In China, it is boom time for the traditional Hanfu silk clothing which are a growing rage alongside the wuxia, Chinese fantasy TV shows full of princes and princesses and magic and delectable silk robes. What was the most Googled TV show of 2018? No, most probably nothing you have heard of or seen. It was a Chinese wuxia show called The Story of Yanxi Palace.

What connects all this to Varanasi or, to call it by its original, non-colonial, name, Kashi, the political constituency of the incumbent Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi? All of this is connected by something called 'cultural economy'. As the researcher Philip Crang explained in 1997, cultural economy is the understanding that 'the economic is embedded in the cultural’, that ‘the economic is represented through cultural media of symbols, signs and discourses’, and the ‘cultural is seen as materialised in the economic'.

The uplift of Kashi, older, as they say, than time, and redolent with culture had been allowed to degrade to squalor for a very long time. But its rejuvenation, from the cleaning of the famed ghats to the removal of its web of overhanging electricity wires to a new ₹600 crore ($95 million) renovation of the area around the prime Kashi Vishwanath Temple is a project in cultural economy. If by facilitating its urban renewal, it would be made into a centre for the experience of Indian culture than that would not only be an cultural success, but a vital economic one.

The potential is almost unfathomable. Note that one old, prized building in Europe - repeat one, single building - the Norte-Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire a few days ago, and within 48 hours offers of around 900 million euros poured in from the rich, the famous, and the in-charge-of-peoples-taxes in Europe.

Before the accident, Norte-Dame received 14 million visitors a year. Even in its dereliction, Kashi received more than 5 million visitors a year (mainly domestic), and the very hint of a clean-up gave its tourism numbers a boost - from 5.7 million in 2015 to 5.9 million a year later. What needs to be noted though that the bump came from domestic visitors and the number for international visitors remained the same at around 300,000 people.

Mongolia

The cultural economy of Kashi

Is India’s ‘necklace of diamonds’ complete?

Mongolia beckons