Intimate Encounters With Unmappable, Unforgettable Places

At Tulsi Ghat, Varanasi, she holds on to her mother’s ashes and stares at the river shimmering before her. Memories of their previous family visit wash over her. She finds herself standing still, absorbing the choreography of chaos that is modern-day Varanasi. The smoke, the dogs, the rotten flowers, the floating diyas, the many shades of animal excreta. She remembers her mother encouraging her father, a poet, to relocate to Banaras, where he could write his poetry by the banks of Ganga like Tulsidas.

Six years later, she returns to the same cacophony with octogenarian historian and researcher Linda Hess. Too much had changed by then. It’s no longer the old Varanasi, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi has represented in Parliament since 2014. Humble temples have been replaced by huge concrete structures. Security guards and blazing lights are everywhere. Serene morning prayers have been turned into public performances and aartis into cheap spectacles.

“The city, known by its formal name, Varanasi, is literally not even Banaras when seen in its avatar as Modi's seat in Parliament,” writes Ananya Vajpeyi in her new book, Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities. “Typically (for him), he has built a ghat at a far end of the river from Assi called NaMo Ghat, after his own initials.”

The redevelopment that has since taken place under the project named 'Kashi Vishwanath Corridor' is being perceived as decisive in changing the city's historical geography. The entire area consisting of lanes, houses, ghats and shops around the Vishwanath temple complex and the Gyanvapi mosque that abutts its boundary wall is being redone.

To Vajpeyi, this makeover “has the imprimatur of the Modi government's authoritarian ambitions” and “bespeak fascist hubris rather than human scale.” A conscious attempt to wipe out “all traces of Muslim history from Banaras and, most importantly, asserting the demographic, cultural, and political dominance of the majority community" becomes evident. Both Hess and Vajpeyi mourn the loss of the city that once had a spine.

In Place, Vajpeyi studies the world like observing a million lines crisscrossing an elderly woman’s face—every city commemorates unique lines of wisdom and pain. For 25 years, she has explored 13 cities across India, Europe and the United States through the lens of history, literature and personal experiences. Wherever she goes, she stops not only for the touristy pleasures but also for collecting life-affirming friends and investigating her personal journey against the world’s pain points. Bombed, threatened, maimed, and killed—she documents how war changes entire peoples, geographies and belief systems.

There are three cities that Vajpeyi can call home, and they melt away and morph into alien geographies before her eyes—New York, Delhi and Istanbul. New York is where she began to dream of being a writer, as a pivot from her lifelong scholarly work. She knew every nook and cranny and celebrated every spectacle that emerged in her life as she walked long distances with an Orhan Pamuk or W.G. Sebald book in her arms.

However, she also happened to be there during the 9/11 attacks. From a city that had been a continuous inspiration to her, New York became a timid reflection of itself, one that was forever tainted with terror, one that eternally sought revenge on the world after that. Her question reverberates across the entirety of the book: “How much vengeance is enough? Baghdad? Kabul? Gaza?”

Delhi continued to be the author’s origin story—it is where she grew up, under the careful tutelage of her father, a Hindi poet, whose finest literary achievements include a one-on-one meeting and conversation with playwright and visionary Samuel Beckett. Here, she starts to listen to qawwali seriously, rediscovering Amir Khusrau, the beacon of Persian literature in India. In her research, she is exposed to the dominant misogyny at the very foundation of Sanskrit. She is horrified at the deep-rooted casteism that has falsely elevated the 'mother of all languages', thus tainting the entire linguistic progeny. At the end, she is convinced that the language is not dying but committing slow suicide.

It is in India where she feels the historical effects of the West's wars on West Asia, one that has injected poison into the veins of the world. “Like bombs. Like bombs above Baghdad, Gulf War on CNN, America bombing Iraq then, now, again. Always.” With the help of scholarly friends like Ashis Nandy and John Vaillant and the aid of the Indian epic the Mahabharata, she stumbles upon the realisation that wars end the world as we know it. Just like entire clans were erased in the ancient war, the world is erased after Gaza and Palestine. There really is no looking back.

Place is a meditative book that is meant to be taken in slowly. It is not a travelogue or a light “10 things to do when in X” listicle. It integrates emotion with geography, infrastructure with violence, and institutions with power.

For example, the author chooses to visit Mumbai’s Shivaji Park on December 6, 2013, on the death anniversary of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. She discovers that while there is no official national holiday, every year, huge crowds of Dalits gather to celebrate the occasion. This causes a temporary exodus of the locals. The fact that casteism is very much alive is exposed when the owner of a makeshift shop says, “The locals don’t like our people to flood this place. They see us coming and clear out immediately. They don’t want to do business with us.”

Years later, when the author returns to the same spot, it has been overtaken by a huge establishment, a memorial for Ambedkar. Strangely, it doesn’t feel the same. She feels the same way she felt when she was visiting the grand Kashi Vishwanath esplanade in Varanasi, where a humble idol has now been decimated, almost erased under the immensity of architectural muscle flexing.

The book ends at Varanasi, almost like the close of a pilgrimage. The author is back there, facing the dirty waters of the Ganga, contending with religious fanaticism. Back to the noisy memories of her half-clad parents jumping into the holy waters, back to where the taste of childhood still lingers.

Place is ultimately a testimony to cities that devolve, disappear, and reappear as altered landscapes—mutated, estranged and haunted by the histories they can no longer hold.

Sreemanti Sengupta is a freelance writer, poet and editor