
and mass media shape popular understandings of the past öproviding modes for the

(26) The entry is modest by Eurowestern standards, but quite high in comparison with local

museums, which are either free or charge one or two rupees.

(27) Those who take such tours normally engage a guide and driver through a private agency, at

costs of several thousand rupees. These guides' accounts thus mediate the museum for many
visitors, though the guides receive no training from Dakshina Chitra. Guides who do this work
maintain that their clients are usually corporate and government VIPs, well-heeled nonresident
Indians, and foreign nationals. During my mid-week visits between November 1999 and April 2000
I rarely noted more than six to eight other visitors.
Subjects of heritage in urban South India 713

formation of historical consciousness while offering obvious and convenient `enemies'

of authenticity. Adding urgency to the heritage agenda are the changes experienced in
everyday life, which are direct outcomes of urbanization and industrialization and are
popularly ascribed to globalization. These include the loss of familiar places as a
result of widened streets and new construction, the demolition of colonial `bungalows',
and the erection of multiunit flat complexes in their place, increased availability of
imported consumer goods, and the fashionable and economically expedient interest in
English acquisition (Hancock, 2001).(28)
The contradictory position of heritage discourses within urban planning and devel-
opment projects is sharpened for many of the city's middle and upper classes because
of their own reliance on and advancement of the new economy, especially its service
sectors and information-technology sectors. That Dakshina Chitra caters to and is
disproportionately supported by them is predictable, as is its location along a corridor
being developed for new industries of leisure, aquaculture, and information technology,
and which lies adjacent to the sections of city inhabited by the wealthier, more globally
connected segment of its population. It is not surprising, therefore, that simultaneous
with the transformations of urban space and everyday life, heritage marketing and con-
servation efforts have accelerated ösome under auspices of multinational and domestic
corporations whose management and stockholders are drawn from this urban elite,
others reliant on government bodies charged with conservation and/or voluntary
associations.

4 Conclusion
At Dakshina Chitra, and in the Dravidianized spaces of Chennai, competing accounts of
culture and history of southern India are made visible. The sites represent efforts to claim
a place, literally and figuratively, in a global network of mass production and consump-
tion. The claim of Dakshina Chitra on the `real' southern India, however, contrasts with
and subtly seeks to displace the authority of the images of the region that Tamil Nadu's
ruling party and its Tamil nationalist predecessors have promulgated. Despite these
differences, both return to the potency of rural spaces and bodies, whether as artisanal
village republic or as rustic wellspring of Tamil identity, and mine the imagery of the
rural for possibilities of cultural autonomy and economic self-sufficiency.
The Dravidianist ruling parties of the state, though especially the DMK, assert the
rural roots of their own membership and constituency by inserting references to Tamil
Nadu's villages and rural districts in the built environment of Chennai: its statues and
memorials, street names, and iconography. In contrast, Dakshina Chitra is imprinted
with the hybridity of India's multilingual and transnational elites. The architectural
style and (English-mediated) semiotic codes of the museum's campus, coupled with
its distance from the city, frame the museum as the city's rural, yet knowable, Other.
For, although the contrasts between the quiet rural prosperity of the museum and the
streets of Chennai are palpable, the reality of Dakshina Chitra is an accessible presence
in the city. The visual techniques of its orientation video assert this, as do the strategies
by which exhibitions have been created and presented for viewing. Not only is this

(28) Popular concerns about the loss of `heritage' are regularly expressed on the pages of the English

biweekly, Madras Musings, which was founded in 1991 by S Muthiah, currently its editor-in-chief.
In interview with me, Muthiah has stated that the mission of the paper is to call attention to
the ways that appreciation and knowledge of local history have been lost with the destruction of
the city's built environment in the wake of unplanned (or poorly planned) development (interview,
2 November, 1999). In other interviews, conducted by me between October 1999 and May 2000,
members of the local INTACH chapter attributed their participation in that organization to
concerns similar to those voiced by Muthiah.
714 M Hancock

