In this lecture I unpack some of the the (ill)logics of heritage in Hindu nationalist India by questioning the ways in which global heritage emancipatory concepts and processes, normally associated with struggles for social justice, mutate and are refashioned on the ground in diverse geographical and political contexts. I look 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). I am particularly concerned with Annapurna’s afterlife as a statuette-turned-deity, and use this lens to track how this and other repatriation cases merge into, resurface and refashion assertive campaigns for ‘reclaiming’ Indian (more often Hindu) heritage. I will argue that in authoritarian contexts, heritage emancipatory vocabularies and processes may turn against themselves, thus illuminating novel folds of the nexus between heritage and violence.

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