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 UNESCO Tentative List of World Heritage for India, officials said on Tuesday.
PIB Culture, in a post on X, described it as a “proud milestone” for the country’s heritage.
“India’s UNESCO Tentative List now has 78 sites, with 5 additions: Bagh Cave Paintings, Group of Temples of the Chambal Valley, Udaigiri Caves, Ginnorgarh, and the India-South Africa serial transnational proposal, Sites of Satyagraha. A proud milestone for India’s rich heritage,” it posted.
The Udaigiri hill in Madhya Pradesh contains a rock-cut sacred ensemble developed primarily under Gupta patronage between the late 4th and early 5th centuries, according to the UNESCO website.
The site includes twenty excavated caves, sculptural panels, inscriptions, circulation paths, rock surfaces bearing early marks and inscriptions, and associated topographical and hydrological features that together form an integrated ritual landscape, reads a description on the website about this nomination from India.
The Bagh caves comprise a group of nine rock-cut Buddhist caves located on the southern slope of the Vindhyan range at the banks of the Baghni river in western Madhya Pradesh.
These caves are the only outcrop of sandstone in an otherwise basaltic region, a significant factor which influenced their architectural forms and 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.
A site should first be recognised on the UNESCO Tentative List before it can be considered for the World Heritage tag.
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 prospective property is proposed to include a total of nine components, two located in South Africa, where Gandhi spent 21 years from 1893 to 1914, and seven in India, where Gandhi spent most of his life, as described on UNESCO website.
The nine components are: The Pietermaritzburg station and the Phoenix Settlement in South Africa; and the Mahatma Gandhi Satyagraha Smarak, 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, it adds.
These nine components represent the evolution of Satyagraha from its inception, as a form of resistance in response to racial discrimination (Pietermaritzburg Station), to an exploratory phase linked to the formation of communities committed to truth and non-violence (Phoenix settlement as the prototype of following ashrams), to consolidation upon Gandhi’s return to India with further evolution into mass civil disobedience movements (Mahatma Gandhi Satyagraha Smarak, Sabarmati Ashram, Mani Bhavan).
The latest components of this nomination represent the institutionalisation phase where the legacy of the movement is encapsulated (Harijan Sevak Sangh, Sevagram, Aga Khan Palace, Gandhi Smriti), the website adds.
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