Space-Body-Ritual: Performativity in the City

Space–Body–Ritual Space–Body–Ritual Performativity in the City Reena Tiwari LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & ...

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Space–Body–Ritual

Space–Body–Ritual Performativity in the City

Reena Tiwari

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tiwari, Reena, 1964– Space-body-ritual : performativity in the city / Reena Tiwari. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-2857-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4763-4 (electronic) 1. City and town life—India—Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh : District) 2. Sociology, Urban—India—Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh : District) 3. Public spaces—India—Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh : District) 4. Spatial behavior—India—Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh : District) 5. Human body—Social aspects—India—Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh : District) 6. Human body—Symbolic aspects—India—Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh : District) 7. Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh, India : District)—Social life and customs. I. Title. HT147.I5T59 2010 307.760954'2—dc22 2010011841

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

List of Figures and Table

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Performativity in Cities

1

Chapter 1

I Am a Rhythmanalyst

7

Chapter 2

Contextualizing Space–Body–Ritual

13

Chapter 3

Contextualizing City and the Body

21

Part I: Constructing Lived Space

39

Chapter 4

Varanasi—A View from Afar

41

Chapter 5

Varanasi as a Spectacle

49

Chapter 6

Body Performance and the Construction of Lived Space in Varanasi

59

Part II: The Nature of Lived Space

69

Chapter 7

Memory and the Lived Experience

71

Chapter 8

Spatializing Memories through Performance in Varanasi

79

v

vi

Contents

Part III: Mapping Lived Space

101

Chapter 9

Mapping a City

103

Chapter 10

Constructing Ritualized Maps of Varanasi

109

Conclusion: Performativity and Lived Space

137

References

145

Index

153

About the Author

157

Figures and Table

Figures 3.1. 5.1. 5.2. 5.3. 5.4. 6.1. 8.1. 8.2. 8.3.

State of Liminality Locating Manikarnika in Varanasi From Above—Construction of the “Other” In the Lane Below—Construction of Self From the River Edge—The Tourist’s View Constructing Lived Space by Body Movements Nati-Imli—An “Everyday” Urban Space Lived Space in the Process of Construction Construction of Lived Space through an Interplay of Textual and Physical Space 8.4. Constructing Lived Space 8.5. Movement in Space 10.1. Tracings A 10.2. Tracings B 10.3. Tracings C 10.4. Tracings D 10.5. Tracings E 10.6. Pilgrim Map 10.7. Inside Outside 10.8. Space Divided 10.9. Map A—At the Periphery 10.10. Traces of the Past vii

30 50 52 54 55 61 83 85 86 89 97 114 115 115 116 116 119 120 121 122 124

viii

10.11. 10.12. 10.13. 10.14. 10.15. 10.16. 10.17. 10.18. 10.19. 10.20. 10.21.

Figures and Table

Freehand Sketch of Yantra Map B—At the Center Mappings Two Mappings Two Mappings Two Mappings Two Mappings Two Mappings Two Mappings Two Mappings Two Mappings Two

125 127 130 130 131 131 132 132 133 133 134

Table 3.1.

Space Triad

32

Acknowledgments

The fire: what one cannot extinguish in this trace among others that is a cinder . . . No doubt the fire has withdrawn, the conflagration has been subdued, but if cinder there is, it is because the fire remains in retreat. . . . Cinder remains, cinder there is, which we can translate: the cinder is not, is not what is. It remains from what is not, in order to recall at the delicate, charred bottom of itself only non-being or non-presence. (Derrida 1991, p. 61, p. 39)

This work remains as a cinder. It remains from what is not there anymore, those moments containing my performativities and experiences in the city of Varanasi; those moments filled with illuminating questions from my informants in Varanasi; those moments of innumerable discussions with my colleagues and constant encouragement from friends; those moments of love and support from my family, my parents; and, of course, those precious moments that I journeyed with my little daughter Charlene, whose coming into this world marked the commencement of this work. My work, as a cinder, lets me feel the warmth of those moments. The cinder is not the word, it is not the letter, but what preceded it; and what precedes the letter has already been burned. (Lukacher 1991, p. 11)

My work, as a cinder, remains as a story to be told, of what has preceded it, of what has been burnt, and that which was destined for the fire. My deepest thanks to all those people who led me into experiencing those moments—those transgressive, liminal experiences—which are not there

ix

x

Acknowledgments

anymore. Only the remainder remains—the cinder—to let one feel the bygone moments. The ideas in this work have been drawn from many sources, from architecture and urban studies, from religion and literature, from anthropology and philosophy, and from personal experiences. Thanks to Caesar Chong and Christopher Kueh for providing valuable assistance with creating images and collages. I would like to thank Dr. Rana P. B. Singh of Benares Hindu University for guiding me into the immense literature on Varanasi. Thanks also go to the people of Varanasi, and especially to Krishna Kant Shukla, for showing me those multitude of sadhus’ ashramas, those cremation ghats with open burning pyres in the middle of the night, and those narrow back lanes, those tiny hubs of activities in the city, often hidden and invisible for an outsider, but where the everyday life of the Varanasi people unfolded. “Everyday” giving rise to this work has been shared with my husband Vini, who has been a collegial and sustaining presence and who has read this work with a critical, editorial eye, and Lalima, whose ongoing queries about the completion date provided me with a stimulus to draw this work to a close.

INTRODUCTION

Performativity in Cities

As death approached, Baiju was placed on the ground . . . in accordance with the general rule amongst Hindus. . . to die in one’s bed endangers one’s chances of salvation. The eldest son then whispered the name of Lord Siva in his ears . . . [T]he barber carried the news of death to all the relatives, and preparation for the antayesti (last rites) began. Baiju’s body was placed at the threshold in the north/south direction, with his head facing the south. . . . The corpse was stripped of all its clothes, shaved, and washed with water from the sacred Ganga, and was dressed in a new white loin cloth. . . . The corpse was then placed on a stretcher made of bamboos. The son of the deceased and three other men shoulder[ed] the stretcher to the cremation ghat . . . relatives accompanying the corpse chanted Ram naam satya hai [Ram’s name is the eternal truth]. (Kaushik 1993, pp. 126-127)

The procession reached Manikarnika, the Great Cremation Ground in the city of Varanasi, India. Manikarnika—where it is believed that Lord Shiva himself resides and utters chants in the ears of the dead so that the soul is liberated. Manikarnika—where it is believed that all three bodies—the causal, astral and physical—are burnt, an event that happens in no other cremation ground in India (Eck 1982). Manikarnika—which is believed to be the place of two opposites, of creation and destruction (Parry 1994). At the ghat the body was placed at the edge of the river, for a final immersion. . . . The corpse was then placed on the pyre. . . . Before lighting the pyre, the chief mourner bathed. . . . He then circumambulated around the pyre, anticlockwise. . . . When the body was half burnt, sesame, and sandalwood were 1

2

Introduction

put in the fire. At this point the women left the ghat. . . . When the body was fully cremated, the chief mourner extinguished the pyre. . . . poured water over his back . . . and proceeded forward without looking back. . . . The chief mourner then bathed and with his wet clothes proceeded home, where he touched four items . . . before he entered the threshold of his house. (Kaushik 1993, pp. 126-127)

The sequence of this death ritual reveals a relationship between spaces, rituals, and bodies. The body involved in the ritual marks out the internal and the external spaces within the city, the spaces within the built form and those that are external to it. By its actions, the body also makes the private spaces of dwellings distinct from the public domain, the streets and squares of the city. It emphasizes the thresholds or the transitional spaces between the private and public domain. The socially and culturally constructed bodies perform, and construct Manikarnika. These undergo a process of transformation while engaged in the acts, both everyday and extra-everyday (Turner 1982). For these performing bodies, Manikarnika is, therefore, not simply a ground for cremation, but represents the Hindu idea of death where death is seen as a movement from the material world to a more fundamental level of existence—that of Being (Kaushik 1993). Death is thought to be a device that guides movement into the ultimate, real realm. The death ritual makes the survivor recognize the transitory nature of the material world (Kaushik 1993). Manikarnika, where rituals of death take place, therefore becomes a space for transcending from one world to another. This movement is a “movement in Quality Space” (Fernandez 1982, p. 410). “Quality” in a space defined by architectural structures is the result of three things. Firstly, it is defined by the nature of the structure and the activities that occur in that space. Secondly, the space reflects personal mental images and can also contain mythical and cosmic images. Finally, the architectural space is such that it can place the body in relation to the cosmos (Fernandez 1982). Manikarnika represents this “Quality Space” involving a relationship between space, body, and ritual. The space, both public and private, is not seen as something exterior to the body, but becomes an integral part of the performing body. If the creative space of architecture is reduced to some abstract (rational) formula of “redoing simple plans and strong elevations” then there is no possibility for architecture. . . . Is the urban realm to be reduced to a nullity by these heartless materialists and technocrats (capitalists)? (Dubost and Gonthier 1996)


3

Has the modern, rational, capitalist space been stripped of its spiritual element in the current practice of architecture? Has the capacity of architecture to place the body in relation to the cosmos been lost? This book is an exploration of the relationship between architectural space and the body. It intends to develop an extensive and holistic understanding of how the body, along with its social, physical, and mental dimensions, inhabits, constructs, and represents a city and its spaces.1 The three processes of inhabiting, constructing and representing urban space are not viewed as distinct and separate from each other, but rather as overlapping and having simultaneous meanings. Thus, the approach is holistic in two ways. Firstly, it puts an end to the dichotomy between the mind and the physical body. Secondly, the notion of space is developed in its entirety because the processes of inhabiting, constructing and representing space are seen as influencing and relating to each other. With the development of the science of perspective around the fifteenth century there was a shift in urban discourse that led to a new way of viewing space, a view that was abstract and neutral with no relation whatsoever to the body except the eye. This view of space started influencing the way space was experienced and represented with a visual emphasis. There has been a considerable swing from this view in contemporary urban discourse where the notion of space as the space of lived experience has gained prominence. This theoretical shift has been led by Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Edward Soja, among others. For example, in The Production of Space, Lefebvre develops the notion of space as “perceived,” “conceived,” and “lived” (1991b, p. 40). The sensory space is the perceived space. Mental space, or the space imagined, is conceived space. These two moments of space are reconciled by living space through the body and that is when the embedded social dimensions are rendered visible. “The whole of the (social) space proceeds from the body. . . . Within the body itself, spatially considered, the successive levels constituted by the senses (from the sense of smell to sight, treated as different within a differentiated field) prefigures the layers of social space and their interconnections” (Lefebvre 1991b, p. 405). The body while living the space is able to construct and understand the social layers within it. Lived experience results in a holistic realization encompassing the physical, mental, and social aspects of space. Building on Lefebvre’s works, Soja introduced the notion of “Thirdspace” in Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. This third space is “an-Other” way of conceptualizing space that extends and recombines the physical, material space with the space imagined, by living the space (1996, p. 5). In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau

4

Introduction

compares the meaning of the city understood by living in the city by inscribing personal itineraries in space, to the meaning grasped by the planners’ bird’s-eye viewpoint (de Certeau 1988).2 The planner’s understanding of the city developed due to this far-away approach is necessarily objectified and abstract, and thereby often overlooks the everyday realities of living in a city. In contrast, by occupying the everyday spaces, one is able to read the “real” text. The text is real for the users of the space, as it is written by the users themselves, through their “narrative footsteps” (de Certeau 1988, pp. 122-149). Walter Benjamin’s writings focus on these “narrative footsteps.” He understands the city by being a “flâneur,” a street prowler who moves with crowds. His essay Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, analyzes spatial activities with respect to the “figures” of the modern metropolis: the prostitute and the flâneur among others. His writings uncover the desires, anxieties, myths, and mysteries of street life that are the “realities” of the “everyday” (Benjamin 1986). There has been an intense discussion on cities and their relationship to bodies (Steve Pile, Joseph Rykwert, Elizabeth Grosz, and others). There has also been a lot of work towards the exploration of “lived space” (Edward Soja, Neil Leach and others). There are writings on performance and cities (Benjamin Rossiter, Katherine Gibson, Richard Schechner and others). As an architect, urban designer, educator, and a trained classical dancer, I perceive a gap between the works done in these areas of Bodies, Performances, Space, and Cities. There is no recent comprehensive work that offers ways of reading, experiencing, understanding, and representing cities through bodies engaged in rituals and performances, where the notion of lived space becomes of utmost importance. This book addresses the overlapping concerns of space, performance, the city, ritual, and the body. I propose that an understanding of the “city as body” through lived experience—through rhythmanalysis, where rhythms of everyday and extraeveryday practices are understood—leads to the design of an environment that is evocative and is able to generate a bodily response from the user. To understand the rhythms it becomes essential to know the way users understand and map or represent the city spaces by their bodies because the users’ maps unravel and make visible the invisible world of “experience,” of non-verbal communication. Lefebvre’s notion of “right to the city” is about empowering the users of the space (Lefebvre 1996). It is also about spatializing the practices of everyday life in city spaces. A new urban politics, that of the urban inhabitants’ right to participate and appropriate urban spaces, has to be understood (Purcell 2002).


5

Set against the contemporary thinking of the city as a spectacle—a spectacle of the politics of pleasure and physical senses—this book establishes everyday life in the city as a ground for authentic experience. Forces of globalization have made questions on authenticity in the everyday all the more critical. I emphasize the city as a space of lived experience—an intricate space giving people a poetic experience, responding to their memories and desires. After contextualizing space-body-ritual and providing an overview of the ways of reading and understanding city spaces historically, three key aspects of lived space are discussed in parts I, II and III. These aspects are the construction of lived space, the nature of lived space, and the way in which lived space is represented or mapped. They are dealt with by examining rituals occurring in the public domain. Both everyday and “extra-everyday” rituals are examined. The extra-everyday rituals cover festivals and rituals related to life phases. Rituals are extensively covered with respect to the scale of space in which they occur. Parts I and II focus on individual urban spaces while part III discusses spatial configuration through bodily rituals of an entire city. These three parts detail specific aspects of Henri Lefebvre’s writings: Lefebvre’s model of the production of space, his notion that the “everyday” can be glimpsed within the “extra-everyday” acts and finally exploration of “rhythmanalysis” as a tool for mapping bodies on cities. There is a need for careful design of public spaces by creating opportunities for “performativities” in everyday spaces of the city—its streets and squares. An attempt is made here to explore ways in which a designed environment can evoke a bodily response and become a ground for practices, both everyday and extra-everyday, to identify the parameters of spatial design that can act as cultural generator. A need to construct scenarios or programs, and design conditions for triggering performativities by reorganizing spatial elements is discussed, so that our experience involves engaging with events that are structured and enhanced through architecture. The notion of the city as a place of multitude rhythms, constantly changing and overlapping through our everyday encounters, is emphasized.

Notes 1. A holistic approach is one that puts an end to dichotomies like nature-culture, individual-community, mind-body etc., so that we have “a whole person, not mind/ body; families, not fragmented individuals . . . art where we are, not in museums far

6

Introduction

away.” R. Schechner (1988). Performance Theory. New York; London, Routledge, p. 39. 2. The technique of observation and analysis from a bird’s-eye viewpoint is a way of inscribing power ideologies in the city. M. de Certeau (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley; Los Angeles, University of California Press.

CHAPTER ONE


I engage with the traditional Indian city of Varanasi to un-layer its performative impulses. Through bodily rituals and performances in Varanasi an extensive understanding is developed of the ways in which lived space is constructed and can be represented. The construction and representation of space is influenced by the way the body is constructed and represented socially: it may be a gendered body constructing a gendered space through its rituals, or it may be an “empowered” body injecting the space with the idea of power. Thus, bodies involved in a wide range of rituals are examined. The exploration of spatial construction and its representation through bodies engaged in rituals is not limited to observations based on other people’s experiences. It includes my experiences while engaged in the same rituals. Being an expatriate Indian, born and brought up in India, my study and interpretation of Varanasi is from the standpoint of one who is close enough to understand its people, culture, and traditions, and who is also close enough to Western academic traditions to position this work within an east-west context. Varanasi is lived by me as an insider and as a woman for a considerable length of time. This way of investigating city spaces by bodily rituals sometimes involves mimetically engaging with the spaces leading to a liminal state when I too play a role in the construction and representation of these spaces. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) makes an important contribution towards the way the “east” has been studied and interpreted by Western academics. Said revealed the Orient to be a fantastic image projected by the

7

8

Chapter One

Occident. The Orient was seen as a European invention in the form of texts and illustrations. Thus, Said refers to the “otherness” of the Orient in the majority of works by Western scholars on the “east.” Sibel Bozdogan (1988) puts forward two ways of looking and representing the Orient. The first approach is “historically rooted in self-affirmation through knowledge of and mastery over Nature as well as Culture, both treated as objects outside the self-knowing subject.” The second approach “does not objectify the world into a lifeless thing independent of the subject, but always questions and reveals it in a constant relatedness of subject and object.” In the first approach, “the detached beholder views the world from a point of view”; in the second approach, “the engaged participant sees the world from a standpoint” (Bozdogan 1988, p. 38). The first approach thus reveals two things—one, the position of authority or power taken by Western scholars in locating themselves vis-à-vis the object of study, and two, the “enframed” view with which the object is represented to the world (Heidegger 1977).1 Bozdogan mentions Le Corbusier’s sketches in Voyage d’Orient as an example of the second approach. The sketches reveal Corbusier’s engagement with the Orient in a way “possible through the complete system connecting eye-head-brain-body-world.” Corbusier’s sketches reveal parts of buildings in a sequence by way of experiencing it, “making his bodily presence in the place strongly felt” demonstrating the way in which “architectural promenade makes place.” Bozdogan emphasizes that Corbusier’s approach is not simply experiential, but it takes into account the intellectual and theoretical framework thus “informing our perception and knowledge of things” (Bozdogan 1988, p. 40). Varanasi is not seen as the “other” by me. In fact, I locate myself within the narrow lanes, the innumerable chowks and ghats of Varanasi, where I perform the rituals, and as a participant understand the construction of spaces and their associated codes.2 I test the Western ideas of space and city legibility through an analysis of an Eastern example by being an “insider.” Erving Goffman (1959) terms the insiders’ and outsiders’ views as “emic” and “etic” views respectively. Goffman has elaborated on this idea of being a participant as opposed to an observer in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In his study of cultures where trance is practiced, he emphasizes the difference between his observations and those of the people possessed (Goffman 1959). This gap between the experience of the observer and that of the participant, between the “emic” and “etic” views, has been one of the more important issues in anthropological fieldwork. In the Panchakroshi ritual and the community ritual at Nati-Imli discussed in parts II and III, I participate


9

as an Indian (Hindu), while in the cremation rituals at Manikarnika that do not allow the involvement of women, I participate as a woman observer. My scrutiny shifts between being emic and etic according to the rituals and their role requirements. As an “insider” I take up the guise of Lefebvre’s “rhythmanalyst” to study and analyze Varanasi (Lefebvre 1996). [W]e can draw a portrait of an enigmatic personage wandering the streets of a large Mediterranean city, with [his] thoughts and emotions, [his] impressions and [his] wonder, and whom we will call the “rhythmanalyst.” More aware of times than of spaces, of moods than of images, of the atmosphere than of particular spectacles, [he] is strictly speaking neither psychologist, nor sociologist, nor anthropologist, nor economist . . . [he] “keeps his ear open,” but he does not only hear words, speeches, noises and sounds for he is able to listen to a house, a street, a city. (Lefebvre 1996, p. 229)

I locate my body, with all its associations, in the urban spaces of Varanasi in order to experience and live the inscribed rhythms. As a “rhythmanalyst,” I go beyond a visual engagement and immerse in the rhythmic, temporal dimension of the space. Time and space is reconciled: [The] cantonment graveyard has vanished into thin air, and with it English roses and epitaphs which, if read together, form a mysterious poem about memory and affection, penitence and hope, about love, heroism and peace. Where the cemetery once was, where Brahm has come again and again for refuge and recollection over the years, is now the site of Varanasi Arts and Crafts. Silks and brocades, brass, copper ware, and ivory are sold over the ossuary where Memsahib previously rested. (Siegel 1995, p. 232)

Past is recalled; the memories of the place, the moods and emotions embedded in it, are brought out to the fore by the “rhythmanalyst.” Critical is the distance that the analyst has to maintain from the object analyzed. Lefebvre writes: Rhythms cannot be analysed when they are lived. For example, we do not grasp the relations between the rhythms whose association comprise our body: the heart, breathing, the senses, etc. We do not even grasp any of them separately except when we are suffering. To analyse a rhythm, you have to be out of it. Exteriority is necessary. And yet to grasp a rhythm you must yourself have been grabbed by it, given or abandoned yourself inwardly to the time that it rhymed. Is it not thus in dance or music? (Lefebvre 1996, p. 229)

10

Chapter One

Rhythmanalysis goes through two stages. The first stage is about living the rhythms. While living the rhythm, the subject blends with it, as the subject too plays a role in constructing the rhythm. The second stage is about emerging out of that lived phase, to be exterior to the rhythm in order to analyze it. This continual shift between the subject and object becomes a vital aspect in the auto-ethnographic writings of Georg Simmel, Friedrich Engels and Charles Baudelaire. Although radically unlike each other in all sorts of ways, their writing is united by an attempt to balance the distance of the detective and the being in the thick of it of the city dweller. . . . An enduring image of the city emerges from their texts. Immersing themselves in the dangerous labyrinth, they articulated a novel experience of the modern city, and in so doing mediated it as both problem and possibility. (Donald 1999, p. 72)

To develop an understanding of a place by taking the guise of a city-dweller first the rhythms of activities and moods are recognized. Positioning oneself exterior to them develops the objectivity needed to analyze and represent those rhythms. The relationship between the subject and the object alters during the two processes of living the rhythm and representing the rhythm.3 As a “rhythmanalyst,” I undergo these two stages of living and representing while moving through the urban spaces of Varanasi. I live the rhythms to understand them and then separate myself from them in order to represent them.

Notes 1. As an example of the first approach, Bozdogan cites Western scholars’ work on Oriental architecture where “features and components of buildings are abstracted and taken out of their context to produce comprehensive classifications and catalogs” S. Bozdogan. 1988, “Journey to the East: Ways of Looking at the Orient and the Question of Representation,” JAE, vol. 41, no. 4. p. 40. The whole approach is based on “enframing” the object, to set it up in a way to make it re-presentable. The ornamental patterns from different buildings are separated from their contexts and are presented on a page forming a decorative pattern in Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament (1856). 2. Chowks are public squares in the Indian city where people congregate for all kinds of activities related to retailing, entertainment, politics etc. They are the meeting places, the nerve-centers of traditional Indian cities. Ghats are stepped embankments that are constructed on the banks of rivers.


11

3. This distance between the “subject” and “object,” between “I” and “That” forms a key to the Hindu Tantrik philosophy. “[W]henever we talk of a real-world we are talking of our idea of a real world, never of the thing-in-itself. But Tantra points out that something of a cloud-screen is first necessary if the inner ‘projectionist’ is to be able to see the images [he] is projecting . . . the fundamental ‘objectivity,’ intrinsically void of particular objects, but which nevertheless makes it possible for a person to experience what [he] projects as objective.” Arts Council of Great Britain 1971, Tantra, Arts Council of Great Britain, London. p. 72. The “subject” and “object” are defined in relation to each other and have to be separate if there has to be any activity or field of action. In Indian philosophy, “subject” and “object” have been called “I” and “That” and the ultimate aim is to merge the two. It is this merging of “subject” and “object” that has been interpreted here as the “lived” space or state of liminality.

CHAPTER TWO


A city can be seen as a vast fabric where activities flow at intra and inter levels of built forms and open spaces. When this flow of activity occurs repeatedly or ritualistically, the space starts to become delineated or defined and can be termed as a space of practice (Bourdieu 1990). The space begins to be identified by that activity. It acquires a quality firstly due to its physical elements, secondly through the ritualized actions occurring in it, and thirdly, through the way the active body responds to the space. The user’s body picks up memory cues from within the setting that provide a framework for rituals to occur. Through an understanding of rituals in spaces, an understanding of the body’s response and relationship to space can be developed. The three key words here are Space, Rituals, and Body.

Space The twentieth century has ushered in the discovery of deep space, or at least its social construction, and yet it is only as the century draws to a close that this fundamental discovery is becoming apparent. . . . Deep space is quintessentially social space; it is physical extent infused with social intent. (Smith quoted in Gregory 1994, p. 3)

Despite being a key to the creation of architecture, the question of space has often been neglected in architectural discourses and has mostly been treated at the physical or material level. This emphasis on appearance has translated into designing spaces that rely on the building façades to achieve a spatial 13

14

Chapter Two

quality. Françoise Choay describes this surface treatment as “façadism” (Choay quoted in Richards 1994, p. 143). Emphasis on designing buildings isolated from their spatial context leads to conceptualizing space as a container of objects. The manner in which we conceive of and define the idea of space is continuously evolving (Lefebvre 1991b). Two diametrically opposed understandings of space developed in the seventeenth century. The first understanding had its basis in the idea of space as being “strictly geometrical.” This was Euclidean space, a mathematical space (Lefebvre 1991b, p. 1). It was similar to the Newtonian idea of space that laid out an absolutist view of space. Here space was seen as an empty container with no boundaries, free-flowing and homogeneous. This space was pre-existing and objects situated themselves within it. Space dominated the objects by containing them. The second way of understanding space was as emerging from the world. It was René Descartes whose concept of space was seen as decisive in developing this second understanding (Lefebvre 1991b). Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz argued that space had to be understood as consisting of the relationships between objects, and they were against the idea of space as an absolute. They saw space as emerging out of the pattern of interrelationships amongst objects situated in it (Alexander, Ishikawa et al. 1977). This view also posed an argument against Cartesian logic that sets out a bifurcated existence, a separation of body and mind. According to Cartesian reason, ideas float around in mental space as objects float around in physical space. There is no association seen between mental ideas and physical objects, between knowledge and practice (Ryle 1949). In total contrast, this link between knowledge and practice is brought forward in the work of Michel Foucault who has highlighted that practices in space produce certain orderings of knowledge. Knowledge of space and practices in space are not distinct, but shape each other (1977b). The way spatial practices of observation (recording, mapping etc.) reflect orderings of power (knowledge) in space has also been discussed by Michel de Certeau (1986). The spatial techniques not only represent space but also construct it. There is a relation between knowledge, practice, and the social construction of space. The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre makes an important contribution to thinking of space as a social product. Lefebvre argues against the way space has been either seen simply as a container, where things contained are described, or dissected into parts, which have been analyzed in isolation from the social aspects (1991b). The transition of knowledge (the mental space) to the physical space of practices, and then to social space has been a key issue in Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. Here, he notes that the Cartesian view posed a question: “how were transitions to be made from mathematical


15

spaces (i.e., from the mental capacities of the human species, from logic) to nature in the first place, to practice in the second, and thence to the theory of social life—which also presumably must unfold in space?” (Lefebvre 1991b, p. 3). Thus, the first key issue that Lefebvre raises is that of blurring the boundaries between the mental, physical, and social realms. Another issue raised by Lefebvre is the knowledge of space being compartmentalized on the basis of different disciplines. Specializations divide space among them and act upon its truncated parts, setting up mental barriers and practico-social frontiers. Thus architects are assigned architectural space as their (private) property, economists come into possession of economic space, geographers get their own “place in the sun” and so on. (Lefebvre 1991b, p. 89)

This tendency of disciplinary compartmentalization works towards fragmenting space, so instead of analyzing things in space Lefebvre analyzes the space as a whole, with its entire physical, social, political, and economic aspects. He develops a unitary theory of space encompassing the physical, mental, and social space. The example he gives is of a picture of a six-storied house with an air of stability around it. The solid appearance of the house is destroyed when it is analyzed as a two faceted machine permeated by streams of energy running in and out (water, gas, electricity etc.). “Thus as exact a picture as possible of this space would differ considerably from the one embodied in the representational space which its inhabitants have in their minds, and which for all its inaccuracy plays an integral role in the social practice” (Lefebvre 1991b, p. 93). Thus, the house in imaginary analysis, or as a mental space, is different from the way it is represented in a picture or drawing. The example emphasizes the true understanding of space by uncovering all its aspects; the physical, mental and social. Following Lefebvre’s approach, I firstly explore the nature, constructional and representational aspects, of space by understanding space as a whole, its physical, mental, and social dimensions. Secondly, I aim to transcend disciplines. I link the anthropological, architectural, geographical, and social spaces. Thus, the space occupied by the body that is visible and invisible is seen as related to physical, architectural space and to intangible social space. Thirdly, the approach towards space is one in which the concepts of knowledge, as well as language, do not just inform notions of space, but also embody those very notions. With respect to knowledge, the techniques that produce information and knowledge of space (like observation and mapping techniques) are looked at. These techniques develop an understanding of urban spaces and contribute towards forming the concept of space. These

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techniques construct urban spaces by embodying this alternative concept of space. For example, while mapping the selected spaces, my body represents what it constructs when it inhabits these spaces. The processes of perception (understanding space), conception (mental re-construction), and representation are seen as interrelated. Hence, focus is on all three aspects: the nature and construction of space as well as its representation. With respect to the relationship of language and space, I draw on Barthes’s theory of signs (Barthes 1997). Space is a palimpsest. Over time, it acquires layers of meanings by the way it is inhabited. These layers of meaning can be uncovered to understand the space. What the space denotes is understood by looking at it from a distance with a “viewpoint,” but in order to uncover the embedded connotations, it is important to look at it from within by inhabiting it.1 The focus is towards de-constructing the connotative codes in order to understand the urban spaces. Spatial connotative codes are analyzed through rituals in the context of the interaction between user and the surrounding space. How these rituals are generated, how their meanings change with time, and how they transform and disappear will be seen with the aim of highlighting their relationship to the spaces as well as to provide answers towards the production of space.

