As a pilgrimage centre for Hindus, Banaras is known as a tirtha: a spiritual ‘ford’ where the boundaries between the physical world and the sacred one are permeable. A tirtha, as Diane Eck (1983, 24) describes it, is a powerful place, where one can easily and safely cross over ‘the river of samsara – this round of repeated birth and death – to reach the far shore of liberation’. Nonetheless, such powerful ‘crossing places’ must be negotiated for the worshipper with the help of meaningful symbols, ritual assistants and organizational structures – they cannot be negotiated alone. The organizational structures, including a variety of institutions, ceremonial practices and ritual transactions form the basis of the Banaras ritual economy; and central to this economy are the ritual specialists, facilitating and instructing worshippers in matters of ritual and belief.

Recent studies examining the sociology of the ritual specialists (or sacred specialists as they are sometimes referred to) operating in Hindu pilgrimage centres have greatly enhanced our understanding of the dynamics of religious belief in Hindu society and power relations involved in the ritual domain, gift exchange, and temple organization (e.g., Fuller 1984; Parry 1994; van der Veer 1988; Vidyarthi et al. 1979).