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 is a city where socio-cultural life is virtually a male domain. It is also a city of widows and saris. Widows represent the underside of Brahminical Hindu patriarchal culture, which makes a woman pay a heavy price for surviving her husband. Banaras is also the city of Kabir, the Julaha philosopher par excellence who, through the imagery and symbolism of tana-bana in his compositions, lifted the ordinary artisan to sublime levels. The Bhakti movement, of which Kabir was a leading figure, constituting the self-conscious articulation of the subaltern castes and groups in the 14th and 15th centuries, was also margin-alised in this ‘grand narrative’ of a Hindu Banaras.
