Security and heritage in the making of urban futures: A new research avenue

Original Research Paper Ethnography 2024, Vol. 0(0) 1–21 © The Author(s) 2024 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/14661381241266918 journals.sagepub.com/home/eth Security and heritage in the making of urban futures: A new research avenue Vera Lazzaretti Instituto Universit´ ario de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA), IN2PAST, Lisboa, Portugal Abstract Heritage and security are distinct research topics in anthropology, but some of their connections have been unpacked, particularly in scholarship about heritage during conflicts and peace building. This article, however, brings them analytically together to understand how they entangle to shape cities and their futures. In scrutinising overlooked similarities between heritage and security, my longitudinal ethnography in Banaras (Varanasi) suggests that both intersect productively in anticipating and making urban futures. I argue that a Hindu majoritarian urban future—as materialised in the walls, signboards and checkpoints of the Prime Minister’sflagship Kashi Vishvanath Dham and Corridor—unfolded precisely through security and heritage. This future seems to be, at least partially, shared by those who are excluded from it. Bridging the largely disconnected anthropological scholarship on heritage and security, this article offers a first ethnographically-grounded theorisation of security and heritage as cross-fertilising urban processes that make futures. Keywords Security, heritage, urban future, South Asia, Hindu nationalism, urban everyday life, urban heritage, policing, inter-religious space Corresponding author: Vera Lazzaretti, Institutio Universit´ ario de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (CRIA), IN2PAST, Av. Forças Armadas, Edif´ ıcio IV - CVTT - Sala B1.130, 1649-026, Lisboa, Portugal. Email: [email protected] From future unimaginable to future materialised After a break of almost 3 years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I return to Banaras (Varanasi) in October 2022 to find that what some of my interlocutors had called an ‘unimaginable’future has materialised in the monochromatic pinkish sandstone of the Kashi Vishvanath Dham and Corridor. Banaras is a city of about 1.5 million people in India’s most populous state (Uttar Pradesh, or UP). It lies on the banks of the Ganges river and features prominently in translocal imaginaries as a unique, ancient and renowned Hindu pilgrimage centre. A stronghold of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for decades, the city was chosen in 2014 as the parliamentary constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The so-called ‘timeless city’subsequently began what the PM’s website describes as a ‘glorious development journey (vikas yatra)’in order to ‘appear more prominently on the world tourist map’. 1 Modi’s pet project for his own constituency is the Kashi Vishvanath Dham and Corridor (henceforth KVDC), 2 a new monumental space finalised during the pandemic. As I walk the redevelopment area around the city’s most renowned Hindu temple, Kashi Vishvanath, I observe the new facilities for pilgrims. Sign boards for ‘iconic sites’ or ‘rediscovered’temples have popped up, confirming official depictions about the KVDC as a showcase of Indian (Hindu) heritage. At the same time, security—a longstanding presence in this neighbourhood—is visibly increased: there are new walls and checkpoints to access the temple compound and, together with the usual UP state police force, guards of a private security company now patrol the new monumental space. ‘Kalpana nahi kar sakta’(I cannot imagine), a sentence that several residents and shopkeepers had often repeated when asked about the future of their neighbourhoods, continues to resonate in my head. At the time of those conversations in 2016 and 2017, suraksha (security) transitioned from being just a nuisance in my daily ethnographic fieldwork around Kashi Vishvanath to becoming a research focus. As often happens in anthropological research, that transition occurred as a result of puzzles that emerged in the field rather than from a priori theoretical interests: indeed, my interlocutors had identified policing and security measures around the temple as a major cause of disruptions to the geographies of pilgrimage that I was unpacking at that time. This prompted me to take a closer look at what suraksha meant for the neighbourhood. The presence of police and security measures had, by then, strayed far from its original purpose of ensuring peace and order in an area potentially fraught with inter-religious tension. Notably, the 18th century Kashi Vishvanath temple is just meters from the royal Mughal Gyanvapi mosque. The latter was erected most likely in the 17th century, on the site and with some of the material of a previous Hindu temple, 3 and is in use for prayers by Sunni Muslims. Because of its origins, Gyanvapi has been a longstanding target of Hindu nationalist campaigns for the ‘liberation’(mukti) of allegedly originally Hindu places of worship and, since the 1990s, the mosque has been under the protection of national and state security forces to prevent an outcome like the one prompted by the Ramjanmabhoomi movement in Ayodhya. 