The afterlives of repatriation: heritage, emancipation and violence in Hindu nationalist India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".