Heritage is something, which you inherit but you also create it

J&K INTACH’s Convenor Saleem Beg talks about preserving Kashmir’s ancient monuments, architecture, Kashmir’s arts and crafts, Kashmir tourism, Srinagar being the UNESCO Creative City, and much more, with Special Correspondent Greater Kashmir, Syed Rizwan Geelani. Excerpts:

Tell us something about yourself; your early education and early life.

I was born and brought up in Srinagar and my education was almost throughout Srinagar downtown. My schooling was done in Srinagar and then I joined Gandhi Memorial and Islamia College Srinagar. By and large, whatever I have known or imagined has an impression or an impact of what was happening in the 1960s in Srinagar to start with, that is why it is formulated throughout me as a person. After that I joined government services where I got an opportunity to work in fields and areas, which resonated with what background I had like crafts and local arts, which are also mystical practices. One’s personality evolves with whatever work one has done. When I was posted in Delhi I was directly linked with the craftsmen. It is not very well known here but I have seen it happening in UP, Banaras, Lucknow, and Rajasthan. Most of the craftsmen draw a spiritual solace out of what they have been doing and that is something, which was happening here also. I vividly remember that during an occasion in Banaras, they were doing Saree. It was not basically a Saree but they call it Saree. But it was cut work. They had to remember the number of knots and this number varied from one stroke to another stroke. I asked a person there, who was addressed as Haji Sahab there. I asked him how do you remember all this. He told me that Beg Sahab, this is our worship, and how can we forget it. This has been resonating with me and I simply recall the Karkhans of Srinagar City, which has a mystical aura about it. That is something which tells you about the depth, continuity, and inspiration which our crafts have. And you would have seen that our crafts are both temporal and spiritual. So somehow that linkage has lived with and grown with me with the passage of time. It remained my passion and I went on to different positions including handlooms, handicrafts as a government officer. That is how I travelled. Whatever work one has been doing now has a foundation of the grounding in the time when I was shaping up in Srinagar, and then initial years of my profession as a government officer. That is how it happened.

Lately, there has been a lot of focus on preservation of heritage. Why is it so important?

Look, heritage by itself has a definition and the most commonly understood definition is that heritage tells you how you have reached where you have reached as of present time. In terms of heritage there is no past, present, and future. What is present today will be past in a couple of decades. It has continuity. Though heritage is something, which you inherit but you also create it, which becomes a past over the period of some years. Whatever is good affirmative about a society in terms of your imagination and expression, that resides in your heritage without compartmentalising past, present, and future. I think now modern thinking about heritage is that it is an activity, which is continuing with the past, present and it takes on to the future.

What’s the current status of heritage structures in Jammu and Kashmir? Do they need further conservation?

There are two types of heritage, one is like cuisines, music, and another one is tangible heritage. Kashmir as such, more so in Srinagar, has a substantial material presence of our heritage buildings. We call them vernacular buildings. We have traditional architecture, we have colonial architecture, which is embraced in vernacular architecture and vice versa. So there are two aspects to it. One is that we should continue to build the way to build it. In times of change, what has been built 100 years back was not something, which was built 200 years back. But that is the layer of culture. That is a layer of technology and a layer of your living tradition, living lifestyle. These have to be preserved as a layer and whatever new is created in built heritage has to be in sync with what was in the past. You can always innovate and address new needs. You have to address the availability of the new materials, change in lifestyles, and change in climates. So I am not saying that we should continue to build the way we have been building, but whatever we have built should have some connections and linkage. And if you have to have that connection and linkage then in that case we should preserve what we have available or is in address. In the last 30 to 35 years, lots of changes have occurred and a lot of inappropriate additions have been made, structures have been removed. We did our first survey of heritage structures somewhere in 2006 or 2007 and we did an update of that and we found that 20 percent of it is nowhere and it has vanished. That apart, we still have a lot which is available. One, as a proof of past technology, as a proof of how we used to live, and as a proof of how we reached that stage. And it is now accepted in the popular imagination of Kashmir that the old building had a very positive and free-living style. Now, somehow the buildings, which we are building are inappropriate which means we still have a lot to learn how we used to build. All this we can do only when we preserve and protect it. Conservation is just one part of preservation. Conservation also does not mean that you have to create something new and you have to repair. You have to restore whatever is available without much inappropriate additions. This means appropriate additions can always be made. When we did the first documentation of built heritage here, we did not do any extensive survey but it was a typological survey. Even in the typological survey, we found about 1000 structures in Srinagar which needed to be preserved and out of them more than 100 were category A structures and we are of the firm opinion that nothing should be changed or nothing should be done in any form to add or alter those structures. Those structures by itself remain examples of our past and examples of our heritage. Those are the structures, which need to be protected, restored, conserved, and wherever sympathetic reconstruction has to be done, should be done.