Ritual Instead of analyzing only the physical aspects of space, an inquiry is made into the ways in which the physicality structures and is structured by practices, or the way in which action constructs space and is constructed by it. Space is seen in the context of our daily and institutional practices. The approach towards analyzing spaces is by way of rituals that occur there. Ritual is defined in many ways. Schechner, for example, describes it as “concept, praxis, process, ideology, yearning, experience, function” (1993, p. 228). Ritual is identified with the sacred and the secular. Any ordinary behavior transformed through sequencing, repetition, and rhythm into a structured event can be termed ritual. In “The Dance of Architecture: From Ritualisation to Performativity and . . . Back Again?” Susanna Rostas explains the term ritual as: A way of acting that is habitual. . . . It is the way that it conforms to conventions that makes the act a ritual act. In everyday life, if we say that something is being done as “a ritual” or even “ritualistically,” we tend to mean according “to the book,” according to tradition or convention. (1996, p. 19)


17

As per the above, acts like “going for a walk every evening” can also become a ritual. The act occurs at a certain time, for a certain duration; the path, the speed of movement and the probable rest points are (can be) pre-determined. The whole act is structured and can be termed ritual. The meaning of rituals here has been limited to those structured events that are culturally determined and have layers of meanings. Roland Barthes’s book Mythologies (1972) explains the concept of cultural semiotics. He elaborates on the culture-based meanings that objects and actions acquire. He gives the example of an axe, which denotes a tool for chopping wood, but possessing the same axe in some societies connotes high status. Thus, an object may have the same denotations, but the connotations change with different cultural contexts. In a similar way there are actions that are built up on layers of meaning. These actions are termed rituals. These rituals have an ability to build on themselves in second, third or higher orders of associations with respect to time and context. It is not possible to understand these rituals by way of observation. They can be understood only through participation. Another way of differentiating between a mundane act and a ritual is the idea of inclusion and exclusion that is inherent in rituals. Participating in a mundane activity depends on the will of a person, while not participating in a ritual act can imply exclusion from a particular group. Yet another way of distinguishing between an ordinary act and a ritual is by the transformative aspect of ritual. Participating in rituals leads to a transformation in the body, referred to as liminality by Victor Turner (1982). When a “ritual stance” is adopted, there is a subtle transformation in the relation between intention and action. At such times, the actor is, in a way, no longer the author of [her] actions; there is a sense that in doing things, the actor is doing more than [she] seems; the actor “removes the sovereignty of [herself] as agent.” (Rostas 1996, p. 19)

The bodies involved in rituals move from their present state into a different state. Thus, there is a change in the state of mind or the body undergoes liminality.2 This transformation involves changes in moods, feelings, and emotions. Ritual thus acquires an expressive quality. It is a practice centered on the human body. The transformed or liminal body is referred to here as a “ritualised body” or a “performing body.” A ritualized body can be well recognized through its exaggerated gestures and special clothing (Bakhtin 1968). These aspects add to the existing layers of meaning that the performing body signifies.

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Ritual as a practice can have the involvement of an individual, a family and community. It can include ordinary acts, or acts that occur occasionally like festivals, and rituals related to phases of a person’s life. It can also include performative forms like dance, play, and theater among others. Performance is most commonly thought of as the conventional entertainment forms of theater, cinema, and electronic media. Activities such as the telling of stories and jokes, and giving religious sermons, have been included within the notion of performance in recent studies (Lutgendorf 1991). The difference between performance as modern day theater or spectacle and performance as ritual needs to be clarified here. Theater depends on its audience, who may or may not respond by attending. The audience is free to come or stay away (Schechner 1988). Against this, in ritual, staying away means rejecting the congregation, or being rejected by it. Thus, ritual is an event upon which its participants depend; theater is an event which depends on its participants (Schechner 1988). A theatrical act has performers and spectators. For the performers, it becomes a ritual as it has a capacity to bring liminality. If the act results in liminality in the spectators as well, then the spectators also become performers and the theatrical act becomes a ritual for them too. Richard Bauman (1977) views performance as an artistic action and an artistic event. The artistic action transforms the performers, and the artistic event transforms the spectators. Due to its transformative capacity this type of performance is termed ritual. In order to convert a theater into ritual, that is, to bring in the participatory experience, it is necessary to write the script on the space itself. It is essential to design the spaces in such a way that this dichotomy of spectator-performer is resolved. Thus, any act that is habitual and structured, has cultural connotations, and leads to a transformed state can be understood as a ritual. Bodily participation is an essential element of ritual. The body becomes a medium to locate rituals in space.

Body The body is both mind and the body, the personal and the social, and more: in Freud’s term, it is “body-ego.” (Pile 1996, p. 185)

It is the body that inscribes its thoughts, emotions, meanings, and memories onto the space, and in the process is transformed. Thus, the notion of body is not as simple as the physical body, but includes ideas of the physical and mental realm, as well as the individual, social and political body associated with it.


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An argument against Cartesian thinking, a dualistic thinking about the relation of body and mind, has been evident since the time of philosophers like Descartes and Leibniz. This argument has re-emerged in the contemporary works of Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Lacan, Michel de Certeau, Richard Sennett, Joseph Rykwert, and many feminist writers such as Elizabeth Grosz and Julia Kristeva. Elizabeth Grosz, while explaining Lacan’s notion of the body, writes: “Bodies and minds are not two distinct substances or two kinds of attributes of a single substance but somewhere in between these two alternatives” (1994, p. xii). This model provides a key towards relations between “the inside and the outside of the subject, its psychical interior and its corporeal exterior” (Grosz 1994, p. xii). Bodies and minds intertwine, both affecting each other. Beside this contemporary Western view of the body, one of the Eastern perspectives on it suggests the idea of a gross and a subtle body. The subtle body has energy points at specific locations. These energy points work towards distributing “existential power to all the sense-faculties, sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell . . . the so-called world exists through the projection of this energy out through a person’s faculties” (Rawson 1971).3 Thus, body is not just the gross body, but is seen as one with all its existential power generated by the subtle body. The gross body is visible while the subtle body is invisible. Body has two sides: the phenomenal, or subjective, and the objective. The phenomenal body is one which is visible and is cognizable by the senses. This subjective side of the body is the individual being, as it is experienced and lived. The objective body is the one that is located in society. Our thoughts, feelings, anxieties, and other states of mind that strike us as mental—intangible and invisible—are parts of this objective body. The social world frames and constructs the objective body (Merleau-Ponty 1968, p. 131). These two sides of the body are very closely interlinked, but are still distinct. The phenomenological side of the body (the physical body) is a representation of the objective side (the social body). Our social experience is reflected on the body by means of symbols (Douglas 1973). These “natural symbols” mentioned by Douglas are the phenomenological aspects of the body, and when applied to practices, rituals, and societies, they acquire a social meaning. Through an understanding of the workings of the body, the workings of society can be understood. Here, the body is not seen as separate from its social and symbolic formation. The physical body is seen as a representation of the social body. The writings of Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Judith Butler, among others, are also concerned with the “lived” body; the lived body which is constructed

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by being located in a particular culture (Grosz 1994). Body is viewed within its social-cultural context. The way people use their bodies in the space becomes important in understanding those spaces in a cultural context. Thus, the body is explored with its social, cultural, and mental constructs. This relationship of body with space also becomes critical in developing my research methodology where I live the selected urban spaces. I position my body physically and mentally in this particular context in order to understand and represent it. The relationship between the phenomenal and the objective sides of the individual, between the physical and mental space of the body, connects the internal mental world to the external material world, bringing the individual closer to the surrounding space. Steve Pile (1996) considers this relationship between the inner and outer world of the individual as being important in understanding the links between the environment, spatial behavior, and the mind. Both phenomenal and objective aspects are considered in locating the body in a space and in understanding the relationship between the implicit mental and the explicit material realms. Thus, I focus on how the body, both physical and mental, phenomenal and objective, constructs and relates to a space.

Notes 1. Connotative meanings refer to emotional values associated with the object or place as well as the meanings acquired due to the historical background, social relations, cultural schemata, etc. The denotative meanings simply coincide with object or place recognition. 2. Liminality is discussed at length in the section “Liminality in Everyday Practices and Everyday Spaces,” chapter 3, “Contextualizing City and the Body.” 3. The Arts Council of Great Britain organized the first major exhibition of Tantra. Works of Indian and Western scholars specializing in the Tantric theory, works from private collections as well as from Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, concerning Tantrism, were discussed and curated by Philip S. Rawson. Ajit Mookerjee whose book, Tantra Art, published in 1967, was the initial inspiration and his extensive collection formed the basis for this exhibition.

CHAPTER THREE


Even prior to the Industrial Revolution, the city was seen as having an analogy with the human body. Population growth, massive migration to the cities, forms of new work, housing and class patterns led to the idea of the city as a diseased body with its social and physical ills (Donald 1999). Therapeutic measures were taken to cure the city of these ills, for example, the City Beautiful Movement. Urban plans and designs by Le Corbusier, Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and others, reflected a view of the city as a place to be controlled and ordered (Bridge and Watson 2000b). Creating “controlled environments” for ease in diagnosis of the diseased city brought a change in the city morphology, as seen in the “walled” cities or gated communities, the shopping-entertainment complex and the detached office block (Davis 2000). Traditional notions of public space/private space and inside/outside were not applicable anymore, and thus, traditional ways of seeing the city in black and white, such as in Nolli’s figure ground map of Rome, were unable to address the specificities of the contemporary city.1 The fast pace of technology brought further changes that shifted the view of the city as a diseased body to that of the city as a kaleidoscope of images. The changing technology and globalization precipitated a homogenized architectural treatment of cities all around the world. For example, Jonathan Glancey (1998) writes about the way Shenzhen, a fishing village on the bank of the mighty Pearl River in China, was developed: [H]ere was a half-built factory capped with what looked like the dome of St Peter’s in Rome. Here was another crowned with, yes, the dome of St Paul’s 21

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Cathedral. There was a vast housing estate in the guise of the Palace of Westminster, complete with a cartoon replica of the Big Ben clock tower. (Glancey 1998, p. 20)

Global forces have diminished the importance of “place” (Ellin 1996). The change it brought about in cities was marked by de-territorialization and placelessness. To counter the resultant homogenization, there were efforts to re-create and reinvent city identities and images. Some of these image building exercises were preservation or rehabilitation of old central cities, the building of new cities which resemble old ones, and the co-operative movement and other grass-root social movements, as well as a re-assertion of traditional social values and institutions (Ellin 1996). But these processes led to the “city of signs” where the city was being read as a sign, devoid of its “original” meaning and completely abstracted from the users’ body (Soja 2000a). The city became an image to be consumed by the users. The automobile enabled the citizen to view the city at greater speed as a “panorama” (Boyer 1994). Peter Hall, in Cities of Tomorrow, notes that the “strip” or “highway” architecture is an outcome of the automobile. Here, buildings are set back from the highway surrounded by a sea of cars in parking lots. The architecture is disconnected from the road, and the signage emerges as a connecting link between the viewer and the architecture (Hall 1996). [T]he fact that the legibility of our present urban agglomerations is mostly due to the efficiency of such graphic systems (whether designed or not) must not hide the bare, inescapable fact that from now on the built up systems in Western society have lost their [semantic] autonomy: if left to themselves and their specific elements, they do not carry symbolic weight any more. (Choay 1986, p. 167)

In fact it is the “sign” that dominates the landscape and replaces, or rather becomes, architecture itself. This change in architectural perception, along with an explosion of technology, has led to a new way of experiencing city space (Venturi and Scott-Brown 1972). Globalization has also resulted in a sharing of common experiences on a world scale. Common experiences have led to common arrangements of elements that make up cities, resulting in their homogenized character. Globalization and fast paced electronic technology have resulted in displaced geographies and blurred boundaries between different regions (Virilio 1997). The individual is lost in the mass of commonality of urban spaces, which has led to a surging need for re-creating and re-defining identities.


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Themed environments and heritage stage sets have emerged as one answer to this problem of homogenous spaces, as an answer to “lost identity” and nostalgia (Soja 2000a). However, these environments tend to work as mere “spectacles.” The images of the city presented in such environments are severed from the mundane, everyday lifestyle and give illusions of other times and places to the spectator (Debord 1994, p. 171). Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, a village that has been re-created to reflect the seventeenth century architecture and lifestyle, is such an example and will be discussed in more detail. These cities of images and signs as discussed in Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972) have provided the city dwellers with a new spectacle to be consumed, a space which they are able to relate to at a visual level alone.2 The city of signs has led to the concept of “the city as a discourse,” a city which “is truly a language” (Barthes 1997, p. 168). The city is read as a text, the intention being to decipher its language by understanding its significations.3 The question of signification is explored in The Eiffel Tower, where Barthes emphasizes that the tower is a signifier with many signifieds. The signifieds change according to the way the tower is occupied by an individual who builds over the original meaning of the tower based on his/her own experiences and interpretations. This highlights the “polysemic” dimension of the sign (Barthes 1997).4 Barthes highlighted the importance of revealing the city’s meanings within a cultural context. However, the contemporary city works by inserting architectural fragments that are de-contextualized, with respect to their original time and place (Boyer 1994). As an example, Orange County, California has a mall called Olde Towne. At the entrance is displayed a large sign “Olde Towne.” “The mall is neither old nor town, instead these signifiers float disembodied and detached from their signifieds, a fundamental characteristic of the advertising form” (Gottdiener 1986, p. 294). Here, the content remains unrelated to the form, and the designed environment works as a kaleidoscope of images that are dissociated from their meanings. It is the image that matters today and the deep-level signifieds have disappeared (Baudrillard 1996). The modern city worked at a detonative level alone (Choay 1986, p. 109). It was all function and form. The form was the signifier, denoting the function. It did not have second order signifieds. Within the modern city, the primary meaning in architectural messages was buildings that represented their uses. Post-modernism has seen a re-introduction of architectural semiosis (Gottdiener and Lagopoulos 1986). However, as Greimas (1986) notes, instead of identifying and understanding a space based on its culturally relational, multiple layered meanings, space

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is now understood in relation to other spaces. Every particular space has a meaning for the inhabitant as it can be contrasted with a space that exists elsewhere. According to the de-constructionists’ claim, the self-referencing signifiers in the city are able to generate meaning for the inhabitants only because they define some difference with other signifiers. The spaces are understood relative to each other. Thus, “here” is understood in relation to “elsewhere.”5 An example of the above approach to the city is the cognitive mapping tradition developed by Kevin Lynch. Lynch was an inspiration to the behavioral geographers in the 1960s and 1970s. His mental maps of cities are based on a perceptual knowledge of physical form. Here, architectural features are identified on the basis of their legibility in relation to each other, instead of being identified according to their connotations. As Barthes remarks: “Lynch has a conception of the city that remains more ‘Gestalt’ than structural” (1997, p. 167). This mode of analysis of urban places based on relational differences has limited urban imagery to the physical form of the city alone—to those elements that are visible and tangible. This imagistic city, relying on visual stimuli, was seen as impacting on the individual such that the metaphorical descriptions of the city have changed from the “physical body” to the “mind” (Donald 1999). The city that was earlier seen as a diseased body started to be seen as having an effect on the emotional and psychological well being of its citizens. The imagistic city saturates the users and they start developing a “blasé” attitude towards it. The experience of the city becomes “a perception of the material world only in passing while on the way to the next stop in the daily routine” (Benjamin quoted in Gottdiener 1995, p. 128). The users’ perception of the city remains limited to its physicality and they develop an attitude where they stop responding actively towards the environment. For them, the city becomes simply a backdrop for daily activities of commuting, work and consumption and is devoid of any inspiration (Gottdiener 1995). The understanding of the city should not be limited to its visible image. Urban architecture, argues Rossi, needs to be understood as the construction of the city in time. “With time the city grows upon itself, it acquires a consciousness and memory” (1982, p. 21). Memories are inscribed and re-inscribed on the city and become important in relating the city to the human psyche. “About being in the city means . . . operating with the city as a category of thought and experience . . . we recall the city through metonymic images and fleeting events” (Donald 1999, p. 121). Thoughts and memories help in relating the individual to the city, emphasizing a strong relationship between the city and the mind.


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Mind-space nexus was where surrealism found its roots. The key idea here was about exploring the manner in which our memories and thoughts were rendered spatially (Ray 1971, pp. 177-178). Lefebvre highlighted this cyclic relationship of imagined and physical worlds and the capacity of the emergent dynamics to influence the social world. “The leading surrealists sought to decode inner space and illuminate the nature of transition from this subjective space to the material realm of the body and the outside world, and thence to the social life” (Lefebvre 1991b, p. 18). Understanding this tension between social space and mental space is critical, and is possible only by an investigation of the body. The physicality of the body, with its sensory aspects, tends to mediate the mental and the social space. The body not only occupies space, but is occupied by space as well. The body both constructs and creates space. This is the “lived” space—the space of experience that can be understood by using the body. For long since the invention of perspective, space has been viewed as abstract, neutral and separate from the body and its sensations. Instead of being confined to the use of visual perspective in understanding space, there is a need to bring in the perspective of the body along with all its physical, mental and social constructs (1991b). This is achieved by using the framework of ritual, body and space. The town as a total symbol, or a structured complex of symbols; in which the citizen, through a number of bodily exercises, such as processions, seasonal festivals, sacrifices, identifies [himself] with [his] town . . . the attachment to one’s environment allows for emotion to be discharged. (Rykwert 1976, p. 3)

The ritualized body explores the space, revealing the full potential of human experience. The space is not read simply as a text, but is placed in a context where the deeper order signifieds are revealed. The city is a “writing.” He who moves about the city, e.g. the user of the city (what we all are), is a kind of reader who, following his obligations and his movements, appropriates fragments of the utterance in order to actualise them in secret. When we move about a city, we all are in the situation of the reader of the 100,000 million poems of Queneau, where one can find a different poem by changing a single line. (Barthes 1997, p. 170)

This reading of the city by the user of the city is very different to the one read from the top of a skyscraper by a person far away and detached from the activities occurring within the city spaces (de Certeau 1988). Here the reader is able to read the text because he/she has written the text by moving through the spaces in the city, being one among the crowd, in contrast

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to engaging in a bird’s-eye view from the top of a tower. The view from the top is from a position of authority. The authoritative approach taken by the city visionaries is perceived as encompassing the knowledge of the city and is panopticon-like because it incorporates a will to control and bring order. It is associated with the idea of power of only a few individuals. How then is the power of the individual, family and the communal body reflected in space? To reflect this power one needs to understand the city-text, which the residents write on the city. By writing the text, the residents play a role in the production and the use of the urban milieu through urban practices, rather than simply acting as consumers of the spectacle. The residents become involved in a work of poesis. A work of poesis is one which gathers meanings and expressions of the residents (Shields 1999 p. 123). My approach views the city as a work of poesis that people construct and re-construct based on time and context, just as they construct language. “Central to the notion of poesis is the ‘event’ of human expressiveness” (Shields 1999, p. 123). People express themselves in the city through their ritualized bodies. Ritualized bodies appropriate and write the socio-cultural aspects on the built environment. The city is thus written by the inhabitants’ actions. In order to read this city-text, the reader has to be concerned with not just the formal and functional aspects, that is, the denotative level, but has to “look at the city in figural or interpretative ways as well” (Boyer 1994, p. 19). As mentioned previously, Lynch has emphasized the aspect of legibility of a city and has derived a vocabulary for reading the city in terms of paths, nodes, edges, districts and landmarks. These elements (except “districts”) simply work at the level of signifier and signified and rely on visual perception. The relationship of the people to the city goes beyond perceptual recognition. The connotations that users place on the city and rely on while reading it are contrary to Lynch’s reliance on the denotations of the physical environment. These connotative codes will be different for different people at different times. Thus, it is not sufficient to simply understand the connotations, but also the way different people relate to them in different contexts. Barthes highlighted the polysemic nature of signs; different people relate signifier to a different signified depending upon circumstance and context and this becomes crucial for an in-depth understanding of the connotations (Gottdiener 1995). Thus, we tend to understand the different signifieds through the readings of different categories of readers. It is important to multiply the readings of the city to develop an in-depth understanding rather than “multiplying the surveys or the functional studies of the city” (Barthes 1997, p. 172).


27

Thus, an understanding of the city and its spaces by de-constructing the physicality—the buildings, streets and squares—will not address problems like placelessness, illegible and homogenized environments and the proliferation of heritage stage sets and theme parks. Besides these visible and tangible aspects of the city, it is important to decipher and reveal the signifieds. The way to do this is by returning to understanding cities through the lived experiences of the users; to bring our thoughts and experiences of the past into an experiential exploration of the city, and to understand the ways bodies involved in rituals activate relationships with, and thereby result in a solidification of, space. The deep-level signifieds or the connotative codes are still there in our environment; it is just that we have lost the capacity to decipher them. “Essential perception of the world, in short, embraces every way of looking at it: conscious and unconscious, blurred and distinct, objective and subjective, inadvertent and deliberate, literal and schematic” (Lowenthal quoted in Pile 1996, p. 14). Thus, a complex understanding of the city is developed with a variety of simultaneous approaches—perceptual and cognitive, conscious and unconscious, objective and subjective.

Everyday Life in the City Does the notion of everyday encompass just the routine and mundane, the acts that are not specialized and cannot be defined easily. Are the extraordinary, the specialized activities, not a part of the everyday (Pile 1996)? Heidegger, in Being and Time (1978), linked the idea of “banality” to conceptualizing the everyday. The everyday was repetitive. The objects, actions and life itself were taken for granted in the everyday. Banality also became crucial for the Surrealists when conceptualizing the everyday. For the Surrealists, “the poetic life in all its variations—love, travel, orality, poetry and performance” served to remove the banality of existence (Shields 1999, p. 15). However, Surrealist art was disposed towards the politics of the state and their view privileged such modern aesthetics over folk-art and dance forms. Such international art movements and markets were distanced from the “everyday,” local, folk art. Everyday is simply “real life,” the “here and now”; it is “sustenance, clothing, furniture, homes, neighbourhoods, environment”—i.e., material life—but with a “dramatic attitude” and “lyrical tone” (Lefebvre quoted in Harris and Berke 1997, p. 13). Lefebvre, although influenced by Heidegger’s and the Surrealists’ notions of the everyday, viewed it more as a dialectic between ordinary and extra-ordinary events, between banality and excitement. Lefebvre, in The

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Critique of Everyday Life (1991a), questioned why the concept of everyday-ness did not include the extra-ordinary, for he felt that these were “moments” that revealed the ordinariness of life.6 For him, the surreal, the extra-ordinary, the surprising, and the magical were part of the real. Lefebvre explains this concept of the ordinary and the extra-ordinary with an analogy of a speech act. We notice two kinds of expressions in a speech act—the first is that which is spontaneous and immediate, and the second is that which is formal and contained. Similarly, two categories of activities can be distinguished. First are those activities that are patterned around private life—preparing food, going for a walk and the like. Second are those that are more orientated towards the public and are more expressive and formal like dancing, singing, and festivities. The first category highlights the relationship of individuals with their own bodies, their acts in a certain place. This category identifies the “rhythm of the self” that is close to the body, has a private nature and is a daily rhythm. The second category of activity highlights the relationships individuals have with public spaces. Acting in public space forms the basis for the individual’s bodily interactions with other bodies within a communal framework. This relationship identifies the “rhythm of the other” that is inclined towards public spaces and has an extra-everyday dimension. For Lefebvre, “The extra-daily rhythms the daily and conversely” (1996, p. 236). The concept of “everyday” thus is a dialectic between ordinary and extra-ordinary, between the mundane and special, and their spatialization traverses from the private to public, from room, to home, to street, to square, to city (Lefebvre 1996). Everyday life is bound not only by the cyclical return of natural phenomena. The seasons, elements and climate . . . but more mundanely by the linear rhythms of life’s trajectories through birth, marriage and death. (Read 1993, p. 127)

Another dimension to everyday life that has been touched on by Heidegger, the Surrealists and Lefebvre has been the aspect of transformation. This transformative aspect of everyday life has also found a place in the Situationists’ movement led by Guy Debord. The Situationists looked at the everyday as “here and now,” as a “situation,” that was an event to bring transformation. Their work begins with a critique of everyday life. They perceived the city “as a site for derive, a drifting, aimless walking and mapping of the psychogeographical areas and ambience of the streets, the marking of their differential emotional intensities” (Read 1993, p. 117). Derive was a semi


29

programmed wandering that aimed at making urban connections by locating bodies in different areas and thus identifying the possibilities of bringing an emotional transformation (Harris and Berke 1997). The concept of “drift” was important, because “Cutting freely across urban space, (situations, ed.) drifters would gain a revolutionary perception of the city, a rational disordering of the senses” (Sadler 1998, p. 94). This notion of the everyday life in the city as experienced through movement was important because it helped in identifying events that could catalyze transformation.7 This transformative notion of everyday life considers the body along with its existential powers. The body in its everyday practice becomes involved in the process of creation. It engages in an act of poesis, in order to read the everyday life that Hegel terms as “the prose of the world” (Read 1993, p. 133). Three aspects of the everyday act are critical—firstly, it is habitual, secondly, it takes into account the body, and thirdly, it helps in choreographing the bodies and places (Pile 1996). Thus, the everyday act may be “given” or “mundane,” or it may be “extra-ordinary,” but because of its habitual, repetitive nature, it becomes crucial to analyze the link it develops between the body and space.

Liminality in Everyday Practices and Everyday Spaces The transformative aspect of the everyday has been reflected in art forms all across the world for many thousands of years and is still visible today. [A]rt works by arousing in the mind of the spectator the latent traces of emotions associated with events in [his] past life (or lives) analogous to those with which the work of art presents [him]. There is a spectrum of modes, covering all the possible categories of emotional experience and expression, through which art can work. The forms of art stimulate in turn latent traces belonging to these different modes, so that the mind “tastes” them, like a juice (rasa). The tasting of these rasas in sequence puts the mind into a special state, in which it transcends its own emotive contents and becomes conscious both intellectually and emotionally of itself. The state is called the great Rasa. (Rawson 1971, p. 39)

The state of great rasa is the liminal state and the art operating in a manner to transform the viewer becomes a liminal device. Liminality is the process of transformation at work. It is a movement from one mental state to another—from a normal, mundane or secular state to a sacred or otherworldly state (Schechner and Appel 1990). Victor Turner, in From Ritual to

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Chapter Three

Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, while explaining this phenomenon elaborates on Arnold van Gennep’s analysis of three phases of this transformation process: separation, transition and incorporation (Turner 1982). The first phase is that of separation from the previous state. It is like embarking on a journey, a detachment from the present state and space. Here, one crosses the threshold to enter into the intervening phase of “transition.” Van Gennep (1960) terms this “limen,” meaning threshold in Latin. This liminal phase has certain characteristics of the first state and is also in the process of attaining some of the characteristics of the new state. The third phase of “incorporation” is about moving into the new state, about reaching the destination point after the journey (Schechner and Appel 1990). This change in mental state can also be accompanied by a change in social status or a parallel movement in space, a physical movement from one place to another.8 Thus, liminality is more of a movement in space—a movement from one “quality space” to another (Fernandez 1982). Schechner suggests that this concept of transformation is that of penetration—of making visible what is invisible (1990). In Greek tragedy and music, Aristotle incorporated the notion of catharsis, which is an effect produced by art on the audience and involves a change in emotional state (Perez-Gomez and Parcell 1994). Catharsis is partially inherent in the Renaissance space. However, towards the end of the Renaissance, space started being represented solely as a geometric entity, and in order to experience it, “human beings literally had to leave aside their bodies and binocular vision, to assimilate themselves with the geometric vanishing point” (Perez-Gomez and Parcell 1994, p. 22). The transformative aspect or the state of liminality was a key aspect of Indian dance form.9 The Natyasastra (compendium of Indian Classical Dance) compiled between the second century BC and second century AD describes the facial expressions and bodily gestures required to evoke the basic emotions of classical Indian dance-theater—love, happiness, sadness, fear, energy, anger, disgust, surprise and peace. The gestures and expressions

Figure 3.1. State of Liminality


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held together with a story line not only convey but also arouse the specific emotional response from the spectators (Schechner and Appel 1990). The link between the performance and the emotions evoked is evident both in the performers’ and the spectators’ bodies. According to Schechner, “the doing of the action of a feeling is enough to arouse the feeling both in the doer and in the receiver” (1990, p. 41). The whole experience is thus transformative, both for the performer and the spectator.10 In this way, the art gets an emotive response from the viewer. It becomes a powerful tool to negate the distance between the subject and object, and between the spectator and performer. This negation of distance makes the subject comprehend the “reality” of the object. Plato viewed truth or “reality” as having three components: first, the object of thought, which is invisible and cannot be sensed (Being); second, that which has come into existence (Becoming); and third, Chora, the receptacle, which contains the above two and is “the space of human creation and participation . . . a distinct reality to be apprehended in the crossing, in the chiasma, of Being and Becoming” (Perez-Gomez and Parcell 1994, p. 9). This space is similar to Lefebvre’s “lived space,” the space that is constructed by the body, space that contains and is contained by the body. The lived space is constructed and apprehended when the body crosses from one state to another—when it undergoes liminality “in the chiasma of Being and Becoming.” Ritual strengthens the relationship between the body and the space, where the body does not view the space from afar, but plays a role in constructing it. Bodily performance becomes an essential part of experience and, in a way, many types of cultural performances (including ritual, ceremony, carnival, theater, poetry) become a means to understand life itself (Turner 1982). As Victor Turner observes, meanings sealed within the layers of socio-cultural life, which are rather inaccessible to everyday observation and reasoning, are understood through the performance process itself.

