May the forts be with you

One thing a Unesco tag does do is help protect a space, and that is a crucial function in a country where, until recently, shopkeepers were using the ancient central marketplace in Hampi, and where planning remains loose and laws, loosely enforced even at major sites.

“When you visit the Sun Temple in Konark, your view of the temple is blocked by the shops in front of it. It took over 10 years to clean up shops and shanties near

Tirupati and the Meenakshi temple in Madurai. But this needs to be done all over,” says Sivasankar Babu, spokesperson of the NGO Tamil Heritage Trust.

Once you get to a site, it’s often hard to tell what one is looking at. Nirman Chowdhury, 28, an independent filmmaker from Mumbai, has visited 14 of India’s 38 Unesco World Heritage Sites. At many, he says, there was little information available.

Where countries with far less to display offer audio guides, interactive exhibits, games, virtual reality kiosks, videos and group activities, in India, the quality of the information varies wildly. Some structures have engaging audio guides that leave you educated and satisfied. Others offer a dusty pamphlet with a couple of lines on artefacts that go back thousands of years.

We are lacking when it comes to content production, says Sabyasachi Mukherjee, director general of Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj museum. He puts it down to a scarcity of researchers and trained staff. “There isn’t a single international or national-level institute at par with the IITs or IIMs for heritage management. We need to start investing a lot more in culture. Other South Asian nations like Bangkok, Thailand and China are already doing this,” he says.

So there’s good news and bad. The good shouldn’t be underestimated. India as a country has more to work with than most. And it’s not too late to dust off the showpieces and draw the world in.

It is rather astonishing that it has taken this long for Maharashtra’s many, massive, centuries-old forts to make it to a Unesco list. Built from solid stone, seemingly impervious to time (many stand just as they did when they were built, despite centuries of neglect), these forts can be found across the region and in the most impossible places — atop mountains in the foothills of the Sahyadris, on an island in the Arabian Sea.

Many date back to the era of the warriorking Shivaji (1630 - 1680).

“The guerrilla tactics of the Marathas and their political ideology of Swarajya (selfrule) led to the creation of unique defence architecture in the region,” says Tejas

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