Rethinking the tourist gaze through the Hindu eyes: The Ganga Aarti celebration in Varanasi,India

Introduction

This article examines alternative ways of thinking about gaze in tourism. In particular, drawing on research conducted in the tourist sacred city of Varanasi, in Northern India, the article explores the interplay between Western and Hindu traditions and practices of gaze enacted at a popular tourist and religious venue, that is the Ganga Aarti ceremony taking place daily on the city’s riverbank. Varanasi, the Hindu pilgrimage city on the banks of the Ganges, attracts millions of Western tourists every year. The city is famous for its riverfront and the ghats, the flights of steps leading down to the river, where Hindus perform their holy rituals and day-to-day activities, and where the tourist gaze is predominantly directed.

Debate about the gaze has been central to academic enquiry on tourism, particularly since the groundbreaking work of John Urry (1990). This research has extensively investigated the ways in which sight and the visual constitute and shape the tourist experience. More recently, theories about the tourist gaze have been rethought to include ideas of practice, performance and the sensual, increasingly reframing the tourist gaze as an ‘embodied gaze’ (Crang, 1997, 1999; Crang and Franklin, 2001; Edensor, 2006; Obrador-Pons, 2003; Urry and Larsen, 2012). However, while a large body of literature has been produced on the tourist gaze, this remains largely ‘West-centred’, both in terms of its theoretical underpinnings and its empirical foci. In fact, the ways in which sight is constructed (and deconstructed), or the conceptual apparatus that we employ in order to make sense of visual practice, are culture specific: different words, metaphors and concepts may be used in different contexts to articulate those very ideas.

Following from these theoretical premises, this article contributes to the debate about gaze by bringing into focus the specific visual practices and discourses mobilized and negotiated in a symbolic, non-Western tourist site. Indeed, I shall show how the Ganga Aarti brings together different gazes and spatial practices and complicates clear-cut, binary divisions between ‘host’ and ‘tourist’ gaze.

From a theoretical point of view, the article draws on cultural geography to frame the discussion on the gaze and to suggest that visual practices cannot be disentangled from the actual contexts in which they happen. While such a theoretical approach still remains grounded within the Western academic realm, my discussion of the empirical case will shed some light upon alternative ways of constructing and performing the gaze informed by non-Western – in this specific case – Hindu visual traditions.

The case study draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Varanasi in 2009 and 2010, which involved participant observation, face-to-face interviews, questionnaires and the collection of audio-visual material. The ethnographic approach informing this article is particularly relevant to the discussion on the gaze in that it allows an acknowledgement of a further perspective about the interplay of visual practices analysed here, that is, the gaze of the researcher. The risk of looking at tourism processes with a sort of disembodied, unpositioned and unquestioned gaze has been highlighted by tourism scholars (Jokinen and Veijola, 2003; Veijola and Jokinen, 1994) and by feminist theorists more generally (Grosz, 1986, 1994; McDowell, 1997; Rose, 1997), and needs to be taken seriously. In fact, in my ethnographic observations, though exercising the academic, analytical, authoritative gaze that as a researcher I was trained to adopt, I was frequently confronted with the (productive) ambiguities brought to light by the situatedness of my gaze. In the field, I was simultaneously researcher and tourist, observer and observed, insider – with regard to the traveller community in Varanasi – and outsider, host – it often occurred that newcomers relied on my familiarity with the city – and guest, and as such, I was seeing and being seen. The different responses and the returning gazes activated by my shifting positionality enhanced my understanding of the play of gazes coinciding around tourism. While I shall not dwell on the researcher gaze in this article, I nonetheless intend to acknowledge it by adopting an ethnographic writing style in the empirical section, which will reveal the situatedness of my analysis by positioning my analytical/narrative gaze down to the stony steps and the lively hustle-bustle of the Ganga Aarti venue in Varanasi: not a supposedly detached ‘god’s-eye view’ (Rose, 1997: 313) perspective, then, but an engaged, situated, grounded stance.

In order to facilitate the comprehension of the selected case study, I am going to briefly introduce the broader context in which this celebration takes place, Varanasi and its ghats (Figure 1) where one is prompted to become familiar with different ideas and practices of vision. My argument is that while the notion of the gaze still constitutes a key tool in researching and theorizing about tourism, we also need to be equipped with the ‘proper words’ in order to be able to understand those particular contexts in which the tourist gaze is enacted. In this article, I suggest that one such word is darshan, a Sanskrit term which can be considered as the Hindu counterpart of the notion of gaze, and represents one of the ways in which the host gaze conceives of itself.

