(In)adequacies of Heritage Conservation and Management: Socio-Spatial Contestations of the Piedmont-Scrublands, Ramanadi Basin, Tamirabarani Productive Landscape

ABSTRACT

Prima facie, our field-site, the piedmont-scrublands of Ramanadi Basin, Tamirabarani productive landscape, in the South Indian peninsula, is a Historical Irrigated Landscape (HIL). However, here, we neither reiterate our field-site as a HIL in need of site-specific solution, nor do we argue for evermore (sub)categories to manage such diverse heritage. We draw on our interdisciplinary fieldwork and argue that the polysemic nature of landscapes and their components are part of their complex contextual lived realities. Continuing to see the multiple meanings and contestations exclusively as ‘wicked problems’ that impinge on practice and policy would be a disservice to the discipline’s well-documented histories of learning through praxis. An ethnographic approach enriched by archival and cartographic studies, which we developed over successive field engagements, enabled us to foreground the (in)adequacies of current heritage conservation-management models, as analytic and heuristic, and present a more progressive model for heritage conservation-management pedagogy.

KEYWORDS:

• Brahmadeya
• microcosm
• pedagogy
• South Asia
• wetlands
• wicked problems

Acknowledgements

We thank the second reviewer for a patient and detailed reading of our draft; their comments were extremely useful in restructuring our core arguments. The first reviewer’s comments were also useful as it helped us bring the material practices of heritage conservation and management more directly into the text. Among various interlocutors, we particularly wish to acknowledge the support of the Ravanasamudram Panchayat, Residents’ Association, residents and Mathivanan M, Senior Research Associate, ATREE - ACCC.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While we understand ‘field’ as a construct, we recognise it as a useful organisational category that offers a way to discuss and debate certain micro-level realities that reflect and resonate with macro-level issues.

2. We draw on over 20 years of long-standing engagements with diverse conservation landscapes, both as academicians and practitioners, including the UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Hampi and Pattadakal (productive riverine landscapes). We argue that the two sites are more than either ‘Group of Monuments’ or ‘Cultural Landscapes’, Suganya (under the name Chittiraibalan 2022) from a landscape perspective and Rajangam (2020) from a community-centric perspective. We then foreground the environmental and social consequences of such prescriptive designations, respectively.

3. Lönngren and van Poeck (2021) review the concept and its wide yet inconsistent application across disciplines. More an Anglophone academic abstraction, it is increasingly applied across disciplines in developed countries or countries that have apparently solved the basic human needs of their populace. Its uncritical application in South Asian contexts where the impossible challenges of addressing social inequities are not merely problems but part of its everyday realities is problematic.

4. All the conversations and discussions with various interlocutors were conducted in Tamil. We have translated the conversations contextually and not transliterated the text.

5. We do take into account the complexities and vast heterogeneity of social actors and structures, across scales, in different social, political, and geographic contexts. However, it is observable that certain patterns resonate, for instance, forms of socio-spatial marginalisation.

6. 8^th to 14^th centuries CE peninsular empires.

7. We discuss the social geographies of other settlements of this basin, such as Pottalpudur, a major pilgrimage centre, elsewhere.

8. Broadly agreed historical periods of this region: early Pandya (1st to 10th centuries CE), Chola (10th to 14th centuries CE), later Pandya (14th to 16th centuries CE), Madurai Nayaka (16th to 17th centuries CE) and later Nayaka & Poligar (long-18th century CE).

9. Today the region encompasses the settlement boundaries of Kadayam Perumpathu, Kila-Kadayam, Mela-Kadayam, Therku-Kadayam, Ravanasamudram, and Govindaperi among others.

10. As part of our bi-annual field school that we run in this landscape, this time for undergraduate students of DSCA, Bangalore, April 2022.

11. Extract from a letter to the District Collector dated 21st June 1875. See next section.

12. We deliberately avoid naming these institutions and industries as we continue to engage with the landscape.

13. These two channels meet again downstream, west of Pillaikulam (now a Panchayat settlement), near a highland.

14. He further argues that Aiyanar and Sastha have more recently begun to be equated with Aiyappa, a god more popular towards the neighbouring state of Kerala, on the western slopes of the Western Ghats.

15. Traditionally, the Yadavas were a cattle-rearing caste owing allegiance to Lord Krishna or Govinda, the God of the Yadavas.

16. The intricate character of this water network has already been noted. We are currently undertaking DEM-based hydrological analysis drawing on the methodology developed by Chittiraibalan (2022).

17. We observe that colonial records referred to the masonry barriers constructed by them as barrages and the older water infrastructure they repaired as anicuts.

18. As part of our April 2023 field school for RNSIT, Bangalore.

19. Currently, the temple management is contesting the railway order.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Krupa Rajangam

Krupa Rajangam, Ph.D is a conservation architect and social geographer. She is currently a Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellow at the Historic Preservation Department, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. She is the Founder-Director of Saythu … Linking People and Heritage, a non-institutional professional conservation collective.

Kuili Suganya

Kuili Suganya, Ph.D is a conservation architect and settlement geographer. She is currently a Research Associate with the MAHSA Project at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. She is a Senior Partner at Saythu … Linking People and Heritage, a non-institutional professional conservation collective.