Banaras, The Heritage City of India : Geography, History, and Bibliography

Contents: Preface. 1. Geographical personality. 2. Banaras: transformation on the cradle of time. 3. Varanasi, the heritage city of India: master plan JNNURM and issue of inscription in UNESCO WHL. 4. Banaras/Varanasi: a selected bibliography. Appendices.

"This book describes various facets of geography, history and heritage of Varanasi, the heritage city of India, on/about which a vast historical literature is available. The section on Geography covers the general background of the topography, climate, soils, vegetation, and human landscape. The history section gives a general brief outline of history, from the ancient to the modern, including a chronological chart. The issue of inscribing the heritage scapes, especially of the riverfront ghats, on the line of UNESCO heritage criteria, has also been fully described.

The bibliography, by far the most complete up to day, contains 1276 entries classified into 16 groups: books, mostly in English; research papers and essays; Persian works; Urdu sources; sanskrit sources; books/articles in Hindi; Marathi sources; Bengali sources; Published reports/Government documents; electronic publications; films (English; Japanese sources; unpublished dissertations; unpublished reports;  (Varanasi: inscribing heritage zones for WHL UNESCO); unpublished (undergraduate fieldwork projects.

This book will serve as a major resource for Banaras studies, urban history, cultural geography, and heritage studies, and can also be used as model frame for similar heritage cities in other parts of the world."