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Figure 1.

Varanasi’s ghats (author’s photo).

The darshan of Varanasi

In mainstream representations – both Western and Indian/Hindu – Varanasi is considered the most sacred city of India because of the auspicious presence of Ganga Mam, Mother Ganges, the ‘heavenly river’ which flows along the Eastern bank of the city and washes away – it is believed – all the sins of present and previous lives. The powerful god Shiva established his eternal abode in Varanasi, thereby bestowing even more sanctity to the city. So auspicious is Varanasi that the Hindus believe that by simply dying here, one attains liberation from the cycle of reincarnations. Cremation rituals performed in the open-air along the ghats are one of the ‘peculiarities’ that most attract the Western tourist gaze. The city indeed seems to confirm Orientalist representations constructing Varanasi as mystical, timeless, picturesque, but also odd, disquieting, deadly (for Orientalist representations of India, see Arnold, 2005; Hutnyk, 1996; King, 1999; Mohanty, 2003; Parry, 1998).

At the same time, the sacred landscape of Varanasi fosters that spiritual connection between the viewer and the divinized view that the Hindus achieve through the performing of the darshan. Literally, the term means ‘seeing’; in its intrinsic spiritual meaning, ‘seeing the sacred’ (Eck, 1998: 3). It is the expression that Hindus normally use when they go to the temple for worship: they say they ‘go for the darshan’ of a particular deity, that is for visually meeting and connecting with that god. More generally, the term signifies ‘auspicious sight’ (Eck, 1998: 104), and it applies to sacred images as well as to places or even persons deemed holy. When pilgrims go to Varanasi, they go for the Ganga darshan, the blessing vision of the sacred Ganges, or for the darshan of Shiva Vishvanatha, that is Varanasi’s patron god worshipped in the homonymous temple in the inner city. The landscape of Varanasi is itself regarded as a ‘divine image’, whose darshan pilgrims come for.

It is the Ganga-blessed riverscape, in particular, that caters for the multiple gazes of diverse travellers and inhabitants, so that the ghats lining the 6.4-km embankment of Varanasi have become the focus where different visual practices are enacted and to which they are directed. Among those ghats, some stand out for their ritual prominence, Dashashvamedha – also simply called ‘the main ghat’ – being the most popular. Here the utmost celebration of vision takes place: the Ganga Aarti, where the darshan of the holy Ganga is celebrated and brought to the stage every evening throughout the year.

Darshan is a key concept in understanding Hindu visual practices and the everyday rituals that constitute what tourists and pilgrims alike recognize as the spiritual landscape of Varanasi. One may argue that while darshan can help frame Hindu ways of seeing and related spatial practices, it is of little relevance to Western, non-Hindu tourists. Yet, this article aims to show that different traditions of vision and cultural practices conflate in major tourist events and sites in the city, and that the hybrid language of the tourist encounter in Varanasi requires us to engage with both the theoretical framework of the gaze and the conceptual complexity of the darshan in order to make sense of that encounter. Indeed, while the spiritual experience accomplished through darshan is central to pilgrimage and religious rituals, the same conceptual framework is also employed to describe the more secular activities of tourism: ‘to have the darshan of a place’ often stands as a cultural translation for ‘sightseeing’, and the ways in which sight is both constructed by the local tourism industry and performed by tourists reflect many of the ideas implied in the notion and practice of darshan. Not only are tourists made aware in many ways of the sacred implications of viewing, they also re-signify the spiritual sight in their own terms, so that darshan often becomes a matter of negotiation in the tourist encounter on the ghats.

Most tourist and pilgrim activities performed in Varanasi are meant to provide a spiritual vision of the city’s landscape, be it the Ganga Aarti or the must-do boat ride along the riverbank to gaze upon the rituals carried out on the ghats. In this article, I shall not delve into a theoretical discussion of the Hindu concept of darshan and its manifold implementation in the discourses, narratives and encounters in and about Varanasi (this is explored in Zara, 2012; also, for analysis of the notion of darshan, see Eck, 1998). Instead, I have chosen to bring the darshan-as-gaze into focus from an empirical perspective, that is to say, by looking at its concrete enactment in the Ganga Aarti ceremony, which I now describe.