4 2Ethnography 0(0) ‘How do you imagine the future of this neighbourhood?’, I used to ask residents and shopkeepers of the lively bazaar around the temple-mosque compound in early conversations about security. Even interlocutors who had just disclosed a local anthropology of (in)security by sharing insights about the neighbourhood’s transitions over three decades, would reply (no matter how much I tried to stimulate their imagination) with the rather puzzling statement: ‘kalpana nahi kar sakta’,or‘I cannot imagine (how the future will be)’. A few months after those conversations, that unimaginable future began materialising at a fast pace. Following the landslide victory of the BJP in UP in March 2017, preparations began for the KVDC. Within 3 years more than 300 buildings were demolished under the watch of UP police and the new monumental space, inaugurated by the PM in December 2021, now connects the temple to the Ganges riverbank. Despite the rubble, the KVDC is widely spoken about and promoted as a new heritage site and the PM has repeatedly stressed that it is a model for development that respects (and does not destroy) history and traditions. 5 How did such a future materialise so quickly, and what is it made of? In the next pages, I address these questions by pulling together and expanding reflections that emerged within the anthropology of security and space on the one hand, and critical heritage studies on the other. In so doing, I attend to the under-explored ways in which security and heritage (beyond times of war and its immediate aftermath) may be entangled in urban everyday life and become co-productive of urban spaces, imaginaries and futures. This article draws on ethnographic material collected during periods of three to 5 months almost every year between 2013 and 2022 through observations of everyday life, embodied spatial experience and engagement with residents, Hindu pilgrimage experts, Muslim and Hindu religious authorities, frequenters of both temple and mosque, shopkeepers and low ranking police, as well as analysis of legal, visual and digital sources in and about the centre of Banaras. The type of Hindu majoritarian future that materialised in the KVDC, my ethnography suggests, was already well in the making in previous decades and is made up of ticket counters, checkpoints, barriers, signboards and people in uniform. Indeed, this future was anticipated in previous decades, and then progressively inscribed onto the historic centre of Banaras, by and through the registers and materials of security. However, it was eventually sanctioned and gift wrapped for the city and the nation with the construction of the KVDC, precisely through the resignification of the city and the neighbourhood using the registers and materials of heritage. Put simply, the future at the centre of Banaras is made of, and materialised through, security and heritage. Through my ethnography, I argue that security and heritage are simultaneous and cross-fertilising urban processes that make futures, and thus should be studied conjointly in other cities. Lazzaretti 3 Security and heritage: Approaches to under-explored similarities Heritage and security are distinct areas of research in the social sciences and humanities but some scholars have begun dealing with their connections. An important article by historian and heritage scholar Mattias Legn´ er (2017) reviews these connections and identifies two main research directions in which security and heritage have been approached conjointly: a first, more prominent direction—which the author calls ‘heritage in security’—includes studies dealing with the protection and ‘securitisation’of heritage, mainly during conflicts. Because heritage-making is an attempt by one group to craft a universalising narrative of the past for transmission into the future (Di Giovine, 2015; Harrison, 2005), heritage is clearly also a target for those who oppose that narrative, and reasons for attacks on it have been widely addressed (Bevan, 2006;Brosch´ e et al., 2017; Layton et al., 2001;Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996). So too have questions of how to protect heritage during conflicts (e.g., Rothfield, 2008;Kila and Zeidler, 2013) and what impact protection and security measures may have on the ground (Russo and Giusti, 2018) and, more recently, on access to urban heritage (Oevermann and Gantner, 2019). A second research direction—in Legn´ er’s terminology ‘heritage as security’—investigates the role of heritage in peace-building, thus framing it as a possible security-making device. It does so by investigating the aftermath of civil wars and armed conflicts, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Middle East (Gould, 2018;Legn´ er, 2017;Walters et al., 2017). This article moves beyond the two above research directions to open up a new avenue that investigates the ways in which security and heritage entangle and shape cities. The urgency of doing so emerged