Heritage Conservation in Postcolonial India seeks to position the conservation profession within historical, theoretical, and methodological frames to demonstrate how the field has evolved in the postcolonial decades and follow its various trajectories in research, education, advocacy, and practice. Split into four sections, this book covers important themes of institutional and programmatic developments in the field of conservation; critical and contemporary challenges facing the profession; emerging trends in practice that seek to address contemporary challenges; and sustainable solutions to conservation issues. The cases featured within the book elucidate the evolution of the heritage conservation profession, clarifying the role of key players at the central, state, and local level, and considering intangible, minority, colonial, modern, and vernacular heritages among others. This book also showcases unique strands of conservation practice in the postcolonial decades to demonstrate the range, scope, and multiple avenues of development in the last seven decades. An ideal read for those interested in architecture, planning, historic preservation, urban studies, and South Asian studies.

Bringing together leading conservation scholars and professionals from around the world, this volume offers a timely look at values-based approaches to heritage management. Over the last fifty years, conservation professionals have confronted increasingly complex political, economic, and cultural dynamics. This volume, with contributions by leading international practitioners and scholars, reviews how values-based methods have come to influence conservation, takes stock of emerging approaches to values in heritage practice and policy, identifies common challenges and related spheres of knowledge, and proposes specific areas in which the development of new approaches and future research may help advance the field.

The book contributes to a recontextualization of authenticity by investigating how this value is created, reenacted, and assigned. Over the course of the last century, authenticity figured as the major parameter for the evaluation of cultural heritage. It was adopted in local and international charters and guidelines on architectural conservation in Europe, South and East Asia. Throughout this period, the concept of authenticity was constantly redefined and transformed to suit new cultural contexts and local concerns. This volume presents colonial and postcolonial discourses, opinions, and experiences in the field of architectural heritage conservation and the use of site-specific practices based on representative case studies presented by art historians, architects, anthropologists, and conservationists from Germany, Nepal, India, China, and Japan. With more than 180 illustrations and a collection of terminologies in German, English, Sanskrit, Hindi, Nevari and Nepali, classical Chinese and standard Mandarin, and Japanese, these cross-cultural investigations document the processual re-configuration of the notion of authenticity. They also show that approaches to authenticity can be specified with key analytical categories from transcultural studies: appropriation, transformation, and, in some cases, refusal.

Most people view cultural heritage sites as static places, frozen in time. In Cultural Landscapes in India, Amita Sinha subverts the idea of heritage as static and examines the ways that landscapes influence culture and that culture influences landscapes. The book centers around imagining, enacting, and reclaiming landscapes as subjects and settings of living cultural heritage. Drawing on case studies from different regions of India, Sinha offers new interpretations of links between land and culture using different ways of seeing—transcendental, romantic, and utilitarian. The idea of cultural landscape can be seen in ancient practices such as circumambulation and immersion in bodies of water that sustain engagement with natural elements. Pilgrim towns, medieval forts, religious sites, and contemporary memorial parks are sites of memory where myth and history converge. Engaging with these spaces allows us to reconstruct collective memory and reclaim not only historic landscapes, but ways of seeing, making, and remembering. Cultural Landscapes in India makes the case for reclaiming iconic landscapes and rethinking conventional approaches to conservation that take into consideration performative landscape as heritage.

The book represents the culmination of a hugely successful heritage preservation project initiated by the Government of India’s Department of Science and Technology. It presents extensive research on the digital preservation of the history, mythology, art, architecture and culture of the world heritage site Hampi in Karnataka, the seat of the Vijayanagara dynasty in medieval India. Further, the book introduces readers to a range of techniques developed by Indian technical research groups for digitally preserving both the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of the region. These techniques are sufficiently generic to be applied in heritage preservation efforts for other historical sites around the world as well. Technological advances have made it possible to not only create digital archives of these heritage artifacts, but to also share these resources for people to view, explore, experience, and analyze. This book showcases how cutting-edge technology can be combined with cultural and historical research to digitize and preserve heritage. It is the consolidation of work conducted under the Indian Digital Heritage project, a unique initiative of the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India. The project involved collaboration between researchers in the areas of Technology, Computer Science, Architecture and the Humanities for the digital documentation and interpretation of India’s tangible and intangible heritage. It highlights the art, architecture, and cultural legacy of the world heritage site of Hampi in Karnataka, the medieval capital of the 14th-16th century Vijayanagara dynasty. The contributors to this book are scientists and technology experts from prominent academic institutes in India such as the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), NIIT, and NID (National Institute of Design) working in collaboration with some of India’s top architects, art historians, anthropologists, heritage groups and multi-disciplinary cultural institutions such as the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS). Their papers will introduce readers to cutting-edge technologies from research areas such as computer vision, 3D modeling and artificial intelligence as they are employed to preserve art and culture in the digital domain. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 details efforts and techniques for modeling and representing the tangible heritage of Hampi, such as the reconstruction of damaged structures, realistic walk-throughs, and haptic rendering. Part 2 includes chapters detailing the analysis and digital restoration of artifacts such as mural paintings, inscriptions and sculptures, as well as mobile-based visual search for artifacts. Part 3 includes chapters on conjectural re-constructions of the architectural life, social life and traditions of Hampi. Lastly, Part 4 addresses the knowledge-based archiving and exploration of cultural heritage.

In Kenya, cultural and natural heritage has a particular value. Its pre-historic heritage not only tells the story of man's origin and evolution but has also contributed to the understanding of the earth's history: fossils and artefacts spanning over 27 million years have been discovered and conserved by the National Museums of Kenya (NMK). Alongside this, the steady rise in the market value of African art has also affected Kenya. Demand for African tribal art has surpassed that for antiquities of Roman, Byzantine, and Egyptian origin, and in African countries currently experiencing conflicts, this activity invariably attracts looters, traffickers and criminal networks. This book brings together essays by heritage experts from different backgrounds, including conservation, heritage management, museum studies, archaeology, environment and social sciences, architecture and landscape, geography, philosophy and economics to explore three key themes: the underlying ethics, practices and legal issues of heritage conservation; the exploration of architectural and urban heritage of Nairobi; and the natural heritage, landscapes and sacred sites in relation to local Kenyan communities and tourism. It thus provides an overview of conservation practices in Kenya from 2000 to 2015 and highlights the role of natural and cultural heritage as a key factor of social-economic development, and as a potential instrument for conflict resolution