Lalita du Perron talks to Shandana Waheed, Doctoral Student in the Department of Anthropology and the Archaeology Center at Stanford, about her work in Rawalpindi, the politics of heritage, and the concept of hostile histories.

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Lalita du Perron: Today I am joined on the SASSPod by Shandana Waheed, who is a PhD Dissertation writer at the Department of Anthropology at Stanford, as well as the Stanford Archaeology Center. Her research stands at the intersection of anthropology, archaeology, and urban studies

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Lalita du Perron: and spans the 19th and 21st centuries in South Asia exploring relationship between material heritage, difficult histories, local populations, and the Islamic State.

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Lalita du Perron: Her dissertation is tentatively titled. Present of the past, politics of heritage in post-colonial Rawalpindi.

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Lalita du Perron: But before I ask you to explain more about your work. How are you.

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Shandana Waheed: I'm good. Thank you very much.

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Lalita du Perron: Thank you for joining me today. So obviously, I read your introduction. It has. It's very dense. There's a lot there that I want to talk about. But before we get into your PhD research,

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Lalita du Perron: tell us a little bit about what's brought you to this work?

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Shandana Waheed: Oh, that that's a big question.

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Shandana Waheed: I think coming to PhD itself was a very well thought out decision.

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Shandana Waheed: When I finished my master's, I went back to Pakistan, and I started teaching

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Shandana Waheed: and I was writing for newspapers, so

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Shandana Waheed: practically I could have taken a different path and become journalist. But doing PhD was

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Shandana Waheed: was a decision to, I think, discover my own self and my family history. The project

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Shandana Waheed: is very personal.

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Shandana Waheed: It's a story of life for me and for many other immigrant families who migrated from India to Pakistan, or from Pakistan to India during partition.

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Shandana Waheed: So that's how I embarked on this project.

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Lalita du Perron: You say in your introduction or I said in your introduction, that you work on South Asia, do you actually do that? Because you mentioned specifically Rawalpindi. So do you truly work on South Asia, or is that just a kind of a framing to broaden the geographical kind of theme of your work?

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Shandana Waheed: Yeah, I think it's a bit of both. If you're working on Pakistan, I don't think you can just work on Pakistan. There was no Pakistan, like 70, 80 years ago. It's all India, right. And if you're working on partition, you're working on immigrant identities, you're working on family histories.

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Shandana Waheed: South Asia is so entangled, both Pakistan and India, but also Bangladesh. You know the kind of history that it has gone through, the way we understand the region today, the formation of nation-states, all of that is so entangled that you cannot study one without the other.

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Lalita du Perron: Let's talk a little bit about the word, heritage. I mean, it comes up in the title of your, the tentative title of your dissertation, and you refer to it when you talk about yourself. Is it heritage? Is it just a fancy way of saying old, or is it an actual thing that's defined by UNESCO, or maybe both?

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Shandana Waheed: So like any other academic framework, heritage could also be defined in many different ways. UNESCO is the foremost institution that defines and sort of makes and breaks heritage in today's world.

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Lalita du Perron: Right.

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Shandana Waheed: UNESCO has different categories in which they conceptualize heritage. There's tangible heritage, and there's intangible heritage.

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Shandana Waheed: And tangible heritage is everything that's material, that's physical that you can touch, feel, construct, deconstruct.

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Shandana Waheed: Intangible heritage is you know, the non-physical things, like music, folklore, dance. So there are different working definitions of heritage. If I'm particularly talking about my work on heritage, I

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Shandana Waheed: focus on architectural heritage, which is non-monumental. So a little different than how we understand heritage. When you think about heritage and monuments, we are always thinking about these castles and forts. You know?

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Lalita du Perron: Whatever.

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Shandana Waheed: Yeah, or ancient ruins like Mohanji-daru, which I also work on. But my PhD dissertation is not focusing on monuments and these big structures that are usually popular as heritage.

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Shandana Waheed: I'm focusing on buildings that were evacuated by immigrants who moved from Pakistan to India. And then these buildings were taken over by Muslim immigrants who moved from India to Pakistan. So in terms of definition, yes, there are

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Shandana Waheed: almost, or more than a century old. They also have stylistic uniqueness, which is, you know, recognized by UNESCO. Once again UNESCO enlisted Rawalpindi as one of the pilot cities for their historic urban landscape project. But they're also interesting because the original owners of the building are not there anymore.

