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

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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.