By : Pramesh Ratnakar

This book attempts an unusual exploration of Varanasi's ideas, events and places that make the city so remarkable.

Varanasi is the maddening, mysterious nerve center of India's spiritual life. It is also an intense paradigm of modern India's five thousand years of conflict with its fraught but splendid past. This book attempts an unusual exploration of Varanasi's ideas, events and places that make the city so remarkable. Specially, it focuses on its people– the Sanyasis, the priests, the young Banarasis – who sustain and perpetuate the concepts of life and death that animate their city.

Pramesh Ratnakar, 35, teaches English literature at Deen Dayal Upadhyay College, Delhi University and is currently working on a doctoral thesis on Nathaniel Hawthorne. He spent his early childhood in Banaras and wrote his first book on the city in 1986. "That was a straightforward look at the physical reality of Banaras", he says. "But, this one, worked out in four years of frequent visits, is essentially about the conflict between the old and new. For Varanasi, I realise, is more an idea than a place. It exists as much in the mind as in space."