Spaces of Heritagisation: The UK Indian Communities and Memorials of War

This chapter inspects the ways that ‘heritage’ is mobilised through spaces and language of memorialisation. It focuses on war memorials in London and Brighton as sites of official and unofficial meaning-making activities by the Indian communities in the UK. Heritage is examined here not just as buildings or preserved landscapes, but as expressions, identities, and cultural practices linked to the past. The chapter brings postcolonial perspectives to explore how memorialising discourses have been organised at these ‘heritagisation spaces.’ The two case studies are the Memorial Gates in Hyde Park London, commemorating the armed forces of the British Empire in the World Wars, and the Chattri Memorial, which honours those Indians who fought in the First World War. The study employed historical, visual and ethnographic methods to study the tangible monuments and the changing nature of the memorializing performances carried out around the monuments. The chapter addresses how meaning is conveyed both through the physicality of the sites and memorials as objects, and through the embodied activities enacted within the spaces by the Indian communities. It documents the heritage-making at work within memorialisation here, examining how differing heritage valuations of a memorial space can be voiced and enacted through time, between material form and immaterial practices, and across cultures.