Why Heritage No Longer Feels Ours

By: Ar. Nandit Pastariya, Assistant Professor, Amity School of Architecture and Planning, Amity University Gurugram

Introduction: Walk into a historic temple, fort, or old neighbourhood today and all you will notice is people clicking photos, not experiencing it. They admire the surface but rarely understand the story. Heritage is all around us, yet for much of the public, it feels distant, boring, or irrelevant. This is not because people do not care; it is because we have quietly failed to help them care

One of the biggest reasons heritage awareness is weak is the way it is introduced. For most people, heritage first appears in school textbooks as timelines, dynasties, architectural terms, and black-and-white images. Research consistently shows that fact-heavy teaching reduces emotional connection. Smith (2006) argues that heritage education often prioritizes “authoritative knowledge” over lived experience, making people feel that heritage belongs to experts, not to them. When heritage is taught as something to memorize rather than something to feel, people disengage early and rarely return.

Earlier generations encountered heritage naturally where temples were part of daily routines, oral stories explained places and rituals, crafts, festivals, and space were connected. Whereas today, urbanization and lifestyle changes have broken these links. Heritage sites are now weekend destinations, tourist attractions, or background scenery. Ashworth, Graham, and Tunbridge (2007) note that as societies modernize, heritage shifts from a lived cultural process to a managed product. Once heritage becomes something you “visit” instead of something you “live with,” emotional ownership declines.

Museums, guidebooks, plaques, and academic writing are often used as technical language, art-historical jargon and assumed background knowledge. This unintentionally sends a message: “This is not for you.” Laurajane Smith famously describes this as the Authorized Heritage Discourse, where experts dominate interpretation while the public becomes passive consumers (Smith, 2006). People feel underqualified to ask questions, form opinions, or connect personally. When heritage feels intimidating, people protect their self-respect by staying indifferent.

Another critical issue is relevance. Many people subconsciously ask whether “How does this help my life today?” “What does a 1,000-year-old structure have to do with me?” If heritage is presented only as “ancient,” “glorious,” or “past,” it loses relevance. Research in public history shows that people engage more when heritage is linked to present-day identity, values, and challenges (Waterton & Smith, 2010). Without these links, heritage feels like someone else’s nostalgia.

It is easy to blame phones and social media but that’s lazy thinking. Studies show that digital platforms do not reduce interest, they change how people want to engage. Short-form, visual, narrative-driven content attracts attention, while static displays repel it (Parry, 2013). The problem is not technology, heritage communication has not adapted to how people learn today. Whether it is visually, interactively or through stories, not lectures. Heritage stayed still while the audience moved on.

Here is the uncomfortable truth; Most people do not connect to architecture or artifacts first. They connect to human stories. Research in heritage interpretation shows that narratives involving daily life, conflict, belief, and emotion create stronger memory and empathy than factual descriptions (Tilden, 2007). When we talk only about style, date, and material, we miss the human layer, the very thing that makes heritage meaningful.

Lack of public engagement is not harmless, yet it indirectly leads to indifference toward destruction and neglect, weak support for conservation funding and cultural identity becoming shallow or symbolic. Graham and Howard (2008) warn that when people lose emotional connection with heritage, preservation becomes a technical exercise rather than a social responsibility. Heritage survives not because laws exist, but because people care.

If we want the public to reconnect with heritage, we must make it experiential, not instructional, use simple, humane language, tell stories before presenting facts, use digital tools as bridges, not replacements, invite people to interpret, not just observe. Heritage is not lacking value. It lacks connection. Once people feel that heritage belongs to them and not to textbooks, experts, or tourists, the relationship will begin to heal.

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