Need of Ethical Guidelines in Community-Based Conservation Consultations of Living Religious Heritage: An Indian Perspective

Care for the built heritage not only provides a sense of key societal identity but also puts additional responsibilities on heritage experts. This intensifies while dealing with the conservation of living religious heritage sites considering the engagement with wider and more varied communities for decision-making consultations. Hence, maintaining balance between the intangible aspects such as traditions and customs of religious communities and the scientific, widely accepted material conservation norms becomes crucial. To achieve this, conservators are guided with code of ethics that lay out certain standards of conservation to be followed. There are many ethical codes written over decades by some prominent heritage organisations, however, only few of them mention community involvement in decision-making process. Moreover, even though the existing codes are applicable to all types of heritage conservation, the same cannot be applied to living religious heritage sites. This is due to the sites’ association with core communities, ongoing traditions and intangible values that are associated with them. This necessitates a framework of guidelines that specifically focuses on the ethical aspects involved in community consultation of conservation decision-making of these sites. India being home to a number of living religious heritage sites of multiple religions and faiths, it becomes vital to understand the Indian perspective for this framework to help and enable Indian heritage professionals to uphold conservation standards.