Banaras Urban Forms And Cultural Histories

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Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories

Author : Michael S. Dodson
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000365646
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (3 download)

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Book Synopsis Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories by : Michael S. Dodson

Download or read book Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories written by Michael S. Dodson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-01-31 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Banaras Reconstructed

Author : Madhuri Desai
Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295741619
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (957 download)

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Book Synopsis Banaras Reconstructed by : Madhuri Desai

Download or read book Banaras Reconstructed written by Madhuri Desai and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2017-06-27 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banaras, the iconic Hindu center in northern India that is often described as the oldest living city in the world, was reconstructed materially as well as imaginatively, and embellished with temples, monasteries, mansions, and ghats (riverfront fortress-palaces). Banaras’s refurbished sacred landscape became the subject of pilgrimage maps and its spectacular riverfront was depicted in panoramas and described in travelogues. In Banaras Reconstructed, Madhuri Desai examines the confluences, as well as the tensions, that have shaped this complex and remarkable city. In so doing, she raises issues central to historical as well as contemporary Indian identity and delves into larger questions about religious urban environments in South Asia.

The World of the Banaras Weaver

Author : Vasanthi Raman
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000650472
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis The World of the Banaras Weaver by : Vasanthi Raman

Download or read book The World of the Banaras Weaver written by Vasanthi Raman and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-08-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Religion and the City in India

Author : Supriya Chaudhuri
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000429016
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis Religion and the City in India by : Supriya Chaudhuri

Download or read book Religion and the City in India written by Supriya Chaudhuri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers fresh theoretical, methodological and empirical analyses of the relation between religion and the city in the South Asian context. Uniting the historical with the contemporary by looking at the medieval and early modern links between religious faith and urban settlement, the book brings together a series of focused studies of the mixed and multiple practices and spatial negotiations of religion in the South Asian city. It looks at the various ways in which contemporary religious practice affects urban everyday life, commerce, craft, infrastructure, cultural forms, art, music and architecture. Chapters draw upon original empirical study and research to analyze the foundational, structural, material and cultural connections between religious practice and urban formations or flows. The book argues that Indian cities are not ‘postsecular’ in the sense that the term is currently used in the modern West, but that there has been, rather, a deep, even foundational link between religion and urbanism, producing different versions of urban modernity. Questions of caste, gender, community, intersectional entanglements, physical proximity, private or public ritual, processions and prayer, economic and political factors, material objects, and changes in the built environment, are all taken into consideration, and the book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of different historical periods, different cities, and different types of religious practice. Filling a gap in the literature by discussing a diversity of settings and faiths, the book will be of interest to scholars to South Asian history, sociology, literary analysis, urban studies and cultural studies.

Split Waters

Author : Luisa Cortesi
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000405907
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis Split Waters by : Luisa Cortesi

Download or read book Split Waters written by Luisa Cortesi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Limited, finite, contaminated, unavailable or expensive, water divides people all around the globe. We all cannot do without water for long, but can for long enough to fight for it. This commonsensical narration of water conflicts, however, follows a pattern of scarcity and necessity that is remarkably unvaried despite different social and geographical contexts. Through in-depth case studies from around the globe, this volume investigates this similarity of narration—confronting the power of a single story by taking it seriously instead of dismissing it. In so doing, it invites the reader to rethink water conflicts and how they are commonly understood and managed. This book: Posits the existence of the idea of water conflict, and asks what it is and what it produces, thus how it is used to pursue particular interests and to legitimise specific historical, technological and environmental relations; Examines the meaning and power of ideas as compared to other categories of knowledge, advancing theoretical frameworks related to environmental knowledge, discursive power, social constructivism; Presents an alternative agenda to deepen the conversation around water conflicts among scholars and activists. Of interest to scholars and activists alike, this volume is addressed to those involved with environmental conflicts, environmental knowledge and justice, disasters and climate change from the disciplinary angles of environmental anthropology and sociology, political ecology and economy, science and technology studies, human geography and environmental sciences, development and cooperation, public policy and peace studies. Essays by Gina Bloodworth, Ben Bowles, Patrick Bresnihan, Luisa Cortesi, Mattia Grandi, K. J. Joy, Midori Kawabe, Adrianne Kroepsch, Vera Lazzaretti, Leslie Mabon, Renata Moreno Quintero, Madhu Ramnath, Jayaprakash Rao Polsani, Dik Roth, Theresa Selfa,Veronica Strang, Mieke van Hemert, Jeroen Warner, Madelinde Winnubst.

