Varanasi

For Heritage as Placemaking, Sasanka Perera and Pooja Kalita study Varanasi as a site that has held immense significance for Hindu and Buddhist communities alike. This site has not only been considered a vital part of ‘Indian’ heritage, but is also popularly perceived as a location that binds different transnational communities together.

Sasanka Perera examines how this site becomes important to Buddhists through an active process of placemaking as well as via the interventions of different state interests. Varanasi is a key site for Buddhists because they believe it to be the place where the Buddha delivered his first sermon in 528 BCE.  But the past is not the only factor playing a role in making the cultural and spatial personality of Varanasi. Different countries bring their own cultural practices to Varanasi, as they do to Bodh Gaya, through pilgrim travel and practices. Thus, Perera’s goal is to understand the ways in which different ‘national’ interests of pilgrims and governments, along with the institutions they set up, play a lasting role in their own imagination of the place. In this way, the research will see how Varanasi is ‘nationalized’ by different people at the intersection of placemaking and bureaucratic practices.

A crucial aspect of Pooja Kalita’s project is looking at cultural practices at Varanasi through the lens of gender: as various transnational communities interact among themselves as pilgrims, tourists, explorers, state agents, etc., gender performance remains neither static nor unilinear. However, the contemporary politics in India makes Varanasi even more crutial to study, as we witness the simultaneous erasure and emergence of ‘new’ heritage in this political milieu, which often negates as well as creates certain histories and mythologies.