This collection of ten essays on Banaras, one of the largest urban centers in India's eastern Gangetic plain, is united by a common interest in examining everyday activities in order to learn about shared values and motivations, processes of identity formation, and self-conscious constructions of community. Part One examines the performance genres that have drawn audiences from throughout the city. Part Two focuses on the areas of neighborhood, leisure, and work, examining the processes by which urban residents use a sense of identity to organize their activities and bring meaning to their lives. Part Three links these experiences within Banaras to a series of "larger worlds," ranging from language movements and political protests to disease ecology and regional environmental impact. Banaras is a complex world, with differences in religion, caste, class, language, and popular culture; the diversity of these essays embraces those differences. It is a collection that will interest scholars and students of South Asia as well as anyone interested in comparative discussions of popular culture. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Nita Kumar offers an evocative and sensitive portrayal of rarely explored aspects of Hindu culture through her analysis of the way leisure time is used by Hindu and Muslim artisans of Banaras--the weavers, metalworkers, and woodworkers. Music, festivals, the place of physical culture, and the importance of going "to the outer side" all are examined as Kumar looks at changes that have occurred in leisure-time activities over the last century. The discussion raises questions of the cultural and conceptual aspects of working-class life, the role of fun and play in Indian thought, the importance of public activities in terms of personal identity, and the meaning of an Indian city to its residents. This analysis turns away from the usual models of Hindu-Muslim conflict by seeing divisions based on occupation, income level, education, and urban neighborhood as more relevant for the construction of identity than those based on religion or community. Kumar draws her information from police station records, Hindi newspapers and periodicals, publications of local individuals and organizations, oral history, and ethnographic data. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This collection of ten essays on Banaras, one of the largest urban centers in India's eastern Gangetic plain, is united by a common interest in examining everyday activities in order to learn about shared values and motivations, processes of identity formation, and self-conscious constructions of community. Part One examines the performance genres that have drawn audiences from throughout the city. Part Two focuses on the areas of neighborhood, leisure, and work, examining the processes by which urban residents use a sense of identity to organize their activities and bring meaning to their lives. Part Three links these experiences within Banaras to a series of "larger worlds," ranging from language movements and political protests to disease ecology and regional environmental impact. Banaras is a complex world, with differences in religion, caste, class, language, and popular culture; the diversity of these essays embraces those differences. It is a collection that will interest scholars and students of South Asia as well as anyone interested in comparative discussions of popular culture. This collection of ten essays on Banaras, one of the largest urban centers in India's eastern Gangetic plain, is united by a common interest in examining everyday activities in order to learn about shared values and motivations, processes of identity formation, and self-conscious constructions of community. Part One examines the performance genres that have drawn audiences from throughout the city. Part Two focuses on the areas of neighborhood, leisure, and work, examining the processes by which urban residents use a sense of identity to organize their activities and bring meaning to their lives. Part Three links these experiences within Banaras to a series of "larger worlds," ranging from language movements and political protests to disease ecology and regional environmental impact. Banaras is a complex world, with differences in religion, caste, class, language, and popular culture; the diversity of these essays embraces those differences. It is a collection that will interest scholars and students of South Asia as well as anyone interested in comparative discussions of popular culture.

This book is a fascinating investigation into how communalism plays out in everyday India. Using the metaphor of tana-bana – the warp and the weft of the Banarasi sari – the author reproduces the interwoven life of Hindu-Muslim relations in the Banarasi sari industry. As the city of Banaras in Uttar Pradesh takes the centre stage as the site of this ethnographic study, the author documents the dissonance in representations of Banaras as a sacred Hindu city and its essential plural character. The volume • examines in-depth the lives of Banaras Muslims in the social and economic matrix of the sari industry; • highlights how women negotiate between home, family and their place in the artisanal industry; and • sheds light on their fast-changing world of the Banaras weavers and their responses to it. With a new introduction and fresh data, the second edition looks at the subsequent developments in the weaving industry over the last decade. This volume will be of immense interest to scholars and researchers of social anthropology, gender studies, development studies, sociology and South Asian studies.

Throughout the Indian subcontinent there are territories and areas wherein culture, geography, and the archetypal cosmos interact with each other to create a sacredscape that is infused with meaning, cultural performances and transcendent power. These sacred sites possess extensive mythological associations where believed that spirit can cross between different realms. In a broad perspective such studies falls within the realm of cultural astronomy, which has two broad areas, viz. archaeoastronomy, concerned with the study of the use of astronomy and its role in ancient cultures and civilizations; and ethnoastronomy that studies the use of astronomy and its role in contemporary cultures. The seven essays in this volume deals with the critical appraisal of studying cultural astronomy and cosmic order and its implications in India, illustrated with case studies like heritagescape of Khajuraho, where stone speaks; manescape of Gaya, where manes come and bless the devotees; Deviscape of Vindhyachal, where goddess resorts; Shivascape of Kashi, where Shiva dances in making order; Shaktiscape of Kashi, that possesses the spatial ordering of goddesses; and Naturscape of Chitrakut, where mother earth blesses.

