Not being a monuments person has determined the kind of writer I am. Two things are anathema to me: subjectivity, with its family members, psychology and self-expression; and historiography, whose household includes monuments, key events, and great personalities. Anything that’s immutable seems to me extraneous to what I understand as reality. I’m not sure if this is a Buddhist position. It could be that Buddha was among the first people to articulate a prejudice against the unchanging. Not for him either God or the self (atman). He saw them as fictions. In this sense, monuments too are fictional.

There’s also my laziness. Faced with the prospect of seeing a monument, I have dropped out due to lack of stamina. In 1979, my mother and I sat at the base of the hill on which the Parthenon stands while my father pluckily went up. On that first and only trip to Athens, I behaved peculiarly, opting to mostly stay in the hotel room while my parents attended Greek nights. Decades later, when I read that Raymond Roussel sometimes travelled abroad with his mother and never emerged (in Egypt, say) from what he called a roulette (a mobile room)—that is, hardly saw Egypt—the anecdote struck a chord, not least because this was the author of Impressions of Africa and New Impressions of Africa. In Athens, I recall it was the sun that made me decide it was too hot to see the Parthenon. My mother was just coming round to my worldview and kept me company. I saw wondrous things as we awaited my father. For instance, elderly Greek women, who recognized us as Indian presumably from my mother’s sari, and who looked at us with indulgent surprise, were, I noticed, wearing black burka-like clothing: I found these ancient cultural continuities between Asia and Europe intriguing.

Recently, something reminiscent of the Parthenon opting-out happened again. We (my wife, daughter, and I) were in Turkey in July last year, in Antalya. A Turkish woman I had met at a dinner in Cambridge said I “must” go to Side, “an old city” only an hour and a half away from Antalya. Because of the term “old city” and the fact that she’d used “an” instead of “the” I had a vision of Side as an enclave in which the Turkish lived everyday lives, I was drawn to it even without knowing what it was. To be drawn to locality is to weigh the possibility of another life: It is not an “expression of personality, but an escape from it.” Side turned out to be a major historic relic of Graeco-Roman past—the term “an old city” had been a misnomer. No one lived there. The main thing my wife and I liked about it was that it had been in decline since the 4th century. Of course, it was no longer in decline. It was embalmed in a tourist resurrection, on display on the laboratory table of a globalization quite different from the globalization of the early years of the first millennium, which had brought it into existence. One of its main features was an amphitheater that, to my relief, was closed for renovation. The other compulsory monument that tourists had to go to was the Temple of Apollo at the edge of what used to be the town.

We walked to it in the searing light, the only human beings who had opened umbrellas to protect themselves, but then I, with the temple arch in my sights, sat down on a bench and said I couldn’t go any further. Unlike my mother, who had deferred to my anti-monumental impulses, my wife and, to my surprise, my daughter, who I had never thought had a taste for history, persisted with sightseeing. They went to the main ruin and then beyond, and I lost sight of them. I sat next to a group of young Lithuanian women. I know they were Lithuanian because I asked the young woman sitting next to me if they were speaking in Russian. History was here.

Later, I heard from my wife that, once they got beyond the arch, they made little progress because my daughter had wanted to sit down to look at the sea. When they returned twenty minutes later, after (as I recently learned) much sea-watching, I was marginally revived, and restive: I decided to investigate the Temple of Apollo and the mysterious stretch behind it. I made my wife and daughter sit down, promising I’d be back in five minutes. I ran to make up for lost time. It seems the main reason we want to participate in history—as members of the human race, or a community, or gender, or simply as individuals, which is what we are, principally, when we’re tourists (a peculiarly non-political identity in which all our political selves converge and are sublimated)—has to do with the fear of missing out. But there must be other forms of participation.

One of these ways of encountering the historical—an un-anxious way, with no concern about missing out—I lighted upon on our walk back, when we entered the shops (themselves repurposed buildings) on either side of the main path. I had noticed that transparent flooring covered part of the street: These floors, which provided glimpses of an underground, were to be found in sections of the shops themselves. Then we realized the underground was the ancient world. It was positioned in a manner that was the opposite of the way the temple was exhibited/advertised: It was interred and concealed but not obliterated. These were the remnants of waterways and people’s houses: a pattern of blue mosaic, for example. There was no compulsion to see it—this absence of a directive, and the anonymity of what was being noticed, meant that you ceased to be an observer. It was as if you’d gone back a thousand years into the present.