reality asserted to persist in the memory and traditional practices of both Brahman
exponents of southern culture and non-Brahman craft producers, it can be reclaimed by
urban consumers through commodity transactions. Dakshina Chitra thus rehearses
cultural claims made by elite nationalists of the early 20th century, the architects of
the Indian National Congress, and their political descendents in the Congress Party. It
recalls the artisanal roots of southern India with idioms borrowed from the lexicon of
secular nationalism, an ideology central to the platform claimed by the Congress Party,
which headed the central government almost continuously from independence in
1947 through the mid-1990s, when it was displaced by a Hindu-nationalist-led coalition.
And, through indirection, Dakshina Chitra discounts the forms of authenticity espoused
in the regionalist imaginary of the state's ruling party.
I have argued here that, during the past two decades, these competing claims about
the cultural distinctiveness of southern India have been accompanied by intensified
efforts, by state and municipal bodies, to attract foreign investment, to accommodate
multinational and foreign business, and to connect with global cultural and economic
institutions. A common position in the globalization debate argues that such claims are
symptoms of the declining cultural autonomy of localities and nations in response to
the impact of capitalist penetration and global consumer culture (for example, Mander
and Goldsmith, 2001). I take the position, however, that the postliberalization empha-
sis on service sector growth, including tourism, has created new spaces for heritage
entrepreneurshipöin handicraft production and marketing, publishing, architecture,
and designöespecially among those middle-class and upper-class segments of the
population who are relatively more advantaged by economic liberalization (compare
Harvey, 1996, pages 316 ^ 324; Huyssen, 2000). Heritage operates as both marketable
good and political legacy. Not only does competition among historical narratives
and commodities exist, there is also competition among the kinds of political conscious-
ness and participation that are negotiated through and/or galvanized by historical
knowledge, spaces, and materials.
The issues that are addressed in this paperöabout the value and meaning of
historical knowledge öare not uniquely Indian but have been occasioned by the emer-
gence and expansion of a global heritage industry and by the broader phenomenon of
the globalization of memory (Huyssen, 2000). The commodified pasts in which themed
cultural environments traffic are often taken as evidence of the postmodernist denial of
place and history (Sorkin, 1992, pages 205 ^ 232; Zukin, 1991, pages 217 ^ 250). In the
scholarly literature on this subjectöa literature in which Disney corporation sites loom
largeöcultural centers, theme parks, and allied sites are treated as manifestations of
the political economy of leisure in advanced capitalist economies. Their semiotic
functions in such contexts are often emphasizedöthey are argued to serve ideological
ends of capitalism by mystifying capitalist relations of production. They are, as Sharon
Zukin (1991, page 228) explains, the ``friendly face'' of corporate power. The emergence of
themed cultural environments in developing and postcolonial nation-states, often in
contexts of economic liberalization, seems to confirm the idea that such sites are out-
comes of, and may in turn promote, global capitalism. Yet, in these settings, themed
environments, like other economic and cultural institutions, are also implicated in the
place-constituting politics of ethnicity and nationality insofar as these politics generate
and rely on narratives of the pastöhistories, genealogies, myths, epics, and life stories.
In postcolonial states, such as India, ongoing political deployments of the past are not
easily disentangled from earlier struggles for regional, national, and ethnic autonomy.
Furthermore, in contexts such as these, in which the contingent and unfinished nature of
the nation is apparent, the `local' that stands in opposition to the `global' is not neces-
sarily the `nation' but can be a region or a group, bound by language, ethnicity, gender,
Subjects of heritage in urban South India 715

