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The pilgrimage city of Banaras is an impressively unique and particularly ancient historical place. It is a place of transition, a city of both death and the regeneration of life, a place on the threshold to the beyond.
This volume deals with the multiple ways this urban site is visualized, imagined, and culturally represented by different actors, groups, especially the visual media. Systematically divided into four parts, the first deals with aspects of the sacred topography. Inhabited as well as structured by divine forces, it focuses on the built environment—icons, temples, wells, and graves—their interrelationship, and role in historically changing ritual practice. The second section discusses the representation of this sacred topography in maps, a continuation of traditional techniques, which brings out the features seen as most significant. The third section on pictures and images, moves toward a form of representation largely Western colonial tradition—frontal views, veduta, panoramas, and postcard photography. The last section covers various representations of everyday space, scarcely articulated but nevertheless fundamental imaginings of the lived world, usually less noted.
The book studies the cultural construction of Banaras as a space which epitomizes the objectification of experience in cultural artefacts and practices. The essays weaved together by a well-written Introduction, discusses imaginative constructions, highly varied, multivocal, and contradictory, marked by tension and sometimes conflict, constitutes its continuing appeal and sacredness.
ISBN - 9780195695700
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