Manimajra Fort: Layers of Living Heritage Beyond the Monument

Figure 1. Aerial view of the fort. Image source: The Indian Express

Heritage sites are often approached as static monuments; considered to be objects that are to be preserved, restored, and displayed. However, my engagement with Manimajra Fort compelled me to question this framework and consider heritage as a layered, living process rather than a frozen past. The fort, commonly reduced to a footnote in regional histories of Chandigarh, reveals how built, natural, and intangible heritage intersect in ways that resist simple conservation narratives.

Manimajra Fort cannot be understood solely through its architectural remains. Its significance lies equally in its continued social memory, ritual associations, and the everyday relationships local communities maintain with the site. During my research, I found that official heritage discourse prioritized structural restoration while overlooking lived practice, like festivals, oral histories, and informal uses of space, that sustain the fort’s relevance. This gap reflects a broader issue within heritage management: the privileging of material authenticity over cultural continuity.

Archival records and colonial-era documentation present the fort as a feudal stronghold tied to political authority. Yet oral narratives complicate this image, revealing histories of negotiation, adaptation, and survival that are absent from written sources. These narratives are not supplementary; they actively shape how the site is perceived and valued today. Ignoring them risks transforming heritage into a hollow aesthetic object rather than a meaningful cultural landscape.

This project (that I undertook as a passion research essay in third year of bachelors) also made visible the tension between development and preservation. Located within a rapidly urbanizing region, the fort is increasingly framed as either an obstacle or a tourist asset. Both positions flatten its historical complexity. Treating heritage as an economic or visual resource alone disconnects it from the communities that have historically animated it.

Through this engagement, I came to understand heritage as a process of care rather than control. Conservation must move beyond technical restoration to include ethical responsibility toward memory, access, and representation. Manimajra Fort thus becomes not merely a site of the past, but a lens through which to question how we choose to remember, preserve, and live with history in the present.

Another issue that this particular case studies brings to the fore is that of continued gender struggle. Noblewomen in South Asian history are often romanticised as figures of luxury and refinement, surrounded by ornamentation and cultural privilege. Yet this visual abundance concealed a deeper form of structural dependency. Prohibited from engaging in paid labour or independently managing property, many noblewomen remained economically reliant on male kin. Their apparent privilege functioned as a veil that obscured profound vulnerability.

Historical records, from court chronicles and gazetteers to memoirs and legal disputes, reveal that women’s agency was frequently conditional. Access to power often emerged only through widowhood, motherhood, or strategic threats rather than autonomous economic participation. Marriage and kinship operated as economic institutions, regulating women’s access to livelihood while rendering their labour invisible.

A striking illustration of this continuity appears in the history of Manimajra Fort. Decades ago, a noblewoman fought a legal battle under British rule to assert her property rights. Today, a woman from the same family is engaged in a similar struggle against male relatives over control of the fort. Despite temporal distance, the structural logic remains hauntingly consistent: women’s claims to heritage and property remain contested within patriarchal frameworks that privilege lineage over equity.

This historical pattern finds resonance in contemporary society. Many middle- and upper-class women today possess education and cultural capital, yet are expected to withdraw from formal employment in favour of domestic responsibility. Framed as personal choice, this retreat often reflects enduring expectations of femininity and reputational surveillance. Forced idleness, once enforced through purdah or custom, now manifests through social pressure masked as care.

Apparent privilege has historically excluded such women from discourses of structural helplessness, rendering their dependency socially invisible. Power, when conditional, remains a form of disempowerment.

By interrogating these parallels, this analysis challenges narratives of linear progress in women’s economic roles. Instead, it reveals cyclical patterns of dependence, where control adapts rather than disappears. Recognising these continuities is not an exercise in pessimism, but an ethical necessity. Without confronting the structures that render women’s labour invisible, empowerment remains symbolic rather than substantive.

{Note- A detailed research essay on this topic is under way for publication}