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Shandana Waheed: They were abandoned or evacuated by their non-muslim residents at the time of partition, and the current owners are not the ones who constructed these buildings.

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Lalita du Perron: So

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Lalita du Perron: I guess I'm thinking about the timeline, because partitions now... Quick math, 77 years ago. Seventy eight, I guess, coming up this year? And at what point does a building become of heritage to the people who live in it? And is there a timeline for that, or

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Lalita du Perron: is the violence of an event like partition always going to interfere with that sense of belonging? Perhaps?

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Shandana Waheed: Yeah, this is a very good question to think about temporality, especially with respect to heritage, and most of our understanding of heritage is very tied to the idea of time in the sense that it has to be very old or ancient. However,

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Shandana Waheed: heritage could also be very personal, it could be very individual. It could be tied to your family. If it is something that gives you an idea of belonging and association,

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Shandana Waheed: and I'm talking about a very non-institutional definition of heritage. So for a family, anything that is in the family for a generation or wo, or maybe 10 generations, both of these things could be heritage right? If it's your grandparents house, it's your great grandparents house, that could be a heritage property for you. It might not be national heritage, but it could be your family heritage.

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Shandana Waheed: So it could be old. But it could also be not old, but has some significance for you.

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Lalita du Perron: Tell us, or tell the community of listeners of the SASSPod how you got to this work, and what brought you to this work. I know that you started working on your own house or your family house in Rawalpindi. Tell us what happened, and then what led to your kind of broadening out and theorizing the work.

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Shandana Waheed: Right, and I think I forgot to answer the second part of your question. So you asked if partition is something that will always be in the way of understanding heritage.

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Lalita du Perron: Yeah.

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Shandana Waheed: And I think it's a very important question when you deal with these properties. I think,

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Shandana Waheed: yes, partition is a reality that we cannot exclude from the history anymore. Like, for us, people like us who have really not experienced partition firsthand.

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Shandana Waheed: Interestingly enough, there's no world without partition for us.

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Shandana Waheed: We only know the world that is existing after partition versus people who basically experienced partition firsthand. They knew a world which was before partition, so they could probably imagine something which was not haunted by partition.

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Shandana Waheed: We cannot.

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Lalita du Perron: Yeah, yeah.

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Shandana Waheed: Yeah, and then coming back to your...

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Shandana Waheed: Now, and I think I would probably connect the 2. I grew up in Pakistan. I was born in Rawalpindi. I grew up in Pakistan. I have a Pakistani passport ID card.

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Shandana Waheed: However, the first reaction that my family or I would have. And someone asked us.

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Shandana Waheed: Okay, and we're in Pakistan. If you're outside Pakistan, and someone ask you, where are you from? Your first answer would be Pakistan.

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Shandana Waheed: If someone asks you, so who are you? Where are you from? And you're in Pakistan, the immigrant families' answer to that question is, we are Hindustanis.

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Lalita du Perron: Wow!

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Lalita du Perron: I did not know that.

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Shandana Waheed: Yeah.

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Shandana Waheed: And it's more specific to Urdu speaking families, because they derive a lot of pride to their lineage, you know, and and their association with Hindustan, not particularly India, that we know today.

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Lalita du Perron: Sure.

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Shandana Waheed: So yeah. The project was also very personal in the sense that we grew up in an immigrant family hearing stories of partition. And you know we were very nostalgic about the past that we had never experienced, and we only accessed that past through the memories of our grandparents.

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Shandana Waheed: But the houses we grew up in were all properties that were evacuee properties. Then they were awarded to these immigrant families in claim. So most of these properties were actually owned by non-muslims, and they were awarded to the Muslim immigrants. As I said before.

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Shandana Waheed: And so one of these houses that we grew up in was a big Haveli sort of a house which was probably owned by a Hindu whose family name was Gupta.

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Shandana Waheed: So the building had a carving on its facade which, said Gupta Building. And that's how we know it. In addition to that carving, the building also had a huge Lakshmi statue at the facade of that building

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Shandana Waheed: which we just like saw growing up as part of our house, and you know we never thought about it as something that was

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Shandana Waheed: other, that was different.

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Lalita du Perron: Right.