The book presents a rich and surprising account of the recent history of the north Indian city of Banaras. Supplementing traditional accounts, which have focused upon the city’s religious imaginary, this volume brings together essays written by acknowledged experts in north Indian culture and history to examine the construction of diverse urban identities in, and after, the British colonial period. Drawing on fields such as archaeology, literature, history, and architecture, these accounts of Banaras understand the narratives which inscribe the city as having been forged substantially in the experiences of British rule. But while British rule transformed the city in many respects, the essays also emphasize the importance of Indian agency in these processes. The book also examines the essential ambiguity of modernization schemes in the city as well as the contingency of elements of religious narrative. The introduction, moreover, attempts to resituate Banaras into a wider tradition of urban studies in South Asia. The book will be of interest to not only scholars and students of north Indian culture and urban history, but also anyone looking to gain a deeper appreciation of this remarkable, and complex, city.

About the Book A NUANCED AND POWERFUL MICROHISTORY SET AGAINST THE SWEEP OF INDIAN HISTORY. Dharmman Bibi rode into battle during the revolt of 1857 shoulder to shoulder with her patron lover Babu Kunwar Singh. Sadabahar entranced even snakes and spirits with her music, but eventually gave her voice to Baba Court Shaheed. Her foster mothers Bullan and Kallan fought their malevolent brother and an unjust colonial law all the way to the Privy Council—and lost everything. Their great-granddaughter Teema paid for the family’s ruination with her childhood and her body. Bindo, Asghari, Phoolmani, Pyaari … there are so many stories in this family. And you—one of the best-known tawaifs of your times—remember the stories of your foremothers and your own. This is a history, a multi-generational chronicle of one family of well-known tawaifs with roots in Banaras and Bhabua. Through their stories and self-histories, Saba Dewan explores the nuances that conventional narratives have erased, papered over or wilfully rewritten. In a not-so-distant past, tawaifs played a crucial role in the social and cultural life of northern India. They were skilled singers and dancers, and also companions and lovers to men from the local elite. It is from the art practice of tawaifs that kathak evolved and the purab ang thumri singing of Banaras was born. At a time when women were denied access to the letters, tawaifs had a grounding in literature and politics, and their kothas were centres of cultural refinement. Yet, as affluent and powerful as they were, tawaifs were marked by the stigma of being women in the public gaze, accessible to all. In the colonial and nationalist discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this stigma deepened into criminalisation and the violent dismantling of a community. Tawaifnama is the story of that process of change, a nuanced and powerful microhistory set against the sweep of Indian history.

In India: A Sacred Geography, renowned Harvard scholar Diana Eck offers an extraordinary spiritual journey through the pilgrimage places of the world's most religiously vibrant culture and reveals that it is, in fact, through these sacred pilgrimages that India’s very sense of nation has emerged. No matter where one goes in India, one will find a landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests, and villages are elaborately linked to the stories of the gods and heroes of Indian culture. Every place in this vast landscape has its story, and conversely, every story of Hindu myth and legend has its place. Likewise, these places are inextricably tied to one another—not simply in the past, but in the present—through the local, regional, and transregional practices of pilgrimage. India: A Sacred Geography tells the story of the pilgrim’s India. In these pages, Diana Eck takes the reader on an extraordinary spiritual journey through the living landscape of this fascinating country –its mountains, rivers, and seacoasts, its ancient and powerful temples and shrines. Seeking to fully understand the sacred places of pilgrimage from the ground up, with their stories, connections and layers of meaning, she acutely examines Hindu religious ideas and narratives and shows how they have been deeply inscribed in the land itself. Ultimately, Eck shows us that from these networks of pilgrimage places, India’s very sense of region and nation has emerged. This is the astonishing and fascinating picture of a land linked for centuries not by the power of kings and governments, but by the footsteps of pilgrims. India: A Sacred Geography offers a unique perspective on India, both as a complex religious culture and as a nation. Based on her extensive knowledge and her many decades of wide-ranging travel and research, Eck's piercing insights and a sweeping grasp of history ensure that this work will be in demand for many years to come.

Banaras has been home to sages, artists, poets, musicians and seekers from all parts of India. The ancient canon of texts passed down orally by the sages was written and transcribed in the lanes and by-lanes of this city. Over the centuries, the art of grafting and subsuming the religious and cultural ethos became the hallmark of Banaras. In this book, Vertul Singh presents a kaleidoscopic view of Banaras that charts a narrative spanning from the present-day city and its origins as Kashi to the fin de siècle of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which witnessed the city’s inclusionary development as a cultural and pilgrimage centre, an opulent trading hub and a basilica of political power. Weaving facts, interesting anecdotes and untold stories to make a rich tapestry, this book is an insider’s account and an unparalleled portrait of the city.