“Kedarnath is everything for us” – Local Belongings to a National Heritage Site

Abstract

In 2013, Kedarnath, a place of pilgrimage in the Central Himalayas, was ravaged by a natural disaster after days of unusually heavy rain. A flood of mud and debris washed around the temple, destroying the site and sweeping thousands of people to their deaths along the entire river valley. Since then, the Kedarnath site has been rebuilt and newly constructed, under the personal supervision of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It became one of the places that are undergoing a new monumentalization and valorization under the Hindu Nationalist Government and the region is increasingly being promoted as Dev Bhumi, the land of the gods for religious Tourism. Kedarnath has always been a contested site where different interest groups have fought for interpretative sovereignty and to utilise it politically and economically for their own ends. Its popularisation in recent years has led to over-tourism in this ecologically highly sensitive mountain region and intensified the battles between the government and local groups. For political and economic reasons, attempts are being made to stabilise an ecologically fragile place and to establish a one-sided narrative that glorifies a Hindu region, which in local narratives is a much more diverse memoryscape. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper aims to address the question: How the appropriation of the Kedarnath site and its marketing alter the attachments of the local people of the Kedar Valley to the site?