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Stories Set in Varanasi
Varanasi is one of the world's oldest living cities, where Hindu pilgrims bathe and cremate their dead on stone riverfront steps. Its standing as Shiva's city sustained priests, scholars and silk weavers through centuries of conquest, which is why stories here link death rites, music and release from rebirth. Masaan and Hotel Salvation sit on its shelf. Open Varanasi on the StoryTerra map and filter its stories by any era.
Open Varanasi on the StoryTerra map9 famous stories set in Varanasi
Live snapshot of the top 9 most popular catalogue items (2026-09-05). Click any card to open this entry on the live map.
Browse 4 books and 5 movies set in Varanasi.

Aparajito
Aparajito picks up where the first film leaves off with Apu and his family having moved away from the country to live in the bustling holy city of Varanasi (then known as Benares). As Apu progresses from wide-eyed child…

Masaan
Four lives intersect along the Ganges: a low caste boy in hopeless love a daughter ridden with guilt of a sexual encounter ending in a tragedy a hapless father with fading morality and a spirited child yearning for a…

Mulk
The youngest son of a Muslim family settled in Benaras gets involved in terrorist activities leading to a bomb blast massacre. His actions have an adverse effect on the family who are left to defend themselves as people…

Hotel Salvation
An ominous dream convinces 77-year-old Dayanand Kumar that his end could be near. He takes the news to his son Rajiv knowing he wants to breathe his last in the holy city of Varanasi and end the cycle of rebirth by…

Yamla Pagla Deewana
Dharmendra and Bobby play a crooked father-son pair based in Varanasi. Sunny plays a Canada based upright man who gets to know after two decades that he has a father and brother in Varanasi. The film is about Sunny's…

Pather Panchali: Song of the Road
Pather Panchali deals with the life of the Roy family, consisting of Harihar, Sarbajaya, Apu and Durga, both in their ancestral village Nishchindipur in rural Bengal and later when they move to Varanasi in search of a…

Revolution 2020: Love, Corruption, Ambition
Book Summary of Revolution 2020 Once upon a time, in small-town India, there lived two intelligent boys. One wanted to use his intelligence to make money. One wanted to use his intelligence to create a revolution. The…

The Temple of Dawn
Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of Dawn is the third novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. Here, Shigekuni Honda continues his pursuit of the successive reincarnations of Kiyoaki Matsugae, his childhood…

The Last Color
It's Holi, 2012, the Hindu festival of spring, and back in Varanasi after twenty years, a young advocate is celebrating a nation-wide Supreme Court order against an age-old tradition of social injustice meted out to the…
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