Urban transformation, state power, and climate vulnerability in Varanasi, India: A three-century perspective

This study examines how successive governments´ state power has shaped the urban landscape in Varanasi, India, and how these interventions have led to uneven vulnerabilities that are now being exacerbated by increasing climate stresses. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in summer 2024, archival research, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis mapping 1,685 features across three time periods, the transformation of green, blue, and social spaces under Mughal, British colonial, and contemporary Indian governance was traced. GIS analysis reveals that urban water bodies decreased by 75% in area and green spaces fragmented significantly over 200 years, with the geometric Mughal gardens replaced by British-style lawns and interconnected waterscapes drained and centralized under colonial sanitation regimes.

Findings confirm much of the existing literature on how state power shapes space through categorization, geometrization, centralization, and the imposition of legibility. Yet the Varanasi case suggests an additional driver that existing frameworks underemphasize: ontological security. The Mughal gardens reflected not merely rationalization but a spiritual longing for an earthly paradise. British interventions in the waterscape emerged not only from revenue logic but from deep anxieties about mortality, disease, and the unpredictability of monsoon hydrology. The Temple Corridor can be interpreted as a political and religious strategy of recovering and monumentalizing a Hindu sacred past, understood as preceding and surviving Muslim and British rule. States and empires, constituted by humans with collective fears, spiritual needs, and ideological commitments, may shape space not only for rational control but also to address deep insecurities about mortality and identity. The spatial order societies inherit is not neutral terrain on which climate stress acts, but a landscape already structured by inclusion and exclusion. Understanding how and why state power has produced vulnerability in Varanasi illuminates why climate impacts manifest locally in different ways, and why disaster and resilience studies must attend to the historical architecture of risk.