This is one of the many issues on which I have been unable
to make up my mind: Should we care about
the preserving the past.? This question
came back to my mind when I read this piece in The Hindu today. Please follow the link for this piece: http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/saving-kolkatas-heritage-buildings/article7360740.ece
In a line that might remind you of Mark Twain’s view on
buying shares, other matters that I am undecided about include whether it is
important to believe in God, whether fidelity is a virtue, should people chase
limitless wealth in life, is it important to care for friends and family or is
it OK to be utterly narcissistic and so on.
Before you shun me, or worse disown me, I have not let any of
these doubts affect the choices I have made in my life, although I will not rule
out the possibility that some of my thoughts and actions over the years may have been influenced
by these doubts. Yad bhaavam tad bhavet,
is what our scriptures seem to prophesy: You become what your thoughts are.
The question is why or should one care about the past at
all? Should one preserve old buildings
as many people across many cities in our country and elsewhere seem to be
endeavouring to lately?
I guess the answer to that depends on what the objectives are.
Buildings and architecture play an important part in historiography. History lessons from our school days have tormented us with details of how buildings unearthed from the sites of various
civilisations of thousands years ago tell us a lot about how people may have
lived in those times.
They also give us beautiful ideas for designing the
buildings of today and to that extent provide a base level of knowledge of
design and architecture that we may all build on now and in the future.
So also buildings associated with great personalities serve
to remind us of the lives that they led and the often numerous struggles that
they went through which eventually made them into the great souls that they
turned out to be.
At an individual level buildings are associated with
personal memories. I have often believed
that places and structures are nothing if they do not bring back memories of
people and phenomena that we know of or care about.
There could be another reason too: Preserving structures of the past just for
its own sake. This is the bit that I am not so sure of. Clinging on to the past when it has no great
bearing for the present or the future seems like such an idle pursuit, a luxury too lavish even
for the leisure class described by Thorstein Veblen.
On the contrary, some destructive, cataclysmic change is inevitable for the
inexorable march of human civilization and for the evolutionary order of nature
to prevail. If that had not happened
would the saber toothed tiger and the huge pterodactyl that we read of in our
primary school natural history have given way to the primates that preceded
homo sapiens? And of all the things that
our knowledge of the evolution of the world tells us, the one thing that we
can be sure of is this: There have been
ice ages in the past and we have no good reason to believe that there will not be any more
in the future.
Such inevitability of change has been endorsed by many eminent
scholars even though we might find them to be dismal in their outlook. Karl Marx (and Heraclitus) is credited with having said Change
is the only constant in life. Every new year’s eve I read of or hear some one
or the other recall Lord Tennyson’s famous line, Ring out the old, ring in the
new. Among economists Schumpeter
developed the idea of creative destruction. And not to forget the Hindu
scriptures that predict that at the end of the yuga all of these creations will
be subsumed in the grand cataclysmic Pralaya.
Granted, these were all said in different contexts and they cannot be used as arguments against the attempts to preserve some ageing edifices that are part of the hundred year old history of a city. But then again what is so great about those seventy or one hundred years in the history of human civilization?
The City of Calcutta itself goes much further than this past century, to the days of Siraj ud Daula, Lord Clive and the black hole tragedy and even before that to the days of the Palas and the Senas who ruled Bengal for several centuries.
In another example, on a recent travel through parts of the North East I came across old dilapidated buildings in Cherrapunji, of homes and offices that had been built by some of the earliest missionaries that followed the East India company and set up trading and missionary outposts for the movement of goods and services from Calcutta to Shillong through Dhaka.
These buildings bear witness to a far more important epoch in the political history of the country which has been altered unrecognizably through the administrative scalpel that the British rulers wielded to separate the nation in the name of dealing with the the festering sore of communalism that they had fomented.
As I stood on the densely wooded hills of Cherrapunji looking at the distant roads winding far below from where we stood into the flooded paddy fields of Bangladesh I could not help wondering how those gritty missionaries had found their way through this unmapped inhospitable terrain.
So here is the question: What is more important from the point of view of history? Preserving some seventy or eighty year old bungalows that will be a constant reminder of the feudal legacy of a society that was spawned by a colonial ruler that has little to offer by way of historiographic learnings? Or various other legacies of the past such as the Welsh church that was built in 1841 in Cherrapunjee?
At the end of it all I am convinced of just one thing: All the arguments that some enthusiastic folks make for preserving various old structures certainly deserve a second thought.
Nanni….Namaskaaram…
No comments:
Post a Comment