ABSTRACT
The politics of religious intolerance and fundamentalism has in recent times posed a worldwide challenge to inter-cultural harmony and peace. India is no exception to this trend. Although credited as a showcase of ethnic pluralism and heterodoxy of religious life, it has not escaped the scourge of communal and ethnic violence. Nonetheless India’s varied experience of dealing with cultural and religious identities offers instructive insights to understand the problems of inter-community peace and reconciliation. Drawing from India’s overarching perspectives to accommodate plural
identities, this chapter focuses on the historical and current instances of communal peace in the holy city of Banaras.2 While tracing the unique lineage of communal rapport in Banaras where the pre-colonial multi-religious synergy is still vibrant, the chapter benchmarks the terrorist bombing of a sacred temple in March 2006, which posed an unprecedented provocation to communal harmony in the city. Amid the serious premonitions of communal violence, the people of Banaras showed remarkable inter-community understanding and forestalled any outbreak of frenzy. This case analysis, based in part on our fieldwork insights, has untangled some typical instances of peaceful civic engagement in Banaras to discover whether the city is uniquely poised towards peaceful communal coexistence, unlike in comparable cases of intimate communal relations. Such city-based analysis might identify the convergence and divergence between the peaceful and riot-prone cities, which face similar national and global provocations.3