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It’s easy enough to say that the creation of the monumental implies the erasure of the everyday or the ordinary but this is often true. The “ordinary monument” is rare, though it might well exist; the “monument to the ordinary”, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, is rare too. Post-deregulation India—that is, post-1991 India, when the country began to sync with globalization—has been busy with monuments: not just airports, like Terminal 3 in Delhi; or malls, like South City in Calcutta; but, in some states, statues erected by political leaders of themselves. The post-globalization statuary in India has been uniformly outrageous. But, after eleven years of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the project—hosted mainly, and aggressively, by the ruling party, but also everywhere a general present-day Indian ethos—of erasing the ordinary is clear and unassailable.

In the last three and a half decades, the project has had different, possibly related, ambitions. One has had to do with “development.” Another, for the BJP in the last decade, is the jettisoning of the Gandhian-Nehruvian legacy. But Gandhi and Nehru were themselves created by an Indian modernity that had a distinctive aesthetic and moral texture. It was a texture—whether we’re thinking of habitation, fabric, or the apprehension of life itself—in which the richness of the everyday resided. This modernity in different ways defined Gandhi and Nehru, but it surely can’t be defined by them. So, to look at the pre-globalization, and (especially as far as the present-day Indian-Anglophone liberal is concerned) the pre-BJP past, as Nehruvian is to mischaracterize it. What’s being destroyed in our time is a modernity whose locations are not narrowly political but culturally and intellectually multifarious. Arguably, the processes of destruction—undertaken through varnishing, tiling, improving, or plain demolition—began well before the BJP came to power under Narendra Modi with the opening up of markets. It’s just that, in the last six years (encompassing the BJP’s second term and its aftermath), those processes have come to a head, politically.

The first instance of this project—which began not by erecting new monuments but confronting some of the most canonical national monuments and sites of independent India head-on—was the BJP’s “renovation,” in 2021, of the Jallianwala Bagh garden in Amritsar (where General Dyer’s soldiers shot down a large unarmed crowd that had gathered to protest the Rowlatt Act on April 13, 1919) and of the narrow corridor through which the soldiers had accessed the garden. In the renovation, the walls of the two buildings through the middle of which the corridor ran had been covered in sculptures of heroic human beings. Distinguished commentators were outraged at the “erasure of history.” What the figures had obliterated, though, wasn’t “history” as we understand it, but what had been plain and invisible: the walls of what seem like early 20th-century buildings (marked, as it happened, by bullet holes). We hadn’t noticed them before. The ordinariness of the walls is important and irreplaceable.

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About a year later, the BJP decided to re-envision independent India’s national emblem itself: the Lion Capital of Ashoka—four lions who stand on the top of a pillar in a cluster, facing four different directions—which had been erected in the 3rd century BCE at Sarnath (the place of the Buddha’s first sermon) by the Emperor Ashoka after his conversion to Buddhism. Ashoka’s turn to Buddhism was caused, according to the narrative we learned at school, by the terrible remorse he experienced following a war he’d won—a war that left thousands dead. The fact that Nehru wished to make the Lion Capital India’s national symbol speaks to the episode he was choosing as a forerunner to India’s new beginning—Ashoka’s newfound pacifism, which had been echoed two thousand years later by Gandhi’s satyagraha. But it also has a feature that’s consonant with something definitive of a non-heroic, essentially non-representational, contemporaneity: the air of vacancy and serenity that marks the faces of the lions. I think this vacancy comprises, for the imagination of the modern, an integer of true liberation.

In September 2022, when the BJP unveiled their version of the four lions on top of the new parliament building (itself built to leave the fussy vestiges of Nehruvian democracy behind), its critics noticed that the lions were snarling. Liberals mourned what had, till then, seldom consciously been part of their field of reckoning: a serenity that does not proclaim itself to the world.

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During the Durga Puja in September–October (the exact dates depend on the almanac), pandals or marquees spring up in the neighborhoods of Calcutta. The Puja is Bengal’s harvest festival and celebrates the slaying of the asura or demon by the mother-goddess Durga. Each pandal is a kind of faux-temple space, a home, temporarily (the Puja lasts ten days), to the goddess and her children: Ganesh, Karthik, Saraswati, and Lakshmi. In Calcutta, for decades now, the occasion has been an opportunity for unbridled play on the part of the pandal designers and the lighting artists. Pandals are very often made to look like monuments or well-known buildings: an Egyptian pyramid, a famous cinema hall, the general post office. The illusion is meant to entertain but also to disorient, so that, for a week, you’re unsure, when you glance at the structure from afar, whether it’s a bona fide part of the neighborhood or not. The result is that you notice the neighborhood again. After ten days, the illusion will cease and the marquee be dismantled, the goddess and her family immersed in the Ganga. But, for a period, disorientation will engender a noticing of the ordinary—the houses of the neighborhood or para with their balconies and windows; the pavements—and ordinariness will become impossible to separate from the experience of wonder; the neighborhood will be enmeshed with a new, fleeting definition of the sacred.

