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Manu Parekh visited Banaras in 1993
A personal note

My yearly secret visits to the city of light started in 1980 and ensured a silent dialogue with the many facets of Banaras, some saturated with mystery while others throbbing with dynamism. In each of my trips I found myself only too vulnerable, alone on the range, and sought visual meanings for greater variability in my creation. A walk through the narrow galis, a boat-ride on the placid Ganga and a probe into the colorful faith sustained crowed enabled me to disentangle images rich in human emotion and formidable in structural beauty.

When I first came to Varanasi, I now see, I must have been in search of certain landscapes that would perhaps mimic the lights, the uncertainties and shadows of my personal inscape. Uncertainties that even now waver between faith and fear in the shadow of my father who had recently died in Gujrat.

There is a strange light over the waters in the bathing ghats which is a solarised, lateral inversion of night. This shadow-play between decay and spirituality obtains nowhere else for me. Generally a landscape gathers air in the background and elements from disparate places are given a local habitation and a name in between such that human presence crowd the picture without a single human figure being visible as through they were just about to appear or had just departed- a flavour and resonance of man-made doubt and faith.

If a paper mirror is crumpled and help up to Varanasi it would reflect a picture that would have a multiple focus and be coherent at the same time. That is my destination when I want to go home. A faceless viewer of a landscape would gain both outline and definition in time and find a mode perhaps, of participating in reality. After many years and many paintings I find that my search has just began, the city of lights is within me, I am far, far from home and time is running short.