Lived Space through Lefebvre’s Lens There is an immediate relationship between the body and its space, between the body’s deployment in space and its occupation of space. Before producing effects in the material realm (tools and objects), before producing itself by drawing nourishment from that realm, and before reproducing itself by generating other bodies, each living body is space and has space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space. (Lefebvre 1991b, p. 170)

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Chapter Three

Lefebvre’s view on space is transdisciplinary, linking historicality, spatiality and sociality. Besides the historical, time based notion of social space, Lefebvre develops the concept of space as a triad. It envelops firstly the physical (nature, cosmos) space; secondly, the mental space (emphasizing the rational, logical and abstract dimension); and thirdly, the social space. These three spaces have been termed “Firstspace,” “Secondspace” and “Thirdspace” respectively, by Edward Soja (1996). The first space for him is the “real” and the second space is the “imagined” space. First space is primarily about the physicality of spatial forms, about things that can be grasped by our senses. Second space is the cognitive or the mentally mapped space. This binary conception of space is questioned by Lefebvre where he proposes yet another spatiality, the lived space that reconciles the first two. Following on from Lefebvre, Edward Soja has introduced the term “Thirdspace” and has called upon “an-Other” way of understanding and relating to space. “Simultaneously real and imagined and more . . . the exploration of Thirdspace can be described and inscribed in journeys to ‘real-and-imagined’ places.” Third space can be explored and constructed by experiencing the material and the mental realm simultaneously (Soja 1996). Contemporary designed environments reflect a lack of understanding of the lived dimensions by the city visionaries where their conceptions of space over-ride the physical realities. This results in an alienated and abstract space, where discourses on space are privileged, rather than practices in space.11 Space cannot be understood or grasped in isolation as a container of people and things. Space is understood “in its genesis and its form, with its own specific time or times (the rhythm of daily life), and its particular centres and polycentrism (agora, temple, stadium, etc)” (Lefebvre 1991b, p. 31). It has to be seen in the context of time and the resultant societal changes. Temporal shifts and the resultant societal changes enrich our understanding of space. The Production of Space (Lefebvre 1991b) discusses a linear spatial model where society’s modes of production are related to the history of spatializaTable 3.1. Space Triad Lefebvre

Soja

Physical

Mental

Lived

Perceived

Conceived

Lived

Spatial Practice

Representations of Space

Spaces of Representation

First space

Second space

Third space

Real

Imaginary


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tion. It begins with the space that is absolute, is natural and analogical to the human body. The first germ of the city, then, is the ceremonial meeting place that serves as the goal for pilgrimage: a site to which family or clan groups are drawn back, at seasonable intervals, because it concentrates, in addition to any natural advantages it may have, certain “spiritual” or supernatural powers, powers of higher potency and greater duration, of wider cosmic significance, than ordinary processes of life. (Mumford 1961, p. 18)

Mumford’s space of spiritual power is termed by Lefebvre as “absolute” space. During communal modes of production this space was transformed into a “sacred” space. This was followed by the emergence of the “historical” space aligned with political states, Greek city-states, the Roman Empire and the invention of perspective. With the advent of capitalist modes of production marked by “the utilitarian, the historical and the aesthetic codes, on the plane of discourse, and the utilitarian and economic codes, on the plane of urban practice” (Lagopoulos 1986, p. 196), the space was fragmented and abstracted where it could be read only in terms of money and power. Its deeper associations with the body were lost in this kind of abstraction. The quantitative aspects of the space started dominating the qualitative aspects— the exchange value dominating over the use value (Lefebvre 1991b) and the space came to be seen as separate from the body. In this shift from an absolute to an abstract space, change is a simultaneous movement and distancing from “nature” towards “culture.” Every product—every object—is therefore turned in one direction towards Nature and in another towards man. It is both concrete and abstract. It is concrete in having a given substance, and still concrete when it becomes part of our activity, by resisting or obeying it, however. It is abstract by virtue of its definite, measurable contours, and also because it can enter into a social existence, be an object amongst other similar objects and become the bearer of whole series of new relations additional to its substantiality. (Lefebvre 1991b, p. 119)

As the space is dominated by humans and becomes a reflection of “culture” as opposed to “nature,” it becomes abstracted. The quantitative aspects of space begin characterizing it. Spatialisations have developed first from emphasising a natural space, through a historical space of territorial power and conquest, into today’s arena of speculative capital. (Shields 1999, p. 169)

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Lefebvre describes the transformation process of the absolute space into abstract space. Absolute space was a natural site chosen for its intrinsic qualities as opposed to the abstract space. This absolute space, when modified because of the ritual requirements, lost some naturalness, but still reflected nature in terms of age, sex, etc. It symbolized family and social relations and was a reflection of the people who constructed or produced it. When this space started extending militarily and administratively, a conflict began between the people producing it and those managing it. Religious domination (priest), domination of monarchy, and then, a military domination established “the space of accumulation (the accumulation of all wealth and resources: knowledge, technology, money, precious objects, works of art and symbols)” (Lefebvre 1991b, p. 49). The power of money and knowledge and the domain of “rulers” eclipsed the power of bodies producing space. The production of space got divorced from the social life resulting into an abstract space. There has been a clash between the community life and capitalism and Lefebvre describes it as a clash between the use values of living and the exchange values of capitalism. Use values and exchange values are derived from the same space. It is when the exchange values are emphasized—when the space becomes merely an area for intervention by planning and state authorities with respect to the “dollar”—that the space stops getting an emotive response from the users of the space based on its qualitative aspects, and gets an alienating, abstract nature. The space is viewed in relation to its quantitative aspects—the size, width, area, location and profit. Lefebvre’s notion of abstract space is that of one which is firstly, “commodified” and secondly, “bureaucratized,” where it is subservient to “property relations” and “systematic surveillance and regulation by the state” (Gregory 1994, p. 401). Another aspect of this space is “decorporalization.” This aspect has also been emphasized by Pile when he suggests that “the abstract Space transports the body outside itself into a visual regime” (Pile 1996, p. 163). The body loses its relatedness to the space except by means of a visual link. Can an absolute nature of the space be grasped irrespective of the time period by viewing space as related to a ritualized body, that is, by considering the socio-cultural constructions of the space as related to the body? 12 Lefebvre further suggests a return to the body in order to understand the three moments of space: physical, mental and social or “lived.” Physicality is explored primarily through “its readable texts and contexts” (Soja 1996, p. 23) by an involvement of our senses. The mental space is explored by “its prevailing representational discourses,” by understanding the inherent ideologies. The lived space that is absolute in nature is “guided by some form


35

of praxis, the translation of knowledge into action” (Soja 1996, p. 23). The understanding of this lived space by the involvement of the body in action reveals the layers of symbolisms, myths and traditions, thus having a direct mediation via culture. An understanding of the lived space is only possible by an analysis of the body involved in everyday practices. “The whole of the (social) space proceeds from the body, even though it so metamorphoses the body that it may forget it altogether. . . The analysis of rhythms must serve the necessary and inevitable restoration of the total body” (Lefebvre 1991b, p. 405). It is the body that leads to the formation of social or lived space. An understanding of the rhythmic movement of the body involved in practices will guide the analysis of the lived space. This lived/social space is one where dualistic modes of thinking in terms of the physical and the mental, and the subject and the object are collapsed. The lived space emerges when the qualitative aspects of space rather than the quantitative ones become prominent.

Notes 1. Nolli (1991), Rome 1748 Map, New York, J. H. Aronson Publishers. 2. Contrary to the city of signs or the highway strip that relies on visual perception of the user, the Middle Eastern Bazaar contains no signs. The communication in the Bazaar is through proximity. The sight, smell and feel of the merchandise, textures of the walls and pavement, sounds of the shouting hawkers, and bright colors of the canopies all become crucial in linking the viewer to the built environment which is totally absent in automobile oriented architecture. Here, the individual is bombarded by a series of non-related images at an unfathomable speed. 3. The concept of a city as a language was a result of Structuralism that was very popular in the 1960s and early 1970s. Structuralism owes its origins to the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Referring to Saussure’s theory of signs, the signifier has a direct relationship to the signified. On the other hand, Roland Barthes’s work on the semiotics of culture, Mythologies, elaborated on a tiered view of signification. In this view, the relationship of the signifier to the signified is more complex. Barthes discusses a picture of an African soldier saluting the French flag on the cover of a popular magazine Paris Match. The image has several levels. It denotes an act of national allegiance but connotes patriotism, colonial subservience and even imperialism. The photo of a soldier saluting a flag as a sign could be joined with other associations to refer to higher levels of myth. The object, besides having a denotative meaning, can be further developed on various levels of connotations. Thus, what the picture denotes is overshadowed by what it connotes. The connotations become much more important than the object itself, and in order to understand it, it is necessary to de-construct the connotations rather than de-construct the object itself.

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Chapter Three

4. Barthes discussed polysemy in relation to the signs being understood by seeing and placing them within the cultural context. 5. Greimas further elaborates on these categories as: sacred vs. profane, private vs. public, external vs. internal, superior vs. inferior, masculine vs. feminine. 6. Moments are those instants that we would each, according to our own personal criteria, categorize as “authentic” moments that break through the dulling monotony of the “taken for granted.” 7. Viewing the everyday life by “walking” is also brought forth in the writings of de Certeau and Benjamin. De Certeau, in his book The Practice of Everyday Life, mentions that ordinary practitioners of the city are walkers and they write the urban text through their movements. In order to read this everyday text of the city, one has to become a walker—Benjamin’s flâneur. As mentioned by Donald in Imagining the Modern City (1999), the flâneur symbolized a certain historical moment, a social type associated with the commodified environment emerging with opening of big department stores in Paris. The flâneur watched and interpreted the city by moving amongst the crowds. Being elitist, the flaneur could never be a part of the crowd and viewed the city with an abstraction. 8. The transformation process has been classified as “liminal” and “liminoid” based on the change in social status. For example, an initiation ceremony is a liminal ritual, while a dance performance is a liminoid ritual. Schechner terms the liminal process “transformation” and the liminoid process “transportation.” Transformation is where participants are changed in status and “transportation” is where participants are returned to their starting places. He gives “initiation rites” as an example of transformation performance. Here the very purpose is to transform people from one status to another. The transportation performance incorporates the participants going from the “ordinary world” to the “performative world” where they start role-playing. Schechner, R. 1985, Between Theater and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. 9. Besides dance forms, liminality was an aspect of other Indian art forms like paintings and music. In music, “the system of musical scales called ‘ragas’ (male, the word means feelings) and ‘raginis’ (female) upon which Indian music is now based, reflects the emotional techniques, especially in the way it explores refined nuances or erotic sentiments through tone, rhythm and melodic pattern.” Arts Council of Great Britain 1971, Tantra, Arts Council of Great Britain, London. p. 36. The musical scale varies according to the time of the day and different seasons and served in evoking different feelings and appropriate emotional responses from the listener. Similar expression appears in many of the Rajput miniature paintings made at Hindu courts in western parts of India between about 1630 and 1800 where color compositions are used to evoke varied sensuous effects. Such pictures make the spectator journey through different states of emotions and feelings. 10. Having been trained in Indian Classical dance form, Bharatanatyam, and performing stories on stage in front of an audience, has provided me with an opportunity to understand liminality from both the performers’ and spectators’ perspectives.


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11. Lefebvre suggests that in the contemporary world, the link between the real, imagined and lived space has been lost due to the dominance of the imagined/mental realm. What is happening is that “a particular ‘theoretical practice’ produces a mental space which is apparently, but only apparently, extra-ideological. In an inevitably circular manner, this mental space then becomes the locus of a ‘theoretical practice’ which is separated from social practice and which sets itself up as the axis, pivot or central reference point of Knowledge.” H. Lefebvre, 1991b, The Production of Space, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford. p. 6. Working under this domination of the mental space, that is, by applying the codes worked up from literary texts directly to the urban spaces, renders the space the status of a “message” and the inhabiting of it to “reading.” Lefebvre gives examples of the utopian, cantered, circular cities and spaces of Enlightenment architects’ imagination, which were realized by Ledoux (Chaux) or by Boullee (Cenotaph for Newton). These were direct constructs of theoretical discourses and emphasized the nature of the city as artifice, where the user took no part in the construction of the space. This leads to Lefebvre’s suggestion about the gap between the three different spaces. The dominance of mental realm has created a gap between mental sphere on one side and physical and social spheres on the other. The spaces have been compartmentalized with little or no links between them. Lefebvre, H. 1991b, The Production of Space, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford. 12. An example of the socio-culturally constructed space is the gendered space.

PART ONE

CONSTRUCTING LIVED SPACE

If space is a product, our knowledge of it must be expected to reproduce and expound the process of production. The “object” of interest must be expected to shift from things in space to the actual production of space. (Lefebvre 1991b, pp. 36-37)

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CHAPTER FOUR


Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend and looks twice as old as all of them put together. (Mark Twain quoted in Eck 1982, p. 5)1

The location of Varanasi on the River Ganga (anglicized and written as Ganges), 696 km from Delhi, pre-dates the arrival of Indo-Aryan tribes somewhere between 1400 and 800 BC. This is validated from the material remains excavated at the Raj ghat plateau, which lies towards the north side of the present city. Varanasi is well connected with other important cities in India by road, rail and air. It has a resident population of around 1,570,000 and a traveling population of pilgrims and tourists of over one million annually (Lannoy 1999). The movement of an individual in four cardinal directions has played an important role in locating Varanasi at the banks of Ganga. The Ganga swerves northward at Varanasi so that its southern bank is actually to the east. In Varanasi the sun rises over the river. And when crossing the Ganga from North to the South one is moving from west to east. This conflation of directions is of great importance. Kashi, the Luminous city, arose at the place where pilgrims crossing the river and returning would move in all four cardinal directions. (Schechner 1993, p. 131)

The city has seen the arrival of many different people who have responded to it in their own personal way.

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Chapter Four

As you get closer to Varanasi, paths converge. Who’s been to Varanasi? Who’s travelled these roads? There are, you know, the pilgrims and renouncers, beggars and robbers, salesmen and who knows what else; there are those who hope they will make it in time, those who long to die in the place they call Kashi, the City of Splendid Light. But I call it Ugraratri Nagar, the City of Dreadful Night. Varanasi is a great cremation ground, and we flock to it. It pulls us there, yes, yes its invisible fingers tugging us. And, no, no we can’t resist the invitation to die. (Siegel 1995, p. 35)

Varanasi is a city of dialectic—sacred-fearful, pure-dirty, where richness and poverty flow in the same narrow lanes. It is a place for the ascetics and nobles as well as robbers and thugs (cheats). So what is Varanasi? Is it a city of Splendid Light or a city of Dreadful Night? The different names of the city highlight different aspects. Sanskrit texts, such as Puranas and Mahatmyas, which are of a mythological or semimythological nature, throw light on different names of Varanasi in relation to different periods and contexts. In doing so, they also reveal different moods and characters of this city in different times. As the limits of the city were demarcated by the river Varna in the North and the river Assi in the South, the city came to be known as Varanasi. The name Kashi was given to the kingdom of which Varanasi was the capital. Although originally the name Kashi referred to the kingdom, over a period of time Kashi started to be used to refer to the sacred nature of the city. Hence, whenever the sacred character of Varanasi is to be emphasized it is by the name Kashi that the city is called. In its ancient past it was known as Anandvan or Anandkanan, which means “Forest of Bliss.” The city bestows delight and it is here, according to mythological literature, that Lord Shiva and his consort Parvati spent countless moments of bliss. The name Mahashmashan—the Great Cremation Ground—refers to the belief that it is here that physical, causal and astral bodies are burnt and the soul is liberated. The name Avimukta indicates the “purifying” nature of the city. The people living here are redeemed of all their sins because of this purifying spirit (Eck 1982). There have been numerous ways that Varanasi has been seen, understood and related to, by residents, tourists, pilgrims and scholars, both Indian and foreign. Mark Twain wrote a breezy account of his brief visit; Pierre Loti. . . announced that the ultimate secret of wisdom was hidden away in a back lane of Benares; Patric Geddes looked into the city’s town planning problems, and an honorary doctorate was conferred on Carl Jung; Lowell Thomas, the notorious publicist


43

of Lawrence of Arabia, brought Benares to the attention of the mass American audience with an overblown travelogue. (Lannoy 1999, p. 50)

Historians like Hiuen Tsang, Al-Biruni, Ralph Fitch and James Prinsep have been associated with Varanasi. Varanasi has been the subject of continuous research not only for Indian scholars, but also for scholars from other countries like Africa, France, Germany and England. Richard Lannoy mentions that this varied and rich mix of scholars has produced literary and artistic works including photographs, etchings, paintings and works of pure scholarship (Lannoy 1999). James Prinsep, archaeologist and mapmaker of the late 1820s, became an important figure within the literary circle in Varanasi. His historical, social and cultural representation of Varanasi are important to an understanding of the early nineteenth century city, but reflect a definite bias and an “outsider’s” perspective (Eck 1982). Around the first millennium BC, Aryans arrived in this “Forest of Bliss.” In Varanasi there has been a cultural osmosis between the original tribes and the Aryans. There has also been infiltration from other cultures—the Greek, the Kusana, the Mongol, the Huna, the Pathan, the Mughal, and finally the English (Bhattacharya 1999). The religious power of Hindu and Muslim sects has been displayed by destroying each other’s sacred sites. These sites have now become sites of violence and civic disorder. Monumental Hindu temple architecture in Varanasi has similarly not survived due to the repeated destruction in the Muslim era between the twelfth and the seventeenth century, but the city has been able to keep its religious traditions intact in terms of its archetypal-cosmological frame and the festive rituals performed by its residents (Eck 1982). The remnants of this ancient cultus are plainly visible today. When we see the trunks of great trees daubed with orange sindur, swathed along with string, and sprinkled with water by circumambulating worshippers; when we see a plain stone in a “shrine” consisting of nothing but two bricks surmounted by a slab of rock; when we see worshippers bathing in a pool or tank; when we see them smearing Ganesha or Hanuman with vermilion and sprinkling flowers in his lap—we are seeing something of this city’s religious life that is pre-Shaiva, pre-Buddhist, and probably more than three thousand years old. (Eck 1982, p. 54)

The ancient Varanasi can still be glimpsed today in the ritual practices of its people.

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Chapter Four

Death provides an economic sustenance to most Varanasi residents either directly or indirectly. Various groups of sacred specialists earn their living on or around the cremation ghats of the city (Parry 1994). Varanasi is an originpoint and microcosm of the universe, providing the faithful with the goals of human existence, and the death rituals give definition to Hindu culture and are used as tools for maintaining cosmic and social order (Parry 1994). The death ritual acts as a symbolic transformatory device leading a person from the social world to the cosmic world (Kaushik 1993). The uncanny nature of Varanasi:2 The boy heard the distant laughter over the cries of the hawkers, the chanting of priests, the arguments of customers at the stalls (“fifty rupees and not an anna more!”), the shouts of devotees (“Har, Har, Mahadeva!”), and he recognized the leper’s hideous laughter (“Haha! Haha!”). He was hidden in the clamorous crowd that shoved and pushed their way through the galis—sick and holy people, frightened and desperate, cunning and devout, animated by bloated miseries and delicate hopes, interminable greed and love, and their incalculable fears and desires—students, merchants, Brahmins, pilgrims, young, old, all kinds of people, but, above all, those who had come to Varanasi to die. (Siegel 1995, p. 41)

There is something about the city that brings to the fore strong feelings of revulsion and fear. This might be related to the inconceivable idea to foreigners of burning bodies in the Burning Ghats that has resulted in a “compulsive counter projection of paranoid suspicion” amongst Indians themselves (Lannoy 1999). Whatever the source there is an element of fascination with the city’s dark side, and a tendency of visitors to harp upon the polluted river, the dirt in the lanes, the chicanery and crime, chiefly from moralistic motives. However as Jung frequently pointed out Mandala symbolism, both eastern and Western, usually divides the circle of totality into four equal parts, and one of these parts is represented by dark colours and black. (Lannoy 1999, p. 51)

It is this dark, uncanny side of Varanasi which has been of immense interest to a number of scholars. This dark side has also been made prominent in the city due to its association with Tantrik sects (the skull bearers). Smoke in spirals rose in whirls and ghastly curls, reached with dark and ghostly fingers through branches overhanging, smokey fingers passed through scorched trees into blacker, bleaker, nearly moonless night. . . . Putrid flames blazed in


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Vijaya’s eyes. He saw the shadows of a man, the Skullbearer sitting in meditation by the crackling corpse and cackling. . . . They passed close by him. Was it the same mendicant they had met on the way? You can’t tell—the same skulls and ashes, identical signs, ferocious nakedness and frightful poise. They are all the same. They are all death in life. (Siegel 1995, p. 45)

The skull bearers called aghoris have their place and identity in this city as most of their practices involve the use of the cremation ground (Parry 1994). Varanasi city-structure and its architecture have been discussed from various viewpoints in the works of the scholars mentioned above. For many foreign scholars, Varanasi portrayed a picture of exotic Orient. The scenic beauty of the ghats became a favorite theme in many painters’ works, like those of William Hodges, the Daniells and others (Lannoy 1999). After the view of the wide, flowing Ganga, it is the monumental palaces and complexes that attract attention at the ghats. Ghats became a site for display of wealth and power for many royal families and rich households of India.3 As one moves from the ghats towards the city, one tends to lose oneself in the maze of narrow lanes, winding through two to three-storied houses with intricately carved balconies. The havelis, that are houses of the rich, have been built around a central court, with ornamental gardens at several levels. The façades of older mansions display an Islamic influence, with balconies and window screens elaborately wrought with filigree decoration. The narrow lanes are dotted at intervals with innumerable stone idols of various deities. Jerry Pinto’s description of Ram Kumar’s city paintings reflects a sensory appreciation of the back lanes of Varanasi. “[T]he backstage of the city where lanes follow the lost windings of the thumri; where corpses may be stood up against a wall while the pall-bearers stop for a beedi; where old women wait for death” (Pinto 1998, p. 8). The narrow, winding lanes are dotted with small and large temples at the corners. These lanes lead to the bazaars where shops open up directly onto the lanes, with their displayed goods almost touching and spilling over the lanes. This dense development along the ghats is known as pucca mahal and grew out of a desire to be as close to the river as possible. It was intended to form a defensible space that could work as a trap for the Muslim invaders. Lannoy (1999) mentions that, when viewed from the ghats, this high-density development provides an urban skyline of Varanasi that reflects an architectural “cubism.” The inner courtyard-oriented dwellings have been formed by repeating the basic units of single cubes and rectangles. This style emerged to meet the demands of

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the extended family system. Cubes were replicated and added whenever the need to accommodate the growing family arose. The effect is a kind of vertical open-endedness, with stairways going nowhere and rooftops abruptly truncated. It gave the place a wonderful “metaphysical” appearance, as if the city were an observatory not of the heavenly bodies but of invisible celestial beings. Most such houses were either the light buff colour of the local stone or whitewashed, and this gave the city, in certain lights, a distinctly spectral, even lunar, look, haunting and magical. (Lannoy 1999, p. 106)

Beyond the ghats, the city breaks into very definite areas marked by different occupations and ethnic groups. There are coherent neighborhoods of goldsmiths and jewelers, coppersmiths, woodworkers, weavers and others. There are also distinct Muslim settlements, Bengali neighborhoods and many such others. Beyond the railway-lines is the cantonment area with its rigid grid pattern. This was built during the eighteenth century for the English and provides quite a contrast to the seemingly disordered and organic pattern of the older city. The nodal point of the city is the chowk, that is, the indigenous bazaar area. It is a social, cultural and commercial hub of the city. Another social node at a smaller scale is the tea-shop where one finds oneself in between political and philosophical debates and discussions. These seem to spring up anywhere and everywhere. Nita Kumar (1992) gives a colorful description of how the tea-shop has a flexibility to evolve out of anywhere. A tree with a hefty trunk would be taken as the starting point for the construction of the tea-shop. From one side of this trunk a large stove . . . of brick, stone, clay and cow-dung would be built. From the sturdier branches of the tree would be suspended wire baskets of eggs, buns, butter and cakes. The shady leaves would provide shelter for the customers. A few benches here and there would be the complete tea stall . . . the ones in Maidagin were more elaborate. Walls were hung up on three sides; bamboo frames, discarded matting, jute, and gunny bags; tin cannisters hammered out into sheets; even newspapers. (Kumar 1992, p. 46)

These small nodes provide a place for social and intellectual exchange in the city. Besides Varanasi being rife with philosophical and religious oriented debates, it has been seen from very early times as a place for gaining knowledge. It becomes important, especially in an oral culture, to devise methods of passing on knowledge. In Varanasi, knowledge was passed from the master to


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disciple through ashrams. Here, students used to come from far-away places, stay as a member of the guru’s family, and by close association with the guru aimed to become proficient in the chosen skills. Along with a focus on “food” for mind, physical fitness and beauty were seen as bringing the mind and body in harmony. The akhadas, the gymnasia of Varanasi, are still famous and keep the yogic and Indian gymnastic tradition going. As mentioned by Lannoy the akhada is similar to the “idea of Greek kalakogathia—‘beautiful goodness’—uniting order of thought and order of being into a single realm” (Lannoy 1999, p. 216). Indian gymnastics is a popular form of sport in Varanasi and is a very familiar sight at the ghats in the mornings. Many akhadas are located at the ghats, where morning exercise, a dip in the Ganga and a visit to Lord Hanuman who is the embodiment of strength, form a sequence of the daily ritual. Pursuit of the arts has been deeply ingrained in a Banarasi.4 Pandit Ravishanker, a sitarist of international fame, and Ustad Bismillah Khan, a Shahnai maestro, are just a couple from Varanasi. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, there were special establishments called kothas where courtesans danced and sang. These were places visited by aristocrats and the elites to cater to their need for artistic pleasures. In those days, Varanasi was as famous for its courtesans as for its Sanskrit pandits. In present times, kothas have vanished and the “dancing girls,” who are considered to be socially defiled, have their homes and entertainment areas in a lane quite close to the main temple—the “bad” and “good” of the society in proximity to each other (Kumar 1992).5 Varanasi has been the birthplace of a style of Indian classical music and dance broadly known as the Banarasi Gharana. The narrow lanes of the city co-exist with the arts, where during the evenings and mornings, walking in the lanes one finds the senses thrilled by the sounds of tabla and the flute and the sound of the tinkling bells on dancing feet escaping from doorways, windows and balconies opening directly onto the streets. This city is thus rich in various aspects that have been explored by scholars with different points of view. B. Bhattacharya, in Varanasi Rediscovered (1999), makes a note on the various ways in which the city has been understood and rediscovered by scholars. This makes him question whether Varanasi requires a rediscovery. Varanasi is there in the labyrinth of lanes throbbing with life. It is there in those small and large public squares crammed with people. It is there in those gigantic stone steps swarming with people, bathing in the river. It is in the air full of the sound of ringing bells and chanting of shlokas. (Tiwari 1998)

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The aim here is not to rediscover Varanasi. The aim is to understand and represent it by “being absorbed into the city, like one of the leaves on a tree shivering in the breeze . . . becoming a small part of spaces which possess sufficient practical resemblances—‘emptiness, theatricality, darkness, alternatives of frenetic activity and quiescence, noise and silence, endless repetitions’” (Thrift 2000, p. 404).

Notes 1. Benaras is another name for Varanasi. 2. Uncanny implies unwieldy and mysterious based on its use by A. Vidler. 1992, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 3. An example is Man Singh’s palace, of Rajput-Moghul architecture style, dating from 1598, with its great hall of audience and an intricate balcony work. 4. Banarasi is the term used for a Varanasi resident. 5. This proximity of the sacred place with the “dancing girls” is probably due to these girls being associated with the temple in the earlier days, where their performance was held as an offering to the Gods. The dancers were thus required to live close to the temples.

