Kashi is not an ordinary city. It is the heartbeat of India’s civilizational ethos—where Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, and Islamic traditions converged. It traced how Muslim weavers, saints like Kabir and Ravidas, and cultural figures like Premchand and Bismillah Khan shaped a plural soul, now under threat from communalism and commodification.

This book seeks to present a people’s account of Kashi—its layered history, its spiritual depth, and the lives of those who sustain it quietly and courageously. It is an exploration of the values of inclusion, equality, and shared humanity embedded in the teachings of Mahadev and reflected in the city’s collective memory.

The critique unmasks the exclusions hidden beneath Kashi’s sacred image; it explains how Kashi turns into an Invisible City: sanitation workers suffocated in sewers, widows abandoned in crumbling ashrams.

It reveals how Dalits, Muslims, widows, sanitation workers, and weavers sustain the city but remain silenced in dominant narratives. It highlights Widows, Dalit women, Musahar mothers—triply burdened by caste, class, and gender —endure and nurture life against impossible odds. Their struggles echo the feminisation of poverty across the Global South.

It also portrays how the market transforms heritage into spectacle, commodifying faith while displacing artisans.

Lenin Raghuvanshi, a distinguished Ayurvedic physician, has dedicated his life to advocating the rights of bonded and child labourers, as well as other marginalised individuals. In 1996, alongside his wife Shruti, Lenin established the People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR), to dismantle the closed, feudal hierarchies prevalent in conservative slums and villages through an active human rights network. As an Ashoka Fellow, Lenin served as the President of the United Nations Youth Organization (UNYO), Uttar Pradesh Chapter. Endowed with the International Human Rights Award in 2010 by the City Council of Weimar in Germany, Lenin currently holds the esteemed position of Honorary Visiting Senior Fellow at the Impact and Policy Research Institute (IMPRI) in New Delhi.

The architect behind the Odisha State Employment Mission, and the pioneer of ‘Employonomics’, Chandra Mishra is a visionary dedicated to ‘Right to Work’ and result oriented Employment Policy. After successfully leading the ‘Vote for Employment’ campaign in five Indian states, Chandra founded Beggars Corporation in Varanasi with the objective of transforming beggars into tax-paying entrepreneurs. Chandra proves that human resource is the foundation of the economy, and ‘everybody can work’.

Shruti Nagvanshi, a steadfast advocate for justice and dignity for the last three decades, and co-founder of People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR), India, and Managing Trustee of Jan Mitra Nyas, Varanasi, has won many national and international awards for her work in promoting social justice and defending rights of the marginalised, vulnerable Dalit women and children.
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