Abstract
The book is thematically divided into four sections and has 14 articles. The first section is titled ‘Sacred Topography’. The first three articles seem to fall within the Orientalist framework as they tend to reify Banaras’ image as a cosmic city, that is, part of an ‘imagined landscape’ in which mythology and topography are intrinsically linked.
The fourth article by Sunthar Visuvalingam and Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam looks at the worship by lower caste Hindus of a sacred stone pillar called Lat Bhairo dedicated to Shiva. The site is also sacred to Muslims and linked to the myth of Ghazi Miya. In 1809, the Lat Bhairo, worshipped by both lower caste Hindus and Muslims, was the site of a communal clash which resulted in the felling of the pillar by the Muslim protestors. However, in 1811, in a revolt against the house tax introduced by the British, the Hindu and Muslim communities agitated together, in spite of the simmering tension between the two communities.
The authors analyse in detail the various religious rites, beliefs and historical details related to both Lat Bhairo and Ghazi Miya, such as the marriage of Lat Bhairo, its intimate link to the Kala Bhairavi temple located in the heart of Banaras, the marriage of Ghazi Miya and its relation to the Muharrum festival. They reason that rather than focus on the differing strategies adopted by the two groups for dealing with violence (the Islamic strategy of exteriorising violence [jihad] onto those outside the larger universal community [umma] and the Hindu approach of circumscribing it internally through the transposed mechanism of the sacrifice), one needs to focus on the common symbolic core shared by both Hinduism and Islam. This should be seen through issues such as death and sexual union as revealed in the syncretic cults mentioned above. This would help in formulating codes for domesticating violence, something unavailable within the secular ideologies of today.
One tends to disagree with the authors because Indian modernity has come a long way since its introduction during colonial times, and the civic space available through ideas about citizens and citizenship rights is very crucial in dealing with communal violence.
The second section is titled ‘Maps’ and has three articles of which I would like to discuss Sumathi Ramaswamy’s article which deals with the construction of a temple called ‘Bharat Mata Mandir’ dedicated to ‘Akhand Bharat’, that is, undivided India, a geographical notion found in ancient Sanskrit texts. In this temple, there are no imageries of gods and goddesses but a relief map of India made out of marble. She points out that what makes the act of enshrinement intriguing is that the map functions both as an iconic subject (map reflecting the geographical territory of the nation) as well as an iconic artifact (it replaces Mother India’s familiar anthropomorphic presence with a disembodied cartographic form) in this temple.
However, this attempt remained unsuccessful and today, the Bharat Mata Mandir wears an air of dismal abandon. This failure was due to the conscious refusal on the part of the patron to deploy a somaticised concept of India as a goddess and as a mother named Bharat Mata. The non-deployment of a somaticised image was part of an attempt to forge a secular nationalism based on a spirit of inclusiveness. The failure is also symptomatic of India’s tortured modernity where older practices of reverence were rendered increasingly problematic, even an embarrassment, but the new ones which were to replace the ancient ways proved to be inadequate.
The third section termed ‘Images’ has three articles. Gutschow’s article is filled with rich historical details on how the very idea of painting the panoramic views of Banaras (with its ghats, palaces, temples and mosques) from across the Ganga, got introduced from 1786 onwards. What is missing is a critical evaluation of these panoramic paintings, similar to the task undertaken by Swati Chattopadhyay in her book Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2006). Rather than granting the paintings what she calls an ‘imperial innocence’ (p. 22), Chattopadhyay attempts to understand the ways in which colonial authority assumed the power of narration. And further, how space had to be invented both intellectually and materially, thereby transforming the land into ‘landscape’ (p. 24).
Unlike some of the articles which focus on the sacred topography of Banaras based on textual interpretations, Sandra Freitag, while comparing Banaras with Jaipur and Lucknow, treats them as historically contingent spaces shaped by the ‘active’ production of perceived purposes and products relevant to particular times and contexts. These proposals and products become visualisations of these cities and are then consumed and sustained by the residents of the city. Freitag points out that we should recognise that the Banaras we are familiar with was possible entirely through the efforts of the Maratha kings who in the 18th century constructed dharmashalas, temples and also palaces for themselves. A deliberate attempt was made to shift the historical association with Shiva to a new identification with Ram through the Ram Lila festival and this was possible because of the consolidation of power among three powerful elite caste groups—the Bhumihar dynasty, the merchant bankers and the Gosain traders.
The final section is titled ‘Social Practice and Everyday Life’ and has four articles. Nita Kumar’s article promises much but ends up disappointing the reader and is rather elitist in its tenor given her obsession with garbage, which she even uses as a marker for differentiating between a provincial town like Banaras and a metropolitan city. She aims to comprehend the space of the child at the level of the home, school and neighbourhood respectively so as to bring out the politics of age domination at all three levels. Sadly, all that we get is Nita Kumar’s empathetic rendition of the life world of a few children (one is not sure if the children’s interpretations would have matched hers) and her own nostalgic reflections about her childhood in Lucknow interspersed with comments on garbage dumped at various street corners. Her obsession with garbage is rather intriguing, as after her work The Artisans of Banaras was critiqued in 1992 by Dipesh Chakravarthy in his article, ‘Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze’, one expected some rethinking. This does not seem to have happened.
In the concluding article, ‘Visions of a New Banaras in the Early Twentieth Century’, Vasudha Dalmia handles with a lot of sensitivity the famous Hindi novelist Prem Chand’s novel Sevasadan (House of Service). The novel is woven around the lives of courtesans in early 20th century Banaras and in a very nuanced and insightful fashion, discusses issues such as patriarchy, hypocrisy in the institution of marriage (the main protagonist describing it as a commercial transaction which imprisons a woman to cheerless domestic servitude) and the emergence of social reformers from among the emerging professional class. When the issue of evicting the courtesans from the central squares to the margins of the city gets taken up in the Municipal Board, the novel shows how communities got constructed and ‘social reform’ became a public face hiding commercial and political agendas.
Overall, the book Visualizing Space in Banaras is an important addition to the already available works on Banaras city. However, it leaves one longing for more articles on contemporary Banaras and the everyday lives of communities. Somehow, the obsession of certain Western scholars with Hindu cosmology and its spatial representation leads to the reaffirmation of the already entrenched image of Banaras as a primordial, sacred Hindu city.