Venice in Varanasi: Fluid landscapes, aesthetic encounters and the unexpected geographies of tourist representation

Abstract

This article has developed from a broader research project on tourist representations and practices in Varanasi, India’s renowned sacred city and popular tourist destination situated by the ‘holy’ Ganges. Here, a recurring ‘sense of Venice’ emerged from Western travel narratives and landscape representations, evoked by both visual and more- than-visual encounters. Drawing on cultural geographies of landscape engaging postcolonial, representational and non-representational theories, the article unravels Venice’s capacity to exist beyond Venice and to mobilise affectual aesthetic connections across different social, material, spatial and temporal contexts. Through an empirical analysis of aesthetic experiences of ‘Venice-in-Varanasi’, it illuminates the ontological liminality of Venice as waterland and image and its epistemological capacity to navigate the entangled material, affective and representational modes through which we encounter the world. Advancing relational theories of landscape via an empirical focus on the waterscapes of Venice and Varanasi, the article contributes to water studies and critical tourism by proposing a fluid and mobile ontology of landscape which seeks to destabilise the representational/non-representational binary, thus feeding into growing research in this direction.