You were DG Tourism. Do you think Kashmir has realised fully its tourism potential?

Kashmir for all purposes is known to the modern world as a tourist destination. If there is anything for which you are known here is tourism. Tourism has to stay and it always has. The term tourism is not a very old kind of an affiliation. When we talk of tourism, initially we talked of leisure tourism and that is something, which is about a 100-year-old term when people travelled for the purpose of travelling. Earlier, people travelled for adventures and people also travelled for pilgrimages. Kashmir has all that you require for a good tourism industry. You have natural heritage, you have built heritage besides arts and crafts. Happily, we have not been bad in developing our tourism sector. In terms of its appealing popularity, Kashmir is a brand and the brand is because it is known as a tourist destination. That means the people who have lived here have worked so well and worked so hard and so diligently that we presented to the world a brand. We are a small place and it is the only place, which is known much beyond what it should have been in terms of the area and geography. This small geographic area has produced so much for tourism and travel. Normal definition for tourism and travel is accommodation and transport but here accommodation and transport is subservient. The first and the foremost outcome of our tourism is our handicrafts and that is flourishing. What the Kashmiris did was they did not stay here. I remember in the 1990s, this place was closed and people could not come here and buy the handicrafts. We went out and there were markets, which were developed by Kashmiris in most of the Indian cities where we had our handicrafts selling. They continued to generate interest in tourism except the people who could not go out. When the Valley opened last year or before that in 1996 and 1997 one could see the influx of tourists here.

We are seeing the surge of plastic facades everywhere in the city? Don’t you think the concerned authorities have a role to ensure the city reflects the facades that are part of its culture and heritage?

Plastic is not a Kashmir specific issue but a global issue and whatever negative impact plastic has that is all over. Cities, states, communities, and countries have dealt with it. I don’t think, as a country, we have given much attention to it. We are not giving due attention to it as a State and as citizens as well. Though, one thing that has happened is that mostly it is known how bad plastic is essentially for the environment and we are an environment-fragile place. And this is a place where it is needed much more than any other places. We have to curb this plastic menace.

Srinagar was announced as a UNESCO Creative City yet its artisans are impoverished while the businessmen dealing in Kashmir arts are millionaires. Aren’t the creative artisans being exploited? And how can it be stopped?

This is not a new phenomenon. There is a symbiotic relationship between those who market our craft and those who produce it. There has been a degree or element of exploitation, I don’t rule it out but we need both these because you need people to market your craft and you need people to produce them as well. There is a symbiotic relationship in it. The exploitative aspects of this can’t be ignored but let me tell you that as of now I do not see that kind of an exploitation which was historically here. I think craftsmen need somebody to market this craft and take it to export markets. We cannot expect craftsmen to produce and then to market it in modern day showrooms. For all practical purposes they are producers and they deserve a better life. But there is now a third element to it. Whenever we talk to craftsmen, you have to provide social security to them. There is an issue per se perhaps is not a dispute only on wages it only means that it does not meet all its social requirements. Two things are very important for a craftsperson, one is health, which a middleman or marketing person cannot provide but that is a job of the welfare state and the state should take this on itself. Then there is the housing issue. These are all societal issues for which they deserve to be taken to a better state by the welfare state. Craftsmen need support through state intervention.

How do you see the future of Kashmir carpets, Pashmina shawls, Kani shawls, Crewel, Namdas and Gabbas, Walnut Wood Carving, Chain Stitch, Copperware and Silverware, Willow wicker, Sozni Embroidery, Papier Mache, Khatamband and other Kashmiri arts?

We have great details that we tried to delve into the crafts situation in Kashmir. What you hear today about crafts has been a feeling with craftspeople of the crafts sector all through their history. No wages are there and there is no future but let me tell you it has survived in spite of that. It has a future as long as it has a market demand and for all creative industries, market demand is always there and the only thing is that you have to make an appropriate change. Upgrade your designs, upgrade your skill and inputs. But the creative element is something, which is being marketed. It is not the crewel but it is the emotion behind the crewel. As long as you address the issues of fashion and colour preferences in the market, it will have its demand. By and large, people have been handling it. Because of lesser wages, this complaint that we are perhaps the last of the generation has always been there and that last generation has not arrived and I hope that will never arrive. I am sure there will be migration as some people will leave crafts for whatever purpose and they will look for better avenues. But at the same time there is also great migration inwards. People are coming to handicrafts. We have done a couple of surveys for this creative city and we have seen areas, which were not at all known like Noor Bagh in old city. We never knew that it is a crafts area of the city. The future is there but apprehensions and complaints will always remain but craft as a creative activity will survive and you should have no doubt about that.

There are hardly any monuments in J&K in the UNESCO World Heritage Site list. Are there any, which have potential to make it to the list?

