I recently found myself in Darwin's shoes. I was obviously borrowing many things from the man and applying it to a discipline I have long secretly abhorred. Before I go off on an abstraction trip (ssems to occur a lot these days since I have been walking among philosophers), let me elaborate.
The discipline I speak of is historic preservation, or conservation as it is known among the stiff upper lipped nation and its bastard off springs. I have worked in the field long and close enough to realise it is absolutely unjustified to preserve even a small brick if some other brick elsewhere is to be forgone. And the beauty of this argument is that it works in reverse too. It is sacrilege to tear down even a single brick if some other brick somewhere else is deemed ' heritage'. How did we come to get so entangled in this higly convoluted argument of 'What do we preserve', when the question should be 'Why preserve'. Instead of focussing on the criteria for preservation, we have been trying to sell hogwash in the name of 'nostaligia', 'cultural beacon' and 'architectural aesthetic.' Behind such eloquent masks, preservation is no more than a staggering, struggling reason for a few flawed and misplaced sentiments and a great deal of exoticism. Having tried very hard initially to find a reason beyond capitalism and economic gain to preserve anything, it has dawned on me that preservation is completely at a loss to explain why it exists. Why make a heritage hotel? Well because a plausible economic machinery working to keep the shell that once held a palace from crumbling down fulfills much more: the dream of spending the night living like a 'Maharaja'. The old British orientalism is well and alive, in the hearts of every common man who dreams of an exotic land of which they can never be a part of, but will always aspire to.
But I am not going to get into that, lest I end up writing a significant segment of my thesis on my blog (which Procrastination forbid may actually get me somewhere). What I will raise here though, is how questioning preservation is almost considered immoral. Try telling someone that maybe if the need arises we may have to tear down the Taj Mahal or for the benefits of my 'Western' friends, the Parthenon to make room for future occupation. In fact those are dramatically extreme examples. But I choose to use extreme examples when making a point since they have a certain shock value. Let me ask you this. Try convincing me to keep the Taj Mahal, if it had to be preserved at the cost of my ancestral house where I had spnt many a happy summers. The subjectivity of it all immediately becomes clear as day.
Well anyway, a week or so ago, I happened to address the matter in a class full of highly intellectual architectural thinkers who were being guided towards finding the 'bigger answer' to the biggest question....of Life, Universe and Everything" by a philosopher of no limited calibre. (Everyone knows the answer is 42!) I know...what was I thinking huh?! Well I guess I wasn't. It just burst forth from me, because what I had known somewhere deep inside, had suddenly manifested itself with a brilliance of a thousand stars! (Okay I have a flair for melodrama, but the revelation was pretty awesome nevertheless). I suddenly realised, we dont have to make a conscious effort to preserve. No one person, or 'a team of experts' is qualified to decide for greater humanity what should stay and what could go. The process if left to itself is self sustaining and suddenly I had Darwin to help me articulate it.
It is a process of 'natural selection'....survival of the fittest. Whatever justifies its existance in the broader scheme of things and proves itself indispensible shall and WILL stay. The rest may go, and by 'go' I do not necessarily mean be torn down, I mean it will be modify, will 'evolve' into something new, a higher species, adapted to its times and needs. And yes, at times, it will be completely replaced by something new. But then again is anything ever new, or for that matter is anything ever old. All that we know belongs to the present, to the now. If you see an 'old' building it is as much a part of the now, as is the shining new glass building next to it. We inherit the past and it belongs to the now and we have appropriated it, no later than we have acquired it and acknowledged its existance. The original cannot exist in our time since it belongs to a different time and place. To try and even grasp that original past, let alone retain it is trying to disrupt the time space continuum.
What ensued, no sooner than I had thrown this idea out (most thoughtlessly) was no less than a morality court trail. I felt as though I had stabbed the very heart of humanity by suggesting that we may dispense with all relics of the past without putting up a brave struggle to retain some morsel of it, even if we do it at the cost of morphing and maiming and distorting it entirely. Perhaps I am being a stoic...but in fact I am being pragmatic. Someone wise, who has lived all his life blindly worshiping the physical remains of the 'past', had once compared old buildings in danger of falling into oblivion, with a hypothetical case of my ailing parents. 'Would I', was his passionate plea, 'allow may parents to suffer and die an untimely death, just because they no longer well hale and hearty as always.' He had really hoped, that appealing to my very strong sentiments for my parents would do the trick. But his comparison was flawed in its very concept. See to me, a building that can no longer sustain itself, has lost all function, is already dead, having lived a full life. It is no more than an empty shell, a corpse and I would rather see it cremated than try to mummify it, hoping to breathe back life into it, long after its soul has departed for a better place. I think, that is where our problem lies. We have managed to disembody function and cultural significance and aesthetics from what really upholds them and we have ascribed it to there mere physical containers. We have objectified our past, distanced and removed it from our present, treating it as an uncomfortable 'other' always to be negotiated and never appropriated or incorporated. We have become so attuned to this way of thinking, that anything that challenges this understanding of our past, and threatens its objectified monumentality is considered sacrilage and is condemned to public pelting.
I was almost pelted and I know when Darwin said we evolved from apes, he was pelted too. Because we all know, the world was created in seven days, or sprung from Bramha's naval or whichever version you choose. And we know Man appeared a few thousand years ago out of nowhere as God's most illustrous being and his past is more sacred than a monkey's butt.
Niramish mangsho a.k.a Vegetarian Mutton curry
6 years ago