Water, Knowledge and the Environment in Asia

Author : Ravi Baghel
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1134863330
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (348 download)

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Book Synopsis Water, Knowledge and the Environment in Asia by : Ravi Baghel

Download or read book Water, Knowledge and the Environment in Asia written by Ravi Baghel and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dramatic transformation of our planet by human actions has been heralded as the coming of the new epoch of the Anthropocene. Human relations with water raise some of the most urgent questions in this regard. The starting point of this book is that these changes should not be seen as the result of monolithic actions of an undifferentiated humanity, but as emerging from diverse ways of relating to water in a variety of settings and knowledge systems. With its large population and rapid demographic and socioeconomic change, Asia provides an ideal context for examining how varied forms of knowledge pertaining to water encounter and intermingle with one another. While it is difficult to carry out comprehensive research on water knowledge in Asia due to its linguistic, political and cultural fragmentation, the topic nevertheless has relevance across boundaries. By using a carefully chosen selection of case studies in a variety of locations and across diverse disciplines, the book demonstrates commonalities and differences in everyday water practices around Asia while challenging both romantic presumptions and Eurocentrism. Examples presented include class differences in water use in the megacity of Delhi, India; the impact of radiation on water practices in Fukushima, Japan; the role of the King in hydraulic practices in Thailand, and ritual irrigation in Bali, Indonesia.

Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition

Author : Knut A. Jacobsen
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136240314
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (362 download)

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Book Synopsis Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition by : Knut A. Jacobsen

Download or read book Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition written by Knut A. Jacobsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Salvific space is one of the central ideas in the Hindu traditions of pilgrimage, and concerns the ability of space, especially sites associated with bodies of water such as rivers and lakes, to grant salvific rewards. Focusing on religious, historical and sociological questions about the phenomenon, this book investigates the narratives, rituals, history and structures of salvific space, and looks at how it became a central feature of Hinduism. Arguing that salvific power of place became a major dimension of Hinduism through a development in several stages, the book analyses the historical process of how salvific space and pilgrimage in the Hindu tradition developed. It discusses how the traditions of salvific space exemplify the decentred polycentrism that defines Hinduism. The book uses original data from field research, as well as drawing on main textual sources such as Mahābhārata, the Purāṇas, the medieval digests on pilgrimage places (tīrthas), and a number of Sthalapurāṇas and Māhātmyas praising the salvific power of the place. By looking at some of the contradictions in and challenges to the tradition of Hindu salvific space in history and in contemporary India, the book is a useful study on Hinduism and South Asian Studies.

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City in North India

Author : Michael S. Dodson
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000051366
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City in North India by : Michael S. Dodson

Download or read book Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City in North India written by Michael S. Dodson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a re-evaluation of modern urbanism and architecture and a history of urbanism, architecture, and local identity in colonial north India at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on Banaras and Jaunpur, two of northern India’s most traditional cities, the book examines the workings of colonial bureaucracy in the cities and argues that interactions with the colonial state were an integral aspect of the ways that Indians created a sense of their own personal investment in the city in which they lived. The book explores the every-day and the mundane to better understand the limits of British colonial power, and the role of Indians themselves, in the making of the modern city. Based on highly localized archival source material, the author analyses two key aspects of city-making in this era: the building of new infrastructure, such as water supply and sewerage, and new policies governing historical architectural conservation. The book also incorporates an ethnography of contemporary urban space in these cities to advocate for a more nuanced and responsible approach to writing the history of such cities and to address the myriad problems of present-day north Indian urbanism. Containing examples of bureaucratic procedure and its contradictions and enlivened by a set of personal reflections and narratives of the author's own experiences, this book is a valuable addition to the field of South Asian Studies, Asian History and Asian Culture and Society, Colonial History and Urban History.

