PRODUCING THE GHATS OF BANARAS AS WORLD-CLASS SPACES: The Mobilization of Nishad Boatmen

Abstract

The mobilization of boatmen of the Nishad community on the riverfront of Varanasi, also known as Banaras, against the introduction of a cruise service between September 2018 and the initial months of 2019 reveals the confluence of forces such as Hindu nationalism and the neoliberal pursuit of a world-class aesthetic, which articulate themselves in the urban developments in Banaras. These include the smart cities mission at the level of the city, which has a cruise service among its constituent world-class practices, and the protest at the ghat (the riverfront steps that lead to the Ganga river) by the Nishads—the community of fishermen and boatmen in Varanasi, India—at a community level. Meanwhile, at the national and global level, the Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government has been trying to transform and showcase the city of Banaras as a world-class city with a Hindu nationalist flavour since 2014. The article shows how different dimensions of Henri Lefebvre's dialectic of the production of space undergo changes through state interventions that are seemingly limited to one dimension, that of conceived space or representation of space.