inductively during my ethnographic research in Banaras which I will discuss in the next sections. From a reading of the anthropological literature on heritage and security that I offer in this section, however, we can already deduce that the two processes of heritagisation and securitisation are worth being explored conjointly. In anthropology, concepts of security and heritage and the objects they try to define are seen as contested and negotiable. Ethnographic accounts highlight that both heritage and security are inherently spatial: each is productive of new socio-spatial formations inasmuch as, in their names, places are transformed irretrievably; and so are the ways in which people relate to them. Importantly, ‘heritagisation’and ‘securitisation’are selective processes: they both exclude what is not selected as ‘heritage’, or what is not protected. Anthropological literature about their respective fallouts abounds: it documents ‘spatial cleansing’(Herzfeld, 2006) and the displacement of previous inhabitants from newly labelled heritage sites (Bloch, 2016;Chu, 2018;Collins, 2015;De Cesari and Dimova, 2019;Dines, 2012;Herzfeld, 2010,2017;Meskell, 2019) and the ‘insecuritisation’of people and places through policing and security discourses (Caldeira, 2000;De Goede et al., 2019;Fassin, 2014;Feldman, 2012;Goldstein, 2010;Lazzaretti, 2021a;Maguire et al., 2014). It is precisely in their roles separately as future-makers that I detect another important but under-explored similarity between heritage and security. It is accepted that heritage not only concerns the past, but is also a means through which ‘futures are imagined and 4Ethnography 0(0) made possible’in the present (Harrison, 2013: 7). Ongoing resignification of heritage as having increasingly more to do with future aspirations than modern anxieties (as established by classic works on heritage such as Lowenthal, 1998;Harrison, 2013)has begun to be documented. In postcolonial nations, for instance, heritage is a means for economic gain and global recognition that nurtures a selectively distributed ‘capacity to aspire’(Appadurai, 2004) and the imagining of future (Meskell, 2019;Zetterstrom-Sharp, 2014). As well, ‘aspirational futures’are increasingly in evidence in (Asian) urban contexts (Bunnell and Goh, 2018), and the ‘futuring’of postcolonial cities (Datta, 2019; Urry, 2016) relies heavily on recourse to a selected mythological past (Kuldova and Varghese, 2017;Udayakumar, 2005). In this context, the construction of new monuments and new heritages (Lazzaretti, 2021b;Lefèvre, 2020) becomes crucial for imagining the future. Security is inherently linked to space and places (Low and Maguire, 2019). Importantly, imaginaries and materials of security generate global ‘scapes’(Appadurai, 1990) that articulate discursively and spatially, at multiple scales. But despite the fact that seeking protection from unknown futures is a driving force behind the security-marketing of futuristic technologies, security has only recently begun to be addressed as futureoriented. To do so, scholars pay close attention to the affective and aesthetics of security, and highlight its sensory roots (Caldeira, 2000;Ghertner et al., 2020). They also often build on Rancière’s(2004: 12) elaboration of aesthetic politics as the ‘distribution of the sensible’, that is ‘a shared aesthetic disposition, a normative arrangement of intelligibility’ (Ghertner et al., 2020: 4) and, in so doing, pay close attention to security’s potential in creating consensus and shared future visions. While similarities between security and heritage can be detected in the above literature, their potential cross-fertilisation has been explicitly addressed in the work of anthropologist John Collins, which was inspirational for my own work in Banaras. Looking at everyday policing in Pelourinho, the UNESCO-branded centre of Salvador de Bahia, Collins (2014 and 2015) illustrates how policing shapes supposedly homogeneous urban spaces. In particular, the author suggests that policing is part of the state’s toolkit for producing heritage, inasmuch as it participates actively in the cultural showcasing of the everyday life of selected residents for a tourist audience. Collins’work does not explicitly frame policing and heritage-making as future-oriented processes, but implicitly suggests that aspirations for, and anticipation of, future in Pelourinho are enabled through them. My own ethnography in Banaras provides a solid base to advance this argument explicitly. By connecting the dots in the above literature, this article frames security and heritage in Banaras as processes that assemble and are composed of, imaginaries, registers and materials, and play crucial roles in aspiration, anticipation and future-making. Far from being restricted to institutional domains and manifesting as solely top-down processes, heritagisation and securitisation are seen to create aesthetic consensus and define belonging to the future. They involve a variety of actors who often mobilise contrasting imaginaries and visions of security and heritage. It remains to be seen, however, whether and how these