Just the work of ten years in the life of an extraordinarily brilliant man can make a rich and beautiful book, BENARES ILLUSTRATED: JAMES PRINSEP — WITH JAMES PRINSEP AND BENARES BY O.P. KEJARIWAL (Pilgrims, Rs 15,000). James Prinsep’s records of Varanasi, its ghats, palaces, mosques, houses, melas, and bazars, its tales, beliefs and anecdotes, its households, lineages, livelihoods and castes, its roads, temperatures and constellations, his detailed map of the city — the first ever, his bridge over the river Karmanasa, his invention of a weighing machine accurate to a “thousandth part of a grain”, all this and more have been presented in the book through his illustrations and articles, and through Kejariwal’s lucid essay about the “unsung hero”.

The focus of the volume comprises Prinsep’s 33 drawings, including lithographs and line drawings with their accompanying notes, first published in his Benares Illustrated in 1831 and 1833. The editor hopes that this engineer, architect, numismatist, inventor, social observer, and scholar who cracked, with others, the Brahmi and Kharoshti scripts, will now also be celebrated as an artist.

On the left is a finely drawn elevation of a temple, facing detailed notes on the hereditary skill of building, the transmission of designs based on “Shilp-Shastra”, the lives of builders, followed by the description of each architectural part of the edifice. The “View of the Ganges from the Phatuk or Gate at the top of the Punchgunga Ghat” (top, centre) draws the eye to the far bank where one sees, says Prinsep, the beginning of the road to Calcutta. The artist’s sensitivity of eye and perfection of touch, his knowledge of architectural forms and mastery of perspective, and his obvious enchantment with the scene are only matched by the richness of information about mythology and tradition in the facing note.

Much of Prinsep’s work in Varanasi was an unremitting labour of love. His unbounded energy and curiosity made him one of the foremost social observers, an interest that makes “A preacher expounding the Poorans in the Unna-Poorna Temple” (top, right) and “Hindoo Nach girls” (bottom, right) — done in two different styles — gripping as well as informative. The facing notes, predictably, tell the reader how priests live, how the temple is run, what is special about Unna-Poorna’s temple, and the deity’s possible link with Anna Perenna of Roman mythology, of the lives of dancing-girls, how dance is related to religion and culture, and precisely how many dancing girls there are in Varanasi. The picture of “Bruhma Ghat” (bottom, centre) belongs to his set of famous ghat drawings, typically embracing architecture and human activity with characteristic precision, grace, and vitality.