Australia-India Update Seminar 2001

Shared Heritage: The Common Ground

University Of Canberra

Canberra, 18-19 October 2001

Heritage Preservation: Changing Perspectives In India: A Case Study of The Heritage Hotel Industry

SK Dhar

Regional Manager South Asia

SMEC International Pty Ltd

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, friends of India

I wish to thank the conference organisers for giving SMEC the opportunity to participate in this conference on heritage preservation in India. Our presentation is not about SMEC, but for those of you who are not familiar with the company I will describe very briefly the nature of our business.

SMEC is one of Australia’s most prominent international consulting firms with operations in engineering and many other disciplines and a network of offices throughout the Asia-Pacific region, including of course in India. I would like to return for a moment to the themes expressed in the opening session of the conference yesterday concerning co-operation between Australia and India. SMEC currently has 15 projects in India and project offices in eight states. SMEC has incorporated SMEC India as a local company, with more than 200 staff, all local.

SMEC India is:

• Creating employment in India of both a professional and administrative nature
• Generating export income for India through the use of SMEC India staff on SMEC projects in other countries; and
• Facilitating technology transfer from and to India within the SMEC Group of Companies.

However, the purpose of the presentation today is to describe the Heritage Hotel industry in India, its origins and character, and the way in which it has reflected both changing approaches to heritage preservation and also the evolution of Indian development policy.

I would like to begin with a quotation from Mahatma Gandhi which encapsulates the theme of the presentation.

“It behoves every lover of India to cling to the old Indian civilisation, even as a child clings to its mother’s breast.”

The Indian independence movement had a number of intellectual pillars, but one of these was the notion of a rich Indian civilisation, evolving over many thousands of years through countless manifestations. This is a source of great pride for Indians in the culture, tradition and heritage of their country.

This heritage, common to all Indians, was one of the cornerstones of the concept of an Indian national identity differentiating Indians from their colonial rulers.

The importance of this concept gave rise inevitably to heritage protection playing an important role in the policy priorities of independent India.

National policy began to be formulated in the 1950’s and in accordance with the development thinking of that time gave the state primary responsibility for preservation and management of the national heritage, as enshrined in the Historical Sites Act of 1954.

However, there were always practical constraints on the implementation of this policy. An independent India was subject to virtually limitless demands on its financial resources, particularly for national development and poverty reduction which remain key priorities for the Indian Government today.

In addition, there were at that time and still are serious attitudinal problems related to heritage preservation within state bureaucracies.

India, unfortunately, does not have a strong track record of maintenance and asset management at state level. Much of the religious heritage of India, for instance, was codified by the state from the establishment of the Archaeological Survey of India a century ago, but the preservation of this heritage remained the responsibility of local communities in the form of trusts supported by donations from pilgrims. The state has not yet developed a serious concern for asset management - which is reflected in the deterioration of much of the heritage sites supposedly under its care.

It is against this backdrop that the Heritage Hotel model emerged in India from the fifties onwards.

With the benefit of hindsight we can see that this model was many years ahead of its time in terms of its approach to both heritage protection and development policy.

I cannot stress enough that the Heritage Hotel model arose out of spontaneous arrangements between traditional owners no longer able to maintain their palatial residences and hotel operators who saw new commercial opportunities emerging.

The Heritage Hotel model combines effective preservation with commercial viability. I wish to emphasise that this trend was not a gimmick or a cheap slogan. It represents meticulous preservation, restoration and maintenance, far better than the equivalent in the state sector, without the need for ongoing support from the public purse.

Much of this success is due to the nature of the Indian hotel industry which has its origins in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The industry has always been highly concentrated, with large companies operating a chain of hotels, focusing above all on the top end of the market.

This industry had a tradition of high standards of service and accommodation, drawing on the management tradition of the imperial era and the Indian tradition of service and hospitality which in the end is believed widely to be divinely sanctioned.

This is illustrated by a quotation from the Vedic Scriptures which we believe to be as old as civilisation itself.

“atithee devo bhawah”

which means literally

“guest is god”.

With that philosophy in mind the Indian traditional hospitality knows no bounds.

In addition, the links of the Indian hotel industry to the country’s industrial sector mean that the investment capacity and strategic sense necessary to assume this new responsibility was forthcoming.

I would like to describe for you one particular hotel with personal significance for me, namely the Oberoi Palace in Srinagar, Kashmir, the place from which I come. For many decades Kashmir attracted most of the tourists travelling to the Indian subcontinent. This palace, converted to a hotel, has sprawling, terraced gardens overlooking the famous Dal Lake with the Himalayas all around. This breathtaking location and the palace itself rarely had a vacant room.