The spectacle of the ghats: the Ganga Aarti celebration

Rows of pedal rickshaws out of the expensive hotels of the Cantonment at around 6pm to carry tourists that go to see the Ganga Aarti puja [worship] on the main ghat. This is a tourist attraction and a religious ritual. Hindu people don’t mind being watched by tourists, it’s a way of sharing their culture. Tourists go to the ghats by taxi, but for the Aarti puja they go by pedal rickshaw. (Tourism officer, Varanasi) ¹

At the main ghat, preparations have been going on since the early afternoon: the ghat has to be cleaned up, washed, the liturgical objects organized and the stage set up. Actually, being a daily event, the ceremony takes place in a sort of permanent theatre where the flights of steps and the terraces of the ghat itself function as natural stalls, circle and balconies for the audience, and the stage is formed by stable platforms used for mundane purposes during the day. The entire amphitheatre and the stage overlook the Ganges, which is the true object of reverence in this celebration. The river is used as a privileged location from which to view the ceremony: during the performance, the waterfront is teeming with boats full of tourists and pilgrims watching the ritual from the river, taking pictures and making dip dan, the offering of little candles to the Ganga. The flashes of cameras dotting the dark watery background throughout the celebration and the flickering candles floating downstream bestow a glittering effect upon the already colourful and glowing performance. Package tourists are treated to this event, which adds a touch of glamour to the ‘experience’ and is always included in the tour, even for short stays:

One-night visitors arrive at the airport, are transferred to the hotel, and then in the evening we take them downtown: Aarti ceremony, short boat ride, short rickshaw ride. We have to give them the experience in short. (Indian tour operator officer) ²

As if going to a theatre night out, tourists are collected outside the hotel by their chauffeurs – as the opening quotation suggests – and arrive at the ceremony by pedal rickshaw, the local folkloric version of the taxi. The rickshaw ride is indeed part of the ‘experience’:

… if you want to explore Banaras [other name for Varanasi] you have to add some adventure: the cycle rickshaw, the boat, walking into the old part [of the city] … On the rickshaw they [tourists] feel that they’re moving with the crowd, but they’re away from the crowd. Besides, cars cannot go near the ghat, and we cannot make them walk too much. (Indian tour operator officer)

…they arrive with rickshaw from the big hotels of Cantonment, the rickshaw-walas [rickshaw drivers] are all white dressed. Arrive in main ghat, watch ceremony, like 20 minutes, then they come here [at a different ghat for a special dinner organised specifically for high-end tourists]. (Notes from a conversation with a child on the ghats) ³

Once there, the guide either takes them onto the balcony, where they can enjoy a pleasant vista from above, comfortably seated, without having to mingle with the crowd (Figure 2), or helps them to the prearranged boat for a view from the river. Alternatively, if it is a very small group or a couple, or even a single tourist, the guide secures them a seat in the front row, very close to the performers, where there is always some space reserved for VIPs, donors, or for customers of ‘the big hotels’. All around are residents, pilgrims, passers-by, travellers, backpackers, visitors, Indian families on tour, and a crowd of street vendors, snack and drink retailers, hawkers, postcard and ‘candle-puja’ sellers, street kids, ‘do-I-make-you-henna’ girls, dressed-up holy men posing for pictures, beggars asking for baksheesh. ⁴ The ghat is a public space and the show is free, the spectacle is open to everyone. However, a respected person in the Gangotri Seva Samiti, one of the two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) managing the Ganga Aarti, speculates,

A ticket to see the Ganga Aarti? Yes, that day will come. ⁵

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Figure 2.

Tourists at the Ganga Aarti (author’s photo).

The toot of conch shell horns starts the ceremony off. The seven pujaris ⁶ lined up on the platforms stand impeccably dressed in front of the audience and Ganga-ji, ⁷ holding vessels of burning incense, the first of the ritual objects to be used in the liturgy. They are young, good-looking Brahmins dressed up in full regalia, rigorously trained for months to perform this ritual. Devotional songs, praise of Ganga, bells and the rhythmic clapping of the attendees accompany the celebration. Derived from Vedic fire rituals, the Aarti revolves around the offering of fire: blazing cobra-shaped lamps and elaborate chandeliers are waved in circular movements by the celebrants, who repeat the movement in the four cardinal directions. This is the most suggestive moment, highlighted by clever scenic effects:

At the Ganga Aarti. I meet a very nice kid, we chat all the time about the ceremony. He speaks good English, and is very smart and funny. When I ask him why they switch off the stage lights at the moment of the fire, he replies promptly: For looking beautiful! Of course. (From my field notes) ⁸

