ABSTRACT

India’s BJP government headed by Hindutva icon Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 with a campaign slogan: ‘Toilets first, temples second.’ Drawing on Gandhi’s philosophy and legacy some 150 years after his birth, Swachh Bharat or Clean India is a monumental project with sweeping programs, propaganda, and political agendas. Gandhi famously said that ‘sanitation is more important than independence’ and Modi has leveraged that sentiment to fuel everything from urban renewal and heritage gentrification to outsourcing controversial corporate-funded infrastructures within World Heritage properties. India’s vast archaeological and historic legacy is now being marketed, tendered, auctioned, and ‘adopted’ by corporations within a neoliberal strategy that leverages the past for the future. And while it is easy to cynically caricature these moves, it is more difficult to offer pragmatic alternatives for a nation of 1.3 billion people, millions of whom are without basic services like water and sanitation. How is the burden of protecting a vast patrimonial landscape justified when necessities for the nation’s citizenry are so precarious?

摘要

印度的人民党政府由Hindutva偶像纳伦德拉·莫迪（Narendra Modi）领导，于2014年上台竞选口号：“首先是厕所，然后是寺庙”。斯旺·巴拉特（Swachh Bharat）借鉴了甘地（Gandhi）出生后约150年的哲学和传承或“清洁印度”是一个具有划时代意义的项目，其中包含广泛的计划，宣传和政治议程。甘地曾有句著名的话说，“卫生比独立更重要”，莫迪利用这种情绪推动了从城市更新和遗产高级化到将有争议的企业资助基础设施外包到世界遗产中的一切。现在，公司在新自由主义战略中利用过去的未来来推销，招标，拍卖和“采用”印度巨大的考古和历史遗产。尽管很容易愤世嫉俗地讽刺这些举动，但要为一个拥有13亿人口的国家提供务实的替代方案却更加困难，因为这个国家有13亿人口没有水和卫生设施等基本服务。