ABSTRACT
Political boundaries demarcated on geopolitical considerations often split a continuous cultural region, separating places of faith from their followers and traditional cultural landmarks from the communities that used them. The passage of time hardens these man-made partitions, and the memory associated with these once-familiar sites is often lost with successive generations. Thus trans-boundary shared cultural heritage sites and zones in spite of their merit share an uphill task in terms of their identification as transnational nominations for UNESCO World Heritage status. This is even more challenging in the context of maritime heritage.
Within the narrative of terrestrial histories of nation states, accounts of maritime heritage often become an extension of land-based concerns. A paradigm shift to understanding the history of the sea destabilises linear mapping of time and chronologies of political dynasties and empires. The fluidity of seascapes, transnational narratives and migrations challenge the sanctity of borders and of terrestrial accounts of the past. The focus shifts from rootedness in the soil to routes and intertwined histories of overlapping spaces. How is this fluidity of seascapes to be balanced against the rigidity of maritime boundaries and zones?
