Abstract
Heritage tourism in a postcolonial context is often discussed as a practice of colonial nostalgia, or even neocolonialism. Yet the case of Tranquebar shows that a postcolonial interest in heritage may also promote dialogue and a more reflected reengagement with colonial history in the postcolonial present. The South Indian town of Tranquebar was a Danish trading colony in 1620–1845. This period plays a major role in the current development of Tranquebar, which has been declared the so-called heritage town to attract tourists. As the well-preserved townscape is being promoted as a material expression of Indo-Danish colonial history, it is increasingly drawn into question what this history means in a Danish as well as in an Indian perspective. This causes negotiations of the colonial history at several levels. In the encounter with the town and its residents, tourists have occasion to reflect on the meanings and the nature of the Danish colonial engagements with India and other parts of the world. Equally, Danish and Indian agents in the development of Tranquebar as a heritage town enter into a dialogue not only on the colonial past and its meanings, but also on the postcolonial present. Although the relations between India and the various European colonial powers of the past are far from uncontroversial, in the case of Tranquebar a mutual narrative strategy on the colonial Indo-Danish past is that of anti-conquest, a history which makes a mutual reengagement possible.
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Notes
- 1.
Prior to this, the town was known in Tamil as Tharangambadi. Tranquebar is an Europeanised form of the Tamil name (the transliteration of which varies slightly). Both names continue to be used locally. Here I use Tranquebar as the internationally known name.
- 2.
Here and in the following, unless otherwise noted, I have translated the comments quoted from guest books from Danish.
- 3.
These three Caribbean islands (the last Danish tropical colony) were sold to the USA in 1917.
- 4.
The missionaries sent by the King of Denmark from 1705 came from die Pietistische Stiftung zu Halle in Germany.
- 5.
While decolonisation is frequently an explicit argument in the politics of name changes in India, it should be noted that these name changes are also applied as political tools for expressing regionalist political stances, such as Dravidianist sentiments in the context of Tamil Nadu (Hancock 2008:52). Thus the renaming (which can be seen as appropriations of history) is also very much part of internal Indian politics, even as it may be justified and understood in part on anti-colonialist grounds.
- 6.
Such a commemoration runs against the grain of the effort of post-independence politics of history in India, where the state has worked to build a public history in which this war (which the British termed a mutiny) has been presented as the ‘First War of Indian Independence’ (Cohn 1971:56).
- 7.
From a Scandinavian perspective this narrative of anti-conquest is not unique. Ipsen and Fur have noted that the discourse on colonialism in the Scandinavian countries generally positions Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland as insignificant and relatively innocent and benign colonial powers as compared to agents with greater powers such as the Netherlands and the Great Britain, which are associated with imperial oppression (Ipsen and Fur 2009, see also Fur 2012, this volume).
- 8.
In terms of state-to-state development aid, there are at present no such relations between Denmark and India. In 2005 India, which had itself become an economic power of global significance, terminated its bilateral agreements with a number of smaller donors such as Denmark, Sweden and others, insisting that development aid would in the future only be received from larger donors, e.g. the USA and the EU (Schaumburg-Müller 2006b:39). When the bilateral agreement was terminated, Denmark had in total provided around 6 billion DKK in development aid to India, making India the largest recipient of Danish development aid next after Tanzania (Schaumburg-Müller 2006a:40, 43).
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Acknowledgements
This chapter is based on my PhD project, which I carried out from March 2007 to February 2010 (Jørgensen 2010). I thank the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation for my scholarship and the National Museum of Denmark and the Farumgaard Foundation for funding my fieldwork.
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Jørgensen, H. (2013). Heritage Tourism in Tranquebar: Colonial Nostalgia or Postcolonial Encounter?. In: Naum, M., Nordin, J. (eds) Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology, vol 37. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6202-6_5
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