My metaphorical use of theatrical jargon here is deliberate (see Desmond, 1999; Edensor, 2000, 2001). This is not to suggest that the Ganga Aarti is simply a mise-en-scène of the sacred which bears no real significance in ritual terms, nor do I wish to propose that tourists are passive, gullible consumers of set-up religious spectacles. The Ganga Aarti is a religious celebration performed every evening on the ghats to pay respect to the river Ganges in the form of goddess Ganga-ji, or Ganga Mam. The Ganga Aarti is a common Hindu ritual: Figure 3 shows a sannyasi, a holy man, performing it alone, at sunrise, on a makeshift podium on the riverbank. This ritual has become a major tourist-religious event widely advertized in tourist promotions, and undoubtedly the ritual is turned into spectacle, raising questions as to the relationship between the authentic and staged or even fake, and about the merging of sacred and profane.

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Figure 3.

Ascetic performing the Ganga Aarti on the ghats at the sunrise (author’s photo).

Yet, this is not just a matter of ‘staged authenticity’, as Dean MacCannell (1976) would put it. One should not forget that the very origin of the theatre, in ancient Greece, was connected to the religious sphere: the Greek theatre was originally a ritual space in the middle of which stood an altar where the priest or the shaman performed their rites while bystanders gathered around. The deep, ambiguous intertwining of spiritual purpose, exterior ritualism and gaze performance – both the spectators’ act of gazing and the performer’s exposure to the gaze – which lies at the origin of the theatre, is revived in the Ganga Aarti. Elements of religious ritual, aesthetic intention and entertainment come together in this performance, which revolves around the celebration of the darshan as the sacred act of seeing and being seen: it is the divine vision of Ganga-ji that is celebrated and symbolically brought to the altar, at the centre of the stage. The gaze is ritualized into the Aarti ceremony in what may be considered as the staging of the darshan. At the same time, the altar-stage itself becomes the object of reverence of the devotee-spectator, the catalyst of the gaze, and the priest-performer in the spotlight interpreting the liturgy of darshan becomes the visual focus of the crowd, as if a godly effigy on a pedestal, a murti, ⁹ an idol, a rock star on stage, an actor on set.

The Ganga Aarti, therefore, activates multiple and intersecting practices of vision: those of the tourists positioned on terraces to dominate the view and enjoy the best vista (see Minca, 2007), or lured into boats by the promise of the best photographic shots; the practices of devotional gaze by pilgrims and devotees; the mystical gaze of the performer to the deity, and that of the crowd to the performer; the aestheticization of the ritual; the turning into spectacle of the ghat landscape; the commodification of the gaze into postcards and DVDs of the Ganga Aarti sold by hawkers and in shops all around; the surveillance eye of the state pointed to this site, considered a particularly sensitive area. ¹⁰

And yet if on the one hand, the Ganga Aarti is the ultimate celebration of vision and aesthetic landscape, tourists’ sensual involvement in this event is not confined to the sense of sight. Tourists gazing upon the scene are immersed in it, although such an immersion may be once again controlled and directed in different degrees, as the following excerpt from my interview with a local tour guide suggests:

Whether spontaneously or guided, tourists get involved in the Ganga Aarti. An example is provided in Figure 4 which shows a female tourist pulling the thread linked to the bells that sound throughout the celebration. In so doing, ‘tourists collaborate “in the production of the spectacle”’ (Edensor, 2000: 334, quoting Chaney, 1993), and become ‘performers’ themselves (Edensor, 2000), playing their role both in the spectacle of the sacred staged on the ghats and in the choreography designed by the tour operator, where some room is provided for the tourist to feel participant and not simply spectator.

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Figure 4.

Tourist ringing the bells at the Ganga Aarti (author’s photo).

It is worth noting that while the gaze of independent travellers and backpackers is less constrained into specific locations and patterns, and is in fact free to circulate and select its own perspective and modes of involvement, performances of the gaze often conflate at the Ganga Aarti: independent travellers may end up rubbing shoulders with package tourists on the free-access terraces, ghat steps and front-row seats, or watching the show from a rented boat side by side with a vessel full of tourists taking pictures and listening to the explanation of their guide. Likewise, pilgrims enjoy the darshan of Ganga and the Ganga Aarti on board boats or among the audience alongside tourists, and so do local people, residents, sellers, ascetics and beggars, for whom the daily celebration becomes an occasion for a pleasant diversion or for activities as diverse as people watching, chatting and practising English with foreigners, touting, earning a living, or meeting new people.

