The past hasn’t been obliterated yet. Much is as it was, which means that when the Hilton hotel opens for business (construction began exactly as world markets slumped in 2007, and therefore stalled for many years), it will find itself both the site of one of the city’s busiest informal transport hubs, as well as the entryway to a bustling vegetable market whose layout has remained unchanged for centuries. And it has no reason to be nervous; it has company, in the form of four other luxury hotels, all of impeccable international reputation, which precede its entry into the area.

Here comes the neighbourhood.

When upstanding, upper-class people in Bengaluru lament the loss of their heritage, they are not talking about Begum Mahal. When they celebrate the city’s heritage, they are not talking about Shivajinagar, an area designed to be the servants’ quarters of the British Empire, where the beauty is ancient but modest and functional, and so tightly packed between people and goods—and so defiantly ungentrifiable—that you hardly notice it. What are they talking about? The good guardians mean something like Victoria Hotel, a sprawling property that sat on Residency Road, in the commercial centre of the city. Victoria Hotel was a lazily run establishment that served indifferent food in great atmosphere (a late-Victorian-style cottage) and allowed its clients to bring their dogs to dinner, all the better to be sucked dry by mosquitoes while waiting it out in the lawns. When it was knocked down—at about the same time as Begum Mahal went up in flames—and replaced by a giant mall, some of my best friends lost their minds (that mall has long been in operation, and while it looks apocalyptic, it employs about a hundred times more people than Victoria Hotel ever did). The selfsame guardians huddle at the Bangalore Club, the city’s most exclusive subsidy for the rich, and hope that everything they hold dear—the immaculately laid out 150-year-old pile set in acres of manicured gardens—won’t be torn down. Where would we be, after all, if Winston Churchill’s unpaid bills from 1899—now obsequiously displayed at the entrance to the dining room—were to disappear? (Rumour has it that in 1991, the president of the club was showing Prince Charles the exhibit, when, bowing too enthusiastically and too often, he hit his head on the table that housed Churchill’s bills and passed out).

I like late-Victorian architecture. I particularly like its tropical mutations; the monkey-tops to keep the monkeys out, the stingy little windows to keep the cool air in, the Arabesque patterns on the floors to keep the slaves busy. I’ve been taken as a guest to the Bangalore Club plenty of times, and invariably enjoyed myself (other people’s subsidies are easier to be hypocritical about when you can occasionally have them). And yet, I think civilization would only benefit by burning the place down and starting again. Bengaluru’s heritage hysterics are a smokescreen: what the fine people are fighting to protect is class control. Make no mistake. In a city where you can move from being working class to middle class in the space of a day, where, at long last, opportunity actually exists, this is a war against mobility.

Heritage is the ultimate revenge of the rich: history reflected in a fun-house mirror and dipped in liquid nitrogen to make the distortion last. Heritage is a means of denying that history is made—and remade—every minute of every day in every part of the world. Heritage is an attempt to lock time up in shiny tinsel wrapping; an attempt to disguise accidents of fortune as noble intention. Heritage is the pretence that the cobblestoned streets of some quaint European city whose only economy is a tattered illusion of itself are somehow superior to the dynamically heaving roads of the developing world megalopolis. Heritage is a plot to distract you from noticing that Bengaluru became a far nicer place to live in once it began offering hope and looking like shit.

This essay forms a part of Silicon Plateau, a forthcoming art project of T.A.J. Residency/ SKE Projects and Or-bits.com.