Until now, heritage and security have mostly been studied separately, coming together mainly in research on conflict or post-war recovery. Less attention has been paid to how they shape everyday urban life and the future of cities.
In this talk, Vera Lazzaretti presents a book project in progress that addresses this gap, based on longitudinal ethnographic research in Banaras (Varanasi), India. The book follows the conversion of a densely inhabited neighbourhood into the Kashi Vishvanath Dham and Corridor, a major Hindu pilgrimage complex that has reshaped the city’s social, material and political fabric. It shows how heritage and security work together in futuring the ‘timeless’ city, foregrounding what Lazzaretti calls majoritarian urbanism.
Drawing on the last chapter, the talk focuses on mukti (liberation), a concept traditionally linked to death and spiritual release in Banaras’s Hindu religious landscape and imaginaries. It shows how this concept is currently being reinterpreted in political discourse, urban redevelopment and everyday life. Lazzaretti argues that mukti has become a key idiom within a grammar of majoritarian urbanism in which demolition, displacement and the destabilisation of minority belonging in urban space are rendered intelligible as liberation.
Vera Lazzaretti is a senior researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) in Lisbon, currently working on the politics of heritage and security in urban South Asia and southern Europe.