There are a number of Indian hotel operators and their names will no doubt be familiar to many people here, but I will describe briefly one other example, WelcomHeritage, which is typical of the industry.

For some years Welcom has been acquiring a series of palaces and forts for conversion to hotels. These hotels are marketed quite deliberately for their heritage value. I wish to quote some of the rather romantic and poetic descriptions of the hotels drawn from promotional material.

“India, immersed in the sands of time … “

“Pomp and pageantry … “

“Gracious and splendid living … “

“Retreats of yore, pristine in their glory … “

What is important about these comments is that they are incompatible with lack of maintenance, care and service. Heritage preservation is critical to the commercial success of these sorts of hotels.

The economic reform process has had important implications for heritage preservation generally in India and for the Heritage Hotel industry in particular.

The general principles of the reform process will be familiar to everyone here, but I will list the basics as a reminder.

• Emphasis on market forces within a national planning framework
• Mobilisation of private finance
• Enlarged role for the private sector
• Government regulation
• Planning by incentives rather than state investment.

This changing policy framework and redefinition of the role of the state has had important implications for the Heritage Hotel industry.

The industry began as a commercial transaction responding, on the one hand, to the financial constraints imposed on royal rulers in independent India and, on the other hand, to the opportunities these presented to the Indian hotel industry. The state played a peripheral role at best in this process.

In the past decade this situation has evolved into a form of public-private partnership in which the state and private investors and operators have different but interrelated roles.

The role of the Indian hotel industry is, as before, to provide:

• Capital for restoration and preservation, and;
• The operation and management skills to cater for a very distinguished clientele.

The role which has emerged for the state is to provide:

• A range of incentives to ensure the mobilisation of private finance for restoration of Heritage Hotels
• A process of approval and registration to set national standards and oversee compliance with them
• Promotional support, especially in attracting foreign tourists
• Concessional loans for new projects.

In many ways this is an operating model for the way in which the public and private sectors are expected to co-operate in the national vision for a post-reform Indian economy.

I wish to conclude by looking briefly at some emerging issues related to this Heritage Hotel model in India.

The first point is related to the question of preservation for whom.

Heritage Hotels inevitably imply a large measure of exclusivity based on financial capacity. The average Indian citizen would find the cost of staying in Heritage Hotels quite prohibitive. In this sense access is being denied to a large proportion of the population while the industry emphasises its heritage preservation role.

I must point out, however, that the choice facing India in the immediate years after independence and even today is not between state preservation and private preservation but between private preservation and a constant process of decay. I have no doubt that if many of the palaces now operating as hotels had not been converted for this purpose, they would now be in ruins, possibly beyond any hope of restoration even if funds were available.

However, it is possible that measures by the state could assist to reduce this restriction on access to some extent.

• Guidelines could be developed through regulation or incentives to provide for controlled public access to private heritage sites on specified national holidays and the like.
• Heritage briefings could also be encouraged to ensure that tourists are fully informed about the history of the hotels in which they are staying, their history and the lives of the people who once lived there.

Simple measures such as these would at least give some practical expression to Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of the Indian heritage as common to all Indians.

Nevertheless, I must admit that poverty is the most pressing barrier to access to and preservation of heritage of all kinds in India. It is only when incomes and educational levels rise for the poorest Indians that they will be able to derive benefit from heritage policies or practices, regardless of how effective these might be.

The final point I would like to consider is the potential to apply this Heritage Hotel model to other aspects of heritage preservation in India.

Examples that come to mind are:

• National parks and Mughal gardens

The gardens in particular are one of the most striking examples of Indian heritage, some of which are sadly all too often in decay. To cite one example, Ram Bagh in Agra, quite close to the Taj Mahal and Itmad-ul-Daula, which is overgrown and pillaged, despite being a protected site

• Classic train routes

By which I mean above all the train lines linking the northern and eastern plains of India with hill stations, using trains with pull and push engines on either end, plying on serpentine tracks, climbing the sub-Himalayas. These represent not only an engineering marvel but also a remarkable aesthetic experience for the travellers. It is important however, that these lines not only be retained but retained in the character of their original operation rather than as modern rail lines. This will be increasingly difficult for Indian railways with commercial constraints to achieve

• Wildlife reserves

There have been attempts in a number of African countries to preserve wildlife by transforming animals into commercial assets for the people primarily responsible for their destruction – or as an economist might say, making them into investment goods rather than consumer goods. I think there is scope for applying these sorts of approaches in India within the framework of the Heritage Hotel model. There are many wildlife sanctuaries run by the state, but there is plenty of scope to do more to preserve the wildlife as heritage.

Thank you, Mr Chairman, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your kind attention.