There is a con-fusion of gazes projected on to each other: while the crowd of pilgrims and locals immersed in the performance of the darshan enhance that picturesque and spiritual aura of which the tourist gaze, laden with Orientalist expectations, seeks confirmation in place, the ‘host gaze’ in turn finds in the unfamiliar, often ‘bizarre’ looking tourist its exotic object. On several occasions during my observations at the Ganga Aarti, I was asked by Indian tourists, pilgrims or even city dwellers to pose with them in a souvenir photo, as Western tourists would do with colourful women in sari and exotic, long-bearded holy men.

Because of its popularity and symbolic importance, the Ganga Aarti has also become a site for the mobilizing of different claims and discourses. Indeed, while the host gaze performed at the Aarti is constructed mainly as devotional in the form of darshan, this also has political and social implications. Sadly, some of those claims have taken the path of violent political and religious fundamentalisms. Following earlier bombings in other hotspots of the city, the Ganga Aarti has been targeted by a terrorist attack as a result of the longstanding Hindu–Muslim communal dispute: on 7 December 2010, a bomb went off in the adjacent Sheetla Ghat while the Ganga Aarti was being performed, leaving a baby girl dead and several injured. The host gaze played out at the Ganga Aarti, then, appears also as a site of conflicting agendas: it constructs the ceremony as a symbolic venue of Hindu identity and by the same token becomes a privileged platform for Muslim claims. Interestingly, the blast was caught live and uploaded on YouTube by a tourist who was filming the ceremony. ¹² It looks like once again the tourist gaze – increasingly expanding through the diffusion of ever more accessible technologies – was there to capture, rework, re-produce and circulate images, discourses, events, places, making increasingly difficult to disentangle tourist from host and any other enactment of the gaze.

However, the religious discourse played out around the Ganga Aarti is not only one fuelled with communal hatred. Rather, religious claims seem to be revolving more on the orthodoxy and authenticity of the performance. The opinions of the people whom I spoke to – tourists, residents, tour operators, institutional representatives and scholars – are generally divided into those who praise the ritual as a true reviving of tradition, those who dismiss it as mere show business emptied of its original spiritual significance and those who simply enjoy the celebration without questioning its real purpose too much.

The Ganga Aarti is run by two NGOs: the Ganga Seva Nidhi and the Gangotri Seva Samiti each runs its own Aartis, which take place simultaneously in the two bordering ghats composing what is understood to be the main ghat. From my interviews with people in both organizations and my ethnographic observation, I gathered that there is a mild competition going on among the two. Claims over orthodoxy are mainly made on the basis of the supposed adherence of the performance to the original Vedic rite, and the ‘authenticity’ of the ritual is measured in terms of attitude, of purely spiritual intention not distracted by the lure of profit making. Comparing the two Aartis, a respresentative of one of the two NGOs states,

Aarti is the same, Ganga is the same, but mind is different. We stay in Kashi Vishvanatha [ancient name for the inner city], Ganga is our original mother, Aarti is just a regard of my mother. In the respect of the mother, when we are burning the fire is for two reasons: one is that it is the gaze of our mother’s face; and second thing is the pollution: fire has a purifying power. ¹³

As the above quotation suggests, religion is not the only discourse mobilized in the Ganga Aarti. The environmentalist mission which animates the patronage of the Aarti constructs this celebration as an act resonating with social, political and cultural values. The symbolism of spiritual purity embedded in the Ganga worship is employed to promote ecological awareness and implement actions for the preservation of the holy river. Both the organizations are particularly committed to this cause. In a promotional DVD produced and distributed by the Ganga Seva Nidhi, the narrator explains,

Aarti is a symbol of reverence to the divinity of Mother Ganga. It is not only prayer to awake the spirituality, but a constructive effort to reawaken the latent consciousness of people towards the sordid impurities and pollution of Mother Ganga. (Ganga Seva Nidhi, 2006)

Other forms of social commitment are put in place: the Gangotri Seva Samiti, for example, provides support to the poor by supplying food and blankets to the local beggars. Westerners are often involved either in the management and promotion or in the sponsorship of the Aarti, although Indian private donors and associations too are among the contributors. Interestingly, as acknowledged in the DVD quoted above, one of the major sponsors of the Aarti is the Hotel Taj Ganges Varanasi, which is part of the Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces Company, a leading brand in the high-end hospitality market. In fact, besides social action, the Ganga Aarti constitutes an opportunity for economic interests and commercial exploitation, too.

