Toilets first, temples second: adopting heritage in neoliberal India

Abstract

India’s BJP government headed by Hindutva icon Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 with a campaign slogan: ‘Toilets first, temples second.’ Drawing on Gandhi’s philosophy and legacy some 150 years after his birth, Swachh Bharat or Clean India is a monumental project with sweeping programs, propaganda, and political agendas. Gandhi famously said that ‘sanitation is more important than independence’ and Modi has leveraged that sentiment to fuel everything from urban renewal and heritage gentrification to outsourcing controversial corporate-funded infrastructures within World Heritage properties. India’s vast archaeological and historic legacy is now being marketed, tendered, auctioned, and ‘adopted’ by corporations within a neoliberal strategy that leverages the past for the future. And while it is easy to cynically caricature these moves, it is more difficult to offer pragmatic alternatives for a nation of 1.3 billion people, millions of whom are without basic services like water and sanitation. How is the burden of protecting a vast patrimonial landscape justified when necessities for the nation’s citizenry are so precarious?.