Literary Narratives as a Tool for the Conservation of Indian Cultural Landscapes

Abstract

The large majority of conservation and preservation projects tend to examine physical artefacts as ‘primary documents’ to effectively comprehend the multiple layers of a cultural landscape. There is the expectation that this analysis provides better insights into the transformation of these cultural landscapes over chronological time. However, besides built artefacts which undeniably carry history in their form and making, the existence of life events can also contribute towards an understanding of ‘palimpsestic reality’. On these lines, cultures, beliefs, and traditions are encoded within recurrent social practices such as celebrations, festivals and superstitions, thereby creating strands of oral traditions. These oral traditions pervade the histories of place and space, becoming the essence of place and serving as forms of communication of a shared traditional knowledge of art, ideas and cultural materials transferred between successive generations. Song and dialogue – reflecting the content of historical and mythical time – including folklore, poetry, prose, verses, chants and ballads, are central to these transmissions. Deep narratives also allow landscapes to initiate their own creation stories with respect to the transformation and adaptation to the particulars of site location, society, culture and traditional knowledge systems. Through focused ways of examining the historical geographies of traditional Indian landscapes, this paper seeks to understand the diverse ways in which resident populations express their complex relationships with these landscapes, associating with the transformations of these landscapes and reformulating their relationships to society.