Re-colonizing spaces of memorializing: The case of the Chattri Indian Memorial, UK

Abstract

This article inspects the ways that spaces of war memorialization are organized and re-organized through official and unofficial meaning-making activities. It aims to contribute to the discussion of the 'value' of memorializing by examining a multifaceted space of remembrance and commemoration: the Chattri Indian Memorial built near Brighton, United Kingdom. The article brings postcolonial perspectives to explore how memorializing has been organized here, focusing on the activities of once-colonized people and the affective, embodied aspects of organizing practices. Built in 1921 to honour Indian soldiers who fought in World War I, the Chattri evolved from a colonial instrument to symbol and space for ethnic-Indian group activities. The study employed historical, visual and ethnographic methods to study the tangible monument and the changing nature of the memorializing activities carried out around the monument. Memorializing is conceptualized within three inter-related processes: colonizing, de-colonizing and re-colonizing to examine how forms and practices of memorialization constitute a values-laden organizing system. Keywords Affect, Chattri, Indian, memorialization, re-colonizing This article focuses on the phenomenon of 'memorializing' as an important way that society organizes and valourizes space. It specifically aims to contribute to studies of the organization of memorializing by drawing on postcolonial perspectives. It examines a multifaceted site of commemoration and remembrance, the Chattri Indian Memorial near Brighton, United Kingdom, and the ways that this space has been organized and re-organized through physical, spatial and affective meaning-making activities. Standing on the edge of Brighton in a onceremote part of the Sussex Downs, the Chattri Memorial was built in 1921 to honour Indian soldiers who fought on the Western Front during the World War I. Designed to render

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Silent cities, silenced histories: subaltern experiences of everyday urban violence during COVID-19

“…Memorialisation practices are central to societies and, in turn, play a critical role in social research that centralises culture and symbolism in understanding social worlds (Harvey 1979, Tuan 1979, Cosgrove 1998. As practices of cultural production and meaning-making (Macdonald, 2013, Ashley 2019) memorialisation 'signifies aspects of the past as important: the making-valuable, through conscious acts, those objects, places, events, practices, memories, ideas, even sensibilities that are attached to the past in some way' (Ashley 2019). Memorialisation 'helps us string past events in our minds, providing them with historical meaning' (Zerubavel 2003:13).…”

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