CHAPTER FIVE


In Banaras today, the name Manikarnika bears with it the double-edged power of a living and transforming symbol. For the pilgrims, it calls to mind the sacred kund with its life-giving waters of creation, and at the same time it calls to mind the cremation ground with its burning fires of destruction and liberation. Here at the heart of the sacred city is the transformation of life and of death (Eck 1982, p. 251). Varanasi is famous for its powers of liberation as well as for death. The hub of activities is the riverfront, with its eighty ghats (stepped embankments) stretching through the length of the city. This could be referred to as the “strip” in Varanasi (see figure 5.1). On the strip is located Manikarnika, known as the Great Cremation Ground. It is considered the sanctuary of death and the place to attain liberation. People prefer to breathe their last here, hence we find a number of old age homes located on the ghat providing shelter to many people from the surrounding regions who have migrated here. Many others, who cannot die here, wish to be cremated here. Hence bodies from all over India are brought here. A familiar sight in the city is dead bodies being carried on shoulders, on rickshaws and on the roofs of vehicles. If the bodies cannot be cremated here then the relatives of the dead bring their ashes to be immersed in the Ganga. And if this too is not possible then there are postal services available for the ashes to be sent (Eck 1982). Besides being known for death, Manikarnika kund (stepped bath) associates this place with sacredness. Pilgrims from all over India come to have a dip in the kund, which is considered to be a sacred act. Death and pilgrimage

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Figure 5.1. Locating Manikarnika in Varanasi. (Image by the author)

can be said to underpin the economic activity at Manikarnika, as well as at Varanasi. The inhabitants of the city are dependent on this business directly or indirectly (Eck 1982). Instead of death evoking an image of sadness and mourning that might be engulfing the city all the time, death is seen as an important aspect of life here.


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A burping, pot-bellied, pan-spitting jocularity or a muscle-bound-devil-maycare assertiveness provide the predominant stereotypes for those who work and live by Manikarnika ghat, rather than the morbid moroseness one might perhaps associate with people who spend their lives in an atmosphere perpetually permeated by the smoke and smell of the funeral pyre. (Parry 1994, p. 21)

This casual attitude towards death is developed due to the nature of the setting where the death rituals take place. Instead of being hidden away in an enclosed place, death here forms very much a part of everyday life. Due to this transparency, the fear associated with the idea of death is lost. In fact, death is seen in a positive way, an event without which life is incomplete. My initial experience of Manikarnika: On the second day of my arrival at Varanasi I was told by my local informants to visit Manikarnika where I could get a glimpse of “Indian culture.” I walked along with crowd being pushed and shoved within a maze of cobbled alleyways. The crowd consisted of residents and tourists—pilgrims, daily bathers, shoppers, and porters with loads of wood for the cremation pyre. Amongst these I could also find the snarling dogs and the enraged bulls giving you the run of your life. The goods were overflowing down up to the open drains from the little shops on the sides. Almost at every corner a “shikhara” (spire) sprouted up announcing the location of some temple and every few minutes there passed a group of mourners carrying a corpse on the bamboo bier on shoulders. Picking my way carefully amidst all this “chaos,” which was so different from my everyday life world, I was trying my best to avoid brushing against others.1 The sounds of the temple bells clanging, Sanskrit chanting interlaced with a cacophony of shouting vendors and hoarse cries of the mourners left me in a bewildered state. (Tiwari 1998)

Although among the crowd, I did not belong to it. I was very much like Benjamin’s flâneur, “who is not so much a creature of the crowd as someone who remains aloof from the crowd, and observes it from afar” (Leach 1997). The flâneur does not belong to the crowd. In fact his experience is by way of remaining outside the crowd. A lack of knowledge of the city makes the task of using and relating to the city difficult for the flâneur. Reaching Manikarnika Ghat I walked down the terraces and steps where cremation takes place. Manikarnika Ghat was the first amongst the ghats to be built in stone in 1302 AD. Restoration works along with some new developments have been carried out from time to time. “Everything about the architecture here is surreal—fretted, pinnacled, intricate, honey-combed— the sombre-coloured stone work blackened by smoke from pyres which burn all twenty-four hours; the layout is multi-levelled and complex to an almost

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hallucinating degree” (Lannoy 1999, p. 160). The environment, with its sensory and spiritual aspects, was overpowering. I appropriated three different positions at Manikarnika that incorporated the three gazes—the gaze of power, a voyeur’s gaze and a tourist’s gaze. The first position was the “viewing” platform at the first floor level from where I was able to look straight down onto the cremation grounds (see figure 5.2). It offered the scene from “a privileged position.” I was looking down at enormous number of pyres, a body half burnt, a skull being cracked as a part of a ritual, a man circumambulating and giving fire, near and dear ones standing around in mourning. In the narrow lane below, people were carrying yet another dead body on the bier, taking it for a dip in the Ganga. I could hear the noise, the chants, and sounds floating up and sometimes when the wind blew towards me, I was engulfed with the smoke from below. (Tiwari 1998)

This position for me was one of power, and control over my own body. Here, the viewers could move away from the smoke, cover up their nose,

Figure 5.2. From Above—Construction of the “Other.” Viewing the cremation ground from above, which offers a position of power to the viewer for “constructing” the viewed. (Image by the author)


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or show their aversion or disgust, because this position was from where one could see but not be seen. This privileged position constructed a space filled with horror, fear, strangeness and revulsion.2 It also afforded a power to the viewer to “construct” the viewed: In creating you, I give you a history, an erotic reading, and a standing in the situation. I may treat you with indifference, and let my gaze brush across your face, as it would across a distant cloud in the sky. (Sartre 1943/1956, p. 379)

I constructed Manikarnika as fearful and strange. My gaze from this first position had a similarity to Foucault’s gaze of power (Foucault 1980b)—“the gaze of the person of power who looks through the spaces of the panopticon” (Denzin 1995, p. 44). The panopticon spaces offer a one-way observation—from the seer to the seen. This first position at Manikarnika offered me a similar situation, where I could see others without being seen. This lack of reciprocity between the viewer and the viewed in the gaze defined the latter in isolation from its context, but incorporated the subjectivity of the viewer—in this situation my class, race, gender and my knowledge of the place (Foucault 1980b). Manikarnika, constructed by me as strange and fearful, was a superficial construction as I was seeing it as remote from its social, cultural and historical context. The second position was from where I was able to look at the scene from close quarters; however, there was still a distance maintained between myself and the object (see figure 5.3) I proceeded down the steps in between the walls of the temple on one side and the pavilion on the other. On the right was the pavilion underneath the temple, occupied by Doms (the low caste in the Hindu caste hierarchy). It is an unwritten law that the fire for cremation can only be bought from the Doms. As mentioned by Neeta Kumar, Doms charge heavily for the price of fire, and their services towards the ritual, thus “reducing to penury many villagers who wish to give their deceased the benefits of a Kashi cremation” (Kumar 1992, p. 136). Crowd of mourners had gathered around the Doms, haggling after the price of the fire. On my left was a window looking down into the Shiva temple, where a few of ascetics were sitting, smoking, meditating or doing puja at the sacrificial altar.3,4 At such times, loud mantras and bells could be heard even from a considerable distance. This narrow lane with steps offered me to be a part of the activity, and still be away from it. I could see and hear what was going on. I could smell the incense or the odour of the burning bodies on the pyres. I could feel the heat and the brush of the people passing by. But there was still a space of “otherness” created between the physical environment and myself. The physicality of the interface between the street and the surrounding

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Figure 5.3. In the Lane Below—Construction of Self. The dot indicates my position within the narrow lanes, the tall walls on the side engulfing me. In this position, my gaze was being reciprocated. I was being observed by those standing above, which made me “aware of myself” and constructed my subjectivity. (Image by the author)

built form contributed towards it significantly. On my right, the level difference between the pavilion and the narrow lane led to my isolation from the pavilion. On the left side, the window with its iron bars looking deep down into a small room emphasised the subject-object relationship. Besides this physical interface, there was a socio-cultural interface that led to an abstracted understanding of the space. (Tiwari 1998)

The gaze constructed at this position was one where the seer could also be seen. Sartre elaborates on this voyeuristic gaze as: “the gaze will be given as well . . . when there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or a slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain” (Sartre 1943/1956, pp. 257-258). Voyeuristic gaze is reciprocated. The hidden eyes behind the curtain or the window respond to it. The physical positioning of the viewer is such that it involves the look of the other. This is demonstrated in this second position occupied by me at Manikarnika. Here, I was constituted as an object where I could feel the stares of others


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from behind the windows. The calls of “Is Madam English?” from above, made me aware of myself as an object of vision.5 Hence, the gaze from this second position worked similar to Sartre’s gaze. It turned me “into an object for the other and a subject for myself” (Denzin 1995, p. 47). As mentioned by Denzin, this gaze had the capacity to “embarrass, humiliate, humble and shame” (1995, p. 47). It made me aware of myself. It constructed my subjectivity. The third position was where I found my way through an extended journey by the river to view Manikarnika from the front (see figure 5.4). The main temple overlooking the cremation pyres is located at the river’s edge, fronting the river. Its placement is formal, the front of the temple complex located against the formal element of the site, the river’s edge. The interesting aspect is the disjuncture between the formal logic of the temple and my or the tourist’s experience of approaching it from the city. I had to work my way, by taking a boat from the nearby ghats to see it face to face. Here, Manikarnika cremation ground, with the temple forming the background, is viewed from the river with the river edge constructing a barrier between

Figure 5.4. From the River Edge—The Tourist’s View. View from the River. The symmetrical, frontal aspect of the temple presented formally to the tourist on the boat. (Image by the author)

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the perceived and the perceiver. This view becomes essential in the tourist’s understanding of the place, and is not at all essential for the resident. For the local residents, the axial, frontal aspect of the temple is not missing even when approached from the side. The symmetrical façade viewed from the side brings the memory of the frontal aspect of the temple. This makes the residents believe in their movement along the central axis. This knowledge and memory of the temple façade from the front enables the residents to bring the “real” and “imagined” city together. But for me, as a tourist, the “view” had to be presented from the front in a formal manner. The first two positions were inadequate without this third view from the river in forming an initial understanding of Manikarnika. This third view employs the “tourist gaze” where the gaze produces an object for consumption (Urry 1990). The commodity so produced generates either pleasure or a sense of strangeness and wonder. This gaze involves an experience that is different from those encountered in the everyday life (Urry 1990). In all the above three positions—the first, at the rooftop; the second, within the narrow lanes; and the third, from across the river’s edge—there are a few common things that lead to the space being understood as abstract: First is the distance or the gap between the viewer and the viewed, which may be physical as in the first and the third positions. This gap may be mental and invisible, as in the second position, where layers of meanings embedded in the space are not revealed due to the lack of socio-cultural knowledge. The understanding developed is superficial. There is a big gap between the way viewers appropriating the three positions imagine or construct the place in their minds and the “real” space. They are unable to grasp the reality of the place. Secondly, the space is simply seen as a product to be consumed by them. Manikarnika offers a theatrical space. Tourists pay to see the “act” being performed. In all the three positions appropriated by me at Manikarnika, there was a price attached. The cost varied depending on the clarity of the view that could be photographed. This monetary exchange had to be negotiated with the boat person and with self-proclaimed “tourist guides.” These guides can be seen hunting for their potential customers right from the railway station and are spread at every tourist spot in the city. The cost varies on the capability of these guides to take the tourists closest to the place offering an “authentic” experience to the tourist.6 The tourists’ reading of the city is similar to Benjamin’s physiognomic reading of the city in One-Way Street (1979).7 Here, the urban setting is represented as a modern theater where, according to Schechner, it is the audience members who are in control (1988). The design of the theater is such that the audience is free to come and go, and it is the theater that suffers if


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the audience stays away. At Manikarnika, the tourists can see and hear the “acts,” watch the performers, talk to other hangers-on, but leave when they want to, without disturbing others. Their staying away will mean less money exchanging hands. Thus what they bring to Manikarnika is an abstraction characterized by a dualistic division of space, the space that is real being separate from the one that is imagined. They also bring an economic dimension to the space. This example illustrates Lefebvre’s explanation of the specificity of the capitalist mode of production of space—the way in which space gets suffused with the tonalities of capitalism. Returning back to my accommodation at Assi Ghat, the “spectacle” at Manikarnika unsettled me. “[T]he concept of spectacle itself is not direct but alienated, rooted through visual and media metaphors” (Shields 1999, p. 78). The gaze—the eye as a tool—distances the event, transforming it into a spectacle. “The spectacle is heir to all the weakness of the project of western philosophy, which was an attempt to understand activity by means of the categories of vision. . . . The spectacle’s function in society is the concrete manufacture of alienation” (Debord 1994, pp. 17, 23). The utilization and reliance on vision alone leads to creating a spectacle that is non-dialectic, inaccessible and alienated. This spectacle at Manikarnika reminded me of Lefebvre’s theory of alienation of vision, where I could see Manikarnika, but was unable to understand it, could look but not embrace it. The visit raised questions in my mind: What was it that united this disordered, chaotic and apparently fragmented space together? What kept it going? Surely the answer was not to be obtained by a visually dominated approach. Perhaps, I had to employ a different way of looking at the space. Denzin elaborates on Merleau-Ponty’s gaze as one that is about creation and action. “I create my visible world through my acts of perception, through my contact with that which I make visible through my actions . . . my look is always embodied, an extension of my carnal being” (1995, pp. 46-47). Thus, the look is not limited to an engagement with the object at the level of vision, but it incorporates a bodily engagement. The Hidden Order: Tokyo through the Twentieth Century by Yoshinobu Ashihara (1989) provides clues towards an understanding and revelation of the underlying hidden order in the context of Tokyo by living the city. Besides this, Lefebvre’s emphasis on a return to the body pushed me into a “rhythmanalysis” of Varanasi. My intention at that time was to explore the way in which Manikarnika evolved from an absolute to a sacred space, and then transformed into an abstract space based on historical periods (discussed in the following sections). But my approach as a “rhythmanalyst” led me towards discovering that the absolute nature of Manikarnika could be revealed in all the historical periods.

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Notes 1. The place was new and the people were unknown, and that made me construct a physical barrier, a distance, between my body and the “other” bodies. 2. People unfamiliar with the sight of the burning bodies conjure Manikarnika as fearful, strange, and repulsive. Tourists and most Indian women fall within this category. There is no role of women in the death rituals that take place at the cremation grounds (except in very few castes). Parry, J. P. 1994, Death in Banaras, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Thus although an Indian, the experience evoked negative feelings in me. 3. Puja means worship. 4. Persons who have reached a certain level in ascetism. Sinha, S. and Saraswati, B. 1978, Ascetics of Kashi, Bhargava Bhushan Press, Varanasi. 5. Indian women are rarely seen at the cremation grounds. Hence seeing me, a woman, at the cremation grounds, immediately put thoughts in the minds of the locals that I was not one of them. The Indian women can be the object of gaze, but not be the ones who gaze, especially in the cremation ghat. I had reversed this situation, and hence there was the doubt in the locals’ minds about my being Indian. 6. The other costs, besides money, are discomfort, dirty clothes, etc. 7. Physiognomy is the art of determining character or personal characteristics from the facial features or the body form.. The Macquarie Library Pty. Ltd. 2002, Macquarie Dictionary, at http://www.macquariedictionary.com.au/ (November 10, 2001).

CHAPTER SIX


The Individual Body and Everyday Ritual What makes it possible to grasp Manikarnika in totality—the absolute state from within this fragmented nature? It requires a different “way of seeing.” Lefebvre has theorized the importance of “ways of seeing” in the construction of the modern, capitalist understandings of property, space, person and use value (Lefebvre 1991b). My initial approach to Manikarnika through the vision of a flâneur brought the “abstract” nature of Manikarnika to the fore. A re-visioning becomes essential for the Varanasi residents, in order to identify themselves within this abstraction, and to make a place for themselves in the city. This re-visioning becomes possible by way of their actions—their rituals. These rituals start defining the users of the space as individuals, where their bodies begin to influence the construction and articulation of space. This way of relating to the space by bodily rituals re-constructs the absolute, lived space from within the sacred and the abstract Manikarnika. The absolute, lived space by the aghori is constructed from within the contemporary abstract space. Who are aghoris? He roams about in dreadful cemeteries, attended by hosts of goblins and spirits, like a mad man, naked with dishevelled hair, laughing, weeping, bathed in ashes of funeral pyre, wearing a garland of skulls and ornaments of human bones, insane, beloved of the insane, the lord of beings whose nature is essentially darkness. (Briggs quoted in Parry 1994, p. 263)

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The above description of Lord Shiva perfectly fits the stereotype of the aghori. There is a remarkable similarity between the character assumed by the aghori and the person of Shiva. The aghoris who are males “not only renounce the world for a life of asceticism, but turn the values of the world upside down and fasten upon the reverse side” (Eck 1982, p. 328). These renouncers appear strange and shocking to most Hindus who try to keep away from them. The goal of this marginalized sect is to attain liberation by a deliberate engagement with those things that the world scorns. “If all, indeed, is Brahman, then one must not spurn any aspect of life or death” (Eck 1982, p. 328). The most feared place for a common person—the cremation ground—thus becomes a home for the aghori. Appropriating Space by Body Movements The aghori performs everyday. He sleeps over the model bier (made from remnants of the real one), smears his body with ash from the pyres, cooks his food pilfered from them and consumes it out of the human skull. He seats himself on the torso of a corpse to worship.1 His actions are meant to identify his body with death (Arts Council of Great Britain 1971). His close association with the dead bodies and the graveyard is a means by which he overcomes the disgust and defilement with which the society perceives the dead. The corpse or the physical body on which he meditates becomes a tool to attain the invisible body of his Goddess—the ultimate truth. Space in the public realm is appropriated by the simple act of marking. Space is demarcated by Aghori’s private actions in the public sphere. Moving through Manikarnika late evening, I chanced upon a scantily clad ascetic performing what I “thought” to be strange acts. My immediate response was to move away and avoid acknowledging him.2 (Tiwari 1998)

Although this space constructed between me and the aghori was not marked physically, it still had a powerful presence. His mere presence worked as a structured act. His presence was declared by his nakedness. His eyes were burning red. His whole demeanor was “awesome,” and in speech he was quite abrupt and uncouth. A theatrical space emerged with Aghori as a performer and people moving around him as an audience. The aghori’s body inserted itself in space, shaping and re-constructing it. His body became an agency to make his presence felt. He evoked different emotional and bodily responses from others. Some wanted to acknowledge his presence, coming close and paying reverence; others tried to get past him without making eye contact. The space around him cleared at such times and


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was filled with fear and strangeness evoked by his body practices. Thus, his body also became instrumental in making the audience member realize their presence in space. Body Constructing a Lived Space When the aghori sits to do his meditation he first of all performs a rite that “establishes” or “fixes” the place where he sits as his solid-center base on the earth (see figure 6.1). In Hindu and Buddhist tantra, there are no external objective spaces. The spaces are understood as relational and hence are

Figure 6.1. Constructing Lived Space by Body Movements. The diagram represents the lived space—conical in shape—constructed by the aghori’s body, while in meditation. (Based on the photograph by Ashok Khanna in Khanna and Ratnakar 1988, Plate 29; manipulated in Adobe Photoshop by the author with assistance from Christopher Kueh)

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subjective. A center of any space can be identified with the “real” center as long as the person is able to relate it with his/her own center (Arts Council of Great Britain 1971). The aghori in the meditative posture and state is able to locate his own center. This involves his meditative movement in the vertical direction along the central axis of his body. He identifies this axis with the central summit of the Meru peak (Hindu’s axis mundi of the universe). A space, conical in volume, is generated. He limits the base of the cone around himself by material objects. The center of his body marks the center of the cone. “His psychic energy gathered at the central point is able to penetrate upwards out of the realm of the material form” (Arts Council of Great Britain 1971, p. 60). This space is the culmination of the material and the mental world. For the aghori, yoga is not to be used just for producing “physical effect,” but is used to reflect an interrelationship of physical body, mind and space (Arts Council of Great Britain 1971). Thus, the newly constructed absolute, lived space becomes an extension of Aghori’s body space by being able to relate at both physical and metaphysical levels via the ritual. The Place Re-Constructing a Body In most Indian cities, cremation grounds are located towards the outskirts of the city. Here, corpses are laid on piles of wood and are burnt. Sometimes the dead bodies are not completely burnt and these places then become home to crows, vultures and dogs. The cremation grounds are generally thought of as “impure” places. Contact with the dead is considered to be defiling (Arts Council of Great Britain 1971). Because these places become “peripheral” for the society, they become home for the aghoris who are considered to be social outcasts because of their practices. The cremation ground—a ground “impure” for the common man; a ground not to be accessed everyday; and a ground associated with fear—becomes a meditation ground for the aghori. The peripheral body finds its place in the periphery of the city that holds a peripheral ritual.3 The theory of abject as mentioned by Kristeva (1991) is about abjection having corporeal, psychological as well as socio-spatial dimensions.4 These dimensions of abjection are represented by the aghori’s occupation of the cremation grounds as his home. He is a social outcast and occupies the least desirable space, at the periphery of cities. Contrary to this, the central positioning of the cremation grounds at Manikarnika, and death at Manikarnika being sacred, brings a new dimension to the aghori’s occupation of this space. Because of its centrality, the aghori makes use of the graveyard at Manikarnika to construct a voice that speaks of personal identity. His desire to construct an identity, a


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place in the society, is strengthened because of his exclusion from the sociospatial interactions. Brian Jarvis in Postmodern Cartographies (1998) mentions the need for the abject to be brought back to the center of the city. He gives the example of mundus. Mundus, as defined by Lefebvre, was a pit for the trash of the society (people condemned to death or a newborn not accepted by the father). It was positioned right in the middle of the township. It was a link to the subterranean spaces of fertility and death. It was sacred, as well as an accursed place. It was sacred “as locus of time, of births and tombs, vagina of the nurturing earth-as-mother” (Jarvis 1998, p. 192). In the mundus, the boundaries between life and death, fertility and destruction, became hazy. Manikarnika acts as a mundus, where the abject of the society find a place. The aghori, a marginalized person of society, is brought right to the center of the public domain, is made visible, and becomes accepted by the society. The death ritual at Manikarnika becomes a part of the everyday, and becomes sacred. This placement of the abject at the center, at Manikarnika, in the visible public domain, blurs the boundaries of alienation, purity and impurity, fear and non-fear, center and periphery, for a common person. For the aghori, these boundaries never exist because of his being permanently in a ritualized state. His everyday rituals associate him with the prostitute who is considered to be the most socially defiled person.5 Through his rituals he maintains contact with the dead, which is considered to be defiling by the common man.6 He suspends the hierarchical structure of the everyday life by being involved in these rituals. His ritualized space emphasizes an unhierarchized and undifferentiated humanity. His ritualized space emphasizes equality (Parry 1994).7 In his permanent state of liminality, the dualistic division of the city space in terms of pure and impure, fearful and non-fearful spaces is unified by the aghori within the context of any city. At Manikarnika, it is for the audience—the walkers—as well, that these boundaries are collapsed. This happens due to the occupation and construction of space by the aghori through his private acts in the public domain. The acts of the marginalized at the center of the city renders the constructed lived space visible to the dominant culture. This constructed space recaptures the state of the absolute—non-differentiation and a unity of the opposites. Thus, this process of the construction of lived space involves three things, as discussed above. First is the appropriation of space by the body, by its physical presence alone. Second is the embedded ideology—the connotative codes in the physical space. These connotations assist in visualizing the constructed lived space, by other bodies, in relation to the aghori’s body. The third aspect is the action of the body in space relating the physical to the mental. This relation becomes critical in the construction process.

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The Family Body and Extra-Everyday Ritual Further to the notion of the abstract space discussed in Manikarnika as an Abstract Space, Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man mentions a loss of public space in the Western context because of a change in the way people behaved in the public domain—the natural expression got lost in the requirement for a culturally defined behavior (Sennett 1974). The public space became distanced from the “natural” body. It influenced the way people behaved. People withdrew from this abstract space, and according to Sennett, the family unit became a means to do this. Family became a shield to protect oneself from the state dominated and controlled public domain (Sennett 1974).8 In the big city environment it was the family unit that gave refuge to the individual. It was an arena where feelings could be invested, which was not possible in impersonal market situations. Expression of feelings was the right of the natural human being and was linked to the private domain of the family unit. “The geography of the capital city served its citizens as one way to think about nature and culture, by identifying the natural with the private, culture with the public” (Sennett 1994, p. 90). Thus, the city space was divided into public and private, one linked to “culture” and the other to “nature.” The cremation ground at Manikarnika breaks this dualism of natureculture. A prominent public space, it stages the act of cremation, which is “private” in nature as it incorporates the actions and expression of the family. The cremation ground is located at the center of the city and can be reached by foot alone. This makes the death procession journey through the narrow lanes to the cremation ghat. The built morphology of Varanasi makes this death ritual concerned with the family unit an everyday part of the public arena. Death becomes visible to the people. This visibility changes the way people associate with the idea of death. It becomes an acceptable part of life because it leads to re-birth. Lannoy describes the atmosphere at Manikarnika cremation ground: The scene is eerie, mainly because the buildings are somehow spectral in appearance; under a pall of smoke shadowy figures tend the pyres on stone platforms, one tier above the other, each connected by stone steps. . . . Clusters of male mourners stand to the side on high parapets. Sacred cows jostle the attendants preparing piles of logs. From a striking building to one side of the pyres tourists lean over balconies to watch. Children take advantage of hotair currents to launch their kites. There is no pomp. The mood is casual but not disrespectful; for the Hindu, death of the physical body promises rebirth. (Lannoy 1999, p. 161)


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Manikarnika becomes a place for all—tourists, children, mourners, workers at the site, and also for the old and dying.9 “Natural expression is outside the public realm” (Sennett 1974, p. 94). This is not the case at Manikarnika. Within this public space dominated by “culture,” it is through the rituals that the body expresses itself and is able to resolve the dichotomy of nature and culture. The death procession is required to move from the dwelling to the cremation ground. The transition from private to public domain is effectively used to demonstrate the relationship between life and death. This transition also involves gendered bodies. As mentioned by Jonathan Parry “the binary distinction of gender is used to articulate the opposition between complete conjunction and complete disjunction between life and death” (Parry 1994, p. 54). Gendered bodies in a ritualized state reveal the opposition between life and death and between private and public domain. “At death it is men who give birth” (Parry 1994, p. 54). Cremation ritual is identified with the early Vedic sacrificial ritual where the sacrifice gave birth to the patron.10 At death it is the chief mourner (the eldest son of the deceased in most cases) who, by the ritual of breaking the skull, releases the spirit of the dead (Parry 1994). Men are required to come close to the dead while women are supposed to remain aloof. Women are thus allowed to accompany the procession from home only for a short distance. At the first crossroads, where the stipulated boundary of the private domain ends, a pitcher filled with water is broken. At the second crossroads, at the border of the neighborhood, the women are asked to return back home (Parry 1994). This marks the transitional zone between the private and the public zone, women being associated with the private and men with the public domain. Apart from the role of gendered bodies in demarcating the space, the various acts that the ritual demands from the body add towards making the space legible. The spatial story is punctuated by the offerings of rice-balls that are made when the dead body is taken to the cremation ground. The offerings are made at the place of the death, at the door of the house, at the crossroads on the way, at the place where the bier is placed and on the body when it is laid on the pyre. After the cremation, the chief mourner carries a pot of Ganga water over his shoulders and with his back towards the pyre smashes the pot on the burning embers. This signifies a break between the dead and the living. Without looking back the mourners return home, sometimes via a different route from the one by which they had come (Parry 1994). As Parry mentions, the change of route signifies an auspicious beginning. A dip in the Ganga before coming back means a pure body ready to make an auspicious journey back. All along, the ideas of dead, living, pure and impure

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bodies are reflected by the actions of the body in space. The ritualized body is able to inscribe these ideas on the physical space, thus bringing the mental and the material realms together. A grammar of an urban landscape is seen as emerging here, the beginnings of constructing the city-as-narrative. The physical spacing and the thresholds of private and public space merges the gap between the living and the dead. This is the absolute space and is very well constructed from within the abstract Manikarnika.

Notes 1. “Tantra makes use of the graveyard in several ways. The Sadhaka is supposed to make it his home, at first literally, and later metaphorically. He must confront and assimilate, in its most concrete form, the meaning of death together with the absolute social defilement it entails. His Goddess . . . who gives him birth . . . also destroys him in the flesh. His image of her is incomplete if he does not know her as his tearer and devourer. The hideous corpses, defiling corpse-handlers, jackals and crows scattering his bones are Her agencies.” Arts Council of Great Britain 1971, p. 41. The corpse, or the material body, becomes a device to attain the invisible body that is the “ultimate truth.” 2. As mentioned earlier, there is a barrier formed between the aghori and the common person. People do not understand his “strange” practices and thus do not want to be associated with him. Yet, they are aware of his “powers” and do not want to offend or insult him. 3. The ritual is related to “impurity” and does not become a part of the “everyday.” 4. Abjection is about defilement, humiliation and spiritlessness. Kristeva, in Strangers to Ourselves (1991), mentions that this state has a reflection in the physical, psychological and spatial realms. 5. “Sexual intercourse is the principal form of ‘enjoyment’ which Tantra harnesses to its spiritual ends, treating it as a paradigm of divine ecstasy.” Arts Council of Great Britain 1971, p. 26. The body of the prostitute as an agency for attaining spirituality breaks the dualistic divisions of pure-impure, for the aghori. 6. “Surrounded by death in the place of death, those aspects of reality that end in the fires of the cremation ground become distasteful . . . attachment to the world and the ego is cut and the union with Shiva, the conqueror of death is sought.” Kinsley, D. R. 1977, “The death that conquers death: Dying to the world in medieval Hinduism,” in Religious Encounters with Death: Insights from the History and Anthropology of Religion, eds. Reynolds, E. & Waugh, E. H., Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park. p. 100. 7. “Aghori doctrine poses questions about the ultimate legitimacy of the social order. . . . In orthodox caste society, polluting contacts between castes must be eliminated in order to preserve the boundaries of the group, for which, as Douglas (1966) argues, the boundaries of the body often serve as metaphor. The Aghoris inversion of


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the same symbols of the body margins implies exactly the opposite message. With the destruction of boundaries implied by the consumption of flesh . . . and so on, goes an affirmation of the irrelevance of caste boundaries.” Parry, J. P. 1994, Death in Banaras, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. p. 262. 8. Sennett gives an example of the change in people’s behavior in Haussmann’s Paris. 9. There are people who come from the surrounding regions and wait for their death here at Varanasi. They watch the “scene” from the balconies of the nearby building specifically used to lodge the old and frail. Their future becomes visible and they prepare themselves for it. 10. There are many similarities between the Vedic ritual and the death ritual. The site for cremation is prepared in exactly the same way as in fire-sacrifice, the prescriptive use of ritually pure wood, the purification of the site, its consecration with holy water and the establishment of Agni (fire God) with the proper use of mantras. Having dispersed his own body in the sacrifice, the dead reverts to the embryonic state and is then reborn. Thus cremation is not merely an act of destruction but simultaneously an act of creation. J. Lipner. 1994, Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, Routledge, London; New York.