sexuality, or class, which exists contentiously within (and against) the nation-state, to
which it may have been ceded by erstwhile colonial authorities.
The examples discussed in this paper attest to the continuing importance of historical
consciousness in the political, economic, and cultural life of southern India. Competing
regional and national imaginaries are sustained as well as troubled by the articulations
of local identities and institutions with global flows of information, people, and capital.
These cases suggest that the questions to be asked about the new styles of themed
cultural environments are not only who buys into them and profits from them, but
also about the forms of historical consciousness that they mediate and the political
subjectivities that they solicit.
Acknowledgements. This paper is based on ethnographic and archival research conducted in
Chennai from August to December 1996 and from September 1999 to May 2000. Research travel
in 1996 was funded by a Faculty Career Development Award and a Faculty Research Award from
the University of California, Santa Barbara; research travel in 1999 and 2000 was supported by a
Fulbright Hays Faculty Research Abroad award from the US Department of Education, a Regents
Humanities Fellowship from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Additional archival
research at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC in May 1998, the University of Chicago in
June 1998, and at the British Library in July 2000 was supported by Faculty Research Awards
from the University of California, Santa Barbara. An earlier version of this paper was presented
to the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. I gratefully acknowl-
edge the comments and suggestions of Aarthi Kawlra, Vinay Lal, Janaki Nair, M S S Pandian,
A Srivathsan, and D Thiagarajan. I appreciate, as well, the comments of Society and Space editor,
Geraldine Pratt, and of four anonymous reviewers. I alone am responsible for the final version of
this paper and for any errors of fact or interpretation contained herein.
References
Appadurai A, Breckenridge C, 1992, ``Museums are good to think: heritage on view in India'', in
Museums and Communities Eds I Karp, C Kreamer, S Lavine (Smithsonian Institute Press,
Washington, DC) pp 34 ^ 55
Bajpai N, Radjou N, 2000a, ``IT industry: great prospects ahead, II'' The Hindu 30 March, 2000,
page 12
Bajpai N, Radjou N, 2000b, ``Raising global competitiveness of Tamil Nadu's IT industry''
Economic and Political Weekly (on-line edition) 35 449 ^ 465, http://www.epw.org.in
Bajpai N, Sachs J, 2000, ``Reforms in the statesöIII'' The Hindu 26 January, page 12
Barnett M, 1976 The Politics of Cultural Nationalism (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ)
Basu A, Kohli A (Eds), 1998 Community, Conflicts and the State in India (Oxford University
Press, New Delhi)
Bhagwati J, 2001, ``Growth, poverty and reforms'' Economic and Political Weekly (on-line edition)
36 www.epw.org.in
Bhatia G, 1991 Laurie Baker: Life, Works, and Writings (Penguin, New Delhi)
Cable V, Weston A, Jain L C, 1986 The Commerce of Culture (Lancer International, New Delhi)
Chakrabarti V, 1999 Indian Architectural Theory (Oxford University Press, Delhi)
Chattopadhyay S, 2000, ``Expedient forgetting: architecture in late-twentieth-century Indian
nationalist imagination'' DBR 43 16 ^ 29
CMDA, 2001, ``Development control rules'', Chennai Municipal Development Authority,
http://www.cmdachennai.com
Cohen N, 2000 Urban Conservation (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA)
Crang M, Travlou P, 2001, ``The city and topologies of memory'' Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 19 161 ^ 177
Davis P, 1999 Ecomuseums: A Sense of Place (Leicester University Press, Leicester)
Department of Culture, 1986 Performance Budget 1985/86 (Government of India, New Delhi)
Discover India 1996, ``Discover Madras'', special issue, February
Equations, 1997 Dossier on Tourism: Issues in Tamil Nadu (Equations, Bangalore)
Ford Foundation, 1999 Ford Foundation Annual Report (Ford Foundation, New York)
Gandhi M K, 1997 [1909] Hind Swaraj Ed. A Parel (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)
Geetha V, Rajadurai S, 1998 Towards a Non-Brahmin Millennium (Samya, Calcutta)
Greenough P, 1995, ``Nation, economy and tradition displayed'', in Consuming Modernity
Ed. C Breckenridge (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) pp 216 ^ 248
716 M Hancock