Marginalities and Mobilities among India’s Muslims

Author : Tanweer Fazal
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000901947
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis Marginalities and Mobilities among India’s Muslims by : Tanweer Fazal

Download or read book Marginalities and Mobilities among India’s Muslims written by Tanweer Fazal and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-19 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies how marginality impacts the everyday lives of Indian Muslims. It challenges the prevailing myths and stereotypes through which Indian Muslims have come to be seen in the popular imagination. The volume engages with questions of citizenship, collective violence, and issues of civil and criminal jurisprudence. It explores the linkages between development, marginality, and citizenship – the three critical issues for modern democracies today. Going beyond the singular narrative of a community on a continuous slide, the chapters in this volume present diversities of the Muslim experience of exclusion and participation. It discusses themes such as violence and marginality among minorities; Indian Muslims and the ghettoized economy; employment aspirations of low-income Muslim men; intergenerational social mobility of Muslims; the nature of the middle class; and the question of Islam, development, and globalization to showcase the living conditions of Muslims in India. Part of the Religion and Citizenship series, this timely volume will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of political studies, sociology, political sociology, minority studies, public policy, religion, citizenship studies, diversity and inclusion studies, and social anthropology.

Religion and Urbanism

Author : Yamini Narayanan
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317755421
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (177 download)

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Book Synopsis Religion and Urbanism by : Yamini Narayanan

Download or read book Religion and Urbanism written by Yamini Narayanan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conceptions of 'sustainable cities' in the pluralistic and multireligious urban settlements of developing nations need to develop out of local cultural, religious and historical contexts to be inclusive and accurately respond to the needs of the poor, ethnic and religious minorities, and women. Religion and Urbanism contributes to an expanded understanding of 'sustainable cities' in South Asia by demonstrating the multiple, and often conflicting ways in which religion enables or challenges socially equitable and ecologically sustainable urbanisation in the region. In particular, this collection focuses on two aspects that must inform the sustainable cities discourse in South Asia: the intersections of religion and urban heritage, and religion and various aspects of informality. This book makes a much-needed contribution to the nexus between religion and urban planning for researchers, postgraduate students and policy makers in Sustainable Development, Development Studies, Urban Studies, Religious Studies, Asian Studies, Heritage Studies and Urban and Religious Geography.

Studies in Religion and the Everyday

Author : Farhana Ibrahim
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198902786
Total Pages : 401 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (989 download)

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Book Synopsis Studies in Religion and the Everyday by : Farhana Ibrahim

Download or read book Studies in Religion and the Everyday written by Farhana Ibrahim and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-22 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies in Religion and the Everyday is a collection of essays addressing the contours of religious beliefs and practices in the context of everyday life in India. Events and processes in contemporary India--especially post the 1990s--have contributed to distinct modes of articulating religious practices. This volume is an attempt to historicize--and problematize--the categorization of religion as a universally held and analytically distinct feature of human life and seeks to understand the conditions--historical, political, discursive--and processes of authorization under which a particular set of practices, values, and dispositions constitutes the 'religious' at a specific point in time. By bringing together studies that draw from diverse methodological and epistemological approaches, the book will serve as a useful introduction to religion in India for the general reader and as an indispensable resource for students and researchers. The volume presents fresh perspectives on existing fields of study such as the city, capital, minorities, secularization, and the state--no longer seen as distinct from religion but actively co-produced with religion in the context of the theoretical rubric of the everyday--thereby marking a departure from approaching the question of religion solely through the lens of identity and conflict.

