In the charged arenas of post-colonial identity, heritage rarely remains a neutral archive of the past. It becomes a battleground where memory is curated, contested, and conscripted into the service of the present. Hindutva has long been understood as the ideological project that seeks to define the Indian nation through a singular Hindu civilizational essence. Its quieter sibling, which one might call Herititva, operates through a parallel logic: the conversion of physical remnants of history into vehicles of political ideology. Where Hindutva mobilizes faith and cultural symbolism, Herititva mobilizes stone, inscription, and nomenclature. It transforms monuments, pillars, and ruins into proofs of historical grievance or civilizational continuity, often at the expense of documentary complexity. The recent controversy surrounding the Pelourinho Novo, or Pilorino Novo, in Old Goa offers a sharp illustration of this process.
For centuries the black basalt pillar near the Basilica of Bom Jesus stood as the Pelourinho Novo, the New Pillory. In the Portuguese colonial order it functioned as a municipal marker of authority, a place where decrees were proclaimed and the power of the Câmara was made visible. Similar structures dotted the Portuguese world from Lisbon to Brazil. Local memory in Konkani may have remembered it with the name Novo Khambo. Archival maps from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries record its presence. Yet the structure itself was a civic instrument of Portuguese municipal life, not a documented site of ritual mutilation tied to the Goa Inquisition.
In recent years that settled identity has been unsettled. Official discourse and popular narration have increasingly referred to the pillar as Hath Katro Khamb, the Hand-Cutting Pillar. The new designation evokes images of hands severed for refusal to convert or for other colonial crimes. The shift is not supported by Inquisition processos, missionary letters, or contemporary chronicles linking this particular monument to such punishments. Earlier accounts sometimes associated hand amputation with pre-Portuguese practices under Adil Shahi rule for debtors or minor offenders, yet the leap to a singular narrative of Christian atrocity against Hindus is a modern ideological construction. The renaming performs what one may call called an anasemic reversal: the pillar that once made law visible is now made to make victimhood visible. Heritage is no longer allowed to remain layered and ambiguous; it must serve a clear moral and political story.
This is the signature move of Herititva. It selects a fragment of the built environment, strips away competing layers of meaning, and re-inscribes it with a preferred historical emotion. In Old Goa the surrounding landscape is already thick with Portuguese ecclesiastical grandeur, itself a UNESCO World Heritage ensemble. The isolated pillory becomes a convenient counter-monument, a site where colonial violence can be localized and ritualized. Once the name changes in official notifications and public speech, the physical object begins to carry the weight of an ideology that claims to recover suppressed truth. Memory is not recovered so much as re-engineered.
Similar conversions of heritage into ideology appear across post-colonial societies. In India the most dramatic instance remains Ayodhya, where a disputed mosque was demolished and replaced by a temple whose consecration was staged as the restoration of an interrupted civilizational continuum. The material act of destruction and reconstruction was accompanied by an intensive campaign of historical narrative that rendered the intervening centuries as interruption rather than complex coexistence. Place-name changes follow the same pattern. Cities and districts once carrying Mughal or colonial designations are rechristened with Sanskritized or Sanskritic-sounding names, as if linguistic purification could undo historical sedimentation. Each act asserts that authentic heritage is singular and continuous, and that other layers are accretions to be peeled away.
Beyond India the pattern recurs. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, post-independence governments have reinterpreted pre-colonial ruins or colonial-era structures to underwrite new national myths. Great Zimbabwe was long claimed by colonial archaeology as the work of outsiders; after independence it was reclaimed as proof of indigenous African statecraft. The reclamation was necessary and just, yet it also risked flattening the site into a pure emblem of racial continuity, sidelining questions of internal hierarchy and regional interaction. In the Middle East, Ottoman and colonial architectural remains have been alternately celebrated, neglected, or demolished according to the ideological needs of successive regimes. In each case the physical remnant is pressed into service as evidence for a preferred genealogy of the nation.
What distinguishes Herititva is its intimate partnership with majoritarian cultural politics. It does not merely correct colonial distortions; it substitutes one set of distortions for another. Complex archives that record multiple uses of a site across centuries are treated as inconvenient. Local Christian communities in Goa who grew up calling the pillar by its Portuguese and Konkani names find their lived memory displaced by a narrative that positions them as historical beneficiaries of violence. The ideology of heritage becomes a zero-sum contest: one community’s claim to continuous victimhood requires another community’s association with historical guilt.
The deeper danger lies in the reduction of the past to a moral ledger. Heritage ceases to be a shared, contested resource for understanding how power, faith, and material culture intertwined. It becomes a set of props for contemporary identity projects. Scholars and local residents who insist on documentary precision are easily painted as defenders of colonial nostalgia. Yet precision is not nostalgia. The Pelourinho Novo was a Portuguese municipal pillar; it may incorporate earlier Indian stone; local lore may have associated it with punishment. All these facts can coexist without being forced into a single ideological sentence.
Post-colonial societies inherit layered landscapes precisely because colonialism did not erase everything that preceded it, nor did independence erase everything that colonialism built. The responsible politics of heritage would preserve that layering, allowing citizens to confront the full record of domination, adaptation, and survival. Herititva prefers simplification. It turns the past into a mirror that reflects only the desired present. In Old Goa a solitary basalt pillar has been made to speak a language it never recorded. The stones remain silent. The ideology that speaks through them is anything but history.
This conversion of heritage into ideology is not unique to one region or one political formation. Wherever the nation is imagined as an organic whole threatened by historical interruption, the temptation arises to conscript monuments into the work of restoration. The result is rarely deeper historical understanding. More often it is the hardening of communal boundaries and the narrowing of the space in which multiple memories can inhabit the same physical ground. The politics of Herititva, like its sibling Hindutva, thrives on that narrowing. The task of a mature post-colonial public sphere is to resist it, not by denying the violence of the past, but by refusing to let any single narrative monopolize the stones that remain.
