Shubhangni Gupta

SUBHANGNI GUPTA, then a graduate student at Stanford University, Stanford, California, was awarded a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “Heritage Landscapes in the Practice of Ownership and Expertise: Marwari Havelis in Shekhawati, Rajasthan,” supervised by Dr. Thomas B. Hansen. The research project investigates the practices of ownership and expertise in the arena of heritage preservation of Shekhavati havelis in provincial Rajasthan, India. These havelis are residential courtyard mansions built by the wealthy Marwari community from the early 19th to mid 20th centuries. The buildings are considered to be of lay heritage value to visitors because of elaborate fresco paintings depicting scenes from Indian folklore and modern colonial subjects that adorn these lime and brick structures. However, being in non-urban landscapes and being private property, they are not formally listed on heritage protection lists on state, national or international levels. Despite the lack of formal “on paper” presence, Shekhavati havelis are sites of multifaceted use and value by the local community that are often at odds with how external experts frame heritage value and engagement. Through 15 months of robust ethnographic and archival fieldwork, the project argues that to study the multiplicity of stakes, stakeholders and heritage practice, we must allow for the multiple subjectivities that exist within a single moment of heritage engagement. For this purpose, the project adopts the conceptual framework of heritage afterlives, and contextually applies it to the study of noninstitutionalized, non-urban, and unlisted or ‘unprotected’ heritage buildings. Contextualizing these afterlives through a focus on multiple claims of ownership and the expertise that seek to legitimize them allow us to see them as sites of conflict situated within the mundane everyday.