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Paper short abstract

We examine how Hindu pilgrimage sites in Uttarakhand are mobilised as heritage within nationalist politics to construct exclusionary belonging, while infrastructure projects marginalise local communities and sacred relationships, revealing heritage as both a resource for exclusion and resistance.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Hindu pilgrimage sites associated with the Char Dham Yatra are mobilised as heritage resources within Hindu nationalist identity politics to construct exclusionary visions of national belonging in Uttarakhand, North India, while simultaneously serving as focal points for large-scale infrastructure projects that disregard local populations and ecological systems. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the research explores how heritage and infrastructure operate as entangled processes that materialize insider/outsider divisions—marginalising local communities, non-human actors, and divine beings, understood here not metaphorically but as locally acknowledged agents embedded in situated religious ontologies, in favour of tourist and pilgrim flows aligned with state and elite development agendas.

Our project conceptualises heritage as a resource complex embedded within power relations that shape both symbolic mobilisation and material transformation. It reveals how the Hindutva movement appropriates pilgrimage sites for exclusionary nationalist narratives, coinciding with infrastructure policies that local residents have come to describe as forms of profound disrespect toward local knowledge, spiritual relationships with the landscape, and the needs of mountain dwellers.

By examining the entanglement of heritage politics and infrastructural intervention, this research demonstrates how polarisation manifests not only in competing narratives but also in material transformations that generate experiences of marginalisation and loss. At the same time, it examines everyday practices of resistance—grounded in care for land, people, and sacred relationships—that contest these dual processes, revealing heritage as simultaneously a vehicle for exclusion and a resource for resilience.