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Shandana Waheed: But something changed over time. I mean. I left for college, and then I left for U.S. So

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Shandana Waheed: many years passed, and one day, when I went back to do my field work for my master's thesis, I found that Lakshmi statue was gone.

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Shandana Waheed: And that was the moment that made me realize that something has changed.

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Shandana Waheed: And that's how I started investigating the change that was there in the buildings. But it was also a change in the community. I grew up in a neighborhood where

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Shandana Waheed: we had Hindus and Sikhs and Christians living together, and as I grew up, I started to realize that this is not very common. And that's why I was interested initially to study those communities where people from different religions are still coexisting. However, when I went back, that was not the case. And then this is how I moved from studying people to focusing on buildings.

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Lalita du Perron: What are some of the politics of heritage? I mean? I can think of lots of different ways that you could both define how you could define politics as well as heritage. And so if you put those two together with all the variables, there's probably hundreds of definitions, but maybe give me the main three that you kind of come to mind when you talk about the politics of heritage.

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Shandana Waheed: Yeah. So in the context of Rawalpindi. And the study that I am trying to create is

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Shandana Waheed: through three dominant themes that are ownership, identity and belonging.

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Shandana Waheed: and when I say ownership, it is both legal and social. So these properties, which I am calling evacu properties

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Shandana Waheed: and the name itself is very self-explanatory in the sense that these are the properties which were evacuated by outgoing immigrants.

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Shandana Waheed: were then taken over by the institution of Okaf.

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Shandana Waheed: which is basically an Islamic institution, part of the Islamic state, and it is supposed to overlook the religious properties. However, partition kind of positioned the institution of Okaf in a very unique way in Pakistan, where it became the guardian of all the evacu properties.

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Lalita du Perron: And then.

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Shandana Waheed: They kind of made a new wing, which is now called Evacu Trust Property Board,

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Shandana Waheed: and it functions under the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

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Lalita du Perron: Hmm.

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Shandana Waheed: So in terms of evacuee properties, the ownership is both legal, and sometimes it contested between Evacu Trust Property board and the awardees of Evacu Trust

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Shandana Waheed: Property Board, who are the people living in these buildings.

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Lalita du Perron: Yeah.

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Shandana Waheed: At times it is still contested between people who left

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Shandana Waheed: and never really figured out what they really want to do with these properties. So these properties

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Shandana Waheed: were sort of abandoned, and there were people squatting in these properties. And

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Shandana Waheed: 50 years later Evacu Trust Property Board realized, oh, this is a property that we never figured out what to do with it.

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Shandana Waheed: And then by that time the property was altered. It was used by multiple owners, and you know there were 300 people claiming the ownership of the property. So this is the legal aspect, and there are court cases which are ongoing, for

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Shandana Waheed: you know, since partition, and have never been resolved.

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Shandana Waheed: There's also ownership of like, let's say my grandfather was awarded a certain property, and then he never transferred it to his sons, and now, like he had 5 sons, and each son had

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Shandana Waheed: 3 children. So there are like 22 people.

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Shandana Waheed: and my grandfather is still an awardee as a claimant to evacuee property, he does not really own the property.

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Shandana Waheed: So now there are 22 people who need to fight that court case

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Shandana Waheed: with the state, but also amongst each other.

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Lalita du Perron: Wow!

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Shandana Waheed: And sometimes these properties are not that big. They're just like,

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Shandana Waheed: you know, 2 bedroom houses or...

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Lalita du Perron: Yeah, it's not like you can all take a room and do what you will. Kind of thing.

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Shandana Waheed: Yeah. So gradually some family members move out, some, you know, whoever can afford, would go, and then who cannot afford, would stay.

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Shandana Waheed: And the ownership is just somewhere in between these people.

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Shandana Waheed: so the question of ownership is very complicated. It's legal, it's historical, it's familial.

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Shandana Waheed: The question of identity is.

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Shandana Waheed: Again, there's a question of immigrant identity. There's a question of your national identity as a citizen of Pakistan. There is your, you know, whatever is your family identity. People have different family affiliations. There are religious,

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Shandana Waheed: sectarian affiliations that you have. So, based on that, your relationship with the space changes. At 1st place, you can only be awarded an evacuee property if you are an immigrant, and I'm talking at the time when the resettlement was planned in a way where evacuee properties were supposed to accommodate

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Shandana Waheed: immigrants. Later on, it was not that strict. People were buying and selling evacu properties right, left and center.

