ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Exploring Identity Constructs and Nation-building Narratives at the Hampi World Heritage Site KRUPA RAJANGAM Krupa Rajangam (
[email protected]) is with the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru and Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal. Vol. 56, Issue No. 16, 17 Apr, 2021 The author would like to thank all the respondents and participants she interacted with for making her research possible. Specifically, she would like to thank Bishnu Mohapatra for a fruitful discussion on politics, the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage for a partial fieldwork grant, and the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) for their doctoral fellowship. An early version of this essay titled “Shifting meanings, mutable materiality: material culture in nation building narratives at Hampi World Heritage Site” was presented at the NIAS National Conference titled “Nation, Community, and Citizenship in Contemporary India,” which was held in January 2017 in Bengaluru. While critical scholarship, across disciplines, has analysed the link between heritage and exclusive group identity, how is this pairing constructed in the everyday, as an ongoing process? I address the link between heritage and exclusive group identity in this photo essay, which is based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, and visual and archival research in Hampi, Karnataka. Hampi is recognised as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). I observed that various identity constructs connected to the site’s heritage imagination, comfortably straddled “scale,” whether big or small, regional or national. For instance, in the colonial period, the ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 site was “nationally” constructed as an absolute Hindu empire, while in the nationalist period, it was constructed at a “subnational” level as representing Kannada nadu.