Tourism as a site of multiple gazes

The analysis of the case study illustrated in the previous section allows for a number of considerations which link to key arguments in the debate about tourism within cultural geography – and in tourism theory more generally. Let us start from what lies at the very core of the Ganga Aarti: the celebration of the devotional gaze, the construction of the gaze as darshan. Let us also start from the assumption that this can be considered as an expression of the host gaze, of the ways in which indigenous cultures represent themselves. One important implication of looking at the gaze from this perspective is that it brings greater attention to the spiritual gaze onto the agenda of tourism research. This is meant not so much in Urry’s sense of the ‘reverential gaze’ (Urry, 2002 [1990]: 150), or of a particular, ‘semi-spiritual’ attitude of the tourist towards the object of the gaze (Urry, 2002 [1990]: 43), as in the sense of opening up inquiry on the visual to diverse epistemological possibilities implied in the act of gazing.

The darshan suggests a way of understanding the visual experience as one enabling a connection with different dimensions of reality: the material, the representational and the transcendental. While much has been written in Western literature on the gaze about its representational power, the potential of sight in exploring liminal aspects of reality still constitutes an open field of investigation. However, if the celebration of the sacred sight of Ganga-ji is at the base of the Aarti, we have also seen how a set of different meanings and practices comes into being around this ritual intention.

It should be noted that the Ganga Aarti is literally and symbolically a platform where an ancient ritual is not only performed and revived, but also put on display for the visual consumption of its spectators, be they tourists, pilgrims, visitors or local people (see Oakes and Sutton, 2010). It is a way of staging the Hindu ritual heritage, of showing and ‘sharing culture’, as the quotation opening the previous section makes clear. That is also suggested by the continuous, ambiguous allusion to the Aarti performance as a show – for which one day we may even have to purchase a ticket. Through the Ganga Aarti, the host gaze conveys a representation of Hindu cultural identity as one shaped by deep spiritual significance and elaborate ritualism where ‘every step of […] religious activity has got a meaning’, as the local guide states in the interview excerpt quoted above.

Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, such an emphasis on tradition and spirituality seems to reinforce Orientalist tropes of mystical, timeless India, as if the host gaze colluded with the tourist gaze to perpetuate the colonial legacy embedded in dominant representations of ‘the Orient’ (see King, 1999). And yet the spirituality visualized at the Aarti is not uniform and undifferentiated, it takes instead various nuances and meanings. It is represented as purely Hindu and by reaction stirs up claims of Muslim religious identity; it provides glimpses of the local sacred tradition and entertains, at the same time, Western ideas and idealizations of Indian spirituality; it is loaded with devotional and ritual as well as ecological, social and economic purposes, as the ethnographic account has shown. Thus, if on the one hand, we have learnt from poststructural thought and critical theory to deconstruct sight and become aware of the discursive formations accomplished through the visual, looking at the actual practices and spatialities of the gaze can in fact enable further insights into the manifold, situated ways in which the visual is constructed, signified and played out.

That resonates with the new wave of academic research brought about by non-representational theories across the humanities and the social sciences where special attention is given to notions of performance, practice and corporeality (Lorimer, 2005; Thrift, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2001). This perspective is largely informed by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962 [1942], 1968 [1961]), Pierre Bourdieu (1977) and Michel De Certeau (1984). In tourism studies, this has led to a reconsideration of the original idea of the tourist gaze to acknowledge the whole embodied sensorium involved in the tourist experience as well as the ways in which the gaze is put into – and shaped by – practice (Crang, 1997, 1999; Edensor, 1998, 2006; Haldrup and Larsen, 2010; Obrador-Pons, 2003, 2007; Obrador-Pons et al., 2009; Urry and Larsen, 2012).

One of the ways in which the debate about gaze merged into geography is through the discussion of the landscape idea, which is particularly relevant to our case study. Widely influential, in this respect, has been Cosgrove’s (1984) theorization of landscape as ‘a way of seeing’. Cosgrove makes the point that landscape is an inherently Western – and, specifically, European – way of seeing the world. The way of seeing inherent in landscape is ideological because it constructs reality according to a particular perspective. In modern tourism today, landscape represents a very powerful means of framing and taming the other (Minca, 2007; Löfgren, 1999; Urry, 1995). This is particularly the case with India, whose ‘exotic’ spiritual tradition and ritualism – often perceived also as obscure and disquieting – are framed into the aestheticized landscapes of tourist promotion (see Zara, 2012: 156–161 for empirical evidence).

