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1 Making the Past in a Global Present: Chennai’s New Heritage Christmas, 2004 News of the Indian Ocean tsunami flashes on my computer screen. Almost realtime images of confusion and agony appear in short order. I see women searching for missing children and battered fishing boats run aground. Soon, bloated corpses will be nudged to shore. After trying unsuccessfully to telephone, I rely (again) on the promises of electronic immediacy and send frantic e-mail messages to friends in Chennai. Within a couple of days, replies have arrived. I am relieved to hear that all are okay if rather shaken. The same cannot be said for the city’s beachfront, much of it occupied by fishing communities and hut colonies. The destruction in Chennai, including more than two hundred casualties, was concentrated along its twenty kilometer shoreline. Although Chennai fared better than areas farther south and in Sri Lanka, the tragedy was compounded by the loss of motorboats, catamarans, baskets, and nets—all of which portended disaster for the livelihoods of many in the city’s fishing communities.1 The tsunami struck India’s eastern coast when I had nearly completed a draft of this book, and although I do not deal with that event in any detail, it has shaped the book’s direction and lent urgency to some of its questions. On a personal level, my concerns about its devastating effects were sharpened by the fact that it struck a city I had called home for several extended periods from the mid-eighties on. And there was painful irony in the coincidence of my having just completed a chapter on Chennai’s Marina Beach memorials as the wave’s force overtook those very sites. More important than any personal coincidences, however, is that the tsunami’s impact is not explicable outside the transformations in statecraft, culture , and political economy that India, like other postcolonial nation-states, has 2 The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai experienced in recent decades. Natural disasters are rarely natural in their genesis or effects and Chennai’s commercial and industrial development, especially with the impetus of privatization and deregulation, contributed to conditions that exacerbated the effects of the 2004 tsunami. Beachfront commercial developments from tourist resorts to shrimp farms have led to the removal of the buffers such as mangrove swamps and casuarina stands that would have mitigated the wave’s intensity and its inland reach. And like the redevelopment that has occasioned the resettlement of inner-city slumdwellers in the city’s hinterland, the tsunami added fuel to existing efforts to relocate fishing groups from beachfront sites that were being eyed for lucrative commercial use and high-end residential development . The instant destruction of the tsunami, like that of the bulldozers used for street clearing and demolition, wiped away the material fabric of everyday life and livelihood with its embedded forms of remembrance, both the implicit memory of bodily habitus and the explicit memory of semantic understanding, even as it brought forth new memories.2 The tsunami was an exceptional event, scarring indelibly the places it struck. The creative destruction of global capitalism, however, is remaking many of those same cities, towns, and villages in both catastrophic and routine ways.3 These transformations, while exacerbating the destructive impact of the tsunami and other such disasters, also echo the globalizing force of capital during earlier centuries of European colonial expansion. Then, as now, the collisions and confluences of knowledge, goods, persons, and spaces have demanded reorientations to both shared pasts and futures. Like the outbreaks of nostalgia that, according to Svetlana Boym, followed episodes of revolutionary change in Europe, so also has the radical restructuring of neoliberal globalization called forth a “yearning for a different time,” not only for a glorious past, but also “for unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future that became obsolete.”4 Such yearnings are congealed in the imagery, narratives, built form, bodily practices, and artifacts by which shared pasts are represented and through which memories together with aspirations are engendered. It is the making of the past—the creation of both spaces of the past and the knowledges and sentiments glossed as past-consciousness—in the present conjuncture of neoliberal globalization that this book explores. Several broad questions thread the chapters together. As a group, they hinge on the relation between cultural memory and postcolonial statecraft, in particular , their intersecting and diverging social spaces represented in...

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