Urbanisation as a phenomenon has existed since long. By 2050 almost 70 $\backslash${\%} of world's population will live in cities, hence a demand for more efficient urban systems. With many trends coming up on the urbanisation front, from `liveable cities' to `inclusive urban growth', the latest concern is of `smart cities'. As an umbrella concept, smart cities have three subparts: human intelligence, collective intelligence and artificial intelligence (ICT), of which the latter is taking up the major limelight. While assessing India's urban conditions, it can be gauged out that there are various prerequisites before embedding ICT into the system. This paper attempts to redefine the smart city concept in Indian perspective reviewed through the lens of human + collective intelligence. Varanasi which has been proposed as one of the smart cities to be developed would be taken as a case study. Varanasi, being synonymous to living continuity of traditions and deep culture, possesses a legacy of institutions for learning and innovation. However, rapid and haphazard urbanisation has disturbed the delicate balance between the city's various facets thereby making it a living laboratory for carrying out the `smart' urban experiments. The paper takes up a holistic approach for evolving the smart city criteria and intends to define it on the basis of prioritisation models. The approach used in this paper for the purpose of analytics is `interpretive structural modelling (ISM)'.