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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