Kāśī Kṣetra, Kāśī Maṇḍala: Digitally Mapping Evolving Interpretations of an Idealized Sacred City

Abstract

This article employs digital mapping to better understand historical and contemporary interpretations of pilgrimage routes in Vārāṇasī, North India. Focusing on visitation circuits linking the Aṣṭabhairava (Eight Bhairavas), it compares digital maps of these circuits to descriptions in the fourteenth-century Kāśī Khaṇḍa, nineteenth- and twentieth-century maps, and contemporary listings and pilgrim activity. Mapping and comparing these variants illuminate ways in which sacred geographies are conceived of and interacted with, as well as the various authorities, explanations, and justifications used to make sense of complex systems in sacred spaces. This study does not support theories of the “degradation” of a previously more uniform or ideal sacred landscape, nor explanatory models which suggest that more contemporary routes are the result of historical waves of development. Rather, the routes mapped suggest that an array of context-contingent resources and logics are selected and combined based upon a particular agent’s immediate circumstance in order to determine appropriate ritual action. Instead of describing an historical arc or uncovering an obscured tension between authorities, this study identifies the toolkit with which the sacred territory of Vārāṇasī is remade and reinterpreted, over and again.