Hancock M, 1998, ``Unmaking the `great tradition' '' Identities 4 343 ^ 388
Hancock M, 1999 Womanhood in the Making (Westview, Boulder, CO)
Hancock M, 2001, ``Festivity and popular memory in South India'' South Asia Research 21 1 ^ 24
Harvey D, 1996 Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Blackwell, Cambridge, MA)
Huyssen A, 2000, ``Present pasts: media, politics, amnesia'' Public Culture 12 21 ^ 38
Irschick E, 1969 Politics and Social Conflict in South India (University of California Press,
Berkeley, CA)
ITDC, 1989 Sixty-first Report, Committee on Public Undertakings (1989 ^ 90) India Tourism
Development Corporation Limited, Government of India, New Delhi
Jairaj B, Mehta K, 1999, ``One five star or one fifty villages: tourism on the East Coast Road''
CAG Reports October ^ December, 8 ^ 9
Kalam M A, 1996 Sacred Groves in Kodagu District of Karnataka (South India): A Socio-historical
Study (Institut Franc°ais de Pondichëry, Pondicherry)
King A, 1990 Urbanism, Colonialism and the World Economy (Routledge, London)
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett B, 1991, ``Objects of ethnography'', in Exhibiting Cultures Eds I Karp,
S Lavine (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC) pp 386 ^ 443
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett B, 1998 Destination Culture (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA)
Krishnamurty K, Pandi V, Palanivel T, Saibaba P, Pratap D, 1996, ``Indian economy, 1995 ^ 96 to
1997 ^ 98'' Economic and Political Weekly 31 661 ^ 672
Kurin R, 1991, ``Cultural conservation in exhibiting culture'', in Exhibiting Cultures Eds I Karp,
S Lavine (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC) pp 315 ^ 343
Kwok, K-W, Kwa C G, Kong L, Yeoh B, 1999 Our Place in Time (Singapore Heritage Society,
Singapore)
Mander J, Goldsmith E (Eds), 2001 The Case Against the Global Economy (Earthscan, London)
Menon, A G Krishna, Thapar B K, 1988 Historic Towns and Heritage Zones (INTACH, New Delhi)
Ministry of Education, Social Welfare and Culture, Department of Culture, 1978 Report of the
Working Group on Art and Culture for the Sixth Five-Year Plan (Government of India, New Delhi)
MMDA, 1995, ``Master plan for Madras metropolitan areaö2011'', draft, Madras Municipal
Development Authority, Madras
Muthiah S, 1999 Madras Rediscovered 4th revised edition (East ^ West, Chennai)
Nagaraj R, 2000, ``Indian economy since 1980: virtuous growth or polarisation?'' Economic and
Political Weekly (on-line edition) 35 2831 ^ 2838, http://www.epw.org.in
Nath S, 1994, ``Tourism: a case study'', paper presented at Conference on the Role of Services
Sector and Expanding New Areas of Employment and Augmenting FOREX Earnings,
24 November, Goa; copy available from Library of Congress, Washington, DC, South Asia
Microfiche Collection, 96-900781, I-CLR-698.1
Pandian, M S S, 1998, ``Stepping outside history: new Dalit writings from Tamil Nadu'', in Wages
of Freedom Ed. P Chatterjee (Oxford University Press, Delhi) pp 292 ^ 309
Pesch L, 1999 The Illustrated Companion to South Indian Classical Music (Oxford University
Press, New Delhi)
Phadnis A, 2000, ``Foreign tourist arrivals up 6.7 pc'' Business Line Internet Edition 8 May, page 5
http://www.indiaserver.com/businessline/2000/05/08/stories/140872p5.htm
Pinto A, 1999, ``End of Dravidian era in Tamil Nadu'' Economic and Political Weekly (on-line
edition) 34 www.epw.org.in
Prakash V, 1997, ``Identity production in postcolonial Indian architecture: re-covering what we
never had'', in Postcolonial Space(s) Eds G B Nalbantōlu, C T Wong (Princeton Architectural
Press, New York) pp 39 ^ 52
Presler F, 1987 Religion Under Bureaucracy (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)
Rajagopal A, 2000 Politics After Television (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)
Rajeswari Communications, 1997 A Vision of the South (Madras Craft Foundation, Chennai)
Ramanujan A K (Ed. and translator), 1985 Poems of Love and War (University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, IL)
Ramaswamy S, 1997 Passions of the Tongue (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA)
Ramusack B, 1995, ``The Indian princes as fantasy: palace hotels, palace museums, and the
palace on wheels'', in Consuming Modernity Ed. C Breckenridge (University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, MN) pp 66 ^ 89
Rao N Venugopal, 1994, ``Learning from a legacy: how and what?'' Economic and Political Weekly
29 288 ^ 289
Rivie©re G, 1985, ``The ecomuseum: an evolutive definition'' Museum 148 182 ^ 183
Subjects of heritage in urban South India 717