Waiting for Swaraj

Author : Aparna Vaidik
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009032380
Total Pages : 245 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (9 download)

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Book Synopsis Waiting for Swaraj by : Aparna Vaidik

Download or read book Waiting for Swaraj written by Aparna Vaidik and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in British India of the 1920s, Waiting for Swaraj follows the cadence and tempo of the lives of the intrepid revolutionaries of the Hindustan Republican Association and the Hindustan Republican Socialist Association who challenged the British Raj. It seeks to comprehend the revolutionaries' self-conception - what did it mean to be a revolutionary? How did a revolutionary live out the vision of revolution, what was their everyday like, did life in revolution transform an individual, what was their truth and how was it different from that of the others? The book locates the essence of being a revolutionary not just in the spectacular moments when the revolutionaries threw a bomb or carried out a political assassination, but in the everyday conversations, banter, anecdotes, and in the stray fragments of the life in underground. It demonstrates how 'waiting' was the crucible that forged a revolutionary.

Cultural Heritage Ethics

Author : Constantine Sandis
Publisher : Open Book Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1783740671
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (837 download)

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Book Synopsis Cultural Heritage Ethics by : Constantine Sandis

Download or read book Cultural Heritage Ethics written by Constantine Sandis and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2014-10-13 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theory without practice is empty, practice without theory is blind, to adapt a phrase from Immanuel Kant. The sentiment could not be truer of cultural heritage ethics. This intra-disciplinary book bridges the gap between theory and practice by bringing together a stellar cast of academics, activists, consultants, journalists, lawyers, and museum practitioners, each contributing their own expertise to the wider debate of what cultural heritage means in the twenty-first century. Cultural Heritage Ethics provides cutting-edge arguments built on case studies of cultural heritage and its management in a range of geographical and cultural contexts. Moreover, the volume feels the pulse of the debate on heritage ethics by discussing timely issues such as access, acquisition, archaeological practice, curatorship, education, ethnology, historiography, integrity, legislation, memory, museum management, ownership, preservation, protection, public trust, restitution, human rights, stewardship, and tourism. This volume is neither a textbook nor a manifesto for any particular approach to heritage ethics, but a snapshot of different positions and approaches that will inspire both thought and action. Cultural Heritage Ethics provides invaluable reading for students and teachers of philosophy of archaeology, history and moral philosophy – and for anyone interested in the theory and practice of cultural preservation.

Fiction as History

Author : Vasudha Dalmia
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 1438476051
Total Pages : 460 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Book Synopsis Fiction as History by : Vasudha Dalmia

Download or read book Fiction as History written by Vasudha Dalmia and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains the Hindi novel’s role in anticipating and creating the story of middle-class modernity and modernization in North India. Vasudha Dalmia offers a panoramic view of the intellectual and cultural life of North India over a century, from the aftermath of the 1857 uprising to the end of the Nehruvian era. The North’s historical cities, rooted in an Indo-Persianate culture, began changing more slowly than the Presidency towns founded by the British. Dalmia takes up eight canonical Hindi novels set in six of these cities—Agra, Allahabad, Banaras, Delhi, Lahore, and Lucknow—to trace a literary history of domestic and political cataclysms. Her exploration of the emerging Hindu middle classes, changing personal and professional ambitions, and new notions of married life provides a vivid sense of urban modernity. She argues that the radical social transformations associated with post-1857 urban restructuring, and the political flux resulting from social reform, Gandhian nationalism, communalism, Partition, and the Cold War shaped the realm of the intimate as much as the public sphere. Love and friendship, notions of privacy, attitudes to women’s work, and relationships within households are among the book’s major themes.

