Beyond Heritage: Ruplal House as a Site of Collective Inheritance
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KAIKOBAD-kaikobad-arch-smarchs-2026-thesis.pdf
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38.65 MB
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Adobe PDF
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12566547d7d3b2a5a6e766e68d315127
Author(s)
Kaikobad, S. M.
Advisor(s)
Gupta, Huma
Date Issued
February 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
In Dhaka, the bustling capital of Bangladesh, heritage management is simultaneously stabilized by law and destabilized by everyday urban life. Bangladesh’s Antiquities Act (1968), as a legal framework, designates certain buildings as protected “antiquities” to preserve the past, but often reinforces entrenched power dynamics rather than addressing the ground realities. This research argues that heritage must be understood not as a static monument frozen in time. Instead, it is a site of collective inheritance where plural and contested claims, memories, and uses coexist like a living metabolism. The study uses the “enlisted protected sites” by the Department of Archaeology of Bangladesh to show how heritage acts as an urban artifact, a material anchor of collective memory that continually evolves through occupation, adaptation, and decay. Based on this analysis, the thesis explores each inheritor’s imagined “claim” to the house through speculative scenarios of future inheritance. This process reveals the legal, social, and ecological tensions that inform the governance of heritage in Bangladesh.
Drawing on heritage studies, critical political ecology, and decolonial theory, as well as extensive interviews and visual representation, this thesis contributes to contemporary shifts in heritage management in cities of the global majority. Placing Ruplal House, a nineteenth-century neo-classical mansion by the Buriganga River in Old Dhaka to the foreground, it offers to reveal the central paradox of heritage in Bangladesh: while the state freezes sites as “antiquities,” everyday life unfreezes them through occupation, adaptation, growth, maintenance, memory, and survival. It elaborates how the formal recognition of “protected monument of national significance” resists legal fixity, highlighting the current use of the building simultaneously as a market, a residence, a military-controlled occupancy, a ruin, and an ecology of toxic hydrological entanglements. This study does not simply call for more effective conservation of Ruplal House; instead, it draws attention to collective micromanagement of heritage edifices through care, maintenance, and repair as a user-centric conservation system. Going beyond existing scholarly accounts of the importance and failures of the Rupal house, the research presents this house not as a monument awaiting rescue, but as a contested site of collective inheritance.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
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