No Museums on Mall Road

Yet every day, every minute, India is washing its hands of Hampi. Seven villages have encroached upon the core heritage zone, bringing with them thousands of residents, people who have to live and survive, of course, but, it would seem, at the cost of using a 500-year-old step well as a public toilet, a temple as the base for a hut, pillars of exquisite craftsmanship as columns for clotheslines, and all of Hampi as a gigantic grafitti wall.

This is an epic setting for an epic tragedy, Hampi’s second desecration in 450 years. A medieval-era visitor once described it as earth’s finest city; it was Karnataka’s only state-of-the art statement to the world’s architects, designers, urban planners, till perhaps Infosys City.

Three hundred years from now will the technopolis Narayanamurthy and Nilekani built be subjected to similar neglect? Will the workstations where today’s software codes are written be tomorrow’s public latrines? If it’s too coarse a thought to contemplate, think of Hampi; and shed your tears.

If Hampi has a guardian angel, he must be a sardonic, resilient being. This is a city where the irrigation system still works — 700 years after it was built. This is a city where, inscriptions record, freshwater lakes were dug before a construction boom erected houses, markets, temples and palaces. Infrastructure wasn’t left to another generation.

A piquant comparison can be made. It would set southern India’s greatest city in the 15th and 16th centuries against the urban centre that northern India prides as its ‘Millennium City’, its 21st century showpiece: Gurgaon.

Infrastructure — bjili, sadak, paani in popular idiom — is not the first priority in Gurgaon. This is a feverish building site, the brave new crucible of India Tomorrow. It has no time to indulge the past, no second thoughts for lakes not dug.

Can one call Gurgaon a city — that is, a location with an urban sensibility? In terms of public spaces it has small parks and big malls. Gurgaon’s ‘Mall Road’ has already acquired the sort of social cachet that Old Delhi’s Mall Road did maybe two generations ago. Yet, if you wonder why Hampi is part of India’s collective amnesia, tackle a more mundane question: where are the museums in Gurgaon?

Why is a museum so relevant to a city? It is a tribute from the city’s builders to those who preceded them — to their heritage. (Likewise, a zoo is another essential, a nod to natural heritage.)

It says something about today’s India that Gurgaon doesn’t have (mind)space for museums, not even a museum, perhaps, to the computer, the invention it owes its fame and fortune too. In such an India, Hampi will be nothing more than unused real estate, wasteland waiting for the developers to move in.

It is easy to blame the government, trash the bureaucracy and have nasty digs at the Archaeological Survey. Maybe the fault lies with citizen India too; it has abdicated responsibility for its communal inheritance, given it away to the government. This is history as statism; it reduces Hampi to PSU drudgery, the Taj Mahal to a joint secretary’s portfolio. It is not the way of enlightened societies.

One recalls a visit to Springfield, Illinois, as middle American a town as the Midwest can conjure. Abraham Lincoln is buried here. As visitors streamed in at his memorial, volunteers from the city stood by with a pride that was hard not to appreciate. This was their heritage and they were going to show it off, with dignity, even if all they had to do was hand out brochures and say, ‘‘Thank you.’’

Not all custodians of India’s heritage are hard and crusty. In Chennai, T. Satyamurthy, ASI superintending archaeologist, dances from one room to the other, pointing out his office was once Robert Clive’s workplace, contemplating the ceiling and saying, with a wicked smile, ‘‘Madras Terrace… So difficult to get now.’’

In Hampi, T.M. Keshava has spent a career tending to the ruins, so much so that his children in Bangalore tease him about his ‘‘other family’’. In Fathepur Sikri, the city Akbar built, works Munazzar Ali, a scrawny man with no personality till you see the electric eyes. Not yet 30, from a small town in Uttar Pradesh, he has spent the past year excavating a market and the equivalent of a civil hospital.

In a time when people his age dream of answering other people’s queries in gleaming, air-conditioned towers, what compels Munazzar Ali to labour day after day under the baking sun, seeking his destiny in nameless rocks and stones, each with a story to tell. A colleagues calls it dewangee, lunatic passion.

The future of India’s past needs more such lunatics.