Be Sensitive To Heritages

A video surfaced online this Wednesday which showed a group of young men quarrelling with a senior citizen at Patan Durbar Square. The video showed them harassing the old man and threatening to send him to jail. One of them also claimed to be “from the media” and hurled obscenities. Thankfully, the locals and the Lalitpur Metropolitan City Police intervened and things did not escalate beyond verbal confrontation. A day later, the Mangalbazaar Police and heritage activists brought the youths in for questioning. They were released a short while later.

Going by people’s comments on Facebook, the boys were practising parkour by jumping on and around the temples of the UNESCO World Heritage Site. The video showed one of them using an elephant of the Viseshwor Temple as the base for a flip. The old man asked them to stop as their actions could damage the centuries-old monuments and disturb the domestic and foreign tourists in the area. They refused and sought to force him to back off.

At the police station, the youths were informed about the importance of such heritage and the need to be sensitive toward them. In a video posted by activist Yadav Lal Kayastha, they seemed to realise their mistake and were apologetic. But one of them made a striking remark: “We did not know we should not have done such things.” “We did not know the value of our heritage,” he added. And this shows the real problem.

We do not respect our heritages because we do not understand their civilisational importance. We do not regard them because we do know their historicity. We have reached a point where we view them as props, not artefacts. This has led us to treat them like these parkour artists did.

The Viseshwor Temple, also called Vishwonath Temple, is one of the first temples King Siddhi Narsingh Malla built. It houses one of the only inscriptions in Patan that prove the existence of a golden water spout on the premises of what is today the Durbar Square. Each strut, each column and each wall contain exquisite carvings and masterpieces of Newa and Nepali art. Each brick has a story to tell. One of the stone elephants that the boys were jumping off of has a crushed man beneath its left forelimb. According to the Twitter account Sarvamnaya Newah Veda-Tantra, which regularly posts about the Kathmandu Valley’s culture, language and history, the man is Ghiyas-ud-din Tughlaq, the Sultan of Delhi, who invaded Simraungadh. Sarvamnaya tweeted Thursday that Malla kings and their aristocracy (present-day Chhathariya Shrestha) trace their arrival to Nepal from Simraungadh and this image shows the hatred they had for the Muslim ruler who forced them out. Through their actions, Wednesday’s traceurs could have damaged a rare physical object linking Patan’s nobility to Mithila and beyond.

And the ultimate tragedy is that this case is not an isolated one. As someone who lives near Mangalbazaar, this scribe sees people spitting, jumping, hitting and even urinating on or around monuments all the time. The throwing of plastic wrappers and the etching of names on walls and wooden pillars are so common that he does not even notice it anymore. Our level of ignorance towards our own shared past is mind-boggling.

Similarly, in Hanumandhoka, the very bodies set up to protect the palace complex have been accused of desecrating it. The Trailokya Mohan Narayan Temple near the Kumari House used to have exquisitely carved struts that “stole the heart of anyone who laid eyes on them,” renowned architect Wolfgang Korn once told the author of this column. “But they have replaced all the struts except those on the lower roof with featureless wooden blocks,” he told him a couple of weeks back. Kasthamandap has still not opened to the public because the authorities went against heritage preservation norms and replaced its ancient idols with newer replicas. Kathmandu Metropolitan City’s move to install tall national flags at the square a few months ago was national news.

Perhaps it is, as the youth said, that people do not know the value of our heritage. But I can’t help but question: how can they not? We all know that these sites are world heritage sites, there are big plaques and signboards announcing them at various places. We know that these hold religious and cultural importance, we all study it at school and we have to memorise it to pass our exams. We may not know the details but we know that these are hundreds or thousands of years old and are often our only source of knowledge about the past. We know enough but it seems we just don’t care.