Rethinking the tourist gaze through the Hindu eyes: The Ganga Aarti celebration in Varanasi,India

Abstract

This article is about the practices of the gaze enacted in tourist sites. It draws on ethnographic research carried out in the Indian sacred city of Varanasi, on the bank of the ‘holy’ Ganges, to suggest alternative, non-Western ways of conceptualizing and performing sight and the visual. The case study focuses on the Ganga Aarti, a popular Hindu ceremony performed daily on the city’s riverfront. Celebrating the sacred vision of the Ganges, this ceremony can be considered as an expression of the ‘host’ gaze. At the same time, the Ganga Aarti and the quaint city’s riverscape constitute the focus of the tourist gaze, and draw together, in fact, diverse visual traditions and practices. Indeed, I argue that tourist places are to be understood as sites of multiple, situated gazes, where different gazing subjects negotiate different visions, meanings and practices and co-construct, both visually and physically, the tourist space.