World heritage list is in a different category. We have got around 67 monuments in J&K and earlier we had about 73 monuments in the national list of monuments. It is a countrywide phenomenon and some monuments get upgraded and get recognition. What is important is how many monuments we have identified and how many monuments have been placed on the protection list of the Archeological Survey of India, which is a national protection or of State archives which is a local protection. There are more than 120 monuments, which are on both state and national lists. Some of the monuments out of this list come to the list of UNESCO. This is an administrative procedural issue also that a monument gets selected on world heritage list. It is not that UNESCO doesn’t know that we have such monuments here. Our Mughal Gardens and Burzuhama are on the tentative list and I am sure that many of the shrines in Kashmir can get to the UNESCO heritage list where you have to do a two-step exercise: one that they are placed on the tentative list and second is that they are placed on formal list by UNESCO. Kashmir is on the notice of UNESCO. It takes time and energy and needs focus for this, but somehow we lost it.

Do you think it is important to introduce heritage education at school level to raise awareness on heritage conservation?

It is very important because at one point of time in the 1950s, a lot of our local heritage activity was part of our curriculum. But the J&K schools that have adopted SCERT and NCERT syllabus did not upgrade these. With the result, most of it does not figure now in the curriculum. If you see the text books of social studies of the 1950s and the current times, you will see that in the 1950s we were much more keen on local elements including arts, poetry, and history. But it is not there now because new subjects have come and pushing them away has created space. But in NCERT also which we have adopted, there is 20 percent space for local elements but we have not even availed that 20 percent. Unless you have heritage education you cannot save heritage. Whatever knowledge or whatever impressions we get now come from the school system. The education, penetration of the school system is quite adequate now. So whatever you have to know, you have to know it from the books. Even the family now knows most of the things from books which children get to study. It has to be part of education and has to be mainstreamed into education. There is a dire need nationally and one can see there is a concern all over the country now. If you are lacking something in education that is heritage knowledge and heritage inputs in our educational system.

Tell us something about INTACH and its works?

Basically we are a part of a national organisation. It was set up in 1984 as a National Trust for Art and Culture and we are one of the chapters like other states have their chapters. There is a cut out agenda and chart for which INTACH has to work. It has to work for advocacy, preservation, restoration, and promotion of heritage. There is a lot to be done in heritage education, which INTACH is fulfilling. We have been doing as best as we can, given the resources in all these areas. We have documented heritage here and have also persuaded and encouraged the government to devise laws for protection of heritage. We are one state among the many states in the country in which we have legislation on heritage protection passed in 2000. It is a different matter that it was not implemented the way it should have been implemented. But we have the laws because we have done documentation here. We have provided a lot of knowledge material about the heritage here. Conservation was something which was known in Kashmir, but nobody would talk about it. Now we have expertise in conservation. We are doing documentation, presentation, and interpretation of museums. We also worked in Amar Singh College in 2020, which was awarded by UNESCO in which we did restoration of Amar Singh College. So UNESCO presence is already here. We have done a lot of work here but there are still a lot many things that need to be done. We have not even scratched the surface. In terms of effective implementation, perhaps one success story I think which we have done is that people have got aware about it and they talk about conservation and believe that heritage needs to be protected and crafts need to be upgraded.

Has INTACH any role in conservation or preservation of monuments present at Pattan or Parihaspora?

These are all nationally protected monuments. Parihaspora and Pattan parks are nationally protected monuments. But you have to accept that whatever is in a ruinous state will continue to be in a ruinous state. You do not reconstruct a temple or a Masjid if it is in a ruinous state because then it will lose its essence. The idea to protect is that you do not create something new there but you keep it at a stage in which it is so that people know that it was built in the 7th or 8th century. These are not living monuments. We have to accept that. Monuments will stay in what state they are but we should ensure that after we have granted them a protection, they should not be further damaged. They should be preserved in the same state and we should take steps for preventive conservation.

What are the future plans of INTACH’s J&K Chapter?

We will continue to do the work which we are doing. Currently, we are working with Smart City to upgrade and rejuvenate downtown. We are doing it in a big way. In downtown they have not ignored the aspect of heritage. We are adequately addressing these issues. Over the years, a lot of inappropriate additions have taken place in Srinagar downtown. So the traditional and heritage aspect of the buildings in the old city has been intervened under the Smart City. Smart City is very cooperative and keen and they are representing the vernacular status of our downtown in terms of built heritage.

Should INTACH be the only organisation on which people will remain dependent for preservation or conservation of heritage?

People should not at all depend on INTACH only. We are one of the players in the entire system. In fact we are not happy that there is nobody else doing it. It is not a happy situation for INTACH. It is in the interest of INTACH if there will be other people also who do it because that makes it a mission and that mission has to be taken up by the society.