Drawing Varanasi in Charcoal
Varanasi is a city older than traditions. I draw it the way I live in it: in fragments, shadows, and small intensities.
I have lived in Varanasi long enough to stop seeing it as a postcard. That makes it harder to draw, and more worth drawing. The city is never one view. It is a boatman's shoulder, wet stone, incense smoke in afternoon light, a lane you walked once and still remember.
Charcoal suits this place because Varanasi is never fully sharp. Details dissolve into haze. Edges soften. A drawing here is as much about what you leave out as what you define.
Place as feeling
When I draw Varanasi for someone, whether they live here or far away, I am not selling a landmark. I am trying to hold a temperature, an hour of the day, a memory of being somewhere familiar.
At BHU, art and life were never separate for me. Ghats as a second home, campus as imagination, drives to hospitals and temples as mobile studio spots for sketching. That mix still shows up in how I work: vivid, unexpected, rooted in the everyday.
Recently, work from the studio has been shown at Garicoco and Svas here in the city. Those evenings reminded me that Varanasi does not only belong in tourism frames. It belongs in rooms where people live, eat, talk, and pause.