The chapter draws on interviews, carried out in 2017 and 2019, as well as on government and city-level documents, political speeches and media material. The questions raised by Williams concern the politics of religion and utopian urbanism and the implications for imagining future urban citizens in a city that has acquired a special status within Indian national politics in the early 21st century. Since his election as prime minister in 2014, Narendra Modi has increasingly mobilised Varanasi (the constituency from where he contested the elections) as an urban stage for asserting a modern, Hinduised version of the city. Varanasi as an ancient site of Hindu orthodoxy is the point of departure for a movement aiming at a utopian vision of a future “heritage smart city.” Williams argues that through the prosaic language of India’s smart-city policy, a vision of a new India is projected that is tied to a Hinduised imagination of the nation.