similar urban processes become interwoven and work conjointly to make futures. I now turn to my field site to ground the hypothesis of heritage and security as cross-fertilising urban processes that make futures. Lazzaretti 5 Banaras and Hindu nationalist aspirations for it Banaras is often portrayed in popular narratives as ‘sitting outside of mortal time, and as a seemingly unique urban site with a particular (“Hindu”) religious character’(Dodson, 2012: 1). This powerful imaginary has been produced over time, but crystallised through the actions of a variety of regional patrons and the colonial administration during the 18th and 19th centuries (Dalmia, 1997;Desai, 2017;Dodson, 2012;Freitag, 1989;Gaenszle and Gengnagel, 2006). Urban imaginaries continue to evolve, however, and be productive in the contemporary moment: the above idea of Banaras—particularly its symbolic capital as a ‘Hindu city’—appears to be central to its choice as the constituency from which the BJP 6 and its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, campaigned during the 2014 national election. 7 At that time, Modi’s controversial public image as a Chief Minister of Gujarat and ‘Emperor of Hindu Hearts’, was morphing into a more appealing image as a self-made vikas purush, or development man, able to guide the world’s largest democracy out of the ‘bad days’of previous governance and make India a global power and a world-class destination (Jaffrelot, 2021;Kaur, 2015). Banaras, then, afforded Modi ‘a symbolic religious and urban backdrop that would appeal to his Hindu-right supporters—committed to realising India as a Hindu rashtra (nation)’while at the same time he campaigned more on economic issues (Williams, 2021: 160). BJP electoral slogans included ‘acche din anevale hain’(good days are about to come), and ‘sabka sath, sabka vikas’, (with everybody’s effort, development for all). After Modi’s electoral victory in 2014, the emphasis on development and promises of a prosperous future began to affect Banaras and its imaginary. The city became the recipient of numerous government initiatives, including the widening of roads and improvement of railway junctions, renewal of the electricity supply system and ‘beautification’of religious infrastructures, as well as projects for the ‘rejuvenation’of water bodies and sanitation of the ghats (the area along the riverfront) and the river. The city’s‘face-lift’ accelerated with its inclusion in the second phase of the Smart City Mission in 2016. 8 This scheme rethinks the city’s future in accordance with six principles, in which heritage and security feature prominently. 9 The smart city concept is often mobilised to project India’s urban future as one that materialises in tandem with foreign investors and corporates and expresses itself through new digital technologies (Datta, 2015), but imaginaries of the smart city acquired a very specificflavour in Banaras. The future of the ‘timeless city’is in fact reimagined as a mixture of allegedly ancient traditions and futuristic infrastructures and technologies, as exemplified by advertising slogans for projects of Banaras’vikas yatra that play with the tradition/modernity binary—a binary that apparently is dissolved through Banaras’projection as a ‘smart heritage city’(Williams, 2021). 10 Registers and materials of heritage evidently play a crucial role in projecting Banaras in a Hindu majoritarian future: as in the case of the KVDC, and in line with a long history of patronage and resignification, the city’s historic fabric continues to be the canvas on which the urban visions of politicians, as well as administrative and cultural elites, are inscribed (Desai, 2017;Freitag, 1989,2006). Alongside references to heritage, commentators and scholars have observed that the BJP government built its national appeal crucially through references to security, 6Ethnography 0(0) particularly during the national electoral campaign in 2019. 11 In Banaras, though, registers of security were mobilised well before it became Modi’s constituency. These are often interwoven with the reality of a heterogenous population: despite being often described as a ‘Hindu city’, about 30% of population is Muslim and since colonial times these kinds of cities and particularly their religious festivals and multi-religious places of worship have been governed as potential threats to public order and security (Pai and Kumar, 2018;Varshney, 2002). Apart from a few instances of communal riots in the 19th and 20th century (Raman, 2010), though, Banaras has not experienced the extent of interreligious violence seen elsewhere in India. Due to a long and well documented history of productive inter-religious collaborations in the once thriving but now declining textile sector (Kumar, 1987;Raman, 2010), the city is often described in scholarly accounts, media and by Banarsis themselves, as an example of Hindu–Muslim brotherhood and a virtuous exception in a region prone to inter-religious violence. This very narrative has been shown to assist the reproduction of a ‘everyday peace’(Williams, 2015) that, however, rests on the inherent inequality