Varanasi

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Toward dusk the western bank of the river fills with smoke, and the smoke does not lift. At Manikarnika, the chief of the burning grounds, the pyres are never all out at once: one fire is dying as the next is laid, and the men who tend them measure their lives by a flame they are forbidden to let go cold. A body arrives wrapped in cloth, is carried down the stone steps, is bathed a last time in the Ganges, and is given to the wood. Above the ghat the old houses lean toward the water, blackened by three thousand years of the same fire. This is the place that Hindus call Kashi — the city of light — and the light it is named for is not the daylight on the river but the light by which, here, the dead are believed to cross over.

The city stands on the left bank of the Ganges in what is now southeastern Uttar Pradesh, near 25.31 degrees north and 83.01 degrees east, on the long curve where the river bends north toward its source — an auspiciousness the pilgrims read into the very geography. It carries three names, and each opens onto a different layer of its past. Kashi, the oldest, comes from a Sanskrit root meaning to shine; Varanasi, the modern official name, is traced to the two streams that once bracketed the sacred ground, the Varuna to the north and the Asi to the south; Benares, the spelling the British used, is a worn-down English rendering of the same. To its devotees it has a fourth and more intimate name, Avimukta — the Never-Forsaken — for in the city’s own mythology it is the one place on earth that the god Shiva has never abandoned.

A city older than its records

How old Varanasi is depends on which testimony one trusts. The archaeologist finds firm ground only around the eighth century BCE: excavations at Rajghat, on the northern edge of the city, have yielded artifacts dated to roughly 800 BCE, with traces of nearby habitation running back perhaps a thousand years earlier. That is already old enough to place Varanasi among the oldest continuously lived-in cities on earth — a settlement on the Ganges when Rome was a cluster of huts. By the sixth century BCE it was the capital of the kingdom of Kashi, one of the sixteen great states of the Gangetic plain, and a center of trade in muslin and silk that it has never wholly ceased to be.

The tradition’s own account reaches far past any record. In the Puranas, Kashi is not founded but eternal: it is said to rest not on the earth at all but on the point of Shiva’s trident, so that when the cosmos dissolves at the end of an age, the city alone is spared the deluge, lifted clear of destruction. Shiva is made to explain his name for it in a line that the scholar Diana Eck, whose Banaras: City of Light (1982) remains the standard study, renders from a Puranic eulogy: “Because I never forsake it, nor let it go, this great place is therefore known as Avimukta.” Between these two accounts — the spade’s eighth century BCE and the scripture’s beginningless city — a reader is meant to feel the distance, and to understand that the city’s antiquity is the kind that swallows dates. Mark Twain, who toured India on his 1896 lecture circuit and wrote of the city with distaste for its crowds and its priests, gave the sensation its most quoted form: “Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.”

The stone ghats of Varanasi falling to the Ganges, where pilgrimage, bathing, and cremation share a single waterfront. — Seema Sareen, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What gives the city its physical character is the river itself, and the long flight of steps that meets it. Some eighty-four ghats — broad stone staircases, many of them built or rebuilt by the kings and merchant houses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — run for several miles along the crescent of the bank, each with its own name, its own shrine, its own clientele of priests and bathers and boatmen. At Dashashwamedh, the principal bathing ghat, the dawn brings thousands down to the water to stand waist-deep and pour the river back upon themselves; in the evening the same ghat fills for the aarti, the lamp-offering to the river, brass flames swung in slow circles against the dark. Two of the ghats are given over to fire rather than water: Manikarnika and, downstream, Harishchandra, the two great cremation grounds. To walk the riverfront is to pass without a break from one threshold to the next — the bath that cleanses, the temple that instructs, the pyre that releases — as though the whole bank were one instrument tuned to the passage between worlds.

The city where dying is being saved

Varanasi belongs to a set of seven sacred cities, the Sapta Puri, that Hindu tradition holds to confer moksha — liberation from the round of birth and death — upon those connected to them. Ayodhya, Mathura, Haridwar, Kanchipuram, Ujjain, and Dwarka complete the seven; but among them Kashi has always been held first, the city where liberation is not merely possible but, in the strongest formulations, assured. The Sanskrit maxim from the Kashi Khanda of the Skanda Purana states it with no hedging: Kashyam maranam muktih — death in Kashi is liberation.

