Banaras Reconstructed: Architecture and Sacred Space in a Hindu Holy City

by Madhuri Desai

Overview

Between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banaras, the iconic Hindu center in northern India that is often described as the oldest living city in the world, was reconstructed materially as well as imaginatively, and embellished with temples, monasteries, mansions, and ghats (riverfront fortress-palaces). Banaras’s refurbished sacred landscape became the subject of pilgrimage maps and its spectacular riverfront was depicted in panoramas and described in travelogues.

In Banaras Reconstructed, Madhuri Desai examines the confluences, as well as the tensions, that have shaped this complex and remarkable city. In so doing, she raises issues central to historical as well as contemporary Indian identity and delves into larger questions about religious urban environments in South Asia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295741611
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	06/27/2017
Series:	Global South Asia
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	34 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Madhuri Desai is associate professor of art history and Asian studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She is the coeditor of Colonial Frames, Nationalist Histories: Imperial Legacies, Architecture, and Modernity.

Table of Contents

Introduction | The Paradox of Banaras

1. Authenticity and Pilgrimage

2. Palimpsests and Authority

3. Expansion and Invention

4. Spectacle and Ritual

5. Order and Antiquity

6. Visions and Embellishments

Conclusion | Banaras Revisited

What People are Saying About This

Alka Patel

"Banaras Reconstructed is a comprehensive and thorough work of research focusing on a pilgrimage city whose ‘timelessness’ is a veneer much in need of historicization."

Rebecca M. Brown

"Banaras Reconstructed astutely integrates a wide range of pilgrimage texts, contemporaneous histories, and visual representations with close analyses of the built environment to give us—at long last—a volume that dynamically brings together the multifarious layers of this city."

Muzaffar Alam

"Desai recuperates a forgotten history and weaves together various strands of material and religious culture of Banaras from Mughal times to the nineteenth century, when the legend of the city’s eternity crystallized and came to be widely disseminated. This book is a powerful piece of scholarship, a breakthrough in the study of this important South Asian site."

Interviews

The subject of Banaras Reconstructed is the iconic Hindu religious center in Northern India, often described as the oldest living city in the world. A closer look reveals however that this city, though immensely venerated, was also reconstructed both materially as well as imaginatively. Between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banaras was embellished with temples, monasteries, mansions, ritual bathing tanks and riverfront fortress-palaces (ghats) that constitute its architecture, urban nodes and sacred spaces. Individuals from across South Asia invested in Banaras and created a city that could both realize and enhance textual prescriptions in a larger political and cultural climate of Indo-Islamic and colonial regimes. Its refurbished sacred landscape became the subject of lively pilgrimage maps and its spectacular riverfront was described through panoramas, picturesque views and effusive travelogues. This book examines the confluences as well as tensions that have shaped this complex and remarkable city. In so doing, it raises issues central to historical as well as contemporary Indian identity. It provides new perspectives on Banaras as well as delves into larger questions about religious urban environments in South Asia.

Editorial Reviews

"A painstakingly pieced together work of longue durée urban history."

Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review

"Desai shows clearly that the city, especially its waterfront, has been a canvas for the inscription of power—of Mughal courtiers, Bengali merchants, British imperial functionaries, Hindu rajas, Maratha nobles, and an array of others trying to create their own narratives of heritage and lineage, whether for political or personal gain."

Journal of Asian Studies

"Banaras Reconstructed is a valuable intervention in the field of early modern and colonial architectural history, one that productively opens up new passages into the complex history and historiography of the “Hindu city.”"

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH)

"Madhuri Desai has dexterously attempted to describe and exemplify how varied aspects have contributed in the consecration of Banaras as sacred amidst other buildings which hold a high degree of historical significance. The arguments by the author are meticulously supplemented with original layouts and documentations dating from the reign of Mughal Emperor Akbar."

Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities

"An important book that brings new life to one of India’s oldest, holiest, and best-known cities. Nowhere has the longer history of Banaras’s many (re)constructions been more cohesively or persuasively told."

Art Bulletin