Shandana Waheed is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University and received a 2022 summer graduate research fellowship from the Center for South Asia.
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Waheed's archival ethnography project, Present of the Past: Politics of Heritage in Rawalpindi Pakistan, traces property allocation policies in the refugee resettlement project regulated by Evacuee Trust Board, post-partition land laws, cantonment planning and development, urban development schemas, and Rawalpindi’s unidentified architectural heritage. Waheed investigates how this profuse ruination of a multitude of historical layers is embedded in the politically configured national space. The selective recognition of Rawalpindi’s heterogeneous past informs the understanding and recognition of heritage in Pakistan’s national cultural policies and framework now when heritage of the ‘other’ is a highly contested issue in South Asia’s current political environment.
Project Summary:
Waheed's project focuses on the constitutive role of heritage in imagining the nation’s past and defining its present through the case study of Rawalpindi; a city situated in Punjab, Pakistan. The political configuration of the city’s diverse architectural heritage and how different communities interact with it today, raises questions about the genealogy of architectural heritage, the process of selection of national heritage, role of ‘ruins’ and ‘ruinscapes’ in imagining a nation’s history, and engagement of heritage in the formulation of national memory. It further underscores the interaction between various religious and ethnic communities with the city’s diverse heritage, and the role of historiography in making heritage a political and nationalist project.
The CSA research fellowship enabled Waheed to conduct archival research in London over a three-month period in the summer of 2022. Waheed's preliminary online research has indicated that the Indian office records in the British Library and Cantonment records as well as Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in The National Archives are important for the historical context of Waheed's research. These archival records will not only help in tracing the colonial legacies of heritage management in the city before Partition but also reveal the policies and frameworks that have been carried forwarded in the post-colonial state and are continued to be implemented today.
