Sacred treasure

A limited edition pictorial guide to Varanasi returns a rare British Library map to India after more than a century

As the nation focuses on recovery plans for Varanasi, we call up the chronicles of its spiritual capital. Visitors to Harmony Bookshop, that beloved Assi Ghat fixture, find 60 plus titles on the past and present of the home of Tulsidas’ epic poem Ramcharitmanas, across genres, including Diana Eck’s lyrical 1982 modern classic Banaras, City of Light; Vasanthi Raman’s The Warp and the Weft, which uses the sari to tell the city’s communal history; Geoff Dyer’s whimsical Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, told between Venice and Varanasi. Then, there are the sumptuous coffee table books, the handbooks; even an audio guide by Robert E Svoboda featuring music by DJ Cheb I Sabbah.

Adding to the fine body of guidebook literature around the sacred city, Roli Books has just released Nandini Majumdar’s stylish, educative new guide to the city, Banaras: Walks through India’s Sacred City (Roli Books, 184 pages, Rs 599/ 15,000). “You don’t think Varanasi is conducive to walking around as it is dirty, but its lanes require residents to walk around and get to know the city,” says Majumdar, a young local who began working on the book five years ago and marks its completion from Oxford, England, where she has just completed graduate studies in World Literature. “It’s depressing when you live in Varanasi and see what is happening. But we want people to be aware of this and there is a lot that can be done.”

The book comes in two versions. A limited edition of 200 features a digitally printed, 2.9 metre-long map, reproduced for the first time in India in lovely, watery pinks, greens and yellows, on imported white canvas. Enclosed in a box set with a hardback guide, the package is priced at Rs 15,000 (the mass market version is a paperback with generous foldout flaps, more affordable, if not as gorgeous).

‘‘I don’t think there is another illustration, another panorama of the ghats as they were 150 years ago. We have replicated the scroll in its exact size, to be faithful to the original, which is at the British Library in London,” says Roli Books publisher Pramod Kapoor of the map, drawn and lithographed by artist Durga Pershad and originally printed in 1901 by an old Allahabad press. ‘‘We have good museums in India and have improved our methods vastly, but unfortunately our archiving is not good. The map might not have survived in this pristine condition here; we have lost what we have lost. We don’t have something like this in India.”

Originally from Varanasi, Kapoor remembers running in and out of its lanes growing up, as he spreads the scroll out on a long work table in his wood-panelled office, pointing to the particular ghat he calls home. It has changed tremendously, and he looks forward to the new Government’s focus on cleaning up. “The river has needed attention for a long, long time. In our time—I left in 1975—I remember learning how to swim and it was as clean as any private swimming pool can be. There used to be an area where women swam, with barricades for privacy. It was a ritual—even now it is a ritual, perhaps with fewer people—for locals to have daily baths in it. Today, you can’t put a finger in it, it has gotten so bad.”

The map—which Pramod remarks is very folk, just as it looks contemporary—came together with the author’s research through serendipity, and only the publisher and his wife Kiran have seen the original. Even his daughter Priya, the company’s editorialdirector, hasn’t seen it. ‘My parents were looking for something else and found this painting,’ explains Priya, who was born in Varanasi and often returned for visits from New Delhi, where the family settled. ‘The manuscript Nandini Majumdar sent us three years ago, a big block of research she had done at the time. No one had mapped this part of Varanasi since the 1920s, which is when the municipal maps were made. Since then, not too much has changed, but the landmarks have changed. We thought, why not make this a practical resource, a guide. When you stop at a shop or temple, you know exactly where you are with this book.” Every ghat is mentioned here, she shows us; even the road to Sarnath is marked.

Each copy of the limited edition is accompanied by a numbered certificate. ‘People in fact nominate their number, a lucky number, or number 1, and you keep a register tracking who each goes to. This is new to India, and this is our third limited edition,’ says Pramod, who began the publishing house, well-known for its handsomely produced illustrated titles, in 1978 and also published Delhi 360. This similar limited edition, of which he estimates only 10 copies remain, is now Rs 20,000, up from an earlier Rs 15,000. “In the West, these special editions can go for four to five times its original price at auctions.” The Kapoors often deal excessively with permissions, they say, more difficult in India than in the West; thinking there prioritises dissemination, they feel. For curatorial projects, Pramod has travelled along Europe’s Western front from home to home through Ypres and beyond in search of war memorials for Roli’s forthcoming World War I book, among upcoming archival projects.

Father and daughter speak fondly of the peaceful nature of cultural confluence and thereby of Hindu-Muslim relations in Varanasi, tracing far back. “My father had a lot of customers who were traders, weavers, who would come and get boxes made for their products,” recalls Pramod. “They would bring their own water, what they call jham jham, and give it to my grandmother and she would happily drink it, though the food they ate was separate. There are more Shia-Sunni riots in Varanasi than Hindu-Muslim.”

“I hope this newfound focus actually changes Varanasi for the better, and not worse,’ adds Priya, who has sent the book out to language rights publishers, hoping for a Hindi edition to reach out to that audience too. “I hope whoever develops the city uses the book because it’s a great record. It tells us the original purpose of old buildings, for example, which is useful now.”

In the book’s six walks, Majumdar reaches for more intimate stories; for example, the fishing community in one of the ghats has so many young people hanging around it because of the unusual amount of people deprived of an education, in this area. The commentary is socio-economic here:

‘One result of social reform movements was that energies were channelled into ritualised religious activities rather than those that would improve the immediate environment of young people.’

The ghats’ various akharas—the juna akhara of the Naga sadhus for example—and the listings of musical concerts are other features highlighted in this accessible, photograph-filled guide. It tells us:

‘What Banarasis value is a khula dil (an open heart) a khula mijaz (an open nature), and khuli bat karna (speaking openly). They equally treasure the little bit of open space, the khuli jagah, in the heart of their neighbourhood. For them, happiness is the easy movement through the layers of the self and the world.’

“I’d keep walking around in the same place and doodling till I was able to draw where it was,” says Majumdar, who found 20 detailed contemporary maps in the development authority’s resources, traced and used throughout the book as a practical supplement. Repeated perambulations threw up surprises even for the 27-year-old local, author of five children’s books. She spent 16 formative years here, a decade of it associated with NIRMAN, a non-profit organisation working for children’s education in Varanasi; along with her mother Nita Kumar, author of The Artisans of Banaras, which speaks of 80s Varanasi. (Royalties from paperback sales will be donated to NIRMAN.)

Majumdar kept happening upon one place after another, and was fascinated by Siddha Kshetra, a maze of alleys containing some major shrines, said to be the birthplace of Agni. “There’s something humble and cosy about the city, but also magical and fantastic,” she says.

This view is shared across generations. Pramod Kapoor laughs, remembering the common myth of the Til Bandeshwar statue; locals say it increases by a til a day. “People are quite different in Varanasi. They live in their own world, they don’t know where their bed finishes and history begins.”

Banaras: Walks through India’s Sacred CityNandini Majumdar