Consecration by Clearance: Heritage Governance and Its Suspension in the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor:

The Shri Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, inaugurated in December 2021, has improved pilgrim access and safety, restored visibility to shrines long submerged within the old city’s fabric, and become one of India’s most visited religious sites. This paper does not dispute that the Corridor achieves its stated aims; it asks instead what a retrospective analysis reveals about how it was achieved, and what a future intervention would need to do differently to secure the same gains at lower cost. The paper argues that the Corridor’s success and its cost share a single cause: statutory recognition was extended to individually significant elements, above all the shrines, while withheld from the inhabited quarter that had given those elements their meaning. This is reconstructed through the statutory instruments in play: the Ancient Monuments Act’s inapplicability to inhabited fabric, the 1983 Temple Act vesting exclusive authority in the shrine alone, and the 2018 Special Area Development Board Act extending that authority into the neighbourhood as a power of acquisition. The paper develops a Religious-Academic-Lived framework as a way of seeing a sacred precinct, grounded in fieldwork across fifty Varanasi sites in 2024, to recover a vocabulary for looking forward at the next such project.