New Hampi

When you visit a UNESCO Heritage Site, you can expect something that strikes awe and bewilderment as you feel transported into other-worldliness. Like stepping into a snow-globe of sorts, into well kept grounds that highlight the site in its best light; and you feel blessed to have the privilege of being present in a place that has been globally declared as a sacred place that deserves extra care and attention to preserve a part of the world's social and natural history for generations to come.

Hampi, a small dot in Karnataka is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and it doesn't disappoint. A breath-taking group of temples and ruins sprinkled through incredible rock formations of an ancient volcano, maybe under water, thousands and thousands of years ago. The town of Hampi developed in and around these epic landscape. The ancient walls formed the foundation for shops and houses, providing homes for families living and working; breathing life into the pillars and passages of the Virupakshu Temple.

What does a World Heritage listing mean for Hampi?

For the residents of Hampi, it seems to mean sacrifice. Being recognised by UNESCO is a little more complicated for this community. And as progress continues on the gentrification of the town towards a more ideal 'heritage site', it begs the question to what calls to be preserved and what is deemed as culturally significant...

So far, two rounds of demolition have taken place in the Hampi Bazaar displacing around 320 families. Some have been living in the Hampi Bazaar for 100 years or 3 generations. Their roots were firmly in place there and they had established business and set up homes.

On April 1st 2011 at 8pm, police posted demoltion notices on houses and businesses. The bulldozers arrived at 5am the following morning to the pleas and cries of the residents still trying to remove their belongings from their homes. These families have since been relocated to villages surrounding Hampi and forced to find alternate means to earn money to support themeselves. For some small business owners their only option has been to move hundreds of kilometres away to work in farms, fields or factories for months at a time.

Torn between preserving the 'purity' of the landscape at Hampi, it's hard to come to grips with the cost at which it happening. The community of the bazaar had been living peacefully under the shadow of the monuments for over a hundred years. They themselves had become part of the site's history. Virupakshu Temple is still frequented by the locals for their daily puja, as well as visited by the tourists who wish to receive darshan from Lakshmi the resident holy elephant. There is a harmony.

With the destruction of the majority of the bazaar, the local government have left a small section next to the river, but the residents here know that their homes are not safe. With plans for more demolition, the small town seems to be under constant and daily structural change. As we were enjoying lunch at the Shiva Café and chatting with Shiva about the future of the bazaar, a council worker marked the front of his restaurant with a small red chalk line, indicating that this would be the new line for the side walk, eating into his kitchen set-up at the front of his shop. We were shocked by the abrupt way he was informed of the bulldozing that would take place in only a week's time. Shiva seemed to take the news calmly and much better than we expected. We didn't talk more about it that day.

When we returned for coffee the following day, we asked him how he felt about the red chalk line. To which he unfolded to us his grand plan to expand his shop. Forced to rearrange the layout, he would chop and change a few other things, change the entry way, open up another wall and put more tables on the side. He smiled saying "The restaurant will be even better than before".

There's nothing locals can do about their town undergoing a face-lift to comply with UNESCO guidelines and standards. The first demolition day was a day that they will never forget. The residents and business owners left in the Hampi Bazaar do not complain about their predicament, as harsh and unreasonable as it seems to us. As suddenly as change comes, they adopt it and react quickly. They innovate to overcome it.