Four sites, including Udaigiri Caves, in Madhya Pradesh and places linked to Satyagraha, present both in India and South Africa, are the five new additions to the UNESCO Tentative List of World Heritage for India, officials said on Tuesday.
PIB Culture called it a “proud milestone” for the country’s heritage in a post on the social media platform X.
“This is a proud milestone in the rich heritage of India, with the addition of Bagh Cave Paintings, Group of Temples of the Chambal Valley, Udaigiri Caves and the India-South Africa serial transnational proposal Sites of Satyagraha,” it said.
The Udaigiri hill in Madhya Pradesh has a rock-cut sacred ensemble that was built primarily during the Gupta period (late 4th to early 5th centuries), according to the UNESCO website.
Twenty caves, sculptural panels, inscriptions, walking routes, rock surfaces with early sculptural traces and inscriptions, and topographical and hydrological features are part of a unified ritual landscape, according to a description of this nomination in India.
The Bagh caves are a cluster of nine rock-cut Buddhist caves at the banks of the Baghni River on the southern slope of the Vindhyan range in the western part of Madhya Pradesh.
The sandstone outcrops in these caves, the only part of the area that is made of sandstone, were an important factor indeed in the architectural forms and the preservation of mural paintings.
Ginnorgarh Fort, the principal fortified capital of the erstwhile Raj Gond rulers in central India and the Group of Temples of the Chambal Valley: Bateshwar, Padavali and Kakarmath, in Madhya Pradesh have also been added to the list.
To be accepted for the World Heritage tag, a site must first be identified on the UNESCO Tentative List.
The fifth one to be added to the tentative list is the proposed serial transnational property, portraying the evolution of Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of Satyagraha, starting from its conceptualisation in South Africa, and continuing with experimentation, consolidation, and institutionalisation in India.
The potential property consists of 10 elements, 2 of which are in South Africa, the period of Gandhi’s stay from 1893 to 1914, and 7 in India, which was Gandhi’s main residence from 1917 onwards, as explained on the UNESCO website.
The nine components are: The Pietermaritzburg station, the Phoenix Settlement (South Africa) and the Mahatma Gandhi Satyagraha Smarak in South Africa; the Sabarmati Ashram, the Mani Bhavan complex, the Harijan Sevak Sangh complex, the Sevagram Ashram, the Aga Khan Palace and the Gandhi Smriti residence in India.
These nine components show the development of Satyagraha from inception, its being a strategy of resistance in the context of racial discrimination in Pietermaritzburg Station to an exploratory phase associated with the establishment of communities dedicated to truth and non-violence such as the Phoenix settlement as the prototype of following ashramas, and the consolidation stage upon the return of Gandhi to India with further evolution into mass civil disobedience movements, the Mahatma Gandhi Satyagraha Smarak and the Sabarmati Ashram and Mani Bhavan.
The addition to this nomination marks the institutionalisation stage; the transmission of the legacy of the movement into these new parts (Harijan Sevak Sangh, Sevagram, Aga Khan Palace, Gandhi Smriti) of the website.
