Barbarians in India. Tourism as moral contamination

This anthropological study demonstrates how the interplay between international tourism and religious nationalism may be used by postcolonial elites against host communities. An anti-colonial, Occidentalist discourse of tourism as moral contamination has been employed by Hindu religious leaders to encourage and legitimise “spatial cleansing” of the Indian village of Hampi, which is both a UNESCO site and a Hindu holy land. Discursive condemnation of tourism as an invasion of barbarians destroying local culture has not actually targeted the tourists - as outsiders who are beyond the local Hindu frame of reference - but rather tourism service providers. A sedentarist perspective, associating displacement with cultural loss and commercial activity with capitalist immorality, has been employed in this process of Othering.