Resurrecting Banaras: Urban space, architecture and religious boundaries.

摘要

This dissertation examines the intersection of religious nationalism and the built environment in the context of an individual city, Banaras, in northern India from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. This urban landscape was created both materially as well as discursively by indigenous Hindu elite, as a physical manifestation of a revivalist religious agenda. Inspired chiefly by Sanskrit religious texts on the city, and shaped largely by the opportunities and limitations of colonial rule, the construction of its sacred landscape turned Banaras into a center of revived Hindu ritual life. A newly constructed material environment of temples, wharves and ritual bathing tanks was simultaneously represented as antique in indigenous pilgrimage maps and religious literature and as evidence of the city's timelessness in orientalist paintings, texts and memoirs. Combining a wide spectrum of archival material including colonial administrative documents, colonial and indigenous travel writings, maps, guidebooks, pictorial representations and magazine and newspaper articles, the ways in which Hindu Banal as was created and represented, are analyzed.; Each topical chapter addresses all aspect of this urban regeneration including the discourse on the city resulting from the juxtaposition of mosque and temple at various sites, the making and merging of historical and mythical narratives, the creation of various forms of public space through which identities were mediated, the intersection of spatial production and its representations and the fabrication of a Hindu architecture. Drawing from postcolonial theory and architectural and urban history, the study debunks the notion of Banaras being an eternal city and examines its construction as the epicenter of Hindu ritual practice in a historical context. The city's remaking was closely allied with the methods and modalities of colonial rule, with the colonial government regulating its physical and discursive regeneration. Thus, at another level, this study reinterprets the making of indigenous urban environments in the context of their dialogue with colonialism.