If we look at the Ganga Aarti, we can trace in the aesthetic intention in the organization and the delivery of the performance such an attempt at visually constructing the ghatscape as beautiful, pleasing and picturesque. The very turning of the ceremony into spectacle – and, consequently, the attendees into spectators – seems to comply with the working of landscape where all revolves around viewing and sight is, in this case especially, cunningly choreographed ‘for looking beautiful’. The idea of ‘choreographies’ of the gaze (Edensor, 2000) points once again to ‘the performative turn’ (Wylie, 2007: 162), which has interested landscape studies as well (Cresswell, 2003; Minca, 2007; Wylie, 2002, 2005) and enlivened the debate on the relationship between representation and practice in tourism.

A pioneering work in this respect is Edensor’s (1998) Tourists at the Taj, which looks at the spatial practices and embodied performances enacted at the iconic Taj Mahal in India. An urge towards non-representational approaches in tourism analyses also came from the work of Crouch (2004, 2005, 2009), while Coleman and Crang (2002) expanded sight-centred notions of the gaze to include the embodied engagements of tourists in and with place. Crang, in particular, challenges traditional ways of thinking of the tourist gaze as a primarily visual phenomenon by looking at the performative dimension of photographing (Crang, 1997; see also Scarles, 2009). The practices of the gaze are brought into focus also by Minca (2007), who analyses them within the framework of the tourist landscape. By looking at the picturesque Jamaa el Fna square in Marrakech, considered a symbolic icon of Morocco, he shows how tourists are not only lured into the famous square by stereotypical representations of the country, but they also sustain that quixotic landscape with their practices. Minca dwells on photographing in particular, and draws attention to the behaviours of tourists, who climb on the characteristic roof-top cafés overlooking the square, in search for ‘the best shot’ which conveys the ‘real essence’ of Moroccan culture. He points out that by placing themselves in a dominant position, which allows them the right perspective, they act out the idea of landscape as a way of seeing (see Minca, 2007: 442).

Such an aesthetic manoeuvre can be seen at work at the Ganga Aarti as well. On the balcony, tourists seem to exercise that sort of visual power that – Cosgrove (2003) maintains – is implicit in sight, where the viewer is the privileged actor, being in the position of selecting, framing, composing what is seen or, as Cosgrove (2003) puts it, of ‘turning material space into landscape’ (p. 254). From the boat, they look for the picturesque, spectacular view of the ghats, thereby putting again into practice a longstanding Western visual tradition which has ‘taught tourists not only where to look but also how to sense the landscape, experience it’ (Löfgren, 1999: 19). Even by simply mingling in the crowd or passing by, whether photographing or just glancing at the ceremony, tourists play out that ‘spectatorial gaze’ (Urry, 2002 [1990]: 150–151) which resumes typically European practices of vision initiated with nineteenth-century flânerie (Jokinen and Veijola, 1997).

It is interesting noting, however, that while all the above-mentioned practices reproduce a genuinely European way of seeing, they are enacted by Western travellers as much as by Indian domestic tourists. What is more, as I pointed out earlier, not only these practices are carried out by tourists, they are also variously nurtured, predisposed and arranged by the local people, whether tourism workers, Ganga Aarti performers and organizers, or inhabitants earning their living on the ghats – a Coke purchased on the balcony costs twice its normal price, to suggest that what the consumer is buying is not only a drink but also the privileged view that comes with it. By the same token, by performing some of the suggestive rituals and activities that go along with the Ganga Aarti, tourists participate in the ‘typically Hindu’ practices which compose the spectacle of the darshan exhibited on the riverfront.

Thus, the landscape of the ghats – which constitutes the focus of the Ganga Aarti both as a tourist attraction and as a Hindu religious celebration – becomes the theatre for the enactment of practices of the gaze clearly shaped by Western/European aesthetic values and sensibilities. At the same time, it is framed by a ‘way of seeing’ loaded with cultural meanings and symbolisms rooted in the Hindu tradition. These are both reworked and displayed to attract the multiple gazes of (both Western and Indian) tourists, pilgrims, city dwellers, traders and the varied folk that congregate at this venue.

Such a multiplicity of gazes and practices that come together in tourist sites is nicely conveyed by Cartier and Lew’s (2005) idea of ‘touristed landscapes’, which is about landscape as toured and lived, with all the complexities that this implies. In touristed landscapes different dynamics come into play: there are locals and tourists, travellers and sojourners, there are residents becoming visitors and sojourners becoming residents, there are ‘travellers denying being tourists: resident part-time tourists, tourists working hard to fit in as if locals’ (Cartier, 2005: 3. On a similar topic, see Minca and Oakes, 2006). The gaze, then, has to be understood as practised and situated.