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Shandana Waheed: But then, you know, people who were

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Shandana Waheed: sort of in a liminal space between India and Pakistan, and there are a lot of historians like Wazira Zamindar, has written a book in which she discusses these cases where people were just struggling to acquire identity documents, people who were like, let's say, born in India, but they wanted to move to Pakistan, but they were not

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Shandana Waheed: really, like their half of their family remained in India.

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Shandana Waheed: Or they had a government job, so they wanted to retain their job, but they were Hindus. So Pakistani State was forcing them to go to India. When they went to India, they were too late to acquire a document, and they were sent back to Pakistan.

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Lalita du Perron: Oh, my God!

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Shandana Waheed: So there was this liminal space in which people operated for so long. And I think it's still a question, the fact that I was telling you like my grandmother died. She was 96 until that date. If someone would ask her, Where are you from? She would say, I'm a Hindustani.

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Shandana Waheed: So what does it mean for a Pakistani who lives in Pakistan, but is not born in Pakistan, and still identifies as Hindustani? All of these really complicated questions are the questions of identity that I'm looking into.

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Shandana Waheed: And belonging,

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Shandana Waheed: for me is very personal and individual. I would say it's not really, I'm not thinking about belonging to a certain tribe or a clan. It's about, how do you belong to a certain space, a space that's

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Shandana Waheed: maybe your family home. But it's not your ancestral home. It's not a home that's there in your family through generations.

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Lalita du Perron: Hmm.

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Shandana Waheed: How do you belong to a space which is yours, but is also not yours, or has a very hostile history, and reminds you of the loss that your family has gone through

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Shandana Waheed: that you may or may not legally own

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Shandana Waheed: but the only space that you have as your family home? So yeah, all of these questions.

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Lalita du Perron: Wow! It's so dense, and I want to ask you more about hostile histories. But

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Lalita du Perron: you know, as I'm listening to you speak, I'm also thinking about the compounding

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Lalita du Perron: factor that

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Lalita du Perron: people can't travel to the countries that they were born in, or where their ancestral property is sitting, right? So I'm just kind of trying to imagine the sheer bureaucratic hurdles of trying to communicate with a government that doesn't want to talk to you to begin with. That's certainly not going to let you into what they consider their country. And I'm waving my fingers in air quotes for the listeners.

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Lalita du Perron: Do you have any examples? How does that work? What do you actually do?

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Shandana Waheed: You mean in terms of traveling between India and Pakistan?

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Lalita du Perron: Yeah, or just dealing with the bureaucracy of it, because you can't travel. And so everything is done via what? Email or phone calls? Or how do you even communicate about this property that's sitting somewhere that you think is yours? But you can't actually go and see.

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Shandana Waheed: Yeah. So these processes are constantly evolving, and they have evolved since partition. Initially they were both governments were communicating with each other about how they were going to move assets and how they were going to move people, and a lot of families that I've interviewed

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Shandana Waheed: have these stories where, like their assets were basically transferred through the government. They didn't really have to do it themselves.

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Lalita du Perron: Right.

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Shandana Waheed: Versus there are families who did not really have any support from the governments, and they lost everything. And then they claimed things when they came to the other country. There were different pacts. There were conversations and laws about evacuee properties. There were, you know, there was lead at the pact that addressed some aspects of that exchange and loss, and, you know, regaining properties in the new countries.

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Shandana Waheed: And then, lately, the question of visas is really dependent upon the political situation between two countries. And you know, the Presidents and the Prime Ministers. And you know

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Shandana Waheed: how we are feeling today. Kind of stuff. So I mean, there are diplomatic relationships between India and Pakistan, and people apply for visas, and there are certain visas which are

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Shandana Waheed: Pakistan has opened a visa-free corridor for sick pilgrims. So people who want to come to the shrines which are in Pakistan

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Shandana Waheed: and some of the big Sikh shrines are actually in Pakistan. Pakistani government facilitates visas for those who want to come to those Sikh religious sites. And there are annual festivals. And there's a certain number of visas that are issued every year.

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Shandana Waheed: But visas based on family reunions, or like, you know, these kind of heritage tourism

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Shandana Waheed: are not very popular. Especially in the recent years.