Spaces of Religion in Urban South Asia

Author : István Keul
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000331490
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (3 download)

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Book Synopsis Spaces of Religion in Urban South Asia by : István Keul

Download or read book Spaces of Religion in Urban South Asia written by István Keul and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores religion in various spatial constellations in South Asian cities, including religious centres such as Varanasi, Madurai and Nanded, and cities not readily associated with religion, such as Mumbai and Delhi. Contributors from different disciplines discuss a large variety of urban spaces: physical and imagined, institutional and residential, built and landscaped, virtual and mediatised, historical and contemporary. In doing so, the book addresses a wide range of issues concerning the role of religion in the dynamic interplay of factors which characterise complex urban social spaces. Chapters incorporate varying degrees and forms of the religious/spiritual, ranging from invisible and incorporeal to material and explicit, embedded in and expressed as spatial politics, works of fiction, mission, pilgrimage, festivals and everyday life. Topics examined include conflictual situations involving places of worship in Delhi, inclusive religious practices in Kanpur, American Protestant mission in Madurai, the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday in Lahore, gardens as imaginative spaces, the politics of religion in Varanasi and many others. Illustrating and analysing ways and forms in which religion persists in South Asian urban contexts, this book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of cultural studies, the study of religions, urban studies and South Asian studies.

The Algebra of Warfare-Welfare

Author : Irfan Ahmad
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199097534
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (99 download)

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Book Synopsis The Algebra of Warfare-Welfare by : Irfan Ahmad

Download or read book The Algebra of Warfare-Welfare written by Irfan Ahmad and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-24 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Electoral democracy combines the ideas and practices of warfare and welfare, where both work in tandem as near synonyms. India’s robust electoral democracy exemplifies this combination in diverse forms. Critically analysing the 2014 Parliamentary elections beyond the seduction of immediacy and bare cold statistics, this book puts human subjectivity at the centre of election studies and, through an anthropological–sociological approach, makes lives—human and non-human, lived and unlived or unlivable—central to any understanding of elections and democracy. Crafting a new, comprehensive approach, this volume looks at the 2014 elections in relation to the changing nature and forms of elections and democracy globally. Coming from multidisciplinary backgrounds, the contributors to this volume use ethnographic observations to open up a space for new theoretical and methodological reflections on the role of media in Indian elections, the shift to the right in 2014 and its consequences, the significance of traditional Hindu spaces such as the river Ganga in BJP’s victory, the role of gurus like Baba Ramdev, and the electoral choices available to and exercised by the minorities, among others.

Kaleidoscope City

Author : Piers Moore Ede
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 162040558X
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (24 download)

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Book Synopsis Kaleidoscope City by : Piers Moore Ede

Download or read book Kaleidoscope City written by Piers Moore Ede and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situated on the left bank of the Ganges, in the state of Uttar Pradash, Varanasi is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. For Hindus there is nowhere more sacred; for Buddhists, it is revered as a place where the Buddha preached his first sermon; for Jains it is the birthplace of their two patriarchs. Over the last four thousand years, perhaps no city in the world has stood witness to such a flux of history, from the development of Aryan culture along the Ganges, to invasions that would leave the city in Muslim hands for three centuries, to an independent Brahmin kingdom, British colonial rule, and ultimately independence. But what is the city like today? Home to 2.5 million people, it is visited by twice that number every year. Polluted, overpopulated, religiously divided, but utterly sublime, Varanasi is a living expression of Indian life like no other. Each day 60,000 people bathe in the Ganges. Elderly people come to die here. Widows pushed out by their families arrive to find livelihood. In the city center, the silk trade remains the most important industry, along with textiles and the processing of betel leaf. Behind this facade lurk more sinister industries. Varanasi is a major player in the international drug scene. There's a thriving flesh trade, and a corrupt police force that turns a blind eye. As with Suketu Mehta's Maximimum City Piers Moore Ede tells the city's story by allowing inhabitants to relate their own tales. Whether portraying a Dom Raja whose role it is to cremate bodies by the Ganghes or a khoa maker, who carefully converts cow's milk into the ricotta like substance that forms the base of most sweets, Ede explores the city's most important themes through its people, creating a vibrant portrait of modern, multicultural India.