ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Cultural World Heritage Site of Hampi in Karnataka, India, a popular and well known national and international tourism destination. Using ethnographic research at Jathre (the Hampi temple’s chariot festival) and Utsav (a government sponsored cultural festival) it seeks to understand both the ‘authorised’ narrative of the site, as a ‘group of monuments at Hampi’, and its ground realities, as a place with overlapping layers of archaeological park, cultural landscape, embodied space and living heritage. It reflects on the limited official understanding of the actual usage of the site and its meaning to visitors, noting that the construction of heritage by local government serves certain vested interests within electoral, identity and cultural politics.
