COLONIZED HERITAGE Colonization is not limited to custody over land, its manpower, or the riches. It is deeply engaged in influencing the minds, ethics, and social strata, while naturally institutionalizing the meaning of heritage for a nation. The industrial character that came with the colonial control became the basis for actions that caused morphological, typological, and technological alterations that alienated the innercity with its ordinary, everyday character. The insensitive, often superficial, comprehension of the heritage of the Walled City of Lahore is evident in Lord Curzon’s speech, the Viceroy of India, to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1900. India is covered with visible records of vanished dynasties, of forgotten monarchs, of persecuted and sometimes dishonored creeds. These monuments are […] in British territory, and on soil belonging to (the) Government. Many of them are in out-of-the-way places, and are liable to the combined ravages of […] very often a local and ignorant population [...] All these circumstances explain the peculiar responsibility that rests upon Government in India […] They supply the data by which we may reconstruct the annals of the past, and recall to life the morality, the literature, the politics, the art of a perished age […] Indeed, a race like our own, who are themselves foreigners are in a sense better fitted to guard, with a dispassionate and imperial zeal, relics of different ages […] [A] curtain of dark and romantic mystery hangs over the earlier chapters, of which we are only slowly beginning to lift the corners [for] displaying that tolerant and enlightened respect to the treasures of all, which is one of the main lessons that the returning West has been able to teach to the East. (Curzon of Kedleston 1900) In claiming stringent stewardship over the relics of the past and rendering the ‘ignorant local population’ and ‘dishonored creeds’ irrelevant, the colonizers have displayed a non-holistic approach towards heritage. Thus, the adherence of heritage to the perceived identity of the dominant ruling elite and the western definitions of heritage, of tidy control, has long polluted the legacy of the Walled City. The Utopian Palimpsest
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