The Puja made me understand, belatedly, that this is actually how even religious sites in India work—temples, certainly, but also mosques, gurudwaras, and churches. The temple itself is one building among many in a neighborhood. Once you’re in the temple’s environs, you might find it comprises a neighborhood unto itself. There is no single focal or, as in a Renaissance painting, vanishing point. In the Lingaraja Temple in Bhubaneswar, say, you wander from point to point; the deity is one node among many; there’s a lack of fixity. The experience is urban, not communitarian: neighborhood-like, conducive to daydreaming, rather than institutional and disciplinarian. When you emerge from a temple (or, during the Puja, from a pandal), this dispersal of attention continues, as does the redundancy of an isolated, militaristic “sacred” space. The temple is a house among others—it is as secular as the neighborhood, the houses in the neighborhood as sacred as any self-interrogating idea of sacredness will allow. A sacred monument is a contradiction in terms. The monument, whether it’s a real temple or a fake one, is always in play with its other: an ordinary home. The monumental is constantly absorbed into, and reimagined as, dailiness. It forfeits a defining boundary.

Precisely this play of meaning informs Arun Kolatkar’s 1974 poem-sequence Jejuri, which records his desultory visit to a partially out-of-use pilgrimage town in Maharashtra, the eponymous Jejuri. A certain kind of observation abounds. For instance, the poem “The Doorstep” is brief enough to quote in its entirety: “That’s no doorstep / It’s a pillar on its side . . . / Yes / That’s what it is.” And, from “Manohar”: “It isn’t another temple, / he said, / it’s just a cowshed.” The closing lines of “Heart of Ruin”: “No more a place of worship this place / is nothing less than the house of god.” The sacred is what cohabits with, and survives, religion.

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I have been writing this essay in the midst of the Puja, which has made me view the visit I made to Banaras in November 2022 in light of what I’ve been thinking, again, about pandals and neighborhoods, monuments, illusions, and milieu.

At the time, I had been hearing for a few years that the BJP was “cleaning up” Banaras, improving it, making it new. No doubt Banaras would benefit from being cleaner. But those who’d been there after the makeover were mostly shocked, though they couldn’t necessarily pinpoint what it was that had caused disquiet. What appealed to one person—cleaner roads, air-conditioned cubicles for temple-goers to leave their shoes in—disconcerted another. My wife and I decided we’d do some reconnaissance ourselves.

We stayed in a hotel situated in the cantonment area, on the other side of the holy stretch of the Ganga: the ghats with its sadhus, sightseers, and, at one end, funeral pyres. It took us more than half an hour to reach, through traffic that was either paralyzed or anarchic, a junction from which there was a road on which we were told we could walk straight to Kashi Vishwanath Temple. We had last gone there in January 1992, a month after we were married. I recall my father-in-law’s surprise: Banaras, with its clutter and touts, was not, for him, a sensible tourist destination. But it was some idea of that ancient layering that fascinated me. The Kashi Vishwanath Temple had to be approached, in 1992, from the Dashashwamedh Ghat through alleys that bewildered and fatigued you. I remember passing doors: signs of centuries-old habitation. When we finally went in, we hardly knew we had reached the temple, except for some fuss to do with shoes, some signage, a deity, and priests politely attempting to extract money from us in exchange for what turned out to be an unfulfilled benediction: “May you be blessed with a son.” (Six years later, we’d be “blessed,” thankfully, with a daughter.) The temple itself was unexceptional, and as cramped and exhausting as anything around it. Like a second-hand bookshop, it was a place to stop at to appease an arcane compulsion.

Now, almost thirty-one years after that first trip, we walked through the glow and conviviality of Bulanala—a thoroughfare of life and interchange, samosas, jalebis, and chai. At the end of it came the new entrance to the Kashi Vishwanath Temple—actually, not to the temple itself, but a kind of temple complex, to enter which you had to pass security. Two well-meaning policemen asked me to empty my pockets. I was confused. What or where was the temple? It became increasingly difficult to pull up the memory of a congested alley giving way to temple space. We walked into the kind of pleasantly lighted and paved passage that forms the borders of the main building of a hotel. At its end were two large smiling cardboard figures of Narendra Modi and the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath. Then—I’m not sure of the sequence of these encounters—came the Gyanvapi Mosque, a gigantic installation whose message was too obvious: it was caged and dark. (The mosque is prey to a religious dispute like the transformative one in Ayodhya: It is claimed to stand on the site of a demolished site of Hindu worship and is closed to the public by court order.)

