Heritage is a prime concern in most countries today and has budget funds allocated to preserve it as part of the national and international politics of culture. It is intimately connected with group identities which in most countries is associated with the history of its nationalism. Political independence of many countries is an off-shoot of a previously cultivated heritage of a dominant group in a region.
Heritage as cultural produce of a dominant group implies a hegemonic relationship with other groups which are arrayed into some form of hierarchy. The early European colonialism sought to erase local heritage in the form of community subjectivities and sought to replace them with their corresponding West-European cultural codes, ensuring thereby an easier adaptation to the white settlers worldwide.
Heritage is never free from racial undertones, even when these are covered with a legal mantle of equality before the law. This was so in the pre-colonial Indian caste structure, wherein the original designation of varna (colour) got lost under the Portuguese translation of casta (purity of blood). Incidentally, the purity of blood was for long a determining factor for class mobility.
The purity of blood was high among the obsessions of the Portuguese Inquisition in the XV c and thereafter. The Inquisition sought to keep the bourgeois upstarts, belonging to the moneyed Jewish convert families, out of the functions that were considered a preserve of the old aristocracy. The Society of Jesus, at least during its initial phase, was bold to bypass the common rule of purity of blood, and some candidates with Jewish origin were admitted, such as Henrique Henriques, a Jesuit missionary in South India, a pioneer grammarian of Tamil language.
Bamiyan antiquities in Afghanistan were declared World Heritage by UNESCO in 2003, that is following the destruction of the Bamiyan buddhas in 2001. But nothing similar happened after the destruction of the Babri mosque in India in 1982. Is it because India is a different cup of tea? The European archeologists and conservationists are crying hoarse about the ongoing threats to the antiquities of the Middle East following the Daesh take-over of Mosul in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria.
Probably the same individuals and institutions, largely belonging to the former colonial powers in the region, now alarmed and grieving, were overjoyed by the initial readings of the recent happenings in North Africa and the Middle East as an Arab spring that would open the region to the neo-liberal values and consumers of the western market products. Such hopes seem to have fallen to the ground, largely due to the ongoing military interventions by the US and their European allies.
The human tragedies and chaos let loose by coalitions of western allies, who tend to bypass the international forum of UN whenever convenient and call themselves “international community”. It is no more than a bunch of half a dozen of the old colonial powers, instigated by an all-powerful US. The results of such an arrogance are there for the rest of the world to see, except for themselves. Arrogance blinds us to the reality. International support is now sought to preserve the so-called “world heritage”, which in most cases represents the glories of the Greco-Roman empire, a forerunner of the western colonial empires and their descendants.
Even in such cases as the Egyptian pyramids, which may not be far from being reached by the present destructive wave, the defenders of the “world heritage” have little to say about the oppression and blood of the slaves and other victims of the empires that produced many of those archeological wonders. It is an ongoing tragic history of domination perpetuated by the powers that are about powers that were, in the name of “world heritage”. This is certainly another name for idolatry or worship of the biblical golden calf which Moses reduced to ashes and destroyed three thousand idolaters (Exodus:32). Moses was not a Taliban or a leader of ISIL.
By resorting to repeated military interventions through the so-called alliances of the willing, the West is destroying the legitimacy and credibility of the UN as a guarantor of the international law. Besides, it should not be forgotten that the so-called international law was defined only in the 17th century and later as a result of the Portuguese and Dutch colonial rivalries. It was a kind of legal accord among international thieves to safeguard what they had robbed the world over. It is not very different with the recent creation of ICC which serves to bring to book some bolder challengers of the western imperial interests or some “misbehaving” African leaders, as if the western powers were ruled by saints who needed no detention by ICC.
To conclude, it is curious that the Daesh is repeating an old history of the first two caliphates that were set up in Damascus and Baghdad. The military successes of those caliphates were made easy by the extortions of the empires that ruled the region and their inhabitants were willing to welcome new rulers who promised more justice.
(Teotonio R. de Souza is the founder-director, Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa (1979-1994).
