The afterlives of repatriation: heritage, emancipation and violence in Hindu nationalist India

In 2021, a statuette of Hindu goddess Annapurna was taken from a Canadian museum to India as an arguably restorative, if not emancipatory, and decolonial achievement for a postcolonial nation. The statuette was enshrined at the Kashi Vishvanath temple in Banaras (Varanasi), a few metres from the Gyanvapi mosque – a longstanding target of Hindu nationalist campaigns for the mukti (liberation or emancipation) of supposedly originally Hindu sites. This article brings together Annapurna and the Gyanvapi mosque as two sides of the same story about heritage, emancipation and violence in Hindu nationalist India, and proposes an alternative methodological approach to the under-explored afterlives of repatriation. By combining longitudinal ethnographic research in the neighbourhood where Annapurna was enshrined with analysis of media and legal discourses, it teases out under-explored understandings that returned objects and repatriation itself afford in their post-repatriation locality – both in local responses and broader discussions around heritage restitution. I argue that repatriation cases such as that of Annapurna feed into a Hindu nationalist discursive ecology in which notions of emancipation, decolonisation and restitution are mobilised for majoritarian agendas: as exemplified by controversies around the Gyanvapi mosque, these notions increasingly underpin violent claims against minorities and their heritage.