between Hindu majority and Muslim minority (Ibid and Cf. Lazzaretti, 2021a). Frictions at inter-religious sites, threats posed by international terrorism 12 and the movement of pilgrims and tourists particularly in the reputedly ‘labyrinthine’neighbourhoods of the old city, though, remain topics often treated as likely security issues both in the local press (Lazzaretti, 2020) and in everyday talk, as shown below. The Smart City principle of a surakshit city seems itself to nurture the idea of Banaras as potentially dangerous and endangered. The recent increased surveillance of public and religious places and the creation of a Smart City control room (Trinetra Bhavan 13 ), seem to add to this and promote security as both a future horizon and a means to it. Let us now zoom again into the neighbourhood around the Kashi Vishvanath temple and the Gyanvapi mosque to investigate how the above imaginaries of security and heritage play out in, and intersect with, the fabric of the city. Ethnographic explorations of security and heritage at the heart of Banaras In this section, I explore registers and materials of security and heritage as they unfold around the temple-mosque compound and are co-opted by various actors over several decades. Security as, and in the making of, urban future The neighbourhood under investigation has long been seen as in need of security: police were deployed there at specific festivals in colonial times and in the first decades after independence. 14 The massive deployment of security forces that we see recently, however, began with the intensification of ‘liberation’campaigns in the early 1990s and aimed to protect the mosque from attacks by Hindu nationalist militants and, more generally, discourage inter-religious frictions. It should be remembered that in 1990, the Ramjanmabhumi movement that eventually led to the destruction of the Babri mosque by Lazzaretti 7 mobs of Hindutva activists in December 1992, is at its acme. As well, the protection of places of worship was increasingly a national concern, and discussions in parliament eventually led to the 1991 Places of Worship (Special Provision) Act. 15 In subsequent decades, though, a progressive expansion of security to the whole compound and neighbourhood occurred, both materially and discursively. Along with the mushrooming of barricades, watch towers, checkpoints, barriers and bodies in the uniforms of state and national security forces, so too the terminology used in the local press shifted when referring to the securitised area. An analysis of local Hindi newspapers (Lazzaretti, 2020), shows that in 1990, the Gyanvapi mosque is the main object of protection, while later reports mention more often the compound or even the whole neighbourhood. My ethnography below, then, helps pin down a perhaps unexpected turn in the progressive expansion of security; this occurs over the course of three decades, when what the Copenhagen School of Security Studies would have called the ‘object of securitisation’(Buzan, de Wilde and Wæaver, 1998) began shifting from the Gyanvapi mosque to the Kashi Vishvanath temple. This shift, I show below, is now fully accomplished with the KVDC. Let us look more closely at the role of security measures and policing in this shift. While both state and national security forces are involved in the supervision of the templemosque compound, I draw principally on observations of, and casual interactions with, low ranking UP police. As a white woman researching in a sensitive, volatile and potentially dangerous area, and in an increasingly authoritarian setting, I have carefully to navigate the field, adjust methodological strategies and re-interpret research ethics. Open and repeated discussions with the elite, more highly trained security forces, 16 or full disclosure of the scope of my research are not viable options, as is the case with much ethnographic work in similar settings (De Goede et al., 2019;S¨ okefeld and Strasser, 2016). Random and short interactions with low ranking UP police, who are often available for a chat with visitors, and happen to be particularly curious and eager to meet foreigners (especially if they speak Hindi), however, provide crucial insights about on-the-ground work of security measures and policing. This is because UP police are the public face of security: they control almost all the publicly accessible areas at the temple-mosque compound, interact often with local people and pilgrims alike, and have become part of everyday life in the neighbourhood. When my other interlocutors, such as residents and shopkeepers, refer to police in the area, it is the UP police they have in mind, unless they explicitly mention the elite forces. But how exactly does one encounter police there, what does this public face of security look like and what do their attitudes tell us? Every day a heterogeneous, gesticulating and rather lost-looking crowd of Hindu pilgrims proceeds slowly around the temple-mosque compound while they are constantly offered flowers, milk and sweets to donate to the deity Vishvanath. Shopkeepers, pilgrim guides and residents direct them, shouting