Chandni Dhanesh Jeswani — Apophatic Art Practice and Research

What the City Refuses: Apophatic Cosmology and Structural Illegibility in Varanasi

The Kashi-khanda of the Skanda Purana describes Varanasi not as a city that can be seen, but as one that reveals itself only to those it chooses. Kashi — the luminous, the city of light — is constituted in the text through a cosmological grammar of excess and withdrawal: a sacred geography so saturated with divine presence that it exceeds any frame placed around it. This is not mysticism as metaphor. It is a structural condition. Varanasi's genius loci is apophatic by design.

This paper argues that Varanasi operates as a paradigmatic case of apophatic urbanism — a sacred city whose identity is constituted precisely through what cannot be documented, archived, or represented. Where apophatic theology approaches the divine through negation and indirection, Varanasi's sacred geography enacts the same logic spatially: the city asserts itself most forcefully at the moment the archive fails. Drawing on the Kashi-khanda's cosmological framework alongside two photographic archives separated by a century of practice — Samuel Bourne's 1860s albumen prints and the vernacular visual documentation of Sukul — the paper traces what each image refuses to yield. Where Bourne's colonial lens sought to stabilise the ghats as picturesque spectacle, the ritual temporality of the space — its cycles of immersion, ash, fire, and return — moved through and past the frame. Sukul's archive, rooted in a different visual epistemology, reaches toward the same threshold from the opposite direction: an intimacy that nonetheless encounters the same withdrawal.

The paper develops three interconnected concepts through this apophatic lens. Structural illegibility names the condition of a sacred site that generates meaning precisely by resisting the documentary systems — colonial photography, heritage listing, urban planning — brought to bear upon it. Migratory genius loci describes how Varanasi's place-character, rather than residing in any fixed architectural form, travels through performance, ritual repetition, and cosmological inscription — making it mobile, ephemeral, and fundamentally unarchivable. The Religious-Academic-Lived (R/A/L) Diagnostic Framework is offered as a methodological response: a tripartite lens that holds the Puranic cosmological account, the scholarly interpretation, and the devotional bodily practice in productive, unresolved tension — resisting the collapse of any one register into the others.

Together, these frameworks propose that apophatic thought is not merely a theological inheritance applicable to sacred art practice, but a spatial epistemology already operative in living sacred cities. Varanasi does not simply resist documentation as a practical inconvenience. It enacts refusal as a constitutive act — the city's identity is maintained through the very gap between what the Kashi-khanda promises and what any archive can deliver.

For contemporary art practice and research operating at the intersection of the sacred, the urban, and the unrepresentable, Varanasi offers not a case study but a provocation: what does it mean to work in a space that has always already theorised its own illegibility?

Chandni Dhanesh Jeswani is a Dubai-based architectural historian whose work rethinks the genius loci, the spirit of place, as a dynamic construct shaped by memory, ritual, and displacement. She holds a Master’s in History of Art with Curating (with Distinction) from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research bridges architectural history, curatorial practice, and cultural theory to examine how spatial identities are archived, reimagined, and mediated across time. Chandni’s current projects span artistic patronage in Renaissance Florence, the heritagization of sacred geographies in Varanasi, and the Sindhi Hindu diaspora’s use of digital platforms to sustain belonging and spatial memory. She has worked with regional institutions including Art Dubai and Alserkal Arts Foundation, contributing to research-led exhibitions, critical writing, and cultural programming. Across these trajectories, her work foregrounds the genius loci as both a site of continuity and a field of negotiation between history, modernity, and imagination.