We turned slightly right, I think, and arrived at a piazza on our left along whose sides ran a new building. This, we were told, would be functional soon: a guesthouse for VVIPs (Very Very Important People). Opposite it, some sort of surreptitious activity was unfolding: more security and bag-groping. Behind a lit foyer was an elaborately carved gateway, and an inconsequential, incongruous bit of trapping: the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, aggrandized by a new golden dome. We decided there was no point going in. It was that Parthenon moment again: to pause among the tertiary, except there was no tertiary—not only had the prior lack of demarcation between tertiary and central been dispensed with, it was the tertiary (the piazza, the passage) that had inscribed itself with an un-majestic authority. The main monument, the temple, had never—it became clear with hindsight—been a monument, but it had provided the BJP with an opportunity for monumentalizing this part of Banaras. No possibility of confusion anymore; no one would say: “That’s no doorstep / It’s a pillar on its side . . . Yes / That’s what it is.”

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In the Kashi Vishwanath Temple­–Dashashwamedh Ghat area, monumentalization involved (with a clarity and on a scale that’s rare today) removing the ordinary. This became obvious when we exited via Gate 4, and, with an unexpectedness on many levels, the mundane reestablished itself. Here were the lanes we’d walked in 1992! A sari shop inaugurated their unfolding. It had a low entrance and a door that was historic. Inside was a platform with a low precipice for laying out saris. Next to this shop was an even smaller one selling brass knickknacks of no particular beauty. Monumentalization was a tide, the shopkeepers were aware; if the BJP returned to power in 2024, these outlets—between whose storefronts and the Kashi Vishwanath temple now lay a no man’s land of expo ground—would vanish. The shopkeepers would vanish, the lanes and their turns and tributaries and their itinerants would vanish, the fabrics and objects would vanish, and along with these would vanish what had been there for centuries: livelihoods, rhythms, comings and goings, and a vision of how the sacred inhabits the world. The consequences of erasure might be possible to empathize with in the future, but it would become harder to imagine the place of ordinariness in the sacred. We kept turning corners, each corner providing a fresh glimpse or revelation, till we had reached the Dashashwamedh Ghat.

That evening, but even more by daylight the next day, the triumphal changes to the ghat—which we found was punctuated by missile-like projections—and the steps leading up to the temple area were impossible to miss and not wonder at: The steps had been restored and polished, and at the top was a new gateway that led to what one could only call a shopping arcade. When my wife and I went looking for the excellent toilet facilities, we both separately noticed a wall beyond which lay a township, a continuation of the houses and alleyways that would have constituted the fabric of where we were now standing. The absence here and the presence there converged into an intimation of beauty and devastation.

We noticed how happy everyone was where we were—happy, or complacent and prickly by turn, like the priest of a small Shiva temple that stood in the middle of the paved arcade space. An exhibitionist like everyone else, and especially the master he adored, he was doing his rituals demonstratively. When I asked him about this small temple (as it seemed old while its surroundings were proudly recent), he bristled and gave me a vague, generic reply that implied: “I know your type.” In the meantime, a sweeping woman had divulged the mystery of these shrines: “When the houses in the area had been taken possession of and demolished, they let the prayer rooms be.” What we saw as shrines were remnants of a home, a bit of a lifetime or several lifetimes that therefore still had some of the magic of the everyday in which the gods had for long happily existed.

The erasure, which seemed absolute, had deliberate oversights, then, as if the rubber had paused a few times during the redaction. But could the gods really survive without the everyday? This question was crucial when we looked at the little temples. The woman had confessed a sense of fear to my wife: “I feel ill when I look at his photos,” she said. She had been a witness to the transformation. This confidence, made in the course of a conversation to my wife as she was returning from the toilet, was both unusual and bracing—a cause for hope and reassessment, even. Everyone else we’d talked to in the city, including taxi drivers and the proprietor of the magnificent catafalque-like bookshop, Motilal Banarsidass, seemed to have succumbed to a contented zombification. “These Muslim women are very happy,” said a driver, who looked very happy himself, as a woman in burka crossed the crowded road. “They know the government protects them.” And the dour proprietor, when we expressed apprehensions about the renovated temple, told us: “One thing is true: there is no such thing as permanence. Life is change.”

What are the costs of losing ordinariness? It’s no use speculating, because the ordinary is not something we can regain. It occurs, it goes, maybe it reappears in another form. We do not notice it, which is its deep meaning, its potential for receiving our embrace in the future. Still, in all the places that the BJP concentrated its energy on new monuments—Ayodhya, Banaras—it, in the general elections of 2024, fared poorly or lost its seat.

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