in their faces and they are pressed to leave their belongings and shoes at any shop they encounter. If they are already without belongings and hold offerings in their hands, they will be pointed towards one of the gates to the temple. Groups of UP police sit on benches outside the checkpoints, or at other specific posts; a few busy themselves searching pilgrims, while others stare at the crowd. Others chat over cups of chay at small local shops, or have their chay placed in their hands by street vendors. They 8Ethnography 0(0) carry batons, and rifles. Almost all police officers are visibly Hindu: they might have red and yellow threads tied on their wrists or the fresh ash and vermillion on their foreheads that indicates that they have worshiped at the temple. Like temple-goers, many police have bare feet, completing their ambiguity: these UP police are ‘the edge where state and society meet’ (Jauregui, 2016: 22) but they are also ordinary devotees of Shiva. Police too participate in the above-described pilgrim (dis)orienting exercise—they issue instructions to the crowd about how to proceed, where to buy temple-offerings, where to leave shoes and belongings and how to behave. They often push and shove. They serve and enhance the temple and do so not only through their words but also through their bodies and the security infrastructure. Consider, for instance, a police booth positioned until a few of years ago on the main road, next to one of the checkpoints for the compound. Before redevelopment for the KVDC, that police booth carried a sign that welcomed people to ‘Kashi, the holy city of Kashi Vishvanath temple’and a UP Tourism Department information board about the temple. Although just a few meters from the only checkpoint through which Muslims could access the Gyanvapi mosque, the signs bore no trace of its existence. Like the signs, conversations with constables and sub-inspectors omitted the mosque: when asked about the reason for their presence, my interlocutors almost exclusively referred to the security of the temple. The temple alone was presented as the main attraction and a possible target of attacks, particularly by, as one put it, ‘Islamic terrorism’. When asked directly about the security of the mosque, some of the police I talked to over the years acknowledged the proximity of temple and mosque as a security issue but only very few explicitly mentioned the agitation for, and demolition of, the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. The changing fabric of the bazaar that used to exist around the temple-mosque compound corroborates police understandings of the area as focussed on Kashi Vishvanath. Over the last decade, shops that used to sell daily needs or local artefacts— particularly cosmetics, trinkets and wooden toys—were transformed into shops that just provide temple offerings and lockers for pilgrims’valuables. By 2016, a couple of years before the KVDC forced them out, many shopkeepers that I met regularly were complaining that business in the bazaar had decreased. They saw checkpoints and the constantly changing restrictions of access as the main cause of this drop off, and as some began to give up family commercial traditions to turn their shops into temple-focused businesses, the area lost more of its local clientele. Locals, my interlocutors used to say, would not come any more for shopping because they do not find what they want; plus the crowd, traffic and difficulties in moving freely make them impatient. Even Karim, a Muslim interlocutor whose family has for generations run a shop on the main road selling household merchandise, has now turned to lockers and offerings. He began reluctantly by placing a small set of lockers at the entrance to his shop, while continuing his main business. Mosque frequenters who wanted to access Gyanvapi for the Friday congregational prayer, made use of that first set of lockers but in a couple of years and after the inner bazaar was demolished to make way for the KVDC, I find Karim’s shop catering almost exclusively to the Hindu crowd in October 2022. When talking about the transition, Karim mentions the increasing need to obscure his Muslim identity by not displaying the visible signs that he used to exhibit with pride when we first met in 2014. ‘We have no choice’, he explains. Lazzaretti 9 accessed 24 February 2023], and speeches of the PM during functions at the KVDC add and in other visits (Williams, 2021). 8. https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/modis-constituency-varanasi-gets-smartcity-tag/article9128737.ece, [last accessed 10 March 2023]. 9. The six principles are illustrated in the ‘Varanasi Municipal Corporation Corporation’s proposal for the Indian Smart Cities Challenge Phase-II’and are: Suramya Kashi (picturesque); Samunnat Kashi (progressive); Surakshit Kashi (secure); Sanyojit Kashi (organized); Nirmal Kashi (pure) and Ekikrit Kashi (unified)’,[https://smartnet.niua.org/sites/default/files/ webform/FinalSCPVaransi.pdf]. 