Sekhar S, Bidarkar S, 1999, ``Municipal budgets in India'' Economic and Political Weekly (on-line
edition) 34 http://www.epw.org.in
Shankar T, 2000, ``Government indifferent to tourism promotion'' The Hindu 25 April, page 1
Shaw A, 1999, ``Emerging patterns of urban growth in India'' Economic and Political Weekly
(on-line edition) 34 http://www.epw.org.in
Sitaraman S, 1994, ``Society and science'' Economic and Political Weekly 29 290
Sorkin M (Ed.), 1992 Variations on a Theme Park (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York)
Srivathsan A, 1998, ``Politics of Tamil monuments: 1968 ^ 1975'' South Indian Studies 5 59 ^ 82
Teo P, Yeoh B, 1997, ``Remaking local heritage for tourism''Annals of Tourism Research 24 192 ^ 213
The Hindu (English-language daily, Chennai) http://www.hinduonnet.com
1996a, ``Pavement hawkers removed from NSC Bose Road'', 28 November, page 3
1996b, ``Hawkers on Poonamallee High Road evicted'', 4 December, page 3
1996c, ``Traffic moves faster after clearance'', 5 December, page 3
1996d, ``Squatters to be rehabilitated outside the city'', 5 December, page 3
1997, ``Garbage, garbage everywhere'', Metro section, 6 January, page 1
1999, ``Has poverty worsened with reforms?'', 30 December, page 19
2000a, ``Tamil medium: parents of students stage protest'', 26 February, page 3
2000b, ``HC quashes G.O. on Tamil medium'', 21 April, page 1
2000c, ``HC rejects hutment-dwellers' plea for fire-proof houses'', 14 April, page 3
2000d, ``Dalit rights public hearing on 18 April'', 17 April, page 5
2000e, ``Residents sore over attempt to encroach vacant land'', 19 April, page 3
2000f, ``Slum dwellers' demand'', 24 April, page 3
2000g, ``Slum resettlement violates human rights'', 25 April, page 3
2001, ``Statue will be re-erected on Marina seafront'', 21 December (G Chidambaram, Principal
Researcher)
The Times Research Foundation, 1991 Madras 2011: Policy Imperativesö An Agenda for Action,
Volume 5 (Madras Municipal Development Authority, Madras)
Thiagarajan D, 1999 From Village to Centre: The Structures of Dakshina Chitra (Madras Craft
Foundation, Chennai)
Thiagarajan D, no date, ``Dakshina Chitra, a living heritage center for South India'',
http://www.ucalgary.ca/~sici/main/Cmcc/Thiagara.pdf
Tinatanti (Tamil-language daily, Chennai)
1999, ``Ka n niy
akumariyil Amaikkappatta 133 ati uyara tiruva l luvar cilai'' [133-foot

Tiruvalluvar _ _ Kanyakumari]
statue to be unveiled in _ __
31 December, page 2
2000a, ``1-mutal 5-am vakuppu varai tami l valikkalvi aracu pirappitta uttaravu rattu''
[Repeal of government order requiring  Tamil
 medium education from first to fifth
standards] 20 April, page 1
2000b, ``Em. Ji. Ar. Peyarai mairaikavillai'' [MGR's name is not hidden] 6 January, page 3
2000c, ``M atantorum Rs 1000 `ku ral paricu' '' [1000 Rupee `Kural prize' for students]
1 January, page 1 
van der Veer P, 1994 Religious Nationalism (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA)
World Bank, 2000 India: Policies to Reduce Poverty and Accelerate Sustainable Development
(World Bank, Washington, DC) http://www.worldbank.org
Yeoh B, 2000, ``From colonial neglect to post-independence heritage: the housing landscape in
the central area of Singapore'' City and Society 12 103 ^ 124
Zukin S, 1991 Landscapes of Power (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA)