Kerala History Congress (KHC) has said that the fake antique dealer case being discussed widely in the State showed the denigration of the value of heritage to some heroic and nostalgic stories.
An excessive interest in a glamorous past with precious objectification of crown, gun and sword would lead people to a falsified consciousness of a nostalgic past, it said.
“Fantasy matters in such heritage accumulation and not history. Industrial tie- ups mooted by higher education policy makers should take into account this kind of extremely profit-oriented collaborations. Students, while doing utilitarian courses like tourism and heritage management, would develop a tendency to invent heritage based on fantasies and nostalgia,” said Dr. Sebastian Joseph, General Secretary of KHC.
Explaining that history, backed up by auxiliary and ancillary disciplines, is the only panacea for containing romanticisation drives like these, Dr. Joseph pointed out that heritage collection and institutionalisation drive through heritage museums have added a fictional dimension to history.
“People with profit motive all over the world have come in search of artefacts for sale and exhibition. This leads to trafficking of cultural heritage items and sometimes to the duplication of such items to satiate demands from a customer clientele belonging to upper classes in the society,” he said.
The KHC representatives said that promotion of critical history that properly teaches heritage from a perspective of democratic value base, incorporating the heritage of rich and the poor, right from the early school days is the need of the hour.
Prof. Rajan Gurukkal, president of KHC, said that antiques are past goods. “Those using them as curios are antiquarians. The antiquarian approach is too sentimental to be archaeological. An archaeological object is legally not an object of trade. There is abuse of history and archaeology,” he said.