The claim is precise, and to take its measure one has to take seriously the machinery of rebirth it is set against. In the worldview shared across the Hindu schools, an ordinary death is no ending but a turn of the wheel: the self passes on, driven by the accumulated weight of its acts, into another birth, and another, through the long captivity that the tradition calls samsara. To be liberated is to be cut loose from that wheel altogether — to have the self no longer carried into a next life because there is nothing left, no residue of action, to carry it. The yogis and philosophers describe ways toward this release that take lifetimes: the discipline of knowledge, the surrender of devotion, the slow purification of the deeds that bind. What Kashi offers is a shortcut so total it borders on the scandalous. Whoever dies within the sacred boundary — and the boundary is mapped, a marked perimeter the pilgrim can walk in a multi-day circuit called the Panchakroshi — receives liberation directly, without regard for caste, for learning, or for the deeds of a lifetime.

Manikarnika Ghat, the principal burning ground, where cremation continues without pause through the year. — Dennis G. Jarvis (archer10), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The mechanism the tradition supplies for this is intimate and strange. At the moment of death within the city, Shiva himself is said to bend to the dying person and whisper into the right ear the taraka mantra — the crossing mantra, the ferry sound — and that single utterance carries the soul over. Taraka means that which makes one cross, as a boat crosses a river; the image is exact, the dying carried over the water by a word. The boon does not depend on the merit of the one who receives it. This is what makes Kashi theologically vertiginous: a murderer who dies inside the boundary is released along with a saint, because the agent of release is not the person’s own karma but the god’s free act. The tradition does not soften this. It is the whole scandal and the whole consolation of the place — that here, and only here, the long ledger of reincarnation is simply torn up.

From this belief flows the most particular of the city’s institutions: people come to Kashi in order to die in it. The aged and the dying are brought, or come on their own, to spend their last weeks within the boundary, lodged in houses kept for the purpose where the only condition of residence is that death be near. What is sought is what the texts call kashi-labh, the “profit” or gain of Kashi — the good death, the death in the right place. The cremation that follows at Manikarnika is tended by the Doms, a community traditionally ranked among the lowest, who hold the hereditary right to the sacred fire from which every pyre is lit; their headman, the Dom Raja, is in the economy of this city a figure of immense gravity, keeper of the flame without which no one crosses over. The arrangement inverts the ordinary order of purity so completely that it can only be read as deliberate: at the threshold of liberation, the keeper of the gate is the man the social world holds least clean.

Shiva’s house and the well of wisdom

At the religious center of the city, set back a short distance from the river, stands the temple of Kashi Vishwanath — Vishwanatha, “lord of all,” a name of Shiva — which houses one of the twelve jyotirlingas, the lingams of light held to be self-manifestations of the god, points where Shiva broke through into the world as a shaft of fire without beginning or end. The Vishwanath lingam is, for the Shaiva tradition, the most charged of these, the god present in his own city. Beside the temple lies the Gyanvapi, the “well of wisdom,” a tank whose waters are said to hold the liquid form of Shiva’s knowledge — the well into which, in the city’s lore, the original lingam was once hidden to save it.

That hiding belongs to the temple’s hardest century. The structure that stands today is not ancient; it is the latest in a sequence of buildings raised and thrown down over centuries of conquest. The decisive blow came in 1669, when the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb issued a firman ordering the destruction of the Vishwanath temple, and the order was carried out that year. On part of the razed temple’s foundations a mosque, the Gyanvapi Masjid, was built — its rear wall still showing, to the eye, the line of the older Hindu temple it replaced, so that the wound and its history stand mortared together. For more than a century the holiest shrine of Shiva’s own city had no temple at all.

The present Kashi Vishwanath was raised in 1780 by Ahilyabai Holkar, the queen of the Maratha state of Indore, who built it just to the south of the mosque, on ground the older sanctuary could no longer occupy. Ahilyabai — a widow who ruled her kingdom for nearly three decades and spent a great part of its treasury rebuilding Hindu sanctuaries across India that war and iconoclasm had broken — is one of the genuine restorers of the tradition’s sacred landscape, and Kashi Vishwanath is her monument as much as the god’s. Its tower and dome were later sheathed in gold plate, the gift of the Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh, which is why travelers came to know it as the Golden Temple of Benares. The sequence — an ancient shrine, its destruction in 1669, the long absence, the queen’s rebuilding in 1780, the gold added after — is the whole history of the city compressed into one walled compound: endurance not as the absence of ruin but as the refusal to stay ruined.