PART TWO

THE NATURE OF LIVED SPACE

Victor Turner suggests, in The Anthropology of Performance, that rituals involving groups of people have their liminality in public places. “The village greens or the squares of the city are not abandoned but rather ritually transformed. It is as though everything is switched into a subjunctive mood for a privileged period of time—the time, for example, of Mardi-Gras or the Carnival-Careme” (Turner 1987, p. 102). Public spaces in a city are thereby transformed during the liminal phase through the rituals occurring there. What is the nature of the re-constructed or ritually transformed space based on memories? How does the design of the physical setting aid this process of re-construction? Does the communal performance help in achieving a liminal state of the body, where a correspondence can be found between present spaces (actual) and past spaces (imaginary)?

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In its simplest sense, memory is “the mental capacity or faculty of retaining and reviving impressions, or of recalling or recognising previous experiences” (The Macquarie Library Pty. Ltd. 2002). Thus, memory can be a simple recall of experiences of a particular place. It can also be thought of as the re-living of a certain place through imagination or the reviving of impressions created in the mind of that particular place. These impressions can be created by continued transmission of knowledge of that place, through tradition. Collective memory is a part of a community’s active life. It is a collection of multiple and dispersed memories that are relative to a specific community at a certain space and time (Boyer 1994). The grounds for this collective memory are social experiences, in a spatial and temporal framework (Douglas 1980). Memory and imagination have always been seen as critical in the perception of built form. The city has been viewed as a site for both collective and individual memory; each space, each building has a forgotten story to convey (Benjamin 1979). City spaces work as a palimpsest, where memories are inscribed and re-inscribed based on cultural contexts and the circumstances in which they are formed. An important aspect in contemporary urban discourse has been the unraveling of collective and individual memories and the ways in which such memories are spatialized. Memories are inscribed in a city in a number of ways. Modern institutions such as museums, monuments and heritage sites have become collective devices in remembering public histories. Besides being tangible representations

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of history, these are intended to act as “triggers” to memories—collective and individual (Lewi 1999). Boyer (1994) considers museums and art galleries as storage devices that have similarities with the ancient art of memory as explained by Francis Yates. The art of memory was a mental construction in the form of a series of places, each holding a set of images (Yates 1966). These places worked as memory cues or prompts where, in order to recall certain facts, one had to imagine a journey through these places along with their specific contents. The museum had become such a memory device by the nineteenth century: its rooms were a series of places to stop and look around. Visual comparisons were made between rooms representing different time periods. Each period was recalled by the spectator based on features of art and styles. Thus, the journey through a museum worked more towards narrating the evolutionary development of history alongside a compartmentalized time line. Boyer questions the nature of this journey. In reality, time is flowing and boundless, whereas in the museums, time is divided distinctly. Thus, the museum as a memory device, or as a journey through the past, works towards producing an illusion (Boyer 1994). The spectator, while undertaking the journey, is unable to grasp the “reality” that the museum intends to represent or exhibit. History from the curator’s viewpoint is juxtaposed, framed and condensed, and is exhibited for the spectator who absorbs this information. Due to this clear separation of the time-frame between present and past, the museum works towards representing history, rather than acting as a memory device. The spectator is unable to reach out into the past and correlate it with the present; thus, the built environment lacks reciprocity with the spectator. Boyer further observes the incorporation of this de-contextualized approach in the museums and art galleries. These institutions are a collection of carefully researched and ordered display of artifacts, which are juxtaposed at random within the space of these institutions. The display of these works of art is unable to take into account their original spatial and temporal context. Thus, these institutions work more as information-giving devices based on fictional images as drawn by museum directors and art historians (Boyer 1994). Another way of spatializing memories in the city has been through monuments. In his 1903 essay, “On the Modern Cult of Monuments,” Alois Reigl described three types of values associated with historic monuments: memorial, historical and age value (1984). Monuments with a memorial value recall specific moments or events in time. They are the material representations of collective memory. The memorial value of these monuments is retained while the conditions of their origination exist. With a change in


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conditions, either the monument loses its purpose, or as Benjamin remarks, the monument becomes mythical in nature. Benjamin gives an example of the Egyptian obelisk in Place de la Concorde in Paris. The obelisk originally a symbol of Egyptian rule is transformed into a marker for the colonial power of France and thus its signification changes with time. This monument therefore stands isolated from the meaning that it was originally created to communicate and so, for Benjamin, evokes a false history and is mythical (Reigl 1984). Another contemporary technique to evoke and translate memories spatially has been by way of theme parks and restored environments. Richard Schechner (1988), while discussing the “authenticity” of such heritage stage sets, gives an example of Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts. There are no traces of the architecture from the original seventeenth century colony in this place. The plantation has been completely re-created. Not only has the built environment been replicated but also the seventeenth century inhabitants are “brought back to life” by the role-playing of the plantation’s present inhabitants which creates the seventeenth century style of living through the use of language, clothes and food. Following is a visitor’s experience of the plantation demonstrating that although the visitors respond in the manner required by them, they know that the inhabitants are acting, are simply playing a role: “In each building a member of the household that would have resided there greets you and asks ‘How be ye?’ Within a few minutes you find yourself responding in a language that was foreign only moments ago. ‘I be well, thank ye.’ . . . As the day proceeds, the villagers go about their work. Food is prepared in black kettles over hot coals, while they explain to their visitors the difference between pottage and ragout. . . . One young lad is helping building Mr Allerton’s house. . . . The houses are all hand-constructed, some with wooden floors, some with clay (damp in the spring thaw). The streets are uneven, rocky. . . . Many special events continue the theme of historic re-enactment. There is the opening of the Wampanoag Summer Settlement, staffed by native Americans in the style of the 17th century.” (Moran quoted in Schechner 1985, pp. 86-87)

Schechner describes his own experience of Plimoth Plantation as similar to “eager, camera-toting, question-asking explorers of earlier times” (1985, p. 89). In the plantation, Schechner visits a home where two female performers are cleaning up after finishing their lunch. He sits and observes. “I felt more that I was watching a period play than ‘actually being there’ in the seventeenth century” (1985, p. 89). Schechner could feel the theatricality

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reflected in the sanitized representation of the seventeenth century environment. Although there is a movement in time and place, i.e., the spectators move into the seventeenth century environment, they remain conscious of the twenty-first century while experiencing the seventeenth century. Celeste Olalquiaga in Megalopolis highlights this confusion of time and space while locating the body: The postmodern confusion of time and space, in which temporal continuity collapses into extension and spatial dimension is lost to duplication, transforms urban culture into a gigantic hologram capable of producing any image within an apparent void. In this process, time and space are transformed into icons of themselves and consequently rendered into scenarios. (Olalquiaga 1992, p. 19)

As duplications or copies of the original, these restored environments repackage times and spaces which are represented as scenarios, images or spectacles. The spectacle works in alienating the body from the space where lifestyles are sanitized, repackaged and sold back (Shields 1999). Edward Soja terms these environments “real-and-imagined.” Discussing Jean Baudrillard’s (1981) notion of “hyper-reality,” Soja remarks that through these environments another kind of reality, a hyper-reality, is constructed which weakens our ability to differentiate between what is real and what is imagined (1996). These examples of museums, art galleries, monuments and restored environments as memory devices reinforce Christine Boyer’s suggestion that contemporary spatialization of memories has been limited to the insertion of architectural fragments and traces from the past into the present context. Instead of enhancing the collective memory, these historicist re-constructions serve to dilute and sanitize it. Piecemeal and partial, visionary constructs do not address the linkages between past and present (Boyer 1994). They are purposely made for the “tourist gaze,” which is directed to anything that is separate from the everyday. “Places are chosen to be gazed upon because there is an anticipation, especially through daydreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures, either on a different scale or involving different senses from those customarily encountered” (Urry 1990, p. 3). De-contextualized from the everyday, these re-constructions work merely as “entertainment devices.” Besides a non-relational past and present space, these “re-constructed” environments have resulted in the act of “inventing” traditions, a commodification and misrepresentation of “history” in a way that “any oppositional potential rooted in collective memory has been eclipsed completely” (Boyer 1994, p. 5). Tradition becomes merely a commodity and loses its authenticity. These environments that are intended to make people “relive” their


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past simply work as fake environments. History and memory are reduced to nostalgia: “This is the end of art. . . . Today this simulated art takes place in cities that are also double of themselves, cities that only exist as nostalgic references to the idea of the city and to the ideas of communication and social intercourse” (Halley quoted in Soja 1996, p. 194). Consumption becomes a key element in these environments. A consumerist aura envelops everything—anything with a nostalgic value—anything that is a souvenir of yesteryear’s ancient manufacture. This is image consumerism. These images (signs) are dissociated from their signifieds which results in meaning having no relation whatsoever with the form. Our memory of the past finds no place in these constructed environments based on re-written traditions. Why is it so? It is because when the environment is experienced as a spectacle, the identity of the viewer is camouflaged and overpowered by the physical aspects. There is a one-way relationship between the body and the space, where the body does not play a role in the construction of the space. The viewers lose track of time and place due to their journey through unrelated and juxtaposed sites (for example, themed environments). They are unable to locate themselves within the space. Due to continuous bombardment of juxtaposed images, the human body is unable to position itself in relation to the space (Soja 1996). Thus, only two of Lefebvre’s three spaces can be deciphered in these “reconstructed” environments. Returning to Lefebvre’s theoretical concept of space, he conceives of a triad of physical space, mental space and lived space. In contemporary techniques of memorialization, the past environment imagined based on memories (that forms the mental space) is dragged out of its context and replicated on the present (physical space). The past dominates the present and is viewed as an object. A gap persists between the viewer and the viewed. In other words, the body fails to inhabit the space. The “third space,” that is the lived space, is not constructed here. Due to this gap between the viewer and the viewed, the simulated environments raises the issue of “reality.” The reproduced takes the place of reality or in Baudrillard’s terms, it becomes hyper-real (1981). The three environments, museums, monuments and heritage stage sets, as discussed above, though intending to be “authentic” or “real,” fail to be so. Timothy Murray in Mimesis, Masochism and Mime (1997) reflects on reality as something that depends not only on how it is represented, but also on how it is seen and received. These simulated environments have their focus on representation aspects alone. They ignore the way the spectators read or receive these environments. Thus, the context in which the reality is received

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is overshadowed. These environments are not lived and experienced by the body, they are simply objects to be looked at. Memory as a place, as a building, as a sequence of columns, cornices, porticoes. The body inside the mind, as if we were moving around in there, going from one place to the next, and the sound of our foot steps as we walk, moving from one place to the next. (Auster 1991, p. 82)

Memory has a lived dimension. Contemporary “re-constructed” environments cannot or fail to recognize this lived aspect of memory. “Memory was based on lived experience, something that reached out of the past and seized the individual in a manner of naïve and immediate knowledge” (Boyer 1994, p. 26). Memory is an orientating experience for the individual, strengthening the links between the past and the present and links between different times and different spaces. When memory does not have a link to the lived experience, it is reduced to history or a fragmented re-construction of the past. Boyer thus differentiates between history and memory on the basis of lived experience. This lived aspect of memory has coincidence with Lefebvre’s third space, the lived space. Arguing against a binary categorization of space simply as physical (actual) and mental (imaginary), Lefebvre emphasizes its lived dimension that helps in bringing the actual and imaginary realms together. This third space is the lived space. One of the traditional ways of living memories and creating lived space has been storytelling. Storytelling has been a traditional way of recalling memories, and for Benjamin, storytelling was an experience linked to traditions and historical memory. Storytelling was about re-living the past collectively. In contrast, the modern practices of city building have transformed collective experience into fragmented, imagistic, intellectualized re-constructions (Boyer 1994). For Aldo Rossi, an architect and theorist, a city is the collective memory of its citizens, and the memory is stored in specific objects and places. Based on Rossi’s notion, different urban spaces in the city act as trigger points for recalling memory and have the potential to act as grounds for events. These spaces present an opportunity for the introduction of memory and are similar to Rossi’s “types.” Type is an object that embodies “both an idea of itself and a memory of the former self” (Rossi 1982, p. 7). Thus, the city spaces as memory devices need not be imitative copies of the historical environments. They are essentially contextual. They need to develop and transform with time, operating within the footprints of the past and so demonstrate a continuity and strong linkage between the present and past.


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Being contextual is crucial for an environment to work as a memory device. De-contextualizing a setting leads to collective “forgetting” as asserted by Jan Assman (1991). He suggests a transversal of border that brings about a collective loss of memory. Can a community performance serve to link the community to its collective memory and aid in the construction of a lived space?

CHAPTER EIGHT


Based on Boyer’s observations, I pose an alternative to contemporary ways of spatializing memories such that a physical setting that has a capability of unfolding events or performance, becomes a key in translating memories. The response of the body to this setting is not limited to visual level alone, but is complete with the involvement of all senses and the mind. A physical setting that aids movement of the performing body into a liminal state helps in re-constructing a space based on memories. Nati-Imli, an urban space in Varanasi, forms the context for this analysis. A performance episode from a sixteenth century Indian text, Ramcharitmanas, is staged here annually. Written by Tulsidas, this popular text of Hindispeaking, North India is a re-telling of the ancient tale of Prince Rama of Ayodhya (Lutgendorf 1991).1 For the spectators the performance episode at Nati-Imli re-constructs the sixteenth century city of Rama in the contemporary twenty-first century urban space.

Textual Space Since there has been literature, there have been cities in literature. Gita Govinda, Ramayana, Mahabharata (Indian secular and sacred texts) are full with energies and meanings of cities of that time. Literary arts in India have been the transmitters of Hindu tradition. Verses form a part of the Indian literary tradition. Philip Lutgendorf elaborates on the importance of verses in traditional literary texts:

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The verses are not simply a convention, but a reflection of the ancient belief in the efficacy of hearing, reciting and memorizing the sacred word—a belief reflected in the traditional categories of literature, which are conceptualised not as read but rather as “heard” (sruti) and “remembered” (smriti). (Lutgendorf 1991, p. 38)

The category of literature called smriti focuses on the idea of passing on tradition, not through reading but by hearing, remembering and then reciting the verses. Smriti is a unique combination of written and oral arts that carry traditions over generations. Smriti means remembering. Although remembering is a very personal experience, it takes place both at a family and community level. As Lutgendorf notes that in India, it is through smriti that the Hindu community appropriates and relives its past. Thus, smritis act as collective remembering devices that re-construct the traditional themes and stories in a relevant context. For example, Ramcharitmanas, smriti literature, is a creative re-construction of the story of Lord Rama taken from the Sanskrit epic Ramayana.2, 3 The aim of Ramcharitmanas was to present the ancient epic Ramayana in a popular, vernacular form so that it was accessible to all. This text incorporated both a literary and an ethical dimension aiming to situate the audience in the cities of past times as related to the present context (Lutgendorf 1991).4 Ramcharitmanas has acquired its mass audience primarily through oral performance, which has become the medium of transmitting traditional values. This includes reciting the text in ceremonies and festivals, folk singing and theatrical representations. Oral performance portrays the community’s interaction with its favorite text.5 The performance is flexible enough to take into account the social and political issues of a place, and although the performance takes place right across the nation, it gets reshaped based on the interpretations of the socio-political movements and so develops a space of a specific character.6 Repetition of the text is essential for understanding and internalizing it. Ramcharitmanas recitation on loudspeakers is a common occurrence during the festival times throughout Varanasi. As Lutgendorf remarks, this “keeps the epic very much ‘in the air’ and reinforces exposure to it” (1991, p. 428). Group recitations and performances from the text became the most popular tools to make the smriti literature accessible to the masses. These take place at a range of places from private residences, to performances on street corners, in temples, public squares and advertised performances in theaters.


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In recent times, films and television serials have considerably revived the masses’ interest in Ram-lila performances (Lutgendorf 1991). Enacting or performing from the Ramcharitmanas is known as Ram-lila (Rama’s play) and expresses freedom, power and knowledge. When Gods act, their action is called lila, and is translated as “sport” or “play”(Lutgendorf 1991), and according to Kinsley, play in the context of Hinduism is a divine or cultic activity. The purpose of the play is mainly to seek internal pleasure. It signifies the movement of the individual from a routine, everyday realm to a realm of freedom—“movement from an ordinary to an extraordinary realm”—and reflects the “unconditioned and transcendent nature of the divine” (Kinsley 1977, p. xi). In this way, play is a liminal phenomenon where there is not only a change in the state of mind, but also a movement of the body through space, from everyday to an extra-everyday space. As Ram-lila represents ideas of cosmogony and pilgrimage, the streets and squares of towns and cities form suitable settings for the play. Since Ram-lila also emphasizes the everyday, streets and squares that reflect the everyday life of the citizens are appropriated and transformed as participants chart their journey through them.7 For Hindus in India, Ramcharitmanas structures the whole sub-continent. In the text, the movement of the characters starts from Ayodhya in North India, and moves towards Sri Lanka to the south of India, and after the episode of the defeat of the King of Sri Lanka, the journey is retraced back towards the north. Pilgrims and ascetics adopt this pattern while moving from one part of the country to another. Annual itineraries for ascetics reflect Rama’s movements to different sites dispersed all over India that are known for their specific events. Thus, for Rama’s birth, the goal of pilgrimage is Ayodhya, whereas for Rama’s wedding, the preferred site is Janakpur in Nepal, where arriving pilgrims identify themselves as members of Rama’s wedding party (Lutgendorf 1991). All such Ram-lilas involve elements of role-playing and enactment. Varanasi residents follow this same movement pattern in their city during a twenty-oneday period, when they perform the complete text. The whole play is sequential with episodes from the text acted out in series, in different places, on specific days. The actors and audience follow the sequence physically and reconstruct the story by moving from one setting to another (Schechner 1985). Bodily movement maps India on Varanasi, and the streets and squares of the city are appropriated to represent different places of India where sequences of the episode took place. During the festival season, wooden platforms are constructed in the major urban spaces; these structures go un-noticed during the daytime, but during the lila-time at night, the setting is transformed.

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Physical Space: A Performance Episode in Nati-Imli Nati-Imli, an urban square, hosts one episode from the text, Ramcharitmanas, known as Bharata milap—the reunion with Bharata. According to the text, Lord Rama, victorious over Ravana (King of Sri Lanka) returns to Ayodhya, his own kingdom, after fourteen years of exile. He meets his beloved brother Bharata and the brothers embrace each other. This is one of the big moments of the epic: during the peak of the performance, the square which is an everyday urban space “becomes” Rama’s city Ayodhya (Lutgendorf 1991). This production at Nati-Imli is one of the original and is regarded as the city’s oldest and most distinguished lila. It is organized near Lohatiya, an old iron bazaar. Lohatiya literally means “place for iron goods.” Displays of tall pails and woks extend right onto the roads, making the roads of round cobblestones look narrow and heavy. These narrow roads suddenly open out into a huge rectangular space, where the reunion episode takes place (see figure 8.1). This rectangular space is Nati-Imli and is a commercial node at a neighborhood level with residences above the shops. At one end of the square is a small temple (“a” in figure 8.1) and a stepped stone platform about two meters high (“b” in figure 8.1). Next to these is a huge tamarind tree (“c” in figure 8.1), its foliage providing a cover for the platform.8 A paved pathway (“d” in figure 8.1) about hundred meters in length connects this stepped platform to a smaller platform (“e” in figure 8.1).

Textbox 8.1.

Textual Space

[M]en and women all ran out in joy: the ladies formed in procession with stately gait, singing and bearing golden salvers laden with curds, sacred grass, the yellow pigment, fruit and flowers and fresh springs of the tulasi plant, all things of good omen. . . . [T]he whole city of Awadh [Ayodhya] became a quarry of delights. (Growse 1978, pp. 627-628) Many women mounted the upper storeys of the houses to look for the chariot in the sky. . . . on seeing it, raised their sweet voices in auspicious songs of joy. As the waves of the sea rise and swell at the sight of the full moon, so poured forth the women of the city with a tumultuous noise at the sight of Rama. (Growse 1978, p. 628) Seeing all people so agitated by affection, Rama practiced an illusion and appeared at one and the same time in multiplied form and was able to salute everyone with due ceremony. (Bahadur 1972, p. 321)

Figure 8.1. Nati-Imli—An “Everyday” Urban Space. The plan in the center is a diagrammatic representation of Nati-Imli square. It is an “everyday” urban space with shops on the ground floor and residences at the top. Besides being used as a playground for children, the square also serves as a bus-stand. Sounds of cars, buses, rickshaws and cycles, people chatting, laughing, and bargaining keeps the place lively. On entering through the dark and narrow shopping lanes, the open-ness of the square comes as a surprise. (Collage and photographs by the author)

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Preparation for the event consists of cleaning and whitewashing the platforms, clearing the grounds, and laying down a processional pathway for the King of Varanasi. On the day of the performance the area is barricaded (“f” in figure 8.1) and hundreds of policemen line up to control the crowds, which fill the surrounding streets for lengths in every direction. Dignitaries and VIPs of the city occupy the rooftops of the surrounding buildings (“g” in figure 8.1), which are leased off beforehand. Surrounding streets are decorated with lights and are lined with vendors selling snacks and souvenirs. Loudspeakers advertising the event and giving a running commentary of the event appear at strategic locations so that people in the nearby streets, who are unable to see the “act” due to the enormous crowd, participate by listening to these loudspeakers. In terms of attendance this lila is the single biggest event.9

Performance Based on Lutgendorf ’s description in The Life of a Text the re-union episode is carried on in sequential scenes. 1. Action: An enormous wooden palanquin, representing the flying chariot of the defeated king of Lanka, now being utilized by Rama comes in view. It is carried by members of the milkmen community wearing red turbans, and rests on the smaller platform (figure 8.2, a). Soundscape: Chants of “Jai Sri Rama” 2. Action: King of Varanasi seated on an elephant enters along with his retinue. The focus of the crowd shifts towards the king and moves with him as he circumambulates Rama’s palanquin and takes his place on one side of the ground (figure 8.2, b). Soundscape: Chants of “Har Har Mahadeva” 3. Bharata and the youngest brother lie prostrate on the higher platform. Rama and his other brother start walking and then break into a trot towards the higher platform (figure 8.2, c). Soundscape: Ramayanis (people well-versed in Ramcharitmanas) who surround the higher platform start chanting the mantras. Public is absolutely silent in anticipation. 4. Runners, after reaching the higher platform, climb the steps, and after lifting up their brothers lying prostrate on the ground, embrace them. Flowers are thrown on them by the people surrounding the platform. Soundscape: Loud cheering with ringing of bells, gongs and conches (figure 8.2, d).

Figure 8.2. Lived Space in the Process of Construction. The positions taken by the performers in different “acts” are shown here. The white circles at “a,” “b,” and “d” indicate liminal areas during acts one to four. The text used here represents the chants that enliven different sections of Nati-Imli square during the different acts. (Collage by the author based on photographs by Ashok Khanna in Khanna and Ratnakar 1988, Plates 42, 46, 47)

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Figure 8.3. Construction of Lived Space through an Interplay of Textual and Physical Space. Figure 8.3 represents the constructed lived space. Audience at Nati-Imli undergoes liminality at varying intensities. Centrality and the human scale of the performance area allow proximity of the spectators with the performers, thus triggering an intense response from the spectators. (Collage by author based on photographs by Ashok Khanna in Khanna and Ratnakar 1988, Plates 5 and 44)

5. The four brothers form a line, arms around one another’s waist, face straight, rotate 45 degrees, pause and thus take two complete rounds in eight directions (figure 8.3). Soundscape: Acknowledging roar from the appropriate sector. 6. Performers descend and are taken back to the organizing committee’s headquarter. Royal elephant moves towards the waiting limousine that takes the king back to his palace.


