Abstract
Navina Jafa’s work is a comprehensive presentation of the production and execution of heritage walks as category of living exhibits. She positions herself at once as a public academician and a performer in the field of cultural representation, who, through medium of the walks, brokers heritage for touristic consumption. Central to the work, is a dynamic conceptualisation of heritage, whose location in the present is quintessential to its presentation. It is here that the natural environment of the exhibit becomes central to the heritage walk unlike in other forms of fabricated living exhibits like cultural festivals or in the closed space of a museum.
The book is divided into five core chapters. The first chapter elaborates on the concept of heritage as a phenomenon of the present with recourse to the past, an idea that the author borrows from Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. She uses the term parampara to denote the flowing nature of tradition of heritage and by means of examples demonstrate how heritage can have multiple identities. The heritage walks, through their access to the natural habitat of the exhibit, is seen to allow the audience to engage with heritage in this broader sense of the term.
The second chapter titled ‘Functionality, Designing and Executing of Walking Tours’ introduces heritage walks as a category of living exhibits and goes into an lengthy discussion on the methodology of designing and executing the walks. The author places walking tours in comparison to other specific examples of living exhibits on India to present the tours as a new category by virtue of their being organised in naturally existent cultural spaces. Through a series of examples, she goes on to discuss the possibilities and challenges of thus curating heritage in its natural habitat by medium of the walks. Here the methodology she uses is of personal ethnography where she draws extensively on her experiences organising walking tours in Delhi. A key idea that she illustrates thus is that the same heritagescape can be viewed through multiple perspectives by medium of the walks. The term ‘applied heritage’ is used to describe this technique as a means to address various contemporary concerns.
The third chapter is an elaboration of the term ‘study leader’ to denote the person who design and lead the walking tours. The study leader needs to be a multi-skilled professional who is at once a public intellectual, an imaginative story teller and both a performer and producer of the exhibit. She needs to be an effective manager of the participation of the community representatives or ‘tradition bearers’ as well as that of the participants in the performance and be adept in dealing with unexpected situations that can arise in the course. The author illustrates her arguments again by drawing on her personal repertoire of professional experience. She argues that the role of the study leader as a public intellectual ruptures the idea of academics as confined to institutions and creates for it a new domain of the public arena.
Walking tours are examined as a profit-generating enterprise in a free market economy in the fourth chapter. The focus here is exclusively on private initiatives. The author conceives of the entire activity as a system and discusses in detail the inputs, operations and outputs that defines its economy. These include working out the multiple aspects of logistics and strategies of marketing and brand management and follow-up programs. Walking tours as a part of cultural industry is seen to feed into other economic activities of cultural display and representation operating within the same market logic.
Finally, the author places walking exhibits in the emergent global economic and social order as a mode by which the image or multiple images of the nation is ‘brokered’. The images of the nation thus brokered, she contends, allows multi- level links with the global culture and thereby serves as a tool of cultural diplomacy. Similarly it is seen to communicate cultural heterogeneity in a world that increasingly tends towards homogenisation.
For professionals in the field of cultural tourism, the work offers a very thorough presentation of the theory and practice of the relatively less explored field of heritage walks. The dynamic role of the study leader as a specialised professional is particularly well illustrated through the examples drawn from the author’s long career in organising and conducting the walks.
However, the idea of producing heritage as living exhibits for touristic consumption raises important concerns that are not addressed in the work. The incorporation of heritage in to the touristic imagery and more specifically global touristic imagery creates specific demands on heritage which it is expected to cater. The efforts on part of the author to break the stereotype of global terror associated with Muslims in a walk to introduce school children to lived Islamic culture can be taken as an example. The young Sufi singers who are part of this living exhibit are inadvertently participating in the narrative where only the study leader has a pro- active role. I take this example to suggest that in touristic consumption of heritage as in the case of living exhibits it is the consumer (in this case the participant) or the mediator (in this case the study leader) who has a greater stake in what is presented. The community representative on the other hand has relegated roles, like that of the tradition bearer, that (s)he is expected to perform. While the author emerges in the discussion as study leader sensitive to the sensibilities of the communities involved, a more critical interrogation into the idea of living exhibits is called for.
The book has an attractive production made lively by the sketches of the heritage sites and scenes discussed in the work.