Field Notes from Varanasi and Ladakh
By Samidha Pusalkar
Interviewing a monk at Thiksey monastery, Ladakh, India
What happens when we stop thinking of religious heritage primarily as material inherited from the past, and instead attend to the practices, relationships, knowledge and decisions through which it is continually remade?
Fieldwork over the past months has taken me into two very different landscapes of living religious heritage in India: Varanasi, a dense pilgrimage city built around temples, ghats, homes, commerce and the Ganga; and Ladakh, a high-altitude world of monasteries, traditional knowledge, and construction practices now under pressure from a changing climate and a changing economy.
On the surface, the two sites have little in common. Look closer, though, and they raise the same set of uncomfortable questions. What does it mean to conserve something that is still being used, repaired, altered, argued over? Who gets to decide what counts as ‘worth preserving’? And when we invoke “the community,” whose voice are we actually hearing?
These are the questions that followed me through the fieldwork…
Heritage beyond the building
The first thing that becomes hard to ignore on the ground is that heritage rarely stays inside its walls.
A temple in Varanasi cannot really be separated from the streets pilgrims walk to reach it, the smaller shrines along the way, the people who live and trade around it, or the wider sacred geography of the city. A monastery in Ladakh is not reducible to its architecture and its murals either, it is also a site of practice, upkeep, teaching and craft, embedded in an everyday institutional life.
Yet, conservation practices encountered during fieldwork at these places, tend to work the other way: they take the buildings as its primary unit of attention, as if the object and the life around it were separable.
Fieldwork complicates that assumption fairly quickly. A structure can survive largely intact while the relationships that once gave it meaning quietly change. Equally, a material surface can be altered considerably while the practices, knowledge and religious attachments built around it persist. So, the question worth asking isn’t whether something has stayed physically the same. It’s what kind of continuity and change, if any, is actually taking place through and around that material fabric.
“The community” is not singular
A second, related difficulty is how casually the word “community” gets used, as if it’s a single, internally coherent group with a singular view.
In practice, communities contain different generations, different roles, different bodies of knowledge, and often quite different ideas about what should change, what should stay, and what even counts as authentic. This matters most at the point where conservation decisions actually get made.
It would be convenient to imagine a clean divide, heritage professionals on one side, “the community” on the other, but that divide rarely holds up in the field. Living religious sites are governed by multiple, overlapping authorities: religious institutions, traditional practitioners, craftspeople, conservation professionals, government bodies, donors, tourism interests, and long-term residents, each holding a different kind of leverage. Some carry technical expertise. Some carry religious authority. Some control money. Some have the knowledge that actually keeps a place standing but no institutional power to act on it.
So, thinking ‘what does the community want?’ becomes a generic way of looking at it. Instead, the situation makes us think ‘who, within a given community, has the authority to define heritage, and on what basis?’
Aghori sitting on one of the ghats of the Ganga
(Aghoris are extreme ascetic Hindu devotees of Shiva who practice non-duality by breaking social and ritual taboos)
When change is part of the conservation
Varanasi offered some of the sharpest reminders that heritage change rarely reduces to a contest between preservation and destruction.
The redevelopment around the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, for instance, reshaped a large stretch of the surrounding urban fabric, and, in doing so, made previously obscured temples and religious features newly visible. Something was lost and something was produced in the same gesture. A single intervention can reveal one history while pushing another out of view; it can widen access even as it dismantles the older urban relationships through which pilgrimage used to be experienced.
That tension makes it difficult to speak of a single, authentic version of the historic city sitting there, waiting to be preserved. Varanasi has never actually been static, its built fabric, its ritual practices, its pilgrimage routes have all shifted repeatedly over time. Then, should the change happen? It clearly will, and always has. What’s more important is which changes get prioritised, whose values shape that prioritisation, and what forms of continuity remain possible once the dust settles.
What happens when the climate changes?
Ladakh raised a different but related set of questions, this time about materials and the future rather than the past.
