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It is one of those religious sites where life and death co-exist and where multiple feelings are interspersed in a sacred landscape. Although formally labelled as a Hindu pilgrimage destination, the city has spaces of death in the form of cremation grounds, and no one has yet analyzed how this experience of encountering death fits into the overall religious experience. Further, a content analysis study of tourist reviews of a major tourist website, Tripadvisor. Although such a small sample of tourist reviews on social media is insufficient to claim that Varanasi is exclusively a dark tourism site, it nevertheless points towards the fact that a popular pilgrimage destination has a darker side to it with international tourists displaying an inexplicable interest in death and a curiosity about watching the morbid.

I also use theories on authenticity in tourism literature to elucidate the ambiguities associated in labelling a site as authentic or inauthentic. For example, Dean MacCannell writes that authenticity serves as an important motivation in tourism. Berger says that existential authenticity is a special state of being in which one is true to oneself and acts this way as opposed to becoming lost in public roles and public spheres. Authenticity in tourism can be further classified into objective, constructive, and existential authenticity where objective authenticity involves an objective museum-linked usage of the authenticity of the originals or staged authenticity ; constructive authenticity being the result of a negotiable, contextually determined social construction in terms of points of view, beliefs, perspectives, or powers symbolic authenticity , and existential authenticity referring to an experience that involves personal or intersubjective feelings activated by the liminal process of tourist activities Wang, The range of tourist comments available on the Internet provides scope for a polysemic reading of the written text.

Narrative analysis as a research method has been used to gain insights into tourist-constructed identities, meaning-making associated with their experiences, and temporal and spatial characteristics of travel experiences. Narrative enables social research to inquire about the construction of subjectivity in-depth. I examined tourist narratives available on the electronic media in the form of research articles, travel blogs or personal monologues, websites of tour operators and tourist discussion forums considering these blogs as textual artefacts to gain insight into how tourists construct order and make meaning from their experiences.

These blogs and forums covered travel reviews, videos, comments to an existing travel blog, micro-blogs, etc. The blog content ranged from personal experiences, practical information about the destination, local people, food, culture, general facts about the destination, to people met while travelling, warnings to others, security tips, and evaluation of travel-related services. The narratives were provided by tourists not just from India, but also from places such as the United States, the Netherlands, Sweden, South Africa, Mexico, and Britain. The content was subjected to a qualitative data analysis technique in which core themes were identified and compared, and analytical categories derived, keeping in mind the objectives of the study.

In this paper, I mention only those narratives that are significant in terms of understanding the paradoxes associated with dark tourism classification systems. The west bank of the Ganga River on the eastern side of the city is divided into segments each consisting of a series of steps down to the river, called the ghats.

These are places where people perform not just their daily chores of bathing, washing their clothes and domestic animals, but also the cremation of the dead. Several corpses each day are burned at the ghats. Map of India showing the approximate location of Varanasi city.

The first type, the Hindu death rituals, referred to as antyesti the last sacrifice , is often considered to be symbolic of a sacrificial procedure Bloch and Parry, that broadly involves burning the deceased over a funeral pyre, breaking the skull of the body with a stick, and immersing the ashes into the Ganga River. There are several preparatory stages involved before burning the body, such as immersing the body into the Ganga river as a mark of initial purification, wrapping the body with a cloth, offering drinking water and rice to the corpse, and anointing the body with clarified butter.

The death rituals are performed publicly by a group of people locally known as the Doms a caste of lower social standing in Hindu society who control all the activities at the cremation ground selling wood, carrying the dead, flowers, and other items required for the death ritual , a priest of higher social status than the Doms , and the family members of the deceased usually male members. I took this photograph of Manikarnika Ghat cremation ground in Varanasi during my field visit in May It depicts the multiple dead bodies being burned and tourists watching these rituals.

P hoto: Nitasha Sharma. This small sect of Hindu ascetics are rigid renouncers and worshippers of the Hindu deity, Shiva. They are believed to have split off from the skull-carrying Kapalika sect mentioned in Sanskrit texts and the foundation of their order can be traced to that of an ascetic called Kina believed to be an incarnation of Shiva.

The tourist narratives in response to the death-related rituals in Varanasi elucidate the paradoxes and ambiguities generated from the multiple meanings associated with the site.

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A major ambiguity that emerges is in the classification of the tourism site according to the different categories of tourism. How does one distinguish a visitor to a religious site who indulges in prayer and spiritual activities from one who is fascinated with the Aghoris or the death rituals being performed beside the temple? I will now discuss a few themes that emerged from the tourist narratives. Not only a Hindu believer encounters the death rituals and takes away diverse meanings from it, but tourists from other cultural backgrounds do so as well.

The proximity of death is so alien to Western visitors that it exerts a hypnotic pull, and many people find themselves lingering a long while, talking in hushed voices as they peer at the flames.