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Liminal Bodies and Lived Space The fading white circles in the above figures denote the liminal phase in which the performers and spectators enter in various scenes. In Act One it is just the performers and the people who are carrying them who are within the white blob. Both the performers and the people associated with them are initiated into this phase many days before the actual performance. The boys chosen to play the part of lords are trained and start living in a separate place away from their homes many days before the performance. During the twenty-one day cycle of Ramlila they are treated as Gods themselves. “They are not merely blank screens on which devotees project the God of their imaginations; attributes are of essence here, and the ones that the boys possess—innocence, physical attractiveness, Brahmin hood—are essential ingredients in what they become. The boy possesses, by virtue of his attributes, the authority not merely to represent but to become Lord Rama [at] the right moment”(Lutgendorf 1991, p. 281). In the same way there are different roles for different communities in Ramlila. Beautifiers, who supervise the costumes and makeup, represent the community of Gujarati silk merchants of Varanasi and claim their privilege to beautify the “lords.” The carriers of the “flying chariot” are the “milkmen” of Varanasi and the Ramayanis are the rectors from the text. In Act Five nearly all the spectators enter in this liminal phase. People’s engagement in the above mimetic acts and the association of these acts with the everyday places in the city—the houses, the streets and the squares—help to build the climax of the performance which is Act Five in which the four boys hold each other and salute the crowd in each direction. This act has resonances with the textual description where Rama practices an illusion, appears in multiplied forms and is able to salute each person individually. Act Five requires the participation of the crowd from each direction sequentially and the crowd responds by chanting “Jai Sri Rama” and throwing flowers and garlands. The individual who was a spectator in Act One becomes a performer in Act Five. A resident of Varanasi transforms into a resident of the sixteenth century “City of Rama.” Each body enters into liminality, where it not only performs a role as a beautifier or a rector or a resident of Rama’s city, but also becomes one. It is at this moment that the resident re-creates the past city. Thus entering a liminal phase is a pre-condition of “living” memories. The time taken to enter into liminality varies for both spectators and performers. For the spectators, liminality depends firstly on the position occupied

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by the individual in the physical setting, secondly, on the way the physical setting is designed, and thirdly, on the socio-cultural conditions influencing the behavior of spectators. These socio-cultural influences can be due to the spectator being a member of a specific economic or social group, or belonging to a particular sex and age group. The focus in this analysis is mainly on the relatedness of the spectator to the physical setting.10

Lived Space at Nati-Imli— An Interplay of Textual and Physical Space In order to activate memories and construct the lived space there are three processes that are vital in this interplay between textual and physical space. These are: 1. Markings on real/physical space 2. De-constructing imaginary/textual space through mimesis 3. Re-constructing lived space as a monument of memory through transgression Nati-Imli square is set apart from its surrounding environs by markings. These markings may be hidden with respect to the socio-cultural-symbolic factors, or may be visible in terms of alterations on the built environment. After giving Nati-Imli a “special” status, people de-construct the textual space. Appignanesi (1995), while discussing “de-construction” as a strategy to uncover the layers of constructed meanings, explains that the meanings constructed are relative and thus need to be traced back. He says, “Deconstruction is a strategy for revealing the underlayers of meanings ‘in’ a text that were suppressed or assumed in order for it to take its actual form” (Appignanesi, Garratt, et al. 1995, p. 80). De-construction is about peeling away the constructed meanings and finding the underlying structure of the space as described in Ramacharitmanas. The mind relates the essence of this textual space to the designed physical setting at Nati-Imli. The participants in the performance pick the elements from Rama’s city as described in the text, both in terms of the essence of the built environment, and the required body response, and translate them onto the “present” environment. This is through a mimetic engagement with the performance and the setting and it is during this mimetic play that people move into a state of liminality. Here they transgress the present and move


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Figure 8.4. Constructing Lived Space

into the past city. The space constructed is a conflation of the past and present environment. This is the lived space, where memories unfold. (See figure 8.4.) Markings on Real/Physical Space While taking place in the everyday, most used, public domain, the play/ performance at Nati-Imli has a capacity to separate from the ordinary sphere. The act of separation or isolation from the ordinary world is formal and intentional with the separation visible by markings on the built-fabric. The space is “marked” by barricades that are simple bamboo structures, about five meters high, laid across the width of the roads to regulate entry into the area. To view the performance from within the barricaded area becomes a rare privilege, for which people start queuing up for the evening performance from the early morning. As Lutgendorf remarks: the “passes” to enter into this area are “so parsimoniously distributed that one might suppose they were tickets to paradise” (1991, p. 273). The stone platform that is about 1.5 meters high and is a forgotten feature in the everyday landscape is whitewashed and decorated. A pathway of crushed stones is laid for the king and his retinue and the reserved areas for dignitaries on the surrounding rooftops

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are covered with colored awnings and have carpets and chairs. The streets leading to the Nati-Imli square are decorated and lined with vendors. In this manner, Nati-Imli is marked out and separated for this particular episode. Though separated in this way, it still maintains links with the other urban spaces in Varanasi that serve as settings for other sequences from the text. The narrative is realized because of the movement from one theatrical environment to the next.11 Besides the visible spatial demarcation, there are invisible markings on this space through the nature of legends and rumors that abound in it. There is a myth about a disciple of Tulsidas who founded this lila at Nati-Imli. He was promised a physical sight of the lord at the climax and collapsed and died during the scene of the reunion of the brothers—the Bharat Milap (Lutgendorf 1991). These legends give the lila at Nati-Imli an air of authenticity and make it the most attended lila in Varanasi, when every big and small neighborhood square in the city is home to most of the lila at this particular time.12 Its significance is increased due to the attendance of the King of Varanasi, who absents himself from his own concurrently running production to attend the Bharat milap at Nati-Imli. Thus, there is a play of physical and socio-cultural factors in marking out the place. Besides these markings on the physical space, the similarities that the physical setting and the performance carry with those described in Ramcharitmanas, become essential for liminality. The translation of the text on the built environment in Nati-Imli and the performance occurring there, although an imitation, is not an “exact copy of the original.” In fact, the translation can be regarded as a mimetic transformation of both the setting and the performance. De-Constructing Imaginary/Textual Space through Mimesis To be vigorously and devotedly involved in Ram-lila for one month is to take an excursion out of ordinary space and time. . . . The participant not only sees the drama, but finds [himself] acting in it. A vast world is created before and around [him]. Performance after performance this world is built physically and psychologically. (Hess 1983, pp. 171-194)

By assimilating with the theatrical environment, the participants in the NatiImli episode start associating themselves with it. They are able to construct an entirely different world. In play, memory and the city come together. The past world is re-constructed by remembering, imitating and reiterating. It is not


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simply an imitation of the previous actions, but is an evocation of experiences and feeling the past environment by way of imagining movement through it (Perez-Gomez and Parcell 1994). It is a mimetic act. But is mimesis simply imitation—an imitation of the physical elements in the built environment and an imitation of the acts—or does it goes beyond imitation? Centrality of axis becomes a key component that is common to both the spaces as described in Ramcharitmanas (textual space) as well as in Nati-Imli (physical space). The two platforms and the runway connecting them, where the actual performance takes place, are positioned on the central axis of the Nati-Imli square. (Refer to figure 8.1.) The bigger platform where the final act is performed is about one and half meters high and can be reached easily by the people surrounding it. The location of the performance area within the square and its human scale enhances the interaction between the performers and the spectators as performers exit and enter from amongst the spectators. Spectators can touch them, garland them and thus are in close proximity to them. This centrality of axes also promotes a three-dimensional zoning of the space with respect to the status of Varanasi residents. The zones progress from a lower status at the ground level to a higher status on the rooftops. Here, a socially hierarchical space is created, where each person is able to perform as per the zone he/she inhabits as position in the particular zone gives a cue for the bodily action. This zoning creates different degrees of liminality for people in different areas. For the people sitting on the rooftop, the play is simply a spectacle. They are in a world of their own away from the “polluting” crowd (de Certeau 1988). For them, the performing space and spectator space are not interpenetrating. They are like de Certeau’s “voyeur,” standing at the top of the tower and observing the “spectacle” (1988). In contrast, the audience below shouts, throws flowers and garlands, and this is active participation. The barrier between the performing space and the spectator space is violated and thus space becomes fluid. It is difficult to compartmentalize spectators’ and performers’ areas as this space reflects a multiplicity of events. Everyone is involved, plunged in the middle of an array of movement, sound and color. Schechner emphasizes that performing Rama-lila in these settings is powerful because of the fluidity of space resulting in the close contact of performers and spectator: “The flexible treatment of time and space—the ability of one space to be transformed into many places through the skills of the performer more than through the illusionist devices goes hand in hand . . . with a close contact with the audience” (Schechner 1988, p. 165).

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The key to the transformative or liminal process is not the use of physical props, but designing the environment in a way to evoke a bodily response.13 The “wrap-around” setting with the central stage and spectators all around at Nati-Imli is able to work by engaging the participant. The central, wrap-around environment encourages circumambulation, dancing, and sharing, and is in contrast to the theater-type settings, which are confrontational and limit the participation of the spectators to the level of watching. The environment at Nati-Imli has the essence and the rhythm of the setting as described in Ramcharitmanas, which is its centrality. This centrality involves a rhythmic body response. From Act One to Act Five, the rhythms of the communal body change demonstrating a similarity with the rhythms established in the textual space. Aiding this liminal shift of the body in the reunion episode at Nati-Imli, the mind picks elements from the textual space, which it then translates on the existing physical space through the body performance. A relationship between the inner space of mind and the outer physical space becomes visible. Drawing comparisons from “Western” works, it is to be noted that surrealism explored this relationship of the mental and material realm of the body with the outside physical world.14 Tableaux-vivants of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, worked by translating the textual codes on the physical spaces and are examples demonstrating this relationship. Here live performers re-created static scenes drawn from famous paintings (Liggett 1995). Although this relationship between the inner space of the body and the outside physical world is a common feature of tableaux-vivants and the performance episode at Nati-Imli, there is a difference in these two environments. In the tableaux-vivants, the relationship of spectators and constructed space was never reciprocal. Here the spectators could look at the framed view from a distance, which worked simply as a message, a text to be read. The spectators took no part in constructing that text and, thus, remained dissociated with it. These literal translations of the text on the city had one crucial element missing—the relationship of body with space. The translations at Nati-Imli make this relationship of the body with the space visible. Although the body responses have similarities with the textual description, they are mimetic rather than imitative. Another issue raised is the way in which the setting and performance at Nati-Imli become “real” by being mimetic. Is mimesis just an essence of the “real” or is it “real” on its own? Plato and Aristotle outlined mimesis as the fundamental category of art. For Plato, mimesis was a copy, carrying just the essence of the real (Murray 1997). However, for Aristotle, mimesis was more than the art of creating a copy.


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Aristotle agreed that art was mimetic but questioned the nature of imitation as for him mimetic art incorporated rhythms similar to the original work, making mimesis more than mere imitation. Mimesis is thus akin to rhythmanalysis, where the rhythms of the original work are analyzed and lived and built-in. Schechner points out that in a play, the playwright may borrow a story, an idea, an image from life. The rhythm thus borrowed becomes a key to the artwork, around which there are changes and transformations done as per the context. During this process of change, “at a decisive moment, the artwork breaks off and becomes itself ” (Schechner 1988, pp. 37-38). This is where the artwork gets its own identity. The beauty of this artwork is that it is linked firmly to the present context, as seen in Nati-Imli when concurrent social and political issues get a reflection in the performance.15 Although the performance episode is a “copy” of the episode from Ramcharitmanas, and the actions are “imitations,” the environment gains an identity by being contextual. Thus, mimetic performance at Nati-Imli has two aspects—it is a copy, but it is also itself. The mimetic performance and setting at Nati-Imli is not an exact reproduction of the sixteenth century setting and performance; rather, in the process of giving materiality to the past ideas of the sixteenth century environment, the mimesis employed at Nati-Imli makes the past environment manifest itself. Another important aspect at Nati-Imli performance is that “experience” becomes essential in the process of receiving and relating with the environment. The mimetic re-creation of the past engages the participant. In the reunion episode at Nati-Imli, the rhythms and patterns of the past city are recognized in the text and are translated in the present space by the mimetic act. As mentioned by Neil Leach, mimesis refers to an “interpretative process that relates not just to the creation of a model, but also to the engagement with that model” (2000, p. 5). It incorporates the process of re-creating the reality and thus requires an engagement with the object. Thus, while role-playing as a resident of Rama’s city, one tends to actually become the resident. In this manner, the people assimilate themselves into the existing environment, identifying the environment as Rama’s city and themselves as its citizens. Art always “comes after” experience. . . . Making art is the transformation of raw experience into palpable forms. This transformation is a mimesis, a representation. (Schechner 1988, p. 38)

Thus, engagement with the object becomes crucial. That is how the “rhythms” of the original work can be recognized and translated. An example is an artist, who while giving materiality to an idea, does not just create a

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product. In the process of creation, he/she goes into a liminal phase, where he/she lets the “reality” manifest itself. The environment re-created at Nati-Imli becomes “real” for the participants through mimesis. Aristotle showed mimesis in a positive light “to account for the successful poetic representation of ‘ideal reality’” (Murray 1997, p. 1). “What is theorized or understood as ‘real’ or ‘material’ or even ‘historical’ remains contingent on its mise-en-scene, that is, on the means with which it is represented as well as on the context of its reception”(Murray 1997, p. 7). Thus, reality depends on the method of representation and the manner in which the viewer receives and relates to it. There is always a gap between the reality and the representation that is reduced by a representation technique requiring a bodily engagement of the viewer. The choreography of performance and design of setting at Nati-Imli demonstrate that the process of representing the textual space is such that people relate to it as “real.” Spectators grasp the reality by engaging with the environment. There are more layers to mimesis than being a simple imitation. Through imagination a relation is instituted between “artist and the spectator, between the spectator and the work of art, and between the work of art and the artist” (Feral 1997, p. 290). The engagement with the object, at both mental and physical levels, helps in bridging the gap between the object and the subject. In Nati-Imli, this reconciliation between the subject and object is through a constant exercise of imagination, by constantly remembering the past (Rama’s life in this case). The spectators seek to make the lila of Rama actually happen within themselves, within the realm of their imagination by trying to live within the conjured, transcendent world through memory and imagination.16 Participants at Nati-Imli create Lefebvre’s third space—the lived space— by living and incorporating the rhythms of the mental or textual space within the present physical space. With the help of textual descriptions as those in Ramcharitmanas, people try to invoke a world in imagination that is as real and immediate to them as the physical world in which they normally live. Thus, the key to the whole process of mimetic art is in the artwork being contextual. The emphasis is on constructing a space responding to the body (physically and mentally) through the imagination, within the present spatial framework. Re-Constructing Lived Space as a Monument of Memory through Transgression As per Huizinga’s theory (1955), play is characterized by being set apart in space and time and involves a stepping out of common reality into a higher


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order. This movement from one realm to another entails the creation actually and mentally of another world. Thus, there is a transgression of both body and space. Transgression is an interrogation of boundaries—forcing the threshold and examining the liminal space (Foucault 1977b). Mikhail Bakhtin in his monumental study on Rabelais and carnivalesque, associates the body transgression with carnivals. In the carnival, the body is always on the move, always becoming (1968). Hindu thought has been dominated with the idea of “wholeness.” In order to attain the Truth, “the undivided whole,” the ultimate ground of Being, it is important for our sensations and emotions to be properly channelized (Rawson 1971). Thus, the body moves from one state to another in order to become one with Brahman, “the undivided whole.” Mimetic performance at Nati-Imli guides the body movement from one state to another in order to grasp the “reality.” It helps in directing the emotions of the people by an active engagement with the object, which leads to people transgressing from a “normal” state into a liminal state. Here the body crosses the boundaries of the twenty-first century Nati-Imli and moves into the sixteenth century city of Rama. By their mimetic involvement in the play, the people at Nati-Imli imagine themselves to be actual participants in the transcendent sport of Rama, by identifying themselves as one of Rama’s companions. In effect, they seek to replace the real world with the imaginative world of Rama. While remaining physically in the ordinary world, they remove themselves from it by constantly remembering the transcendent world and believing themselves to be a part of that world. Pierre Bourdieu, in The logic of practice (1990), notes that the performing body is not a representation of the “political mythology.”17 In fact, the mythology is lived through the performer’s body. The body believes in what it plays at: it weeps if it mimes grief. It does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life. (Bourdieu 1990, p. 73)

Looking at Western literary works, transgression through mimetic involvement with the object becomes a key feature of Benjamin’s writings: Standing behind the doorway curtain, the child himself becomes something floating and white, a ghost. The dining table under which he is crouching turns him into the wooden idol in a temple whose four pillars are the carved legs. And behind a door he is himself a door, wears it as his heavy mask and as a shamam will bewitch all those who unsuspectingly enter. (Benjamin 1979, p. 74)

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Benjamin argues that an adult perception and relationship to objects is different to the mimetic involvement of the child with objects and places as objects do not dominate the child, nor do they appear as a commodity to him. Instead, there is a playful, reciprocal relationship between the child and the objects. Gilloch elaborates on this mimetic aspect of the children’s play: “In play the child does not stand back from and contemplate the object, but takes hold of it, and mimetically, becomes part of it” (1997, p. 62). The child transgresses through a mimetic involvement with the object and becomes one with it. Thus, a mimetic engagement with the object becomes essential in transgressing to another state. Through mimetic performance, this transgression occurs in Nati-Imli and makes spectators’ experience of Nati-Imli distinct from the experience of restored environments like Plimoth Plantation. An important aspect of transgression is an element of belief. At Nati-Imli, the performance is not a simple matter of role-playing, but has an element of belief in the acts performed, which helps in transgression from one state to another. This is how the mimesis employed at Nati-Imli differs to the one at Plimoth Plantation. At Plimoth, the spectators know that they are role-playing (Schechner 1985). The element of belief in the act is not there because the act is very separate from the ordinary lives of the people. At Nati-Imli, the performance and the built environment are both integral parts of everyday life of the people. What people see acted out in Ram-lila influences their daily lives; and how they act in their daily lives affects the staging of Ram-lila. Mythic enactments work as ideal models but they express the ordinary life of the people in the staging, gestures, details of costume, and scenic structures (Lutgendorf 1991). In the Plimoth Plantation, although there is a movement in time and place, the spectators know that it is make-believe. Based on Schechner’s discussion of Plimoth Plantation (1985), the physical movement for the spectators is from the twenty-first century environment (A) to the seventeenth century (B) and back to A (see figure 8.5, a). At Nati-Imli the sixteenth century environment is a part of people’s everyday context. Physical movement in space is nil as the sixteenth century environment is re-created from within the twenty-first century. As the past is re-created from within the present, people are able to link and perceive space and time in continuity. When liminal movement of the spectators is considered (see figure 8.5, b) at Plimoth, it is from the present (A) to the past (B). Though moving into the past, the spectators are at all times conscious of the present. They know that B is a fake environment and can feel the theatricality in the performances occurring there (Schechner 1985). At Nati-Imli, the liminal movement of the people can be mapped from A to B. The study

Figure 8.5. Movement in Space

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of Rama-lila by Hess (1983) suggests that the experience of the lila is different for different people. Thus, the condition of liminality varies. At one end are the people for whom it is merely a spectacle; at the other extreme there are those who are able to transgress and re-create the city of Rama. For the people re-creating the city of Rama, the movement can be described by Diagram b in figure 8.5. While in the sixteenth century environment, the participant forgets about the twenty-first century. The sixteenth century environment is felt as “real” because its relatedness with the everyday gives it an element of belief (Hess 1983). At Plimoth, people know they are acting, know that it is a fake environment and are aware of the twenty-first century while being in the seventeenth century. The act and the built environment here carry only one element of mimesis that is imitation. The second element as discussed earlier, which is for the artwork to have its own identity, is not reflected. This is because the act and the built environment are situated apart from the present context. Nati-Imli, an everyday urban space, provides a suitable context for the performance where the body transgresses into a liminal state. Transgression into a liminal state involves a temporary loss of self. The psychic energy flows out and includes the object of perception and there is a merging of self and the other. It is here that the lived space is constructed, and becomes a monument of memory. This monument defines the past and articulates its relationship to the present, transforming the memoirs into memorial by way of performance.

Notes 1. Ramcharitmanas finds its origin in a Sanskrit epic Ramayana, composed by poet Valmiki within the first few centuries before the beginning of the Christian era. Lutgendorf, P. 1991, The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, University of California Press, Berkeley. 2. The sixteenth century legend of Rama by the poet Tulsidas has been hailed “not merely as the greatest modern Indian epic, but as something like a living sum of Indian culture.” Lutgendorf, P. 1991, The life of a text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, University of California Press, Berkeley. p. 1. 3. Valmiki composed the Ramayana—“Rama’s way”—between 200 BC and AD 200. It is a long epic, about 25,000 verses, and tells the story of Prince Rama of Ayodhya. Rama, along with his wife Sita and brother Lakshamana, is sent off to the forest on exile by treacherous machinations of his stepmother. Ravana, the King of Lanka, abducts the wife. Rama follows Ravana to Lanka. After overcoming the demonic powers of Ravana, Rama, along with his wife and brother, returns back to Ayodhya


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after fourteen years. Rama is crowned king. Buck, W. 1976, Ramayana, University of California Press, Berkeley; Los Angeles; London. 4. At the time when this text was written, there were two sects constantly in conflict with each other—Shiva sect, the followers of Shiva, and Vaishnava sect, the followers of Rama. Ramayana is a story about Rama, but gives an important place to Shiva within the narrative. Thus the text aimed at bringing the two sects together. Legend suggests that sectarian differences were breached by this text. Eck, D. L. 1982, Banaras: City of Light, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York. Thus, besides situating the readers in Rama’s city, the text incorporated the contextual issues of reconciliation and synthesis. 5. The popularity of this text can be gauged by people’s responses when the text was dramatized and televised. Lutgendorf, P. 1991, The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, University of California Press, Berkeley. During its telecast time on Sunday mornings, all work was stopped. Huge crowds used to form at the railway station platforms where televisions were installed. The porters refused to work for that specific period. Even the trains got delayed—the drivers would rather watch the serial than drive the trains. 6. For example, in South India, it is considered that the character of Rama’s wife is overtly dominated by men. While representing the text this is taken into consideration and changes are made to suit the local audience. Ibid. 7. In contrast to the everyday settings of Rama-lila, those for Krishna-lila are separated from the “everyday.” As Lutgendorf remarks, “[In] plays of Mathura the play is visualized as a divine drama enacted on a circular platform deep in a nocturnal forest—an arena (as Hawlay points out) decisively separated from the mundane world. Earthly order was not rejected but was left behind at the time of entering Krishna’s realm, as in Mahabharat transcendence was possible only beyond the boundaries of the worldly life.” Ibid., p. 264. 8. The area gets its name from this tamarind tree. “Nati-Imli” means “dwarf tamarind.” 9. “In 1983 the superintendent of police estimated the crowd at 500,000 persons—nearly half the population of the city.” Lutgendorf, P. 1991, The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, University of California Press, Berkeley. p. 273. 10. For details on the socio-cultural issues, refer to Hess, L. 1983, “Ram-Lila: The audience experience,” in M. Thiel-Horstmann, (ed.) Bhakti in current research, Dietrich Reimer, Berlin. 11. Philip Lutgendorf discusses other places in Varanasi that form a part of the sequence for the Rama-lila in The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas (1991). 12. On the issue of authenticity, it is observed that the performance at Nati-Imli is not an exact reproduction from the text. As an example, in Ramcharitmanas, Rama is both the king and the God. At Nati-Imli, these roles are split between the boy

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playing Rama and the actual King of Varanasi. Lutgendorf, P. 1991, The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, University of California Press, Berkeley. The boy Rama plays the role of God, while the King of Varanasi performs the role of King Rama. The spectators do not question the “reality” of representation. In fact, the episode at Nati-Imli becomes “real” to them, because of it being contextual—as it incorporates their King of Varanasi, for whom they have a high regard. 13. An example of built environment responding to the body is the Assembly Hall of Ajanta Caves in India. Cave VI has been designed so as to encourage interaction during rituals with the surrounding architecture. The structure has been tuned as a drum. During circumambulation, any emerging sound continues to echo round the walls. This sensory experience ensures an engagement of the participant with the architecture. Ibid. Another example of such an environment is Maya Lin’s Memorial in Washington, which will be discussed in the conclusion. 14. As Lefebvre remarks, “The leading surrealists sought to decode inner space and illuminate the nature of transition from this subjective space to the material realm of the body and the outside world, and thence to the social life.” Lefebvre, H. 1991b, The Production of Space, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford. p. 18. 15. For a detailed analysis of how the performance of Ramcharitmanas has had a reflection on everyday lives and institutions of the people and vice versa see Lutgendorf, P. 1991, The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas, University of California Press, Berkeley. 16. The conjured city is beautiful, innocent, free, pure and without any evil as mentioned in the text. See Buck, W. 1976, Ramayana, University of California Press, Berkeley. p. 380. The residents of Varanasi desire the purity and serenity of the past city. Their belief in their mimetic play helps in translating these qualities to the lived space, although for a brief moment. The performance thus becomes a projection of the collective desire, as highlighted by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in their analysis of carnivals. For them carnivals are a radical source of transcendence and an act of rediscovery, where the middle class finds its pleasures and desires. Stallybrass, P. and White, A. 1986, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Metheun, London. 17. Bourdieu discusses the notion of “bodily-hexis” as a process where the “political mythology” is not represented but is realized and embodied in the body—in its gestures and thinking. Bourdieu, P. 1990, The Logic of Practice, Stanford University Press, Bloomington. The bodily practices constitute the body in culturally defined spaces.

PART THREE

MAPPING LIVED SPACE

Lefebvre (1991b) in The Production of Space discusses space as perceived, conceived and lived. The way in which we perceive various spaces in the city and the way our bodies inhabit them affects the way we conceive the city. Hence there are links between methods of seeing, inhabiting, and representing the city and the manner in which they are designed. Yet, as Lefebvre has suggested, architects and planners have often ignored the way these spaces are read and inhabited or lived. By ignoring the lived aspect of space, the role of the user in constructing and representing or mapping the city space is completely overlooked. Further, the acts of mapping the city and designing or constructing the city have been compartmentalized by city visionaries, who are often blind to the effects of mapping on the actual construction of city spaces and vice versa. A number of theorists have now recently opened the discussion on the constructive nature of maps. For example, Cosgrove (1999) mentions that the map is usually seen as an instrument to depict facts only, thus overlooking its creative and constructive role. Through my attempt to map the perceived and the lived space of Varanasi, I make the relationship between the processes of construction, inhabitation and representation explicit. “A whole history remains to be written of spaces—which would at the same time be the history of powers” (Foucault 1980a, p. 149). The view employed by city visionaries maps the city space as an object of order and control and is analogous to the panopticon view, which is a view from the top, from the position of authority. The authoritative approach taken by

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the city visionaries is perceived as encompassing the knowledge of the city. When mapped, this knowledge reflects power and a will to control. The map, so produced, feigns to stabilize and mobilize knowledge. Traditionally maps have been ingrained with an idea of neutrality. They have been considered as strictly functional in defining territories, property rights, administrative and social control, etc. (Jarvis 1998). Such maps are considered to be objective and scientific representations, but these maps are not the way in which users relate to the everyday spaces. Users’ maps unravel and make visible the invisible world of “experience,” of non-verbal communication. Thus the users’ map does not simply represent, but is constructive in the way it reveals the lived experience. This constructive aspect of maps destabilizes the notion that space is a neutral category because the map of the place changes depending on the way the place is lived and experienced. It becomes authored. Maps are not anonymous objective scientific representations, but in fact aim to project and inscribe ideologies onto the landscape. Thus the underlying premise is that maps do not simply mirror physical reality; rather they are models that are informed by theory, ideology, social constructs and fields of knowledge.

CHAPTER NINE

Mapping a City

What is a map? Is it just a means of taking measure of the world, or a means of communicating that measure to people? Is the “world” that is measured tangible/material or is it hidden and invisible? Is the process of mapping based on a visual experience, or does it incorporate a total body-experience?

An Overview of the Mapping Process In the 1980s, David Woodward and Brian Harley gave a new direction to the cartographic field. The traditional Western notion of a map as a scientific and rational representation was shifted (Cosgrove 1999). Christian Jacob described this turn as a move from the notion of a map being “transparent” to it being “opaque.” A “transparent” map was one that was considered to be a neutral, information-transferring device and was intended to be a true correspondence of the image and the object. An “opaque” view took into consideration the transformations in the imparted information according to the socio-cultural contexts (Jacob 1996), which made the map a cultural product. It changed the function of the map from representing “reality” to re-constructing the people’s world. Thus the map was no longer seen as a representational device, but was a constructive device as well. This view revealed the potential of mapping as a creative instrument. Another aspect of traditional maps was that they represented stable spaces. Maps separated areas, marked permanent boundaries and classified spaces (Cosgrove 1999). They represented space as fixed, immobile and

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unchanging. Paul Carter’s analysis of the historical maps of the Australian coastline served to negate this view by suggesting that spatial boundaries were fluid.1 As the boundaries were determined by the person constructing the map, they were based on the cartographer’s perception, and thus, they changed according to the mapmaker (Carter 1999). Carter, as have many others in recent spatial geography, exposed the constructive role of the cartographers and destabilized the notion of a map as a neutral device. In the present scenario of globalization and fast paced technology, the very representation of the post-modern metropolis as an entity has come under scrutiny. Soja in Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (2000a), while discussing Chambers mentions: We can no longer hope to map the modern metropolis, because we can no longer assume that we know “its extremes, its borders, confines, limits.” It is more difficult than ever before to represent the city as a discrete geographical, economical, political and social unit rooted in its immediated environs and hinterlands. (Soja 2000a, p. 150)

Urban boundaries have become permeable such that the distinction between inside and outside the city has become ambiguous. Spatial fluidity and flexibility raises the issue of the methods of measuring maps. The measure of mapping is not restricted to the mathematical; it may equally be spiritual, political or moral. By the same token, the mapping’s record is not confined to the archival; it includes the remembered, the imagined, the contemplated. (Cosgrove 1999, p. 2)

Cosgrove states that maps are not necessarily scientific and mathematical, but can also be a means of representing political, social and cultural ideologies of the landscape. Thus, the world that mapping tends to record can be both material-immaterial, tangible-intangible, visual-hidden, remembered, heard and thought. Thus maps could well be viewed as “construction of mind.” The traditional Western idea of the measure of the map is based on the visual phenomena, through the lens of the tourist, de Certeau’s “voyeur” and Benjamin’s “flâneur.” De Certeau’s voyeur catches the totality of the city with a single glance and hence goes outside it and chooses the top of the tower to view it. The tourist’s grasp of the city is through its text—the landmarks, monuments, churches, palaces, historical buildings—emphasized in the tourist maps. Tourist maps do not make visible the invisible rhythms

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of the city that are constructed by citizens through their everyday practices. These rhythms constitute the texture of the city. Citizens of the city are concerned with “textures” and not with the “text” of the city. These textures are understood not by reading or the visual phenomena alone, but by feeling, touching and experiencing. Thus, the maps have to incorporate not only the recordings based on vision, but also those that are experienced and imagined. Besides being visualized cartographic maps, they have to be haptic maps as well. If the intention of the map is to represent “reality” then reality is not grasped just by visual means. It is constituted and formed through our engagement with things. The environment needs to be experienced by the body and then mapped. This experience is not restricted to the five senses working at the denotative level—that is, at the first superficial, visible layer—but is an experience built upon revealing the deeper, hidden layers. These hidden layers which are mythical, symbolic and mysterious form the connotative codes. It is these textures, experienced by the Varanasi residents, which I have mapped. There is little argument that Kevin Lynch’s conception of “city map” is based on perceptual experience. It is humanistic, and recognizes the role of users in space. In The Image of the City (Lynch 1960) the environment is mapped based on people’s mental pictures of that environment.2 His maps reflect that people do not occupy merely the physical environment; they also occupy an environment that they have built up in their minds. As an example, Lynch writes, [In] the process of way-finding, the strategic link is the environmental image, the generalized mental picture of the exterior physical world that is held by the individual. This image is product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide action. The need to recognise and pattern our surroundings is so crucial, and has such long roots in the past, that this image has wide practical and emotional importance to the individual. (Lynch 1960, p. 4)

Lynch emphasizes the role of the body, its sensory as well as mental aspects, in forming the image of a place. But these aspects are lost in the vocabulary derived by Lynch to map the city. The vocabulary—paths, edges, nodes, landmarks and districts—lends a perceptual knowledge to the physical form. As noted by Steve Pile (1996), Lynch is concerned with legibility and the look of the city while also deriving its vocabulary. His five elements can be reduced to the two elements of “streets” and “landmarks” as “paths” and “edges” are covered by the category of streets, and “edges,” “nodes” and

