‘If Baba calls you, no one can stop you’: affective storytelling and the resacralization of heritage in Golconda Fort

Golconda Fort is a state-protected monument of national importance and a major tourist site in the south Indian city of Hyderabad. Its complex sacred geography includes an active Hindu temple alongside ‘dead’ (inactive) mosques and a secluded Sufi shrine (dargah), highlighting postcolonial India's contested heritage management. This article examines how unofficial Muslim guides, whom we term ‘storytellers’ navigate this landscape. We argue that their practice constitutes ‘affective storytelling’ which develops an intimacy between the site, visitor, and the medieval past. This process, what we call a sitational historiography, moves the storytelling from the public narrative (kahani) to privately shared sacred stories, or ‘the stories of the heart’ (dil ki kahani), enabling the guides to facilitate ritual access to the restricted dargah. In doing so, affective storytelling generates a resacralization of the heritage site, which emerges as a potent form of negotiation with the state’s secularizing archival authority and heritage management.