Review: Banaras Reconstructed: Architecture and Sacred Space in a Hindu Holy City, by Madhuri Desai

Abstract

Madhuri Desai Banaras Reconstructed: Architecture and Sacred Space in a Hindu Holy City Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017, 304 pp., 7 maps, 8 color and 115 b/w illus. $90 (cloth), ISBN 9780295741604; $30 (paper), ISBN 9780295741994 “There are few cities in India as traditionally Hindu and as symbolic of the whole of Hindu culture as the city of Banaras.”1 Thus begins Diana L. Eck's pioneering 1982 book on the Indian pilgrimage center of Banaras. Eck, a religious studies scholar, sketched a vivid account that offered dazzling insights into the city's cloistered world of rituals, mythology, and sacrality. Much has been written since then on the city, often considered India's most important pilgrimage center, and over the past twenty years, historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars have analyzed the processes through which Banaras was inhabited, shaped, and invented through political, social, and cultural configurations.2 Yet, within the domain of architectural history, we have until now remained tied to Eck's perception of Banaras as a visual symbol and a symptom of a purportedly timeless Hinduism. The publication of Madhuri Desai's Banaras Reconstructed: Architecture and Sacred Space in a Hindu Holy City changes that. As Desai explains, from the sixteenth century onward, the Hindu architecture of the pilgrimage center was based on typologies made popular by the Muslim Mughal rulers of South Asia. For instance, the forms of the Man Mandir, built on the city's riverfront around 1600 by the rulers of the western Indian kingdom of Amber, cited sixteenth-century Mughal imperial architecture. Desai argues that over time, the spatial and temporal flows of sacrality in Banaras were altered, punctuated, and interspersed with an architecture of political governance. Under colonial rule, European architectural styles, too, left ineradicable traces on the sacred city. What, then, is the architecture of a “traditional” Hindu …