MAPPING WOMEN'S WORLDS IN CONTEMPORARY URBAN BANARAS

Abstract

Banaras, a city in North India in the state of Uttar Pradesh, is characterised and defined typically and predominantly through sacrality and holiness. This rhetoric is privileged in every possible discourse around and about the city. The conception of this dissertation, and the research thus undertaken, take a different starting point, in shifting away from this particular and archetypal discourse and delves rather into women’s everyday worlds in Banaras. A mapping of ‘women’s worlds’ is produced in the thesis by foregrounding women as everyday actors who inhabit, negotiate and indeed sustain this city. Women’s narratives, stories, interpretations, belief systems and corporeality act as interventions to the dominant narratives about the city. These ethnographic accounts not only demonstrate women’s worlds ridden with control, violence, risk and subversions but also reveal embedded capacities and negotiations which shape women’s everyday lives in Banaras, rather than assume men as its default inhabitants.