ABSTRACT
Banaras served as a key location in attempts made by the British colonial state to reorder the meaningfulness of the Indian urban landscape. The state sought to transform the cityscape into a sort of narrative construction encompassing spaces of modernity and non-modernity, linked only by the transformative presence of British governance. But equally, the modernity of Banaras was being carved into the city through exemplars of historical space, and through the fixing of a network of symbolic antiquarian sites which served to consolidate an emerging colonial narrative of the city’s British and even pre-British history. Importantly, distinctions of modernity and non-modernity were fundamental even to western writers who in key contexts had avowed the essential validity, and even desirability, of global cultural difference. Rendering Banaras a physical space of modernity was an exercise in both addition to, and subtraction from, landscape, constituted by large- (and small-) scale demolition and the building of new structures which signified particular European civilizational qualities.
