JOIN USWhen I crawled out from the ruins, dusted my hands and finished reading ‘Babli loves Bunty’, ‘Amir loves Saira’ and everyone from all religions in the 13th century had kindly loved everyone else, I glowed with national pride. I reflected that scrawls with knives and flints did not immortalise monuments in any country other than mine.
Heritage meant a lot to me, even though it took me some time to understand which buildings were part of it. The city looked battered, ancient and sorry for itself, so it was only when I could read the divine engravings of Babli and Bunty that I arrived at the truth. Secondly, the reported heritage spots looked cleaner and newer. So even though the constructions seemed to have fallen like accidents into my modern life, they did give some signs of ancient activities.
I made my list, then, of the awesome heritage sites that seemed to look as if something had once happened in them: Temples. Forts. Palaces. Banks. Government offices. All India Radio Station. Doordarshan. Yahoo.
Even to you, heritage has always meant a lot, or it better do, unless you are anti-national. Remember that it helped when you had to send a postcard once a year to your parents?
I too remember the great past with love. It has meant misty things to me — a Bollywood experience with such beautifully plagiarised songs. A holiday hotspot which was patriotically cheap. A fort that sold food tasting like it had been cooked in the 13th century along with the architecture.
Heritage also helped me and my friends to score highly in our history test if we remembered when the central protagonist of our exam drama was born, when he fought, married, married again, married the 14th time, which son he killed and which one he married off to whom, and when he obliged by dying before he did more damage to our vacations.
Hence, heritage has become as routine, comfortable and used as underwear.
Today, it is all about multi-tasking, exactly like the intrepid Indian road that acts as a cattle-shed as well as a reality show. After all, did the king who built a love shrine for his wife ever imagine that centuries later it would double as a toilet in the early morning, triple as a kitchen later and become an underworld shanty in the night? Did he believe that it would become so famously endangered that it would get the grand privilege of ranking in a global heritage list?
You remember that people lived strange lives in those days, especially without TV or WiFi. It is not clear what they did before even the heritage was invented for entertainment. Did they just wander in and out of empty spaces? For the kings, at least, it was a lot of fun to attend darbars and routinely order people to get their heads chopped, while he was busy remembering which wife, or non-wife, figured next in his exhausting night life. But what did everyone else whose heads remained screwed on their torsos do?
I’ll say one thing about my heritage — that it does show a country that is lawfully lawless. One of the laws that gets things going is karma, in which you know the fruits of your labour will hit you only in your next life — such an admirable Indian law that works because you can’t check whether it really worked or not.
The second is dharma, which, like Indian legalese, is so beautifully written that it cannot be read.
And the third is the law of giving. A grand act, which becomes a crime only when the bribe gets caught.
All the laws had gone into the legends that killed everyone to let one king slip into textbooks. Until another government arrived to take its turn in rewriting history and reveal the dark secret — that we invented plastic surgery through an elephant God, aeroplanes through royal princes and artificial intelligence through some real artifice.
That’s why the global tourist trotters can believe at least one fact, or fiction, about India — it’s incredible.