The Hugli River of Cultures Pilot Project, from Bandel to Barrackpore

The focus of this project are the five former trading posts and garrison settlements up the Hugli river from the megacity of Kolkata. From upriver in the North towards Kolkata in the South they are: Bandel established by the Portuguese in 1660s, Chinsurah developed by the Dutch in 1650s, Chandannagar founded by the French in the 1670s, Serampore urbanised by the Danes in the 1750s and Barrackpore developed by the British in the 1770s. Together they form a uniquely rich heritage corridor which is only now sporadically becoming the focus of national and individual international heritage initiatives. None, however, has built capacity in India in a sustained manner and, most importantly, none has looked to the river.

This project will transform that situation. When it ends in January 2020, across all 5 cities, heritage activists will be up-skilled to international standards in the documentation and promotion of both tangible and intangible heritage, thus energising the third sector groups. 15 owner-custodians of major domestic heritage buildings will have their properties documented as will the citizens participating in the annual festivals. A focused Heritage Management Strategy will be disseminated. Thus there will be a careful combination of resource enhancement and the building of human capital by knowledge exchange across the 5 Hugli cities. Just as the Research Assistants and heritage activists have a proven track record in volunteering, the resources enhanced have been visited twice by the UK PI Magedera and CI Jackson and the area was the birth place of the CI Banyopadhyay so the quality of these as yet undocumented domestic buildings is confirmed (see also visual evidence). The project team will thus documenting architecturally for the first time the hybrid European-Indian style of the riverside mansions in Gondal Ferry Para Ghat near Chandannagar on the Hughli River upstream from Kolkata. Further, it will use boat-borne exhibitions and symposia on the river to revitalise the Hughli as a connective conduit to empower owner-custodians and heritage activists from Bandel in the North to Barrackpore in the South. Building trust with owner-custodians via an informal network over the project's 23-month life span, the team members would collaboratively produce a diverse toolkit of cultural documentation including a substantive Heritage Management Strategy, an hour-long documentary film, architectural drawings, a postcard book, a photographic exhibition, recorded eyewitness testimony, an augmented reality App, all underpinned by academic research. This will allow the Hugli heritage activists and owner-custodians to 'talk heritage' with nationally and internationally accredited documentation and visuals in the local Bengali language (and in English and French) to private sector interests and to local and national government whose heritage projects still in the primary planning stage. This confidence will be centred around two new annual Hughli Heritage Days - 'Huglir Oitijhyo Dibos'. The first two heritage days will be supported within the lifetime of the project. The impact of the second heritage day involving all five threshold towns will be maximized by the sharing with Indian activists and researchers of the project team's documentation of the role of mobile architecture of the 'floats' and their immersion in the river at climax of the festival as well as their analysis of Jagadhatri Puja, a two-week-long devotional festival in Hugli involving hundreds of thousands of people (similar in regional impact to the Rio Carnival, but not internationally known), which is tied to the river via the immersion of huge mobile as it shifts the cultural centre of gravity from the core in metropolitan Kolkata to the periphery of the Hugli corridor every year in October/November.

The Hughli River of Cultures Pilot Project is constructed with a series of internal feedback loops and ongoing self-documentation by the professionals in the Das Photographic Collective. The loops are marked by the milestones of the meetings in February and March 2018, the land-based exhibition in April and the river-borne meetings and exhibition in May and June 2018 and the river-borne meeting in July 2018. They ensure that the project has assessed the heritage needs, not only of the heritage activists and the owner custodians, but also of a wide range of interested citizens, with whom the former will have engaged during the public outreach events such as the land-based exhibition. Their aim of this is to integrate the civil society users of the research (the owner-custodians, heritage activists third sector organisations such as The Friends of Chandanagor [sic] Heritage based at the Rash Behari Research Institute and led by Kalyan Chakrabortti into the project outcomes on an ongoing basis). Aided by the members of the UK and India project team, the Hugli civil society participants will benefit by taking part in an experiential project which allows them up-skill and to view the mansions and their city and the wider riverside region in a new way, appreciating its unique built and event-based heritage as their plan and execute a new heritage event of their own supported by the Indian and UK project team members. Furthermore, the Chandannagar members are facilitated from May 2018 to cooperate with their counterparts in the other cities, these counterparts have been identified but they are currently working sporadically or alone or both. A key feature of this project is therefore to change this via the non-academic project outputs to impactful co-ordinated working which will represent a gain via cultural heritage for all interested citizens across the five cities. Apart from fishermen and the occasional tourist boats, the Indian public does not generally venture out onto the river and the A to B ferries take the shortest and most direct route across. The change in perspective of seeing their cities from the river is a watershed moment which re-establishes a participative connection with the sacred that is part of the way that many heritage activists and owner-custodians view the Hugli which is part of the Ganga (Ganges), but which is not yet linked to heritage. In terms of orders of scale there are 30 heritage activists and owner-custodians per city, about one hundred third sector supporters and a possible audience of 500 for the land-based exhibition including influencers such as journalists and civil servants such as the representative of the Archaeological Survey India who will be expressly invited, the participation figures for the two Heritage Days will be a 1000 each per city because they are not concentrated at one building or site and because the heritage activists can involve school children and other diverse civil society groups. The Pathways to Impact, Justification of Resources and Case for Support and the ODA Compliance Statement give further detail on the local, national and international components and reach of this project.