If we look at the ‘practices of seeing’ (Crang, 1997: 360) and the actual places where they occur, we realize that these are often sites of multiple and multifarious gazes, where different visual legacies interact and merge, making a real distinction between ‘tourist’ and ‘host’ difficult to define. Therefore, a tourist/host categorical reading of the gaze may prove to be a weak paradigm to adopt in understanding the complex phenomenon of tourism. Likewise, it may not serve the purpose to dwell in a rigid representation/performance dualism, or to affirm a sort of epistemological superiority of practice over vision in the wake of recent non-representational enthusiasm.

In fact, the visual and its representational power still play a fundamental part in the way the tourist experience is constructed, and as such continue to deserve scholarly consideration. What academic analyses should pursue, though, are broadened ideas of the gaze, capable of capturing not only the material, sensual and performative dimensions mobilized in tourism alongside the visual, but also the multiple agencies and the diversity of perspectives by which the gaze is constituted. That certainly means giving more attention to ideas and practices of the ‘host’ gaze, but it also means, as suggested above, not abiding in binary epistemologies of the gaze, and searching instead for the diverse, situated ways in which the tourist gaze is shaped, enacted and negotiated by different social actors in different contexts. Moreover, such a search for a new, broader gaze should open up to ideas and theories produced beyond the boundaries of Western academia. In fact, the gaze has been largely framed by Anglo-European theories which have widely disregarded conceptual horizons thriving outside the ‘West’.

This case study has, instead, highlighted the need to engage with a variety of ways of seeing, representing and performing the tourist space where different gazing subjects interact and negotiate, both physically and imaginatively, that very space. In my analysis, I dwelt once again particularly on the Western tourist’s stance. However, this was to demonstrate how the tourist gaze is actually constructed by mainstream representations and cultural traditions circulating in ‘the West’, as much as by the local way of constructing, reworking and performing that very gaze (see Oakes, 1999). Moreover, I also showed how the host gaze, in turn, is not devoid of the influences, practices and cultures brought in by different travelling subjects.

Conclusion

To conclude, the celebration of vision and the beautification of the landscape of the ghats, elevated to a natural altar for the worship of the sacred river, are key aspects of the Ganga Aarti. That in turn produces a multiplicity of acts and behaviours on the part of tourists who put in practice, in this occasion especially, what we might call the best tradition of Western practices of sight: they gaze upon, photograph and frame the view by selecting angles and placing themselves in vantage points. In doing so, they are often directed by a tour guide or by the organization of the event itself which, as we have seen, encourages those practices by constructing the ceremony as a spectacle. And yet, the visual construction of this event still retains a cultural symbolism deeply ingrained in the Hindu tradition, a symbolism that reframes and relocates the tourist gaze within a ritual and conceptual horizon where sight is given an intrinsic transcendental meaning even when it is staged and practised for the sake of purely aesthetic enjoyment. The choreographies of the gaze enacted at the Ganga Aarti combine tourist and host, sacred and secular, and Western and Hindu ways of seeing.

At the same time, while this defining visual practice in Varanasi has been described mainly in terms of spectacle, tourists and travellers feel the experience of being in a ‘real’ place and not in a theatre, they ‘flirt with space’ (Crouch, 2005) and participate actively in the celebration by clapping their hands at the sound of bhajans, ¹⁴ ringing the bells, doing dip dan, interacting with people, either locals or tourists, many of whom are Indians journeying to Varanasi. Indeed, as Crouch (2005) argues, tourism is an ‘intersubjective practice’ and the simple being in ‘the crowd’ can be considered as a form of performance (p. 29). The Ganga Aarti thus brings together ideas of vision and performance.

Hence, this article has sought to demonstrate that multiple gazes converge in tourist landscapes and that while it may be useful to look at their agencies in terms of host and tourist perspectives, we should also be aware that the boundaries between the two are often blurring. Because the gaze is situated, enmeshed in actual places, embodied and performed by different subjects whose positionalities may be shifting – for example the local tour guide at the Ganga Aarti juggling with tourist imaginaries and encouraging typically European practices of vision while providing the basics of the Hindu darshan – we need to think of it as plural and mobile instead of fixed into binary categories. Practices of the gaze have to be rethought to include alternative, non-Western ways of seeing, and only by broadening the ‘researcher gaze’ to different traditions and strategies of constructing, making sense of and performing sight can we better understand its manifold, multilayered implications and workings in tourism.