16.05.2024The afterlife of repatriation. Heritage and violence in Hindu nationalist India

This lecture unpacks some of the (ill)logics of heritage in Hindu nationalist India by questioning the ways in which global heritage and emancipatory concepts and processes, normally associated with struggles for social justice, mutate and are refashioned on the ground in diverse geographical and political contexts. The lecture looks at the 2021 repatriation of a statuette of the Hindu goddess Annapurna from Canada to India, by combining interpretative analysis of media and legal discourses with a longitudinal ethnography of the site in which Annapurna was eventually installed at the heart of Banaras, or Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh, India).