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archive: A city of light darkens

A city of light darkens

Jerry Pinto
The Sunday Times of India, Review
July 11, 1999


    Title: A city of light darkens
    Author: Jerry Pinto
    Publication: The Sunday Times of India, Review
    Date: July 11, 1999
    
    He had heard of Benares.  Even before the 60s made it an official halt
    on the yellow stone road that led to the strawberry fields of
    Kathmandu, Benares lived in the popular imagination of the west.
    
    But nothing prepared Richard Lannoy for the real thing, for a city so
    extraordinary, so bizarre, so surreal.  I came to it with specific
    images in my head: the temples, the boats on the Ganga, Manikarnika
    ghat with its inextinguishable fires.  But what caught me was the
    animation, the excitement, the mystery, even the exotic appeal of the
    city.  It seemed like a compelling exploration of human nature.
    
    When I look back on it now, I see that Benares gives you permission to
    relax into who you are, into your true nature, whether that is a
    grosser or higher one."
    
    This was before he became the Richard Lannoy, author of that
    definitive work on Indian spirituality, The Speaking Tree (1971),
    founder-member of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London,
    photographer of extraordinary insight and visual anthropologist
    manqué.  He was Richard Lannoy, standing on the ghats, watching the
    sunrise over the city of light, mesmerised by a city revealing itself
    and its mysterious inner workings to him.
    
    "It took me some time to discover that Benares was not just another
    Indian temple town but a coherent cultural construct.  Chaotic yes,
    wild, mad and wonderful but also worked out over millennia: the city
    as mandala, as organised microcosm of the whole."
    
    It is this insight, now endorsed by a floodtide of international
    research into Kashi, Banaras, Benares, Varanasi, that illuminates his
    soon-to-be-published Benares, Seen From Within (Callisto Books, Rs
    2,000).  In the shorthand of the publishing world, it would be easy to
    describe this as a coffee-table book.  It is full of stunning
    pictures, spanning a period from 1953 to 1997 when Lannoy visited the
    city again, after 38 years.  But it also has - and this is what
    differentiates it from the common or salon offering of this variety -
    a thought-provoking text.
    
    For this is a valediction for a city that was once alive with
    traditions that stretched back 2,500 years, not just archaeological
    artefact.  "When I began taking photographs for this book in the
    nineteen-fifties I used to call Benares the last living ancient city,"
    he writes but adds on an elegiac note, "Benares has obviously been
    changing, probably inexorably, from a living ancient city into just
    one among many heritage cities, and now reduced to performing a
    pageant of itself."
    
    He recalls that moment of return.  "I was disappointed, completely. 
    None of my friends had dared to tell me of the state the city was in. 
    I was almost too late but I also realised that the book would have to
    change.  I had to take more pictures so that almost a third of those
    you see are new.
    
    The ghats bore witness to the change.  It was more than just the
    garish advertisements promising insta-moksha with karma cola and
    spoken Sanskrit; it was te iron defences around the mosque.  And the
    bathers in the Ganga.
    
    "The first pictures of the bathers in the Ganga were taken by Bourne
    and Shepherd in 1870.  At that time, you could tell where each person
    came from the clothes they had left on the bank.  In the fifties that
    hadn't changed.  In the nineties, all marks had been obliterated," he
    remarks.  To him, this is symptomatic of the changes in Indian society
    as well, as a new homogeneity battles a tradition of pluralism that
    Benares nurtured for centuries.
    
    Benares: Seen From Within is thus no ordinary collection of
    photographs.  It is a unique document, part social history and part
    spiritual experience.  In the wild sweep of wires writhing around
    pylons, Lannoy's camera finds a reflection of the sweep of diyas down
    the river.  The youth of the bodies in the akhaada need no contrast. 
    You fill it in instinctively with a picture of Manikarnika, a body
    waiting in a bylane while the pall-bearers stop for a glass of tea and
    a beedi.
    
    And it is an important book as well because Lannoy makes explicit the
    importance of Benares.  No one who goes there comes away unscathed. 
    This is not because of the magnificence of the ghats, best seen now at
    night when darkness forgives our neglect and excess.  It is not
    because of its religious significance because Benares transcends
    Hinduism.  It reaches the unsuspecting visitor on some elemental
    level; and frightening words, weather-beaten words - mystic, cosmic -
    begin to surface when you try and translate the experience.  And it is
    lying.  But Benares could not have found a better writer for its
    dirge.
    



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