000			02225nam a22002297a 4500
005			20251119121046.0
008			251119b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780192864284
028			_a; CBS Publishers & Distributors _b; 204, FIE, Industrial Area, Patparganj, New Delhi _c; COR/IN/26/7697 _d; 05/11/2025
082			_a306.954 SIN
100			_aSingh, Ravi Nandan.
245			_aDead In Banaras _b: Ethnography of Funeral Travelling. _c/ Ravi Nandan Singh.
260			_a, New York _b: Oxford University Press _c, 2022.
300			_axx, 163p. _c: 24cm.
365			_b1046.50
520			_aEthnographies fatefully rely on chance encounters and mysteriously so such encounters come true. "Dead in Banaras" is an instance of just such a fateful chance encounter. In its inception, it set out to follow the 'dead' across multiple social locations of crematoria, hospital, morgue and the aghorashram, in order to assemble a contemporary moment in the funerary iconicity of the well known North Indian city of Banaras. The crematoria in plural because the open-air manual pyres and closed-door electric furnaces sit side by side within the symbolic inside of the city. The hospital and morgue became chosen destinations because in the local moral world, the city is a medical metropolis anchored by a famed university hospital and storied through real life dramatic narratives of medical emergency, saving and untimely death. Aghorashram on the other hand as an urban Shaivite clinic and hermitage for sexual and reproductive cures works with funerary substances as pharmacopeia. Early on, while undertaking fieldwork, these funerary journeys of the' dead' had a chance encounter with the author's father's death in the city. The same set of places, thereafter, spoke through the sensory logic of the author's father's death. Dead in Banaras is, thus, both an ethnography of being in the dead centre of a city and an autobiographical funeral travelling (Shav Yatra) that narrates the city through a mourner's logic of using the pyre to illuminate the dead as a multiplicity.
650			_aEthnography of Funeral
650			_aBanaras
650			_aDead in Banaras
700			_aRavi Nandan Singh
942			_cBOOK
999			_c66631 _d66631