10. Some of the slogans on the central banner of the PM’s website are, for instance, ‘Modern infrastructure for the timeless city’;‘Kashi witnesses an incessant flow of vikas Ganga’;‘From Kashi, Ganga turns northwards. Now, so will Kashi’s development’; and ‘Global spotlights shines above Varanasi’,https://www.narendramodi.in/kashi-vikas-yatra, [last accessed 10 March 2023]. 11. Arguably, Modi and the BJP have ‘owned’the issue of national security, through strongman rhetoric and controversial policies on Pakistan, Kashmir, terrorism and so-called anti-nationals. For an overview of some of these policies see https://thewire.in/politics/modi-bjp-nationalsecurity, [last accessed 10 March 2023] and Jaffrelot (2021). 12. Relatively minor bomb blasts occurred in 2006 and 2010 at key religious sites; see: ‘India on alert as bomb hits Hindu holy city’,The New York Times, 7 December 2010, https://www. nytimes.com/2010/12/08/world/asia/08bomb.html, [last accessed 11 December 2019]. 13. Interestingly, trinetra in Sanskrit means ‘three-eyed’and is a feature of Hindu deities. 14. The suit Din Mohammad and Others vs. the Secretary of State for India Council through the District Magistrate and Collector Benares, CWP no. 62 of 1936 in the Court of Additional Civil Judge of Benares, and appeal no. 466 of 1937 in the High Court of Judicature at Allahabad, reconstructs several layers of frictions in the area and depicts police as one of the actors of the everyday life of the compound (see Lazzaretti, 2023). 15. This prohibits the conversion of any place of worship of any religion into a place of worship of a different religion and seeks to maintain the status quo at the time of Independence (15 August 1947). 16. These are the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) and are on regular duty only at the mosque and in its immediate proximity. They are more widely deployed only at specific festive times or during visits by politicians and VIPs. 17. The video is available at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/ watch-pm-modis-dream-project-kashi-vishwanath-corridor-plan/videoshow/68381158.cms, [last accessed 9 March 2023]. 18. See https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/varanasi/varanasi-kashi-vishwanath-dham-beginssecurity-upgrade-ahead-of-pm-modis-visit/articleshow/87892736.cms, [last accessed 10 March 2023]. 19. Apparently by the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), a government consultancy organisation. See https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/govt-deputes-cisf-to-providesecurity-consultancy-for-kashi-vishwanath-temple-complex/articleshow/94132154.cms, [last accessed 10 March 2021]. 16 Ethnography 0(0) 20. The website is at culturalheritageofvaranasi.com.Itis‘An initiative of Government of India towards safeguarding the cultural heritage’and carries the logos of the National Museum Institute and the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. 21. https://culturalheritageofvaranasi.com/temples-of-kashi-vishwanath-corridor/, [last accessed etc]. 22. A translation of the speech is available at: https://www.narendramodi.in/text-of-pm-s-speechat-kashi-vishwanath-temple-in-varanasi-uttar-pradesh–544171, [last accessed 21 March 2023]. 23. A detailed analysis of discussions in the local press at that time is given in Lazzaretti (2021b). 24. The family has been fighting in the courts to reclaim their role since in 1983 the UP government, through the Uttar Pradesh Shri Kashi Vishvanath Temple Act, created a government trust to manage the temple: https://updharmarthkarya.in/booking/pdf/1983UP29.pdf, [last accessed 9 March 2023]. 25. I detail these previous uses of heritage in Lazzaretti (2021b). 26. See for instance https://www.livehindustan.com/uttar-pradesh/varanasi/story-vishwanathtemple-corridor-houses-will-be-drone-survey-1793050.html, [last accessed 5 March 2023]; and ‘Drone survey to protect the existence of the temple’,Sanmarg [paper edition], 18 February 2018, p. 3. 27. For an overview of the legal history of Gyanvapi see Lazzaretti (2023). References Appadurai A (1990) Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. In: Featherstone M (ed) Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. London: Sage. Appadurai A (2004) The capacity to aspire: culture and the terms of recognition. 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DOI: 10.1080/13527258. 2014.973060. 20 Ethnography 0(0) Author Biography Vera Lazzaretti is Researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA-ISCTE) in Lisbon, currently working on inter-religious relationships and the politics of heritage and security in urban South Asia. Vera studied Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology in Italy and holds a Ph.D. in Indian and Tibetan Studies from the University of Turin (2013). Before joining CRIA, she worked at the University of Milan, the University of Oslo and the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University. Vera’s main field site is urban north India, and her research interests include the anthropology of space and place; religion and politics; contested heritage; securitisation and policing; inter-religious violence; religious offence; pilgrimage; religious nationalism; and ethnography. Lazzaretti 21