Acts of Heritage, Acts of Value: Memorializing at the Chattri Indian Memorial, UK

The Chattri Indian Memorial is a public site that hosts and embodies heritage in complex ways. Standing on the edge of Brighton, UK in a once-remote part of the Sussex Downs, the Memorial was built in 1921 to honour Indian soldiers who fought on the Western Front during the First World War. As both a sacred place and a space of socio-cultural heritagization processes, the monument is an enduring testament of past values of war heroism, but also more ephemeral practices of ritual. The article documents the heritage-making at work within memorialization at the Chattri as a case study, examining how differing ‘valuations’ of a memorial site can be enacted through time, between material form and immaterial practices, and across cultures. The article theorizes participants’ current affective practices as conscious ‘past presencing’ (Macdonald, 2013), and analyses how their conscious acts of heritage-making affectively enacted values of morality, community and belonging.