Benares from the river, painted by Edward Lear in 1873 — the riverfront as it struck the European travelers who carried the city into the Western imagination. — Edward Lear, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

At the edge of the city, a different awakening

The sanctity of Kashi is not only Shaiva, and one of the oldest counter-claims on the ground lies just outside it. Some ten kilometers northeast, at Sarnath — the old deer park of Isipatana — the man the tradition would come to call the Buddha is held to have preached his first sermon after his awakening at Bodh Gaya, setting in motion the teaching that would grow into a world religion. The proximity is striking and, in the history of Indian religion, far from incidental: the city that became the supreme stronghold of Shaiva devotion and the field where the Buddhist path first turned its wheel stand within an afternoon’s walk of each other on the same stretch of the Ganges. For Gautama Buddha the kingdom of Kashi was simply the nearest great city; that its name now means, above all, the Hindu promise of release through Shiva is itself a record of how the ground was contested and re-contested over two and a half millennia.

The city held the Hindu intellectual tradition just as firmly. It was, and remains, a center of Sanskrit learning, where the recitation of the Upanishads and the disputation of the schools went on without interruption through every change of dynasty — the city teaching the doctrines of the atman, the self, and its release, in the very place that claimed to deliver that release in fact. Pilgrimage, cremation, ritual bathing, and study: these four traffics, running together along the same few miles of riverbank, are what made Kashi less a city that happens to be holy than a holiness given the form of a city.

Reception and afterlife

To the world beyond India, Varanasi arrived first as spectacle and only slowly as meaning. The British administrators and artists who reached it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found a city that fit no European category — neither ruin nor living capital but both at once — and they drew it compulsively. James Prinsep, the Company assay-master and antiquarian who served at Benares in the 1820s and 1830s, made careful lithographs of its ghats and temples that remain among the best records of the city before the photograph; Edward Lear painted its riverfront in watercolor in 1873. The images carried Benares into the Western imagination as the type of the immemorial East, ancient past reckoning — the reading Twain would stamp into a sentence.

Manikarnika Ghat at Benares, lithograph by James Prinsep, 1832 — among the earliest detailed records of the burning ground. — James Prinsep, British Library, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The city’s modern history is a history of the same pressures that built it, intensified. The cremation grounds now consume an estimated forty thousand bodies a year, and the wood smoke and the river’s pollution have made the very sanctity of the water a public question — the Ganges that purifies the worshipper carries, by the time it passes Varanasi, the load of the cities above it. Successive governments have launched programs to clean the river and to clear the dense lanes around Kashi Vishwanath; the recent construction of a broad corridor linking the temple directly to the riverfront, completed in 2021, swept away a quarter of old houses and small shrines to do it, and was received by some as a restoration and by others as a wound to the very fabric the city is made of. The Gyanvapi mosque beside the temple remains, three and a half centuries on, the object of litigation and contention, its surveyed foundations still arguing the events of 1669.

None of this has touched the older traffic. The pilgrims still come down to Dashashwamedh before dawn; the dying are still brought within the boundary; the fire at Manikarnika has still not been allowed to go cold. The city absorbs its own pollution, its own conflicts, its own modernity, the way it has absorbed every conquest, and goes on doing the one thing it was built to do. A pilgrim who has bathed in the river, taken the sight of the lingam, and walked the sacred boundary has, in the city’s reckoning, already begun the crossing; the pyre at the end merely completes it. That is the logic that has held the riverbank busy for three thousand years — a city arranged, stone by stone and fire by fire, around the conviction that here the wheel of return can be left behind.

→ Related: Ganges · Shiva · Hinduism · Moksha · Samsara · Reincarnation · Sarnath · Bhagavad Gita · Upanishads · Atman · Maya Illusion · Bodh Gaya · Gautama Buddha · Mahanirvana Tantra · Kundalini