Remoteness and Development: Transnational Constructions of Heritage in a Former Danish Trading Colony in South India

Abstract

The South Indian town of Tranquebar, a Danish trading colony in the period 1620–1845, has been declared a heritage town by the government of Tamil Nadu, due to the well‐preserved Indo‐Danish townscape and its tourism potential. Both Indian and Danish stakeholders are working for the preservation of the town as an expression of cultural heritage and for its development as a tourist destination. Analyzing how perceptions of development and history are at stake in this transnational process of post‐colonial heritage‐making, I argue that a widely shared conception of Tranquebar as an underdeveloped “remote area” is central to the construction of Tranquebar as a heritage town. Drawing on Edwin Ardener’s theoretical conception of remoteness as an aspect of not only physical space but conceptual space, the article explores the ways in which conceptions of remoteness and (under)development tie in with narrations of history in this former colony.

Keywords:

• Development
• Remoteness
• Heritage
• History
• Colonialism

Acknowledgements

This article is based on my Ph.D. project, “Tranquebar—whose history? Transnational cultural heritage in a former Danish trading colony in India”, which I carried out from March 2007 to February 2010. I thank the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation for my scholarship, and the National Museum of Denmark and the Farumgaard Foundation for financial support for my fieldwork.

Notes

[1] The local Tamil‐speaking population mostly refers to the town as “Tharangambadi”. To the outside world, in India as well as abroad, it is known as “Tranquebar”. This version of the name originated in the period of contact between European traders and the local population, and continues to be widely used. For ease of reference I use the name “Tranquebar”.

[2] In the 1800s, the economy of the Danish colony deteriorated due to the increasing position of the British in India and political developments in Europe which led to changing trade conjectures. Tranquebar became a trading colony without trade, and was unsentimentally sold off (Feldbæk 1980: 254–279).

[3] “Townscape” is an urban equivalent of “landscape”. Within architecture and town planning the term designates the configuration of built forms and interstitial space characteristic of a particular urban setting. In conservation the concept of townscape plays a powerful role in aesthetic evaluations of what is of value (Jacobs 2004: 33). Uses and understandings of the elements that constitute a townscape are inevitably multiple and situated, and may clash. The topic falls outside the scope of this article, but see Jørgensen (2009).

[4] The “heritage hotels” in Tranquebar are restored buildings aimed at an upscale tourist market (www.neemranahotels.com/).

[5] In spite of an official name change to Chennai in 1996 the capital city, which lies 300 kilometres North of Tranquebar, is sometimes referred to by its old name, Madras (Hancock 2008).

[6] The conceptualization of global relations and development in terms of “centres and peripheries” has occasioned too vast a debate to review here. For a convincing critique of the classic distinction between centre and periphery, see Appadurai and Breckenridge (1988).

[7] These categories have a tendency to overlap, e.g. when architects from a university are employed by an NGO to do a survey, or when persons with a church background conduct research on mission history.

[8] Exact figures on the annual tourist flow are not available. An indication is the main tourist attraction in Tranquebar, Fort Dansborg, where the visitor number from April 2006 to March 2007 was 25,555 persons, hereof 25,070 Indians and 485 visitors of foreign nationality (Dansborg Museum administration, personal communication). Staff at the local hotels estimated that 90% of foreign visitors were Danish.

[9] Though the formal declaration of Tranquebar as a heritage town dates back to 1980 (Archigroup 1993: 1), a finalized heritage town development plan has not yet been implemented. Surveys and plans for the townscape or individual buildings have been drafted by both public and private agents ranging from architectural research institutions to NGOs, hotels, the Danish Embassy and governmental departments in Tamil Nadu.

[10] This notion is captured well in one Danish account of the history and architecture of Tranquebar, which refers to the past two centuries as a forfaldshistorie (Pedersen 1987: 64), which translates as “history of dilapidation”, “history of decay” or “history of decline”.

[11] The history of the Protestant mission is commemorated by the Tamil Evangelical Lutheran Church in monuments and in the naming of institutions, as well as in annual processions on the anniversary of the arrival of the first missionaries. The Christian educational institutions serve the general population of Tranquebar, so most inhabitants know of the mission history to some extent, although Christians are a minority in Tranquebar, which is a religiously diverse community with 85.8% Hindus, 7.5% Christians (both Protestants and Catholics) and 6.7% Muslims (Praxis n.d.).

[12] This comment is strikingly similar to academic claims such as those of Edward Bruner and Barbara Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett (2005: 33), who have argued that tourism gives colonialism a second life by bringing it back as a representation of itself. Heritage development in Tranquebar has not been subject to local or academic post‐colonial critiques along the otherwise often pursued line of argument that tourism can be perceived as a form of neo‐colonialism or imperialism (Nash 1977, Britton 1982, Hall & Tucker 2005). Yet dealing with colonial heritage implies subtle balancing acts and redefinitions of the relations between former colonizers and colonized (Jørgensen 2009).

[13] Though not widely recalled by the public, Tranquebar has never dropped completely out of view in Denmark. The former colony has continued to be the topic of literary and scientific works ranging from children’s books to dissertations (Thisted 2009). That plans for preservation efforts with Danish support in Tranquebar arose at this time is undoubtedly an effect of globalization, with modern transport and communication making contact possible through increasing numbers of Danish visitors in the town. However, the title of the 1978 article, “The Forgotten Tranquebar”, remains descriptive of the knowledge of this former colony among much of the Danish public, today as then. When telling about my research to acquaintances in Denmark, I have received comments such as “Oh, Tranquebar. So you are going to Africa?”

[14] Development aid implies a connection between the concept of remoteness and practices of innovation. If a fascination with remote parts of the world can be traced as an element in the history of colonization (Ardener 1987: 40), then the global post‐colonial history shows a continued construction of the former colonies as remote, in so far as the period after the Second World War gave rise to an influential wave of theorizing on the modernization of colonial territories and newly emergent independent countries. In this understanding of the post‐colonial world, what was to be known as “the Third World” became posited as “backward” and “underdeveloped” countries in need of catching up with the developed “First World” countries by means of development aid and modernization projects. As critical studies have since demonstrated, actual processes of development are, however, shaped by appropriation and re‐embedding of the ideas and practices of modernization in locally situated practices (Arce & Long 2000). Returning to Ardener’s focus on innovation, it might be said that remote areas, being associated with a status as peripheral and underdeveloped, attract repeated attempts at innovation and development, which may both emerge on local initiatives, or from outside, in the shape of incoming entrepreneurs, development aid and policies.

[15] After my fieldwork the government of India has, however, sanctioned money for developing Tranquebar as a destination of heritage tourism (Shankar 2008).

[16] A term commonly used in the Anglo‐Indian spoken in Tranquebar.