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“districts” can be considered as landmarks at varying scales. Streets and landmarks are very much the physical, material elements. Lynch’s focus is on the visual and the visible (Pile 1996). His vocabulary of mapping thus becomes limited by his emphasis on purely visual aspects. Although Walter Benjamin’s textual maps of the city were based on experiences of the users of the city, similar to Lynch’s approach, these experiences were imagistic and visual. Benjamin took up the difficult task of representing the momentary and fleeting experiences by way of textual or word maps. He wrote: “to find words for that which one has before one’s eyes—how difficult that can be” (Benjamin quoted in Gilloch 1997, p. 18). In his series of inspired portraits of cities such as Berlin, Moscow, Marseilles, Paris and Naples, Benjamin represented the city as remembered images through his text. The portraits were “attempts to translate the seen into the written, the picture into the word” (Gilloch 1997, p.18). Like Lynch, Benjamin’s approach relied on perception based on visual elements. His urban “physiognomies” were readings or interpretations of the environment based on physical structure of the cities themselves. In his cityscapes, Benjamin presented urban readings or decipherments of the metropolitan environment and suggested that the key to understanding social life is located in the physical structure of the cities themselves. As noted by Susan Buck-Morss (1989), Benjamin’s essay on Naples was about images gathered by a person walking the streets of the city. Buck-Morss draws attention to Benjamin’s preoccupation with the visual image and the title of her book The Dialectics of Seeing—Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project emphasizes this sense of spectacular and sight in Benjamin’s works. Lynch’s and Benjamin’s works are similar in the sense that both are oriented towards the visible. But while Lynch looks at the city as a single unified entity, Benjamin has a fragmentary approach towards the city. Lynch places an emphasis on grasping and representing the city as a unified whole. Sasaki (2000) mentions that Lynch’s representation is similar to the conception of a Cartesian city, where the city is represented in totality and is given a unity by the underlying geometrical principles. For Lynch, the city is a single organism with easily identifiable parts. In contrast to Lynch’s unified city, the city for Benjamin constitutes a monad. It is a fragment representing the totality of the meaning of life: He is engaged in an archaeological excavation of the city to salvage its fragments so that they can be refunctioned. Each element recovered is monadological, containing within it the totality from whence it came, and is also illuminating as part of the new montage in which it is assembled. (Gilloch 1997, p. 18)

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As Gilloch notes, the fragments for Benjamin are “parts” of the “whole,” but can still work as “wholes” in their own capacity. Benjamin writes: “in thousands of eyes, in thousands of objects, the city is reflected” (Benjamin quoted in Gilloch 1997, p. 6). Thus Benjamin’s map is a montage with a superimposition of various fragments or layers. It is a method of arranging, in one composition, images from several sources so that elements are both distinct and blended into the whole. Each fragment has an internal logic and system of organization. Benjamin presents the city as fluid and fragmentary, as opposed to the city as an individual entity. He picks up these fragments from everyday life that are everyday spatial activities, like those of flâneurs or street prowlers, onlookers and sellers immersed in commercial exchange. His procedure is to map the street life in terms of the mundane everyday activities that are motivated by aspirations and anxieties. This fragmentary approach of Benjamin’s, as opposed to Lynch’s unified approach, introduces the notion of distance in “mapping.” As soon as the city is mapped in totality, as an entity, it becomes an object seen from afar and a gap is created between the perceived and the perceiver. This gap or the distance created is central to Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin 1992; Benjamin 1969). As mentioned by Read, the concept of distance is associated with notions of accessibility and the way in which representational forms work. Looking closely implies a thorough analysis, in contrast to getting an overview from a distance (Read 1993). Thus, Lynch’s map representing a unified city gives an overview as opposed to Benjamin’s montage of “monadological” fragments reflecting deep knowledge and understanding of the city. This concept of “distance” in representational techniques becomes very much a part of de Certeau’s comparison between the view of the streets from the top of a tower and from within the streets. In relation to planners’ ways of mapping cities, he wrote: Icarus can ignore the tricks of Daedalus in his shifting and endless labyrinths. His altitude transforms him into a voyeur. It places him at a distance, it changes an enchanting world into a text. It allows him to read it, to become a solar Eye, a god’s regard. The exaltation of a scopic drive. Just to be this seeing point creates the fiction of knowledge. Must one then redescend into the sombre space through which crowds of people move about, crowds that, visible from above, cannot see there below? The fall of Icarus. (de Certeau 1985, pp. 122-149)

De Certeau raised the issue of the “reality” of representation, when objects are seen from afar, as well as the concept of power associated with these

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representations. The maps constructed are different when the city is seen from the bird’s-eye viewpoint, and from the point of view of personal itineraries in streets. The map from afar is abstract and devoid of narratives. According to him, this distanced map is disengaged from the itineraries of the place (de Certeau 1985). Narratives projecting itineraries become crucial for a place. The pedestrians actualise sites through their “narrative footsteps” as spaces for this and spaces for that. In the city people are inscribed, but on it they leave their own everyday traces. (Shields 1996, p. 234)

These traces or markings stitch time and place together. As Read suggests, to move into a place there is a need for a story about it: The story does not express, describe or illustrate a practice, it makes movement and practice possible in the first place . . . The difference between the house for the estate agent or realtor and the dweller is that one maps and the other tours, not “the bathroom is to the left of the hallway,” but “you go along the hallway and bathroom is to your left.” (Read 1993, p. 166)

The story oscillates between presenting knowledge of the place, and spatializing action. De Certeau (1988) makes a comparison between the first type of map, that is, a projection of observations on a plane, and the second type (which he calls a “tour”), which incorporates the itineraries. The first maps the space without a trace of human habitation and activity, as in the example given by Read of the space mapped by the estate agent. The second category of maps incorporates stories that found the place.

Notes 1. In Paul Carter’s discussion of the “coastline,” the coast is a shifting zone between high and low tides that the cartographer arbitrarily “fixes.” “[T]he intervening coastline between the ‘fixed’ navigational features was usually sketched in by eye.” Mathew Flinders quoted in Carter, P. 1999, “Dark With Excess of Bright: Mapping the Coastlines of Knowledge”, in D. Cosgrove, (ed.) Mappings, Reaktion Books Ltd, London. p. 126. “Sketching by eye meant to reduce to a line: with a hand-held pen to reduce a sweep of land to a continuous curve.” Thus, the map of the coastline represented flexibility and change, and relied on the hand that drew it. 2. The Image of the City was an inspiration for behavioral geographers in the 1960s and 1970s. Mental mapping was done for three North American cities. The city maps were derived from the mental images people had of that environment. Pile, S. 1996, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity, Routledge, New York.

CHAPTER TEN


Guy Debord, a key Situationist theorist in the 1950s and 1960s, made a series of maps of Paris after an aimless walk/tour through its streets and alleys. Based on these wanderings, the Paris maps reflected Debord’s engagement, his desires and perceptions within the spaces of everyday life. These maps subverted authoritarian readings based on a totalizing view of the city (Corner 1999) and emphasized the readings of a body moving and performing in everyday spaces. This chapter maps the spaces of everyday life, but the bodily acts that narrate these spaces are not “aimless wanderings.” They are structured acts, with a defined beginning, movement and an end. These structured acts are the rituals and performances. They become a means to narrate stories. By mapping these rituals, the stories of the place become inscribed on the maps. These stories of various places intertwine, characters of one walking into another, thus bringing the different places together: The qualities we experience visually are entirely other than the qualities we experience tangibly, so that there are no means, except that of habitual experience, of working out connections between the two. (Atherton 1990, p. 224)

Linkages exist between the “seen” and “experienced” qualities of the environment achieved by an active engagement with the environment to be mapped. Thus it is a possible intention to produce a map that is experiential

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and participatory. In relation to the nature of this participation, Appelbaum, paraphrasing Berkeley, writes: “. . . as we walk along the road, we are guided by some power, some ability. That power can not be sensory, nor bodily, nor organic in origin, since body in itself is mute, dumb, deaf, and mindless.” What then? It must be “the mind itself that lights up the way. . . . It must be intellect that discloses a world through its radiant vision.” (as quoted in Carter 1999, p. 138)

The mind orders and directs sensory data. My Varanasi maps are intended to be a mental construct, a product of the mind, of the unconscious. Unconscious refers to the liminal state of the individual when this map is constructed. It is in this state that Lefebvre’s (1991b) perceived and conceived spaces are overlapped. In this bodily expedition through Varanasi, I look at the rhythms of daily life. My interpretations are embodied cultural practices and have an everyday or an extra-everyday dimension.1 While these practices may have specific rhythms in terms of movement, gesture, sound and moods, these practices, when mapped on the city, highlight a relationship between mind and material culture. Thus the series of maps produced, besides being mental representations, have a strong socio-cultural dimension and highlight the role of the reader in their construction. The lived, “ritualized” maps will recreate different worlds for different readers and will thus be constructive and creative. The maps will not be static, fixed or stable, but will have a fluidity and flexibility because their construction will vary depending on the type of rituals and the subjective aspect of the mapmakers’ bodies. An example of the subjective aspect is the gendered body that gets represented on the maps and which was also discussed in the rituals at Manikarnika. These lived maps also have an influence on the way various bodies relate to the city and demonstrate their constructive aspect.

A Pilgrimage to Varanasi: Tracings and Mappings The mapping exercise is a kind of pilgrimage. Here pilgrimage does not have any religious connotations, but rather is a journey for seeking “truth,” for in the exercise of mapping as pilgrimage, the pilgrim is seeking the “truth” or “reality” of the city. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. . . .


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The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an “alleged competence.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 12)

Deleuze and Guattari suggest that a representation can be termed as a map only when it gives a glimpse of reality. The representation is a map when it constructs the unconscious, in that it is able to lead the mapmaker or the viewer to a liminal state which, as already discussed, signifies a complete engagement with the object, in this case the spatial representation. I represent Varanasi through tracings and mappings. The idea behind tracing is that it is an exact reproduction. Tracings rely on visual perception in opposition to a map, which is experiential. Tracings mark out patterns. They do not reveal anything new. Mappings differ from tracings in that their role is not to reproduce, but to act as a constructive device. Mappings unfold this creative potential as the approach while constructing them is participatory, experiential and, most importantly, lived. Thus, these lived maps serve two functions: they are descriptive and they also reorganize what already exists. Because these maps are inclusive of experience, they reorganize not only the physicality that exists but also the intangible, hidden forces that trigger the workings of the place. These intangible aspects are the stories, legends, historical events, politics and economics that give these maps the potential to reveal the reality more than the tracing. The lived maps of Varanasi discussed under “Mappings,” while having a potential to be descriptive, will also provide a framework for an emergence of a new space, based on the mapmaker’s experiential journey through the place. In the Pilgrimage to Varanasi, there are two kinds of pilgrims. “[T]he one like a tourist is keen on sight-seeing, wandering from place to place, loving first one thing then another, flitting from one experience to another for the fun of it” (Anandamayi quoted in Lannoy 1999, p. 96). “Tracings” attempts to seek the reality of Varanasi by taking a touristic, a visual, and an abstract approach towards this city. “Tracings” utilizes the visual medium similar to “Mappings,” but fails in grasping and communicating the reality of the place. Representing the “real” city does not merely depend on the technique of representation but also on the process one undergoes to understand what one has to represent. The same technique is used in “Mappings” besides the use of texts, images and two-dimensional drawings, but the maps produced are nearer to revealing a “real” Varanasi than in “Tracings.” It is because the mapmaker in “Mappings” begins analyzing both the visible and invisible rhythms of this place and again becomes a pilgrim, who in a quest for the truth, engages with the rhythms of this city. Pilgrimage is not simply a physical journey through space, but is a journey for the mind as well. Thus, mapping as pilgrimage is a movement of

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body through space. Mapping is interactive and brings about a state of transformation in the body and so constructed maps become lived maps. Although a representation can never be “real,” “Mappings” attempts to narrow this gap between reality and representation more than “Tracings.” “Mappings” represents the spaces in the way they get re-constructed by the mapmaker’s performing body. As discussed earlier, the body in a liminal phase re-constructs a space and “Mappings” represents this re-constructed, ritualized or lived space.

Tracings “Tracings” is my experience of Varanasi as a tourist through its landmarks, monuments and historic buildings and gives an abstract reading of Varanasi, a postcard view, highlighting particular aspects. The representation is sometimes “picturesque” and “panoramic,” like most of the views of Varanasi ghats from the riverside, or from afar. It provides an overview of the city with a “documentary” approach. “Tracings” constitutes some visually appealing cultural icons representing the city as a cultural product to entice the viewers and to generate their interest in the city. “Tracings” as a visual representation works as an information-giving device representing the city as distanced from the body by emphasizing the visual aspects of the city. Tracings A (see figure 10.1) maps the impressions I have gathered reading about Varanasi as a child through comic books and from tourist postcards of this place. My introduction to Varanasi as a tourist is through tourist guide maps. Tracings B (see figure 10.2) begins with a boat ride on the river Ganga. With a romanticized notion of this place, I view the picturesque ghats, aligned with the tall walls of palaces and temples. The morning scene opens with people exercising and bathing on the ghats. There is an anticipation of seeing things “strange” and “new,” which is always a case when the tourist journeys to a different place. Midway on this ride, I start picking up the signs associated with this traditional Indian city that had been mentioned in the tourist maps: meditating ascetics, the old and young together; some frolicking in the water while others collecting the sacred water and pouring it onto the nearby Shiva lingas. The cremation ghat is easily recognised with its blackened temple walls and a spiral of smoke above. (Tiwari 1998)

Tracings C: After this initial “spectacle” I move to locations from where I get “panoramic views,” and in the city lanes that are lined up with colorful idols of Gods and Goddesses (see figure 10.3).


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Tracings D: I go in search for the “peaceful” spots in the city with the sacred kunds (water tanks), the stupas and the historic sites that the guide maps had promised. (Tiwari 1998) (see figure 10.4)

Tracings E: Highlight of my journey is the cremation ghat where my guide tries to enlighten me on aspects of death and cremation. My eyes follow the contour of the temple form and the spiralling smoke moving upwards along with the “departed souls.” (Tiwari 1998) (see figure 10.5)

Mappings The technique adopted in the production of ritualized maps of Varanasi is that of “layering.” Rem Koolhas and Bernard Tschumi, in their mapping exercise for Parc de la Villette in Paris (Tschumi 1987), developed layering as a technique for mapping.2 Each layer revolves around a separate aspect of the program of the site, has a logic and a structure of organization. These layers, when overlaid on each other, reveal the relationships between the different aspects of the program and context. A particular layer can be understood only by looking at it through other layers (Corner 1999). Similar to Koolhaas and Tschumi’s layering technique, the intention here is to develop a mosaic of Varanasi that works as a representational and performative model and reconfigures, based on the performance of the mapmaker. Jameson notes that in order to understand the meanings and contents of a city and attempt an exhaustive reading of it, there is a need for many layers. These layers, when overlaid, construct the “real” map of the city (Jameson 1984). “Mappings” is such a process, where the user gathers thematic fragments of the city by rhythmanalysis. The body moves through the spaces and with time, picks up separate fragments, which are then overlaid to construct a map of Varanasi. While constructing these maps, the users become the narrators of events. Rituals have the potential to work as narratives and structure the relationship of body and space. The ritual practices described below help to choreograph and map bodies on the city. The choreographed bodies inscribe their presence through rituals and help in continually re-constructing the maps. These maps are thus the inhabitants’ maps—the lived maps. Here the urban spaces are represented, in the way they are constructed through rituals. Users of a particular space

Figure 10.1. Tracings A (Picture collage by author based on postcards and tourist maps from U.P. Tourism)

Figure 10.2. Tracings B (Photos taken by the author)

Figure 10.3. Tracings C. (Photos taken by the author)

Figure 10.4. Tracings D (Photos taken by the author)

Figure 10.5. Tracings E (Photos taken by the author)


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form an image of that space according to the way their bodies occupy it. As an example, a man coming to Manikarnika Ghat to cremate his loved one does not see Manikarnika merely as a place for burning bodies. For him, it is a ground where his own physical body, following the sequence of rituals like tonsuring, bathing, circumambulation and giving fire, leads to a transformative experience at a metaphysical level.3 Thus, his body inhabits the space in a particular way so as to construct a personal meaning from it. Viewed at the city scale, rituals involving movement across the city construct the lived map of Varanasi and one of these is the Panchakroshi pilgrimage.

Mappings One: The Panchakroshi Procession The Panchakroshi pilgrimage starts from Manikarnika Ghat and ends at the same place after circumambulating the city. It is a journey performed in six days over a distance of 55.2 miles (88.87 km), usually done in autumn. During the intercalary month, around 45,000 pilgrims perform this pilgrimage (Lannoy 1999). The twelfth century text on Varanasi Kashi Khanda of Skanda Puranan describes this ritual as a “merit giver for liberation from the world” (Singh 1993, p. 43). The sequence of places to be visited, the acts to be performed in each place and the rules to be followed are drawn from Kashi Darpan (1875) by Kailasanatha Sukula (Singh 1993). The ritual commences with a purificatory bath at Manikarnika Ghat. The body, while moving through the narrow streets and lanes, is aware of Lynch’s vocabulary of five elements (Lynch 1960), recognizes the visual elements of paths, landmarks, nodes etc. and is also loosely aware of the symbolic Varanasi.4 The body is aware of moving towards the center in a circle, crossing the different zones of sacredness, leading to a transformative experience at the end of the journey (Gengnagel and Michaels 2001). The place where the journey ends is the same as where it started, that is, at Manikarnika Ghat. Manikarnika occupies two positions. The first is its position on the city periphery. The major urban development has been on the western banks of the river Ganga as the eastern banks have always been subjected to floods. The western banks thus bound the city development. Manikarnika’s location on this “boundary” aids in its perception of being on the periphery at the start of the ritual. On the other hand, Manikarnika is also located midway on the strip of ghats—the hub of activities or the city “center.” Thus pilgrim’s mind perceives Manikarnika as a center at the end of the ritual. The Panchakroshi pilgrimage ritual has three phases—initiation phase, liminal phase and completion phase. During these three phases, pilgrims pick

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different fragments of the city, which when overlaid, form two lived maps of the city. Phase 1: Initiation Colored “pilgrim maps” are supplied to pilgrim groups before they set out for their journey and explain the workings of Varanasi as a cosmogram. The positioning of principal shrines on the way graphically summarizes the city’s microcosmic nature. This pilgrim map is similar to Kailasanatha Sukula’s “The Mirror of Kashi” (see figure 10.6).5 Sukula’s map does not have a single perspective. It reads differently from different directions. The cardinal directions are marked at the outer boundary of the map. The underlying structure of the map is geometrical, with the dominant form of a circle. Two concentric circles inscribed with text, “the road of the large Panchakroshi in Kashi,” mark the outer limit of the city. Represented on this boundary line are the main deities of Varanasi and major pilgrim sites of India. At the center of this circular form is a square consisting of important buildings at the riverfront and at the city-center. The pilgrims place the rolled map on their heads, get blessings from the priest and set out on their journey, by the end of which, they have an internalized image of the cosmogram that they are able to relate to the physical world (Gengnagel and Michaels 2001). The pilgrim map influences the formation of the following layers, in the minds of the pilgrims. Layer 1: Varanasi as a Dharma Kshetra (Precinct of Order and Virtue) Pilgrims conceive Varanasi as a space enclosed within the Panchakroshi route, the sacred space, the “inside,” and beyond the circle is the profane world, the “outside” (see figure 10.7). They know that it is their task to mark this space by foot and their feet have to re-write the geography every year. Their movement is rhythmic and marks the sacred precinct by constructing the Panchakroshi pathway. The “operation of marking out boundaries” is essential for creating a physically and symbolically bounded stage for ritual (de Certeau 1988, p. 122). The demarcation operation is based on mythical fragments drawn from earlier stories. In the context of the Panchakroshi ritual, the underlying idea is the creation of a sacred territory by circumambulation to aid the crossing over to the world of spirit from the material world.6 Pilgrims’ bodies perform this story. The stage, that is, the Panchakroshi pathway, bridges the inside and outside, the sacred and profane worlds. On the right side of the pathway, in the clockwise direction, are the temples and sacred water bodies. The resting places and other services are located on the left (Singh 1993). The Panchakroshi route thus has a mediating role

Figure 10.6. Pilgrim Map. The pilgrim map is based on Kailash Nath Sukula’s map of 1876 “The Mirror of Kashi.” It shows the city defined by the Panchakroshi route with the inner city pilgrim circuit drawn as a square. The city is represented symbolically rather than cartographically. (Source: Tourist pilgrimage booklets)

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Figure 10.7. Inside Outside. Varanasi conceived as the space enclosed within the Panchakroshi route—the sacred space, the “inside.” Beyond the circle is the profane world, the “outside.” (Drawn by the author)

that bridges as well as separates the two zones. It is the space created by the performing bodies—by their actions, their footsteps. These performative movements continue to reconstitute and rewrite the symbolic values of the space so produced. Layer 2: Varanasi Divided As per scriptural prescriptions, Varanasi has five zones demarcated by separate circumambulation routes. These routes are for those who desire to circumambulate the most holy spots—daily, occasionally or annually (Singh 1993). Each route is rhythmically punctuated by halting places. In the Panchakroshi pilgrimage, the intention is to begin from the periphery of the city and move towards the center, that is, the most sacred zone. Thus, the second layer conceives Varanasi as divided into zones, their sacredness increasing from the periphery towards the center (see figure 10.8). Layer 3: Varanasi and India This layer is a representation at Varanasi of the most holy spots in India. The sacred territory of Varanasi, marked by the Panchakroshi route accumulates the power of all the holy places in India by a process of transposition. Singh (2002) mentions that this process of transposition started in the sixth cen-


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Figure 10.8. Space Divided. Varanasi divided into zones, the sacredness of these zones increasing from the periphery towards the center. (Drawn by the author)

tury and reached its peak in the thirteenth century. The maps of India and Varanasi by Singh show the replication of Indian sacred sites at Varanasi (2002, p. 60). The following excerpt from Diana Eck’s Banaras: City of Light discusses this transposition of place: Kashi is said to embody all the tirthas.7 One may visit the far-off temple of Shiva, high in the Himalayas at Kedara—right here in Kashi. And one may travel to the far South to Rameshvaram . . . right here in Kashi. And even if one does not visit the sites of these transposed tirthas in Kashi, the power of all these places has been assimilated into the power of this one place, and the pilgrims who visit Kashi stand in a place empowered by the whole of India’s sacred geography . . . Kashi like a crystal, gathers and refracts the light of other pilgrimage places. (Eck 1982, pp. 39-41)

By moving on the Panchakroshi pathway demarcating the space containing all the tirthas, the pilgrims cover the sacred landscape of India. Thus Layer 3 maps India on Varanasi. Map A: At the Periphery Map A is constructed at the commencement of the journey (see figure 10.9). The pilgrims commence their journey from Manikarnika, after a vow at Jnanvapi well at the Vishwanath temple, and a purifying bath at Mani-

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Figure 10.9. Map A—At the Periphery. Map A is constructed at the commencement of the journey. The journey starts from Manikarnika positioned at the periphery of Varanasi. When overlayed, layers 1, 2 and 3 are from Map A . (Drawn by the author)

karnika Ghat. They locate themselves at the periphery of the circle with the river Ganga and Manikarnika Ghat forming the reference points. Their intention is to move towards the center of the circle after crossing different zones of sacredness. Layers 1, 2, and 3 formed in their minds along with the physical positioning of their bodies at the periphery of the city aid in the construction of Map A. Phase 2: Liminal Phase, The Journey Layer 4: After their purifying bath at Manikarnika, pilgrims move on to the Panchakroshi route. There are five halting places or pause points in the journey. The Panchakroshi path, dwindling through bushes and water bodies, widens up as it approaches the pause points, with their own particular deities, sacred


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waters and their “powers.” At these points, built forms spring up to cater to the needs of pilgrims—lodging places, hotels, rest-rooms, eating joints along with a small number of houses for the serving population. The itinerary for the pilgrim is chalked out from the sixteenth century text, Kashi Rahasya. When and how the pilgrim has to travel, the activities one has to abstain from, the acts to be performed on the route as well as at the pause points are clearly set out and choreographed for them in the text (Singh 1993). Past traces of the performative ritual are picked up by the pilgrim and the choreography of performance, thus dictating the rhythms of body and space. The fire: what one cannot extinguish in this trace among others that is a cinder. . . . No doubt the fire has withdrawn, the conflagration has been subdued, but if cinder there is, it is because the fire remains in retreat. . . . Cinder remains, cinder there is, which we can translate: the cinder is not, is not what is. It remains from what is not, in order to recall at the delicate, charred bottom of itself only non-being or non-presence. (Derrida 1991, p. 61, p. 39)

Foster (1996) suggests a performative act to be very powerful. Long after the performance is over, one is able to relive it through the traces left by the performance.8 The performance is long gone. It has disappeared. Foster mentions that it is impossible to retrace what happened in its entirety. However the potency of performance increases by the very fact that it has occurred; it has disappeared but has left traces to be deciphered. Jacques Derrida speaks of the trace in terms of cinder, as something that “erases itself totally, radically, while presenting itself” (Derrida quoted in Lukacher 1991, p. 1). The pilgrims at Panchakroshi are able to feel and understand the earlier performances through the leftover traces, through “cinders,” and this is what makes their own performative act more potent. The traces are the foot-marks on the dusty path constructing it a little more every year, due to the repetitive travel by hordes of pilgrims; the rounded, smoothened sacred stones and idols indicating the repetitive touches and pouring of water, milk, honey, vermilion and flowers over them; and the temple roofs and walls blackened with smoke and giving a soothing fragrance of the Havana (fire ritual) ingredients, expressing the length of elapsed time. The Panchakroshi route is constructed and mapped simultaneously by the performance and as a powerful and meaningfully charged space is only constructed when inhabited by the moving, choreographed bodies. The space constructed is fluid in a way that its nature and meaning changes when the performance is over. This charged performative space disappears and becomes merely a connector route between different areas of the city.

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But, there are those traces, those markings left behind, hinting at the nature of the invisible space, the space that was constructed and has disappeared. “In the warmth of the cinder one can feel the effects of the fire even if the fire is inaccessible, outside cognition though not without leaving a trace” (Lukacher 1991, p. 2). These “cinders” form an essential part of the urban environment. “Cinder holds all beings and entities in presence” (Lukacher 1991, p. 1) and, though not synonymous with the truth of Being, is very close to that. Likewise, the traces from the Panchakroshi performance form a framework for the next performance. Thus Layer 4 (see figure 10.10) is formed by picking up the traces of the earlier performances and the rhythms of the body that are established by the choreographed performance.

Figure 10.10. Traces of the Past. Layer 4 is formed first by picking up traces of the earlier performances that are specific to each halting place, and second, by the rhythms of the body that are established by the choreographed performance. (Drawn by the author)


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Phase 3: Completion Phase Map B: At the Center The performance is over and the pilgrims return to the same place from which they had started their journey—Manikarnika Ghat. They have reached the center of the world—the axis mundi. Map B, drawn at this time, depicts their journey. The acts performed, the images gathered and the traces deciphered—everything finds a place on this map. The River Ganga and Manikarnika Ghat, which were located at the periphery in Map A, are shifted towards the center of the sacred circle in Map B (see figure 10.12). These places now occupy the most sacred zone within the circular precinct. The experience of this mapping exercise is quite similar to the experience of reading the Indian cosmogram or yantra in Tantrism (see figure 10.11). Yantra is a visual device. It is “a nucleus of the visible and knowable, a linked diagram of lines by means of which visualized energies are

Figure 10.11. Freehand Sketch of Yantra. (Drawn by author based on pilgrims’ booklets)

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concentrated” (Rawson 1971, pp. 70-71). In order to read this yantra, appropriate syllables have to be uttered, prescribed rituals followed and the eye required to move in a certain pattern, beginning from the periphery to the center. In the yantra, “the dot or ‘bindu’ at the centre represents the selforiginated seed of Being and consciousness, . . . which can never be visible or imaginable”(Rawson 1971, p. 93). For the person meditating on the cosmogram, the center is the point of final dissolution as process of meditation is a liminal movement from the periphery of the cosmogram towards the center. A three-dimensional cosmogram has the center at the highest point. While meditating on the yantra, the person moves from the peripheral lower space to the higher quality central space. Reaching this center point symbolizes the act of creation (Rawson 1971). In Varanasi, the center point is the Madhayameshwar/Jnanvapi Kupa (Well of Wisdom) near Manikarnika Ghat. Manikarnika, the geographical center of Varanasi becomes an appropriate representation of the center of the cosmogram, where the death ritual symbolizing re-birth or the act of creation takes place. Reaching Manikarnika at the end of the Panchakroshi ritual indicates a movement into a higher “quality space.” This process of constructing the ritualized map of Varanasi leads to a transformative experience for the body. In their studies included in Altered States of Consciousness (1969), Charles Tart and Arnold Ludwig describe the transformative experience where “perceptual distortion” or a “disturbed time sense” occurs. “These experiences lead to an ‘alternation of thinking,’ ‘hypersuggestibility’ and ‘change of meaning and signification.’ There is a change in ‘emotional experience’ . . . too sacred to be articulated verbally—a deep sense of knowing. Finally it results in a feeling of ‘renewal’ and ‘rejuvenation’” (Snyder 1991, pp. 442-443). In this altered state, there is no separation between the subject and the object. The moving body and the surrounding space are not separate, convergence occurring at the peak of the transformative experience of the ritual, when the body covers the periphery and reaches the center. Map B is constructed at this moment. This convergence of body with the space is not possible simply by taking a distant approach as by being a flâneur.9 My first experience of the Panchakroshi route as a flâneur was different to the experience I had when I moved on it as a participant of the ritual. As a flâneur, I knew nothing about this route except that it was a stage for the famous Panchakroshi performance. I was on a two-wheeler with a tourist guide. I drove on the dusty roads and got down at a few places to take pictures. I abandoned my journey halfway as the performative Panchakroshi space was invisible to me.