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There is something compelling about seeing death at such close quarters. Death in Varanasi is not a mysterious thing. It is a public event that happens by the banks of the river where cows and water buffaloes wander amid the funeral pyres. We stopped for a little while to observe the ghats from a building with a rooftop lookout, watching how the process was carried out and doing our best to maintain respectful despite watching bodies be carried out wrapped in cloth and colourful ribbons, places [ sic ] on a pile of wood and set ablaze. I suppose I can understand how this whole practice has some people a bit weirded out but I found the whole thing immensely fascinating.

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Thanatology draws upon the study of death and mortality and thus, it is useful to examine dark tourism, with its central features of death and mortality, by drawing ideas from it. He supported the analysis suggesting that individuals have a pervasive anxiety of mortality. Clearly, there is a vast amount of literature on death Templer, ; Becker, ; Kierkegaard, ; Mellor, ; Mellor and Shilling, ; Neimeyer and Moore, , but rarely has it been applied to understand the death anxiety levels among tourists.

The concept of sacred space is useful for the understanding of dark tourism.

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Dark tourism sites are powerful or sacred spaces that may involve rituals of commemorating the dead. To grasp tourist motivation at sites of dark tourism such as the Holocaust Museum, concentration camps, war memorials, or cemeteries, it is essential to understand the sacralization process at these sites. The concept of sacred space is closely associated with religion, life and death, and therefore proves useful in understanding dark tourism, where life and death form the core concept.

The concepts of sacred and profane form a paradox pertaining to dark tourism sites. However, the argument by Nick Osbaldiston and Theresa Petray , when applied to Varanasi, makes sense, because despite dead bodies being cremated and floating in the Ganga, several tourists seem to reconcile with it, considering it part of a sacred religious ritual. This can be seen from the following narrative of a person from South-Africa, Navrishka Seebaluk , p. Varanasi is a sacred space that is full of the energy of temples and prayer, burning funeral ghats, religious pilgrims and spiritual seekers.

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The effervescence and collective consciousness of the people and the space creates an atmosphere of sacredness, largely opposing the profanities of everyday life and space boats. The smell of the burning ghat and the sight of hundreds of dead bodies, along with the energy created by the ghat, was a reminder that death is an eminent part of the cycle of life itself.

During the aarti prayer ceremony , the sight of the priests, monks and people praying at the Ganges made Varanasi a special space within Hindu religion. Swamis and monks are key at all Hindu sacred sites. Monks are believed to possess a sacred energy that profane individuals do not possess and their presence adds value to sacred sites. The resulting consciousness of the space and the effervescence created by it impacts even those not spiritually inclined.

I ventured into Varanasi as a pilgrim and spiritual seeker but at times also felt very much like a tourist as a result of the busy city life which is geared towards the tourist market. A dozen kids were playing cricket close to the Hanuman Ghat along the Ganges. A high ball dropped behind the temple.


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I was busy photographing them at the game, when the bowler casually called out for me to fetch the ball. I obeyed and found it floating on the edge of the river. As I bent to pick it up, I realized it was covered in ash. Three fires were smoldering close by. To my utter shock I realized three cremations were underway.


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I stood flabbergasted staring at the funeral pyre barely a foot away from me, as the ash-covered ball in my hand dripped water. A player shouted for the ball and I turned, distressed that I may have unknowingly trampled on a sacred site. The boy took the ball, thumped it on the ground a few times to shed the water and threw it back into play. The cricket game, like everything else in the city, simply carried on amidst the funeral chants and the grieving. Amole, The tour operators and travel agencies both public and private do not boldly mention the Aghoris. There are also a few YouTube videos available on Aghoris.

An important point that one needs to remember in the analysis of tourist perceptions is that societies are culturally diverse with different notions of death and multiple mechanisms to confront mortality. The open display of cremation rites in Varanasi is a cultural shock to Westerners. As quoted by an Italian tour operator in Christiana Zara ; ,. Cremations have a transgressive nuance: here death is revealed, is exposed, and that requires explanation, but the tourist is not always willing, or does not always have the time, to listen to that.

And some of this sanctity reaches out to the tourists and everybody else. But why, really, are we in Varanasi? Is it not perhaps to experience the closeness of death and its frightening everyday character? In fact I spent an entire week exploring the ghats and alleyways until I began to feel that my value judgements had been jolted.

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At times I felt something akin to panic, and decided to leave Varanasi earlier than planned. Oja, Varanasi is as crazy and unique as cities come and if you want to test whether you will love or hate India then I would come to Varanasi. I love Varanasi and I love India. Crazy it may be, vile also but utterly absorbing and definitely special.

Where else would you experience homemade fireworks going off within a metre of you, the locals bathing, swimming and drinking a river times more polluted than the safe limit and dead bodies floating down the river?! I can think of none. Chapman, This has been empirically proved using terror-management theory in social psychology See Fernandez et al. Clearly, the cultural differences related to sites of death and human suffering tend to differ among domestic and foreign tourists.