Kanika Pruthi, Piyush Kukrety and Borayin Larios(v0.1, 20 May 2026)
In Vārāṇasī, movement through the city often becomes movement through the name of Rām.
From the ghar (home) to the bazaar and the ghāṭ (riverbank steps), the name appears and reappears across shifting environments and scales. A small domestic shrine glows faintly in the corner of a room darkened by incense smoke. A calendar bearing the image of Rām hangs beside family photographs and electrical wires. In the bazaar, posters, devotional booklets, framed prints, stickers, keychains, packets of incense, and laminated images spill outward from crowded storefronts into the street. Further down toward the river, the name returns again on walls, shrines, loudspeakers, painted steps, donation boxes, and passing boats.
One rarely meets with these forms in isolation.
The same narrow lane may contain a tea stall with a fading image of Hanumān taped beside cigarette advertisements, a shop selling ritual paraphernalia stacked floor to ceiling with garlands and brass lamps, a shrine blackened by oil and smoke, a loudspeaker broadcasting devotional songs, and a child tracing “Rām” absentmindedly onto a dusty surface with a finger. Someone pauses briefly to touch a shrine while continuing a conversation. A newly laminated poster hangs beside another already fading beneath layers of dust, smoke, and sunlight. The same name appears in different typographies and textures: handwritten, printed, stamped, painted, sung.
video montage Rām-Nām Montage Saturation »
Kāśī, “the city of splendor” and one of the names by which Vārāṇasī is known, is imagined above all as the city of Śiva, perpetually inhabited by the god and shaped by his presence. Yet the city also unfolds through countless traces of Rām. Long regarded as a major centre of pilgrimage, religious learning, performance, trade, and devotional circulation, Vārāṇasī brings together an extraordinary range of regional traditions, sectarian worlds, languages, and devotional practices from across the subcontinent within a single urban landscape. Here, the name of Rām moves continuously through ordinary life. It appears not only in temples and ritual settings, but through commercial exchange, domestic routines, bodily habits, visual culture, and public space, saturating the city alongside its older Śaiva imaginaries.
Many of these objects are inexpensive and mass produced. They are bought, handled, gifted, touched, carried, damaged, replaced, and discarded. Their significance lies not in uniqueness, but in circulation. Repetition allows the name to settle gradually into the sensory fabric of the city.
As images and objects move across surfaces, hands, homes, shrines, vehicles, markets, festivals, and digital media, they gather new meanings and affiliations. Devotion overlaps with commerce, aesthetics, politics, memory, and everyday habit in ways that are rarely fully stable or singular.
At times, the density becomes almost overwhelming. Walls disappear beneath inscriptions. Loudspeakers overlap with traffic, temple bells, street vendors, devotional songs, and passing conversations. The name accumulates not only visually, but atmospherically. Incense smoke, exhaust, dust, flowers, sweat, frying oil, river water, and ash fold into the same sensory environment through which the name circulates.
This is not simply excess. It is a form of presence produced through repetition, circulation, and return