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Figure 10.12. Map B—At the Center. Map B is constructed at the completion of the journey. The journey ends at Manikarnika, which depicts the center of Varanasi. (Drawn by the author; photos taken by the author)

I had perceived the Panchakroshi route as only a connecting road for the separate places, with a few tanks and temples scattered around. By merely using the gaze, the flâneur on the Panchakroshi road is not as inspired as he/she is while performing and constructing the Panchakroshi space: the touch of the rounded stones; the roughness of walls; the smokefilled sometimes fragrant temples; the refreshing waters of the tanks; the assimilated powers of tirthas; the charged body in the act of creation. It is through the kinesthetic responses that the bodily and ideological implications are discovered. It is in the traces left by the bodies that “performed” the Panchakroshi pilgrimage that he/she finds a different story about the city.

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Thus, the process of mapping the space depends on the way the body has lived and constructed the space. The Panchakroshi ritual is one of many rituals that flourish in Varanasi. Each maps the city in a different way so it becomes essential to have such multiple maps of the city in order to represent the users’ city.

Mappings Two: My Pilgrimage My pilgrimage to Varanasi is concluded in the way I began it, on a personal note. Following is an extract from the diary of my experiences in Varanasi that I had kept during my stay there. 13th January, 1999, 22.00hrs.—My last day in Varanasi—I am sitting quietly on the sands of the Ganga. The moon is peeping out from behind the clouds and is being reflected on the gently lapping waters. The silence of the smooth, silvery river is broken intermittently by the sound of the temple bells from far behind. This is the last night of my four-month stay here. I have to catch an early morning train to Delhi, from where I will be flying back to Perth. I have a huge task ahead of me . . . map this city, the way I have lived it, the way I have related to it. This city is within me, in my mind. I have lived it, gathered and understood its rhythms. I close my eyes—and there they are—all my experiences flipping past one another at random: those sounds, that smell, the Benarasis (people of Varanasi), those spires and the great steps, the narrow lanes with their mysteries and the myths, the positioning of my body at the centre of the world during the Panchakroshi ritual and my journey to the city of Lord Rama at the performance episode in Nati-Imli. I realise that it is not just the city that has become a part of me. I have become a part of the city also. I have left my marks, my traces on the city. I have played my own small part in the on-going performance in this city. (Tiwari 1998)

“Mappings Two” conveys these experiences.10 “Mappings Two” is a visual representation of Varanasi like “Tracings.” But while “Tracings” simply reproduces the city, “Mappings Two” maps my movement in the city while I am involved in its everyday and extra-everyday practices. In this journey, I find myself inhabiting the space in the same way as other users. I am enthused by the sounds, smells, textures and colors, and the close proximity of the other bodies in those spaces. I am moved by the myths and legends that abound in those spaces. There is a juxtaposition of the everyday and extraeveryday in these urban spaces of Varanasi. I map rhythms of the city, both the everyday and the extra-everyday (the death ritual). The intention is to reveal the hidden layers, to make visible


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the symbolic, mysterious and mythical layers of this city. As opposed to an overview of Varanasi in “Tracings,” “Mappings” is a framework of fragmentary experiences reflecting a knowledge and understanding of the city. “Mappings Two” begins with my arrival at the railway station, a place where everyday and the extra-everyday collide (see figure 10.13). Moving in the streets I notice dead bodies being carried on vehicle rooftops. This activity seems to have the same air of normalcy as the activity of drying dyed fabric down from the buildings (see figure 10.14). The very narrow inner city lanes are much quieter where sounds of temple bells mix intermittently with music filtering through the upper floor residences (see figure 10.15). Local neighborhood streets give a fair idea of the local residents, their trades and skills, their religion, beliefs and community spirit (see figure 10.16). This everyday street affords a place for events and special rituals that bring in an air of festivity (see figure 10.17). This is very quickly and frequently exchanged for a quiet, somber and respectful atmosphere when a funeral procession passes by (see figure 10.18). Following the procession I reach Manikarnika. Loud chants, temple bells, devotional music on loudspeakers, whispers of people having morning tea, cries and wails of near and dear ones of the deceased, and rituals of tonsuring and bathing leave me wondering about the nature of this urban space which has the capacity to gather rhythms of everyday and the extra-everyday. This is a space that is liminal in its very nature and can only be understood and constructed by an individual by living it. (See figures 10.19, 10.20, and 10.21.)

Figure 10.13. Mappings Two (Photos taken by the author)










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Notes Parts of this chapter were previously published in Media: Urban Forum, “Being a Rhythm Analyst in the City of Varanasi,” 19.3, September 1, 2008, 289-306, Reena Tiwari, reprinted here with kind permission from Springer Science+Business. 1. Refer to chapter 3, section titled “Everyday Life in the City.” 2. Tschumi, B. 1987, Cinegramme Folie: Le Parc de la Villette, Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton; New Jersey. Tschumi, B. 1994, Architecture and Disjunction, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. pp. 171-259. 3. Note the use of “him” and “his,” as it is the men who are involved in this particular ritual of cremation. 4. For symbolic aspects of Varanasi please see Singh, Rana P. B. (1993). 5. It was printed in 1876. The four wooden blocks were printed on cloth as well as on paper; the total size of the map is 79 cm by 92 cm. 6. “The rite of circumambulation and its associated taboos seem to have been common to the whole ancient world . . . the rite was primarily cosmogonic in origin and that it reflected the need once universally felt to live in harmony with cosmic forces. . . . To circumambulate clockwise was to identify with the sun’s diurnal course, regarded as life-enhancing.” Irwin quoted in Lannoy, R. (1999). Benares a World within a World. Varanasi, Indica Books. 7. The term tirtha means “ford” or “crossing place.” It refers to those places that are believed to be charged with power, where one crosses over from the material world to the world of the spirit. Eck, D. L. (1982). Banaras: City of light. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 8. Foster gives an example of how the performance can be glimpsed even after its completion, through the traces that are left: An image haunts me: I see a wall, industrial grey with random markings and dents, as in a factory perhaps, the edges of which are obscured by diagonal shadows of blackness. On this wall there is the faint shadow of a body in mid-air, with arms and legs intact and reaching outward as in a leap, but no other identifying characteristics. The space around this shadow is enormous, there is no such wall; and the body creating the shadow is not visible, already vanished from sight. This image appears whenever I think of performance: it recalls the state of disappearance that is for me the foundation of an event. . . . Performance, through its embodiment of absence, in its enactment of disappearance, can only leave traces for us to search in between, among, beyond. Foster, S. L., Ed. (1996). Corporealities: Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power. New York, Routledge, p. 106.

9. As mentioned by Donald in Imagining the Modern City (1999), the flâneur stands for a certain historical moment, a social type associated with the period from the Revolution of 1839 to the creation of Haussmann’s Boulevard and the openings of the first great department stores. It thus hints at the commodification process

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working in the city. The flâneur watched and interpreted the city by moving amongst the crowds, understanding the signs, images, sounds and the rhythms of everyday. However, flaneurie was an elitist activity and the flâneur, while being among the crowd, was not a part of it. Thus, he viewed the city with an abstraction. 10. As opposed to “Tracings,” “Mappings” has been created after living in the spaces of the city. The camera shots are not from afar, or from a particular viewpoint, but are from within the spaces.

CONCLUSION

Performativity and Lived Space

I began with a critique of the city by going back to basic ideas: to simple spaces, to lived bodies and to everyday and extra-everyday rituals. In elucidating the intricate interrelationships between space, body and rituals, it was found that an approach towards perceiving, conceiving and representing a city does not involve a mere visual engagement; neither does it involve a mere sensory appreciation. It rather involves a bodily engagement with the city, where the body transgresses, and this liminal, ritualized or performing body realizes itself as a part of the city and also recognizes the city to be a part of itself. In the current context of global “acculturation” it has been ascertained that the environment becomes authentic for users when it gets continually restructured by the users’ bodies while they are involved in both the everyday and extra-everyday practices. Ritualized or performing bodies become a medium of realizing a holistic conception and representation of the city and its spaces. Rhythmanalysis has been established as a way to read and understand a city and its spaces. Rhythmanalysis augments the idea of abstract “seeing” with notions of bodily experience. It emphasizes the power of users’ bodies in the everyday spaces of the city at an individual, family and community level.

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Performing Bodies— Inhabiting, Constructing and Representing a City Primarily, the conflict has been highlighted between the city seen as a text to be read and understood from a distance, and the city that is written and read simultaneously. The journey began by introducing the selected urban spaces studies to the reader. “Tracings” represented my initial experience of these spaces; they were seen from a distance with a touristic approach with a reliance on vision. This approach did not reveal the full ontological possibility for human experience. My pilgrimage to these places concluded with “Mappings.” “Mappings” reflected the way in which I wrote and read theses urban spaces simultaneously, as an “insider.” My approach in “Mappings” considered the involvement of users’ bodies. Bodies, when writing the text, achieved the capacity to read and understand it. Users understood the city textures by feeling, touching and experiencing. Distance between the subject and the city as object became crucial here. “Tracings” followed the Cartesian notion of space as abstract and distanced from the body, while “Mappings” incorporated bodies and rituals in the conception of space. “Mappings” thus negated the distance between the subject and object and provided us with an holistic approach towards the conception and representation of space. In “Tracings” I understood and represented “cities as visualized” or the “cartographic cities” of visual mapping and surveillance. By contrast, in “Mappings” I understood and represented “cities as experienced,” or the “haptic city” written by bodily presence. The two approaches used in “Tracings” and “Mappings” have always been in tension. The modernist dialectic between the power of the capital and the state from above, and the power of communities from below, gives a glimpse of this tension (Cohen 2000). This dialectic highlights the power struggle between visionaries of cities as opposed to the individual and community. Power, as directed from above, is visible in cities worldwide and is manifest as a governable space; a space that brings order, control and transparency. This has traditionally been the space of architects, planners, urban designers and geographers. It has been argued that the aim of this voyeuristic reading is to render the city visible by harnessing transparency, control and surveillance, “to get the city right, and so to produce the right citizens” (Donald 1999, p. 121). In contemporary cities, these actions of control and surveillance have obliterated sites that hold the opportunity for unpredictable encounter. Such sites have now largely been transformed into semi-privatized spaces. This has led to the development of a built morphology where uses have been compartmentalized and internalized. The


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enclosed atrium, shopping centers, cultural complexes etc. have emerged as new urban types that have dislocated everyday activities from the street. These “designed” environments are thematized and commodified, and have become sites for consumption only. The result is that everyday spaces in our cities have been overlooked and neglected, and the focus has shifted solely towards creating commodified environments. Against this distant approach resulting in the commodification of space, I have highlighted the hidden powers operating at deeper levels in the city, in its everyday spaces, its nooks and crannies. These hidden powers are the powers of the users’ bodies that work in contrast to the powers “from above.” An example discussed was the power of the individual body manifested in space, as seen by the aghori’s occupation and construction of space. The aghori, although socially outcast, still had the capacity to exercise control and re-construct public space on the basis of his performing body. The power of a “family body” involved in the death ritual was also discussed. The family body expressed itself in the public domain and restructured the urban space through bodily rituals. The death ritual highlighted the fluidity between the public and private realms of the city. In addition the power of the “communal body,” as manifested spatially through Nati-Imli Plays was discussed. The way in which the community is empowered to re-create its past and reconstruct the built environment through ritual was demonstrated. Design intervention in the city requires an understanding of these hidden powers operating in the city, and an understanding of the ways in which the users of the space desire, as well as need, to be empowered to re-construct it. The view from afar that has traditionally been employed by us becomes insufficient for a comprehensive understanding of these invisible powers. Besides resulting in “ordered” environments, this distant approach does not satisfy the users’ need for physical expressivity in space. Examples of bodily exertions in contemporary cities are rituals of entertainment and sports, dance clubs and raves, carnivals and pageants like gay Mardi Gras. Here, the idea of community is reinstated by collective bodily exertions. “The seeking out of such experiences attests to the contemporary desire for disorder and unpredictability” (Bell and Haddour 2000). On similar lines, Sennett’s vision of the city in Flesh and Stone—The Body and the City in Western Civilization (1994) is marked by a desire for unpredictability and spontaneity, surprises and tactile sensations. The privatization of urban space and the resulting fragmentation in an automobile oriented, dispersed, decentralized city has led to a sensory deprivation, monotony and tactile sterility in the urban environment (Sennett 1994). Thus, there emerges a need in contemporary cities to address this desire for physical expressivity. Tim

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Edensor (2000) has argued that contemporary cities have served to restrict physical expressivity and have displaced it to bounded realms. He mentions the Notting Hill (London) and Rio (Brazil) Carnivals as examples of events containing transgressive expressions. He further suggests that although these events offer “a temporary escape into physical ‘abandonment,’ the authorities concerned attempt to order and contain them” (2000, p. 130). This ordering is witnessed in terms of regulations imposed on themes chosen by the dancers, the delineation of areas within which the processions take place and so on. This replaces the spontaneity of events with an organized and ordered spectacle. These environments tend to restrict bodily movement and behavior and hence their very “public” nature becomes debatable. They become mere commodities for visual consumption. The opportunities for chance encounters, surprises, casual performance and display are reduced and these urban spaces are “disneyfied” (Edensor 2000). This tendency for ordering the environment at a larger scale is glimpsed in the history of architecture from Bentham to Le Corbusier. The aim behind order and control is to bring transparency. There has always been a latent terror of darkened spaces and especially now in the current fear of “terrorism,” the “illegibility” of people and things has increased. Ordered environments aim to eradicate suspicion and tyranny, but in turn end up removing the spontaneity and the dreams and memories that people invest in these places. Their purpose is to colonize, to subjugate by displacing desires, tactile exchanges, total engagement and interaction with the environment. “Disneyfied” environments, such as Plimoth Plantation, become incapable of working as transgressive or liminal devices. When ordered and contained, the transgressive nature of these environments is washed away and they remain as simply a spectacle to be viewed by an audience in an abstract manner. The spectacle is an ultimate form of abstraction, where identities, dreams and memories are packaged and transformed into spectacular images. Spectacle has constructed the modern capitalist space that is alienated from the body and is dominated by exchange value instead of use value. I initially read Manikarnika Ghat as a spectacle, as an abstract space distanced from the body and emotions. My gaze understood Manikarnika as a fragmented space in terms of money, power, gender and social hierarchy. The spatial patterns constructed by the workings of the ritual practitioners at the ghat, and the socio-spatial hierarchy established at the cremation area, demonstrated this notion of fragmentation. However, the absolute, lived space emerged from within this abstract space. The emergence of absolute space required a “re-visioning” that involved my body in a rhythmanalysis of the space. Rhythms of the everyday and extra-everyday rituals at Manikarnika Ghat


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were analyzed, an example being the death ritual. This ritual incorporated specific male and female rhythms. Gendered bodies in this ritual were used to narrate ideas of life and death in the space. Ritualized bodies inscribed text on the woman/man-made environment. This text, written by the ritualized body emphasized and established the qualitative aspects of the space instead of highlighting space as a “commodity.” The ritualized bodies in motion marked the urban spaces as private or public by their actions and made the city legible. Thus, it was confirmed that an absolute space could be produced from within the contemporary abstract space through a ritualized body. It was further verified that the process of production of space is not necessarily based on a time line, but is non-linear and cyclic. The issue of authenticity in the current global scenario demands that the decisive question while designing a “real” built environment for users in the contemporary situation is who defines authenticity and on what criteria. Within the context of the Nati-Imli episode and the Panchakroshi pilgrimage, authenticity was defined by each individual based on the socio-cultural context. The individual interpretation of authenticity involved both, the personal and the social. Experience became authentic when the subject and the object became one and this was made possible due to the “everyday-ness” of the settings (for both Nati-Imli and Panchakroshi events). The designed physical environments were inclusive of the users and their practices, and had the capacity to trigger a bodily response involving both perceptual and cognitive senses. Designers of the built environment can thus assist in bringing about real experiences for the users, firstly, by developing a user interactive approach and, secondly, by designing spaces as part of the everyday, not distanced from the present time and context. Practices, both everyday and extra-everyday, are critical because of their transgressive or liminal nature. It is in the state of liminality that an aghori, a Panchakroshi Pilgrim, or the community at Nati-Imli, are able to create lived space, or what has been termed by Soja as the “third space” (1996). This lived space has a capacity to revive memories, as demonstrated at Nati-Imli, and is thus able to give a continuum to space and time. Lived space is where the physical and the imagined city can be glimpsed simultaneously. [T]he visible, ordered, rational city has as its necessary counterpoint a dreamcity where familiar landmarks are so transformed by fantasy and primaryprocess thinking that they can only be negotiated with the aid of a special map whose keys are only to be found in the subject’s Unconscious. (Cohen 2000, p. 326)

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Body in a liminal state during a ritual constructs a “dream city.” The role of ritualized body in cities, both traditional and contemporary and both Eastern and Western, has been affirmed. “Bodies act upon the city, inscribing their presence through movement in a process of continual remaking” (Edensor 2000, p. 121). Bodies experience, re-construct and represent spaces through rituals. There have been numerous ways in which cities have been interpreted, understood and mapped by way of texts, maps, images, myths, dreams and illusions. It has been demonstrated in “Mappings One” that a ritualized body is able to inhabit, construct and represent space simultaneously. The process of mapping a city involved, firstly, inhabiting and living the rhythms of the place, thereby re-constructing the place, and secondly, distancing oneself from the rhythms, thereby analyzing and representing them. In summary, within the framework of the space-body relationship, the idea of “Performativity in the City” has been explored, the process by which the city and its spaces are constructed, read and represented by an analysis of rituals and the ways in which ritualized bodies inhabit, construct and represent space simultaneously. Rituals become a key, as it is through ritual that the individual moves into a state of liminality. Thus, the discussion has centered on ritualized body, where the physiological as well as mental aspects of the body are seen together in their role of urban space construction and representation. Ritual has been highlighted as a device that helps in making the user’s body one with the space he/she inhabits. It is then that lived space, an overlay of Lefebvre’s perceived, conceived and social space, emerges. Returning to the issue of the tension between the viewpoint of the city visionaries from above and the viewpoint of the users from within the city spaces, Soja questions the criticality of macro versus the micro geographies. He asks: Do we learn more about any real-and-imagined cityspace by engaging in micro geographies of everyday life and pursuing the local view from the city streets; or by seeing the city as a whole, conceptualising the urban condition on a more comprehensive regional or macro spatial scale? (Soja 1996, p. 310)

Soja further writes: Understanding the city must involve both views, the micro and the macro, with neither inherently privileged, but only with the accompanying recognition that no city—indeed, no lived space—is ever completely knowable no matter what perspective we take. (Soja 1996, p. 310)


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Besides the question of how we view the city, there is also the issue of who views the city. The city has to be viewed and re-viewed by different users from a variety of perspectives. “[I]t is not so important to multiply the surveys or the functional studies of the city, but to multiply the readings of the city” (Barthes quoted in Leach 2002, p. 4). At a macro level, city visionaries are able to understand the city as a “system” while at a micro level the users understand it by leaving their marks and gathering traces while involved in their everyday practices. Thus, we move beyond the debate that decries either the macro or the micro view. Rather, the process of rhythmanalysis has been proposed as a way to overlay and juxtapose the various views of the city in order to understand and represent it. I have aimed at demolishing singular views of urban spatiality and have forwarded democratic readings of the city in place of an authoritarian reading.

Designing the Urban Environment: An Area for Further Research “Architecture functions as a potential stimulus for movement, real and imagined” and . . . “a building is an incitement to action, a stage for movement and interaction” (Yudell 1977, p. 59). Although the scope of this book was limited to establishing the role of ritualized bodies in reading and writing city spaces, there are directions which further research in this area could pursue. The way we inhabit the city and its spaces, and the way we understand and represent them, affects the way that cities are designed and vice versa. Hence, the parameters of spatial design as a cultural generator—the ways in which the designed environment could evoke bodily response and become a ground for practices, both everyday and extraeveryday—could be an area for further investigation. An example of such a designed environment evoking memories and bodily response from the user and which also aids in generating rituals is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin (see Hass 1998). Another example of this sense of encounter and exchange between architecture and the user’s body is the everyday shopping street as discussed by Gibson and Rossiter (Rossiter and Gibson 2000). Thus, further research could look into ways in which environments can be designed to stimulate rituals that assist bodies into transgression or liminality. “Transgression opens the door into what lies beyond the limits usually observed” (Georges Bataille quoted in Tschumi 1994, p. 65). Transgression reveals the unobserved and the hidden. The transgressive aspect of architecture or urban space design could be further explored. Possible research

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questions could include: How is architectural or urban space designed that engages the users, is interactive and revelatory, and is flexible to change and respond to the changing needs? How can architecture evoke “moments,” those instants when one recognizes a situation or an experience as authentic (Lefebvre discussed in Shields 1999)? What are the spatial design criteria for everyday urban spaces that serve to evoke memories and thus connect different times and places? By way of conclusion, a need for careful design of public spaces by creating opportunities for “performativities” in everyday spaces of the city—its streets and squares—has been put forward. Everyday rituals and performances help in creating a relational response between the space and body. The will to master and control either the space or the body is displaced with this performative methodology. Bodies not only move in but generate spaces produced by and through their movements. Movements—of dance, sport, war—are the intrusion of events into architectural spaces. At the limit, these events become scenarios or programs, void of moral or functional implications, independent but inseparable from the spaces that enclose them (Tschumi 1994, p. 111). Designing for the city involves imagining events taking place in an urban topography. The city space is conjured up by projecting these narrative images. Designing for the city is also about constructing scenarios or programs, designing conditions for triggering performativities by reorganizing spatial elements so that our experience involves engaging with events that are structured, strategized and enhanced through architecture. Design strategies encouraging a more sensual bodily response by addressing multiple readings of the users’ city become essential. City visionaries need to visualize the city “as a site of exchange, par excellence, of festival and lucid centrality (the domain of the ‘carnivalesque’); and as the ephemeral reflection of the social spatialisation: the constantly rebuilt and reappropriated” (Shields 1999, p. 185). The city should be seen as a place of multitude rhythms, constantly changing and overlapping through our everyday encounters and our numerous experiences of time and space. The goal of this spatial praxis should be revelatory, aiming to uncover the hidden and intangible by providing a revolutionary spatial consciousness. The city should be the socio-spatial formation of “full exchange and of assembly” (Shields 1999, p. 185), of myths and legends, of dreams and memories, of thought and experience, of ritual and spontaneity, of tracings and mappings. In essence, the city should be a lived space—the space that is authentic and multi-layered offering people a unique and poetic experience, responding to their memories and desires.

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Index

abject, 62-63, 66n4 aghori, 45, 59-63, 66n5, 66n7, 139 authoritative approach, 26, 102 Being and Becoming, 31 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 56, 71-73, 76, 9596, 106. See also flâneur body, 2-3, 7-9, 18-20, 31-34; family body, 139; performing body, 2, 17, 95, 112, 137, 139; ritualized body, 17, 25, 34, 66, 141-142 Bourdieu, Pierre, 13, 95, 100n17 Boyer, Christine, 22, 23, 26, 71-72, 74, 76, 79 Carter, Paul, 104, 108n1, 110 Cartesian, 14, 19, 106, 138 catharsis, 30 de Certeau, Michel, 3-4, 6n2, 14, 19, 25, 36n7, 91, 104, 107-108 chowk, 8, 10n2, 46 City Beautiful, 21 community ritual, 77; Nati-Imli Bharat Milap, 80-98; Panchkroshi Yatra, 117-128

connotation/connotative/connote, 1618, 20n1, 24-27, 35n3, 63, 105. See also denotation Le Corbusier, 8, 21, 140 Deleuze, Gilles, 111 denotation/denote, 16-17, 35n3. See also connotation Donald, James, 10, 21, 24, 36n7, 135n9, 138 Douglas, Mary, 19, 66n7, 71 East-West, 7-10, 19, 44, 142 Eck, Diana, 42-43, 49, 60, 121 emic and etic views, 8-9 Euclidean space, 14 everyday and extra-everyday, 4-5, 2729, 35, 36n7 façadism, 14 flâneur, 4, 7, 36n7, 51, 59, 104, 107, 126, 127 Foucault, Michel, 14, 53, 95 gated communities, 21 Gauttari, A., 111

153

154

Index

Goffman, Erving, 8 Gottdiener, Mark, 23, 24, 26 Huizinga, J., 94 inhabit, construct, and live, 3, 15, 16, 26, 75, 101, 113, 117, 123, 138-143 Kristeva, Julia, 19, 62, 64n4 Lannoy, Richard, 41, 43-47 Lefebvre, Henri. See everyday and extra-everyday; moments; mundus; rhythmanalysis; space liminal/liminality, 7, 11n3, 17, 18, 30, 36n8, 81, 110-112, 122, 126, 129. See also mimesis/mimetic; transformation; transgression lived experience, 3-5, 27, 71-78, 102; authentic experience/authenticity, 56, 73-75, 99n12, 137, 141 Lynch, Kevin, 24, 26, 105, 107, 117 mappings and tracings, 110-134 Mardi Gras, 69, 139 memory/collective memory, 24, 71-77, 88-91, 94-98 Merleau-Ponty, M., 19, 57 mimesis/mimetic, 88, 90-94, 98 moments, 28, 36n6, 144 mundus, 63 myth/mythology, 17, 35n3, 73, 95, 100n17, 105, 144 nature and culture, 5n1, 8, 33-35, 64-65 Natyasastra, 30 objective and subjective, 19, 20, 25, 27, 110 Orient, 8, 10n1, 45 performance, 8, 23, 31, 36n8, 69, 90, 135n8; mapping as performance,

109, 123; performance at Nati-Imli, 80-90, 93, 96, 100n16; performing body, 17, 92, 95, 98, 112, 147 performativity, 1-5, 142 phenomenal, 19-20. See also objective and subjective Pile, Steve, 18, 20, 27, 29, 34-35, 105106 pilgrimage, 110-117, 128-134, 138 Plimoth Plantation; 23, 73, 96, 98, 140 poesis, 26, 29 reality/real, 4, 11n3, 27-28, 31-32, 37n11, 56-57, 72, 92-95, 98, 103113; hyper-real, 74-75 Reigl, Alois, 72-73 representing city, 48, 101, 103, 106107, 137-38; city as discourse, 23; city as text, 4, 23-26, 36n7, 104105, 138, 141; city of signs, 22; legibility, 22, 24, 26, 105, 140; maps and mapping, 24, 28, 101, 103-108; mental map, 24, 108n2; tracings, 110-113 rhythm, 28, 35, 104-105, 110-111, 123, 141-142 rhythmanalysis, 4-5, 7-10, 57, 93, 137, 140, 143. See also rhythm ritual, 2, 16-18; everyday and extraeveryday ritual, 59-66, 140; family ritual, 64-66; individual ritual, 5963. See also community ritual Rossi, Aldo, 24, 76 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 53-55 Schechner, Richard, 6n1, 16, 18, 29-31, 36n8, 41, 56, 73, 81, 91-93, 96 Sennett, Richard, 64-65, 139 Shields, Rob, 26-27, 33, 57, 74, 108, 144 Situationist, 28, 29, 109 Soja, Edward, 3, 22-23, 32-35, 74-75, 104, 142

Index

space, 13-16; absolute space, 33-34, 66, 140-141; abstract space, 32-34, 57, 59, 64, 140-141; conceived/perceived space, 3, 32, 101, 110, 142; Quality Space (Fernandez), 2; textual and physical space, 14, 63, 66, 75, 79-84, 88-94 spectacle, 18, 23, 26, 74-75, 91, 98, 140; globalization, 5, 21-22, 104; themed environment, 23, 75; Varanasi as spectacle, 49-57 Surrealism, 25, 27-28, 92, 100n14 tantra, 11n3, 20n3, 61, 66n1, 66n5 third space, 3, 32, 75-76, 141

155

transformation, 2, 17, 28-30, 36n9, 90, 93, 112 transgression, 88-89, 94-98, 137, 140-144 Tschumi, Bernard, 113, 144 Turner, Victor, 2, 17, 29-31, 69 Urry, John, 56, 74 Varanasi, 49-57 Venturi, Robert, 22-23 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C., 143 voyeur, 52, 54, 91, 104, 107, 138 Yates, Francis, 72

About the Author

Reena Tiwari is an urban designer, city-thinker and an academic in the Departments of Urban and Regional Planning and Architecture at Curtin University of Technology Perth, Western Australia. She has developed a framework of city-enquiry, underscoring a critical engagement with the embodied and expressive aspects of city life. Her theoretical pursuit into investigating cities becomes a vehicle for developing praxis of city design. Her current projects on multi-modal transport corridors focus on aspects of place-making and user-interactive urban spaces. Her work for marginalized communities both in India and Australia provides a ground for a comparative exploration of the needs, lifestyles, questions of identity and change for these communities. She has a PhD in the area of Urban Studies, a masters in Urban Design and a bachelor degree in architecture. She received Australian Award 2006 for her outstanding contribution to student learning for developing a cross-disciplinary and integrative approach to teaching urban theory and design.

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