“A Series of Vandalisms”: Heritage Violence and Delayed Destruction

ABSTRACT: Heritage preservation is largely constituted around notions of “threat and care” that play out in regimes of regulation, governance, safeguarding, and promotion. But what if those very threats stem from the authorities and agencies professing to care? While this article discusses national projects that impinge upon diverse monumental histories, its ultimate focus is upon the domestication of heritage conflict in India. This entails extending beyond the erasure of monuments to the slow violence enacted upon heritage places and practitioners that culminates in delayed destruction. This violence can be legal, political, or bureaucratic and involve strategies of intimidation, exclusion, and neglect. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, I recount episodes from cities such as Delhi, Agra, and Hyderabad, documenting the social reproduction of loss and damage, in what one interlocutor astutely called a “series of vandalisms.”