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Stories Set in Varanasi

Stories Set in Varanasi — top stories

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.

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9 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

Epic Productions
movie

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…

Setting: Varanasi, India; Kolkata, IndiaTime Period: Early 20th Century India
Masaan

Masaan

ARTE France Cinéma-Phantom Films-Sikhya Entertainment-Drishyam Films-Macassar Productions
movie

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…

Setting: Varanasi, IndiaTime Period: 2010s
Mulk

Mulk

Soham Rockstar Entertainment-Benaras Mediaworks
movie

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…

Setting: Varanasi, IndiaTime Period: 2010s
Hotel Salvation

Hotel Salvation

Red Carpet Moving Pictures
movie

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…

Setting: Varanasi, IndiaTime Period: 2016
Yamla Pagla Deewana

Yamla Pagla Deewana

NH Studioz
movie

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…

Setting: Varanasi, India; CanadaTime Period: 2010s
Pather Panchali: Song of the Road

Pather Panchali: Song of the Road

by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay
book

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…

Setting: ['Nischindipur (India)', 'Varanasi (Benares) (India)']Time Period: 1928
Revolution 2020: Love, Corruption, Ambition

Revolution 2020: Love, Corruption, Ambition

by Chetan Bhagat
book

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…

Setting: ['Kota (India)', 'Varanasi (Benares) (India)']Time Period: 2011
The Temple of Dawn

The Temple of Dawn

by Yukio Mishima, E. Dale Saunders (Translator), Cecilia Segawa Seigle (Translator)
book

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…

Setting: ['Bangkok (Thailand)', 'Varanasi (Benares) (India)', 'Kolkata (India)', 'Tokyo (Japan)']Time Period: 1940s; WWII
The Last Color

The Last Color

by Vikas Khanna
book

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…

Setting: Varanasi, IndiaTime Period: 2012

The 9 stories above are the catalogue's most popular for this entry. For the full live catalogue, open Varanasi in the StoryTerra app. On the live map you can also filter by the exact time the stories take place — any year, decade or century, from BCE to the future.

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