Traditional construction techniques there developed in direct response to a particular set of environmental conditions, and they carry generations of accumulated, situated knowledge. But those environmental conditions are no longer stable. Climate change is putting new pressure on earthen architecture and traditional roofing systems, at the same moment that cement, concrete and corrugated metal are becoming the default building materials.
That combination unsettles the familiar argument between “traditional” and “modern” materials, and it becomes even harder to hold once cost enters the picture. Traditional materials are, if anything, better suited to the local environment than their substitutes. But they are also expensive, and that expense does most of the explanatory work on the ground: households tend to build with earth and traditional roofing only when they can afford to, and cement, concrete and corrugated metal become the default for everyone else. Traditional construction, in other words, is drifting toward becoming a marker of wealth rather than a norm.
Monasteries are not exempt from this logic, and this is where the picture gets more uncomfortable rather than less. In several cases, the constraint was not a lack of money at all, funding and technical means to conserve or rebuild in traditional materials were available. Newer, cheaper materials were used anyway, as a way of cutting costs on the built fabric so that the money saved could go toward other institutional priorities: new infrastructure, expansion, amenities. New construction was, in effect, given priority over the preservation of the old, not because the old was unaffordable but because it competed for the same funds against projects that mattered more to those making the decision.
That should complicate any easy story about traditional knowledge simply eroding under external economic pressure. Sometimes it does. But sometimes the erosion is a choice made from within, by people with both the money and the knowledge to do otherwise, weighing conservation against other things they want built. What the fieldwork suggests, tentatively, is that the future of living heritage in Ladakh may depend less on preserving a particular material appearance and more on preserving the capacity of the whole system to adapt, knowledge, skill and material together, while staying honest about the fact that some of the pressure on that system comes from deliberate institutional choices, not just from climate or cost alone.
View of Chemrey monastery in Ladakh
The image problem
A third thread ran through both field sites, harder to name but just as consequential: the growing power of the visual image of religious heritage.
Varanasi circulates on Instagram mostly as photographs, ghats, temples, boats, ritual, the river at dawn. Ladakh circulates as monasteries set against dramatic mountains, painted walls, prayer flags, carefully composed views. There’s nothing wrong with beauty or photography as such, and tourism has its own legitimate claims on these places. But it’s worth asking what happens when visual appeal starts to shape what gets valued in the first place.
Living heritage, on the ground, is not pristine. It is messy, full of repairs, commerce, disagreement, changing materials, ordinary houses, everyday religious practice, constant small adaptations. Images tend to favour legibility over mess. A site that looks traditional can come across as “more authentic” than one that isn’t, regardless of how much deliberate effort actually went into producing and sustaining that look.
Which raises a question that goes well beyond these two sites: are we conserving heritage, or increasingly conserving the image of heritage, and mistaking the second for the first?
One of the alleyways of Varanasi
Some questions to carry forward
Fieldwork rarely settles anything. More often it leaves you with much sharper questions than the ones you started with.
In Varanasi and Ladakh, those questions circle around continuity and change, plurality and authority, material and knowledge, conservation and the futures it’s quietly building. They also unsettle a few convenient assumptions: that heritage has one value; that communities speak in one voice; that traditional knowledge is uncontested from within; that conserving material fabric is the same thing as conserving heritage.
Instead of asking only what should we preserve, it may be worth also asking: What becomes visible through a conservation intervention, and what quietly disappears from view because of it? And what kind of future is being built into today’s interventions, whether or not anyone intends it?
These questions don’t resolve here. This fieldwork sits within a larger research project on living religious heritage, critical conservation, and the politics of continuity, and there’s considerably more to work through than fits in a set of field notes.
More of it is coming soon, with future publications drawing on this material.
Cite this article: Samidha Pusalkar, “Field Notes from Varanasi and Ladakh” Center for Critical Conservation, September 17, 2026, https://centerforcriticalconservation.com/1513-2/