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Shandana Waheed: And people struggle a lot to go back to their family homes or properties. And yeah, some of them are just lost.

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Lalita du Perron: It seems that your work is much more around the kind of the personal politics of heritage. You're less interested in the UNESCO view of heritage. And you're more interested in what does it mean to me that my building is this old or it's in that country? And so I want to ask you about what you call, or maybe it's not your term, but the quote unquote hostile histories. Because,

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Lalita du Perron: you know, we're living in a world right now, where

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Lalita du Perron: there's so much dispute around land, I mean, I don't know that's ever not been the case, but it's particularly prominent right now, at least in the world that I kind of intellectually occupy. And so these are really pertinent questions about who owns what and why, and at what point?

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Lalita du Perron: At what point is it no longer yours?

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Lalita du Perron: Can you say a little bit about hostile histories and what you mean by it? And to what extent I think your research speaks to these questions that I imagine are going to become more pertinent, as we have more climate migration, and migration for all sorts of reasons that are not out of a desire to go somewhere else, but are forced in some way.

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Shandana Waheed: Yeah.

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Shandana Waheed: I think when we say hostile history, maybe we should unpack the word hostile a little bit.

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Shandana Waheed: It is something that we can understand as unpleasant, something that's maybe violent, something that is pregnant with loss.

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Shandana Waheed: It's something that's so difficult, so tense that

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Shandana Waheed: you probably do not want to even remember that.

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Shandana Waheed: However,

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Shandana Waheed: again, as I said, it's not a choice. If you're living in a space that reminds you of the reason I'm here, is because my family went through that

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Shandana Waheed: because my grandparents migrated,

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Shandana Waheed: the reason I'm living in a building that does not quote unquote, looks like a Muslim building.

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Shandana Waheed: Because it has frescoes and carvings of Hindu gods, and you know all sorts of things that I do not really relate or identify with

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Shandana Waheed: is because we were forced to move in this space, or that was the only option we had. Right?

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Shandana Waheed: So and I think that's what that's where it moves from personal to more sort of a to the level of state.

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Shandana Waheed: And the heritage question also kind of like, transcends from personal to a national and international level where, yes, there's a there's a personal understanding of what can and cannot be your heritage. But

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Shandana Waheed: state also has a say and a way of curating heritage at the national level. Every country today has a national heritage program. And then there is a subscription to international or global heritage which is mostly through UNESCO and all of these really big international heritage bodies.

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Shandana Waheed: And all of this is very, very connected.

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Shandana Waheed: Particularly in Rawalpindi's case, the contestations over ownership identity and belonging were there for like

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Shandana Waheed: 77 years of partition. But the politics of heritage came to foray after UNESCO intervened, and you know they kind of wanted to do something about the historic government landscape of Rawalpindi. But most of the buildings that they wanted to restore

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Shandana Waheed: for all non-muslim building, heritage that looked like non-muslim heritage that had non-muslim past or histories, and

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Shandana Waheed: the government was really confused like, do we really want to promote this kind of heritage? And then people were not really cooperative because they associate themselves with these buildings as their homes, but they dissociate themselves from the idea of heritage that could be something that's associated with the hostile history their family has gone through.

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Shandana Waheed: Yeah, so yeah, it's a very complex love-hate relationship with those spaces. Right?

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Shandana Waheed: And that is why it's so important, like partition happened. It's only in the South Asian context that we think about partition. However, the idea of displacement, the idea of ownership that is a consequence of displacement or movement, is so universal, and it's always been there. I think we have examples of

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Shandana Waheed: the population exchange between Greece and Turkey and all the property problems that came after that, and then partition of India and Pakistan. But you know we have seen these things in Europe as well, and other parts of the world. I think it's very hard to not really think about the global impact of displacement and migration today.

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Shandana Waheed: And whenever there is a movement of people, there's this question of what happened to the assets, the immovable properties that they leave or they acquire.

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Shandana Waheed: And

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Shandana Waheed: they may or may not come from hostile histories. There are people who do voluntary movements. However, then I think if there's not a hostile history question. There is a heritage question that becomes important there.

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Lalita du Perron: Yeah.

