‘There is a lot of rhetoric which
never translates into investment’
Richard Englehardt, an internationally acclaimed scholar on heritage management, was recently in Dhaka to conduct a workshop on ‘Value based Management of the Cultural Heritage of Bangladesh’, organised by the UNESCO. Englehardt recently retired from the position of Regional Advisor for Culture, Asia Pacific Region, UNESCO. He talks to Mubin S Khan on the value and state of Bangladeshi heritage and on how to preserve it
photo by Prito Reza
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We hear a lot of nationalistic rhetoric about the heritage of Bangladesh, but never much objective assessment. In your expert opinion, what is the true value of the heritage that Bangladesh possesses?
Around the world, everywhere you go, people are enthusiastic about their own heritage. There is no legitimate yardstick to assign values to heritage; in fact, heritage is a creation of a local community, about how they perceive it. The rest of the world should stand up and listen to it.
However, we should also try to understand this enthusiasm in the global theme of heritage. One of the ways to understand is to identify heritage not in terms of places, but in terms of themes.
In Bangladesh, the Bangla Language Movement works as a very good theme for heritage. Then you have the wet rice agriculture which started from here and spread to many places around world and becomes an important contribution of local vernacular to global culture. You also have the textile industry, the muslin and jamdani, which is a heritage of this region for hundreds of years and still continues. Textiles is the basis from which the modern world international trade began from which sprung the notions of monopoly, trading cartels etc. In this context, textiles are a very important heritage.
I think this is how you can evaluate the heritage of Bangladesh. And then go about looking for the stories and places that represent these heritages. This is a more holistic approach towards heritage.
The problem comes with industrialisation, globalisation and colonisation in the twentieth century in which heritage was devalued for what would be the new global paradigm – industrial crops, industrial silk etc. What this does is replace the value of local contribution for a much more generic, easily consumable global heritage. When that happens, this process is often subsidised by the government. You get a tax break if you deal in bricks and cement but you get a tax break if you deal in jamdani cotton.
Heritage and its activities get devalued and the sites and the monuments that captured their knowledge are over-devalued for a subsidised, global heritage. It becomes and less valuable in the development and planning framework of the government. It becomes less cared for, degraded and it really does become less valuable.
That is the kind of problem we face in Bangladesh. There is a lot of rhetoric but it never quite translates into investment or even consumption. There is a broad-based consumption of music here, but nothing much else. In Sri Lanka, it is a policy of the government that all children must visit all the nationally important heritage sites at least twice in their duration of their school life. School children don’t go to heritage sites over here.
The kind of rhetorical enthusiasm we have in the school curriculum here does not have any long-standing effect in person’s behaviour. It does not count for anything. Schoolchildren can be very enthusiastic about saving pandas and whales and when they grow up they are all enthusiastic about cutting forests and capturing whales.
In Bangladesh, I think a lot more translation of this enthusiasm needs to happen. It must be integrated into the sustainable development paradigm. We should invest in heritage because it represents what stood the test of time and therefore what is best in us.
There has been long-standing battle between conservationists and property developers over a number of heritage sites that also have great, commercial land value. In an over-populated city, the conservationists are most often on the losing side. Is there something we can learn from other cities on how to preserve heritage during times of rapid urban growth?
Heritage is a public resource much like water and air, which acquires value through generations. Keeping it in the private domain can threaten this value. When you keep it there, heritage becomes captured and it is no longer valuable to anyone else.
In a big urban environment, a high rise only has value during that moment of time while heritage is no longer viewed as a resource. The government should resist this kind of a narrow vision of asset character. When valuation is done only through one tool – rental space – you lose the game. Other asset valuation resources must be used. Large high rise buildings are not energy-coefficient; they produce a lot of heat. And this is not paid for by the people who own them, but by the citizens themselves. People should be made aware of these valuations. Heritage meanwhile, has a lot of consumption value when regarded in the right manner.
In Europe, heritage has been protected through the capitals gains taxes. Other countries have adopted other means. The government has to level the playing field or you have a situation where ‘right is might’ and where no one argues anymore. Then you build a totally unsustainable environment much like what Dhaka has now become.
The answer is obvious but I will still go ahead and ask you, what is the state of our heritage sites?
Not so good. It is little taken care of. And the reason for this is, not enough people are being made responsible for it. There is no use blaming the department of archaeology because an under-resourced institution cannot undertake such a huge task by themselves.
One of the legacies of colonialism is that heritage is viewed as an elite resource, a thing with nothing more than a historic value. People should be made aware of the fact that heritage is a continuation of who they are and with the destruction of heritage a lot of valuable, regional knowledge is lost. Heritage is the source to design templates, to innovation and creativity. It benefits their life of today and of the future to come.
Situated on the Gangetic plains, Bangladesh’s heritage sites are vulnerable to natural disasters as well. Is there some way of protecting them?
This is true about most heritage sites in the world. But what must be understood here is that more than the physical manifestations, preserving the knowledge is more important. If the Eiffel Tower breaks today we can build it again, provided we know the architecture.
In Bangladesh, heritage sites have also come under threat from religious extremism.
Fundamentalism is essentially anti-culture. It tries to destroy culture and it uses this as a terror tactic. It tries to destroy memory in a way that Polpot tried in Cambodia – to bring everything down and start from ground zero, to wipe out history and heritage of the land.
I guess you combat it the way you combat every kind of terrorism – by broadening the knowledge base, by incorporating different kinds of knowledge. That really has to be the answer.
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