Banaras: - The City Revealed

George Michell, Rana P.B. Singh

Marg Publications

2010

152 páginas

5h 4m

ISBN-10: 8185026726

BANARAS or Varanasi, the city between the rivers Varana and the Assi, inhabited without a break for 3,000 years, has been called the holiest city in India, perhaps in the world. Apart from Hindus, for whom a pilgrimage to it is a religious duty, foreigners have been constantly drawn to its otherworldliness and exoticism.

Xuan Zang, visiting in the seventh century, remarked on the large number of Shaiva shrines with delicate stone carvings and noted in particular a linga 30 metres high encased in copper. The broken stump, known as the Lat Bhairo, survives to this day.

A millenium later, the Frenchman Tavernier came by and was enchanted by the beauty of the riverside Bindu Madhava temple just four years before Aurangzeb had it razed to the ground. With the coming of the Raj, surveys were carried out regularly, and James Prinsep counted 333 mosques and 1,000 temples in 1827