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Shandana Waheed: People move to America for studies or for jobs. You know, there's no violent history attached to that movement. But

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Shandana Waheed: home would always be somewhere else for them, and that's where they're more likely to associate their heritage.

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Shandana Waheed: But I think the hostile history probably makes it more difficult

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Shandana Waheed: to come to terms with the past, and the question of how we are going to accommodate that past and the present, which is the heritage question. Okay, these buildings are here. They're beautiful. They have some significance. The UNESCO is recognizing the significance of these buildings. They're appearing on social media platforms. People are attracted to these buildings, which is also a very, very important aspect of heritage tourism.

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Shandana Waheed: You know, people are attracted to these buildings because they look really nice. They look different. They're old.

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Shandana Waheed: So yes, they're here. But

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Shandana Waheed: what do they remind us of. You know, most of the times, Heritage is used to glorify a certain kind of past, to tell a story, and the question of which story we want to tell and how we want to tell it is what is complicated here in this context. Do we want to remember the violence and the loss? Do we want to remember the people who left? Do we want to remember how we came into this place?

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Shandana Waheed: These are what is really complicated about these buildings.

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Lalita du Perron: I'm thinking, and I'm mindful of the time. So let us have our closing thoughts around this, although I'm going to put a really big question to you. I mean, I guess I'm thinking about the role of the nation-state in all of this.

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Lalita du Perron: And then, you know, if I think about the buildings in Amsterdam where I grew up, I mean the beautiful buildings have incredibly violent histories that are never discussed, certainly were not discussed when I was growing up.

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Lalita du Perron: And I think times have changed. Times change slowly in Europe, however. But I think times are changing a little bit, and people are more willing to at least acknowledge the violence that went into creating these buildings. Is there a question there? I think there's a question there. And

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Lalita du Perron: I think it's about. Yeah, the role of the nation-state. And I think the role of the nation-state in obfuscating the history of heritage.

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Shandana Waheed: Yeah, I think cultural diplomacy is the prime example of how heritage is accommodated in the nation-state.

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Shandana Waheed: It's also the question of, you know, what kind of, it's the identity of the nation-state. If you want to say that, okay, we are an Islamic nation-state, or we want to say, we are a democratic, liberal nation-state. Then,

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Shandana Waheed: which space the heritage is occupying, and which heritage has the space in that nation-state? So with partition, one of the things in which we investigate heritage and its relationship with heritage is

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Shandana Waheed: this partition created this category of heritage, which is the heritage of the other.

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Shandana Waheed: And that other is not really present. That other is, you know, connected to the history in the past. But that other is

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Shandana Waheed: present in a very invisible way in your everyday life.

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Shandana Waheed: And that other is present in the nation-state as well. Nation-state is built upon the departure of these people, you know. So yes, the nation-state is very much connected to the idea of heritage and the identity that it can derive from that heritage.

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Lalita du Perron: I mean, I think of the nation-state as having these kind of artificial signifiers like the flag and the National Anthem, and you know, blah blah. But I don't know that I've thought of heritage as part of that, but that seems to be very much what you're speaking to.

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Shandana Waheed: Yeah, I mean, there's the visual aspect of heritage. But there's also like the narrative that it feeds into. You know, if you want to claim a certain past, and I'm thinking about Indo civilization and the Indo sites. The way you claim antiquity and say like, Oh, this! This is a land that's been inhabited for millions of years.

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Shandana Waheed: You say it through heritage. You cannot make claims if you don't really have any material signifiers or evidence of that claim. Right? So. Yes, you can do ethnographic work, but you still need archives.

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Lalita du Perron: Yeah.

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Shandana Waheed: And evidence to what you're saying.

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Lalita du Perron: Yeah.

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Shandana Waheed: And heritage is almost like, an archive, a material archive of the narrative of nation-state.

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Lalita du Perron: There's so much to think about and unpack here. I feel we just kind of scraped the tip of the iceberg. But we are out of time. Shandana Waheed, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast and telling us about your research. When are you thinking of wrapping up and moving on from Stanford?

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Shandana Waheed: Yeah, well, ideally, I'm finishing my 5th year, and then I'll have another year to write. And I think I would love to defend next year, and graduate and move on to the next chapter of my life.

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Lalita du Perron: Okay, 2026 will be your year. Thank you so much for talking to me today.

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Shandana Waheed: Thank you.