ABSTRACT
Banaras is a collage of very disparate and contrary images. It has been a city of temples from time immemorial. It is also a city where people go to die, to achieve salvation in the next life. It is a city where death and the sacred constitute an industry. It has been constructed and represented as the quintessential Hindu city, its antiquity going back to the mists of history, but Banaras’s reality is segmented with many components, each inhabiting separate compartments, and yet contributing and partaking of the whole.
