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A History and Travel Guide to Ancient Varanasi (Benares)

A History and Travel Guide to Ancient Varanasi (Benares)

Last updated on: April 29, 2017 at 4:28 pm by Sunil Daman

A History and Travel Guide to Ancient Varanasi (Benares) 2017-02-10T13:53:12+05:30 Sunil Daman

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No matter what you call it – Kashi, Banaras, or Varanasi – it is probably the oldest and most exciting city in the world. According to lore, Kashi, “the City of Light,” is literally the “mother” of all cities. It was the first city, built by the first king, in the Anandavana, the forest of bliss carpeted with the sacred kusha grass. Before ancient Greece rose to its pinnacle, before Rome or Babylon, Kashi was a great metropolis and was already a thriving religious and commercial center. Way before Christ was born, Kashi was there. Gautama gave his first sermon at Sarnath near Kashi, and the reason he picked Sarnath for the sermon was because great numbers of spiritual seekers passed through there while traveling to Kashi.

According to India’s great epic, the Mahabharat, the name Varanasi derives from the fact that the city (at that time, at least, before it grew into its current proportions) was situated between the rivulets Varana in the north and Asi in the south, which flowed into the Ganga, along the banks of which Varanasi spread. Banaras was coined later, and meant the ras or juice of life. Benares doesn’t really mean anything at all. When the British adopted the name Banaras, they anglicized it as they had done with many other words, and made it Benares.

There’s temples all over the place in Varanasi.

The Holiest Place on Earth

The city’s population today stands at 1 million according to the 2001 census. During festivals and times of spiritual significance, the city bursts out of its seams and may house as many as 5 million. Every year, around 30 million pilgrims are estimated to make their way to Varanasi. India or Bharat with its sights, sounds, smells and tastes that overwhelm the senses is present in all its profusion in Kashi, squeezed into a vibrant microcosm. Kashi is essence of Sanatana Dharma, as the Hindu way of life is traditionally known. It can pick you up and shake you down, breaking all your expectations and priorities, and presenting a visitor with a bundle of contradictions. Life, death and everything in between are up for display at Kashi. Nothing is hidden. It encapsulates life in all its naked glory.

For someone from outside India, Kashi can be quite a shock. A sacred cow may nudge you out of the way not too gently. And the corpses crackling on the funeral pyre can be an overdose of reality to those who have hidden from their mortality all their life. Kashi cannot be ignored by anyone. Some love it, some hate it, but none remain indifferent to it. Life isn’t the same again once you’ve been to Kashi.

In the Hindu way of life, Kashi is the holiest place on earth. It stands on the trishul of Lord Shiva himself. The entire city is dedicated to the three-eyed God of Destruction. It is Avimukta, the sacred space never to be forsaken by Shiva. Those who die here are guaranteed liberation or mukti from the cycle of repeated birth and death. Manikarnika, the chief burning ghat on the Ganga’s banks is never without a body burning on the pyre. This is said to be every Hindu’s duty: to ensure that Manikarnika never goes idle!

Know one quite knows exactly how many temples are there in Kashi. There seems to be one in every streetcorner. Some estimates place the number of “major” temples at 2000, and the number of “minor” ones at 30,000 or more. The entire city was built to a plan to resemble a gigantic yantra, a machine that would become a process of liberation for every human being who entered the space. No wonder then that it was called the city of light.

Kashi is so special that even the Ganga flows towards the north towards her Himalayan home, the only such instance along its entire course in the plains, when it enters the city’s precincts. The river is quite flat and calm most of the year, as it passes through Kashi. But the monsoon sends the river into spate, and as it’s waters rise, temples, ghats and buildings often stay submerged for three months of the year. It is not unusual to see a temple half submerged in the river. Ancient Kashi was frequently engulfed by the river’s waters, and the holy men and their disciples would move to the small hillocks and continue their processes. Today however, the river’s banks are lined with high walls, though they are sometimes inadequate to contain the rise of the river.

As Ma Ganga or Mother Ganga winds through the city, she sanctifies the many ghats. She is one of the key lifelines of the spiritual process at work in Kashi. She is the bringer of life and taker of souls. She comforts the ill and purifies the sadhak (seeker). In the Hindu way of life, the river’s journey represents man’s own winding way through life. many times by her great waters.

A Cultural Capital

Kashi was also the city of knowledge. A great center of learning, it was the epicenter of the immense cultural fabric that spread out across North India. Music, art, literature, science and mathematics, all found their greatest masters in Kashi. The Banaras Hindu University is an echo of that ancient glory, and is making a spirited but entirely inadequate effort to regain what has been lost, and maintain what has somehow survived to today’s times.

Kashi was the center of Sanskrit learning in northern India. Sanskrit is among the oldest languages in the world and is still spoken as the mother tongue of 14,000 people in India. It is also the main language used in rituals and various other religious rites. It is the classical language of India. Like Latin in medieval Europe, Sanskrit was used extensively in literature. Most of the important scriptures and texts of Indian lore were written primarily in Sanskrit, though they were also frequently translated into other regional languages.

The city maintained a healthy tradition of Sanskrit expertise and knowledge for many generations after use of the language died out elsewhere. Today, Sanskrit is primarily restricted to priestly use, but Kashi retains about 40 Sanskrit schools and colleges with a total of over 2000 Sanskrit speakers and experts in the language. The city is home to the Banaras Sanskrit University, which has an extraordinary collection of 150,000 rare Sanskrit manuscripts.

Traditionally, the schools in Kashi and indeed in the whole of India, were maintained as patashalas or gurukuls, where the students were taught under the guidance of a Guru. The Guru is the ultimate authority on all spiritual matters. They transmitted the spiritual process through the time-honored guru-disciple relationship. For the most part, this aspect of Kashi is mostly lost. There still are a few genuine Gurus, but they are hard to come by, especially while trying to sift through the hordes of masqueraders. However, those few that are genuine and still available are keeping alive a process that has survived many thousands of years, through even the worst depredations of the invading hordes. Hopefully, modern India will not wipe them off the map.

Varanasi can be rather filthy at times, something the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised to change.

Varanasi can be rather filthy at times, something the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised to change. Ahron de Leeuw – Flickr (CC-BY)

Kashi in Turbulence

Kashi’s preeminence made it the focus of a sustained campaign of destruction when Islamic kings took the throne of Delhi from the twelfth century onwards. So thoroughly did they do their job of wiping out the city’s heritage that there is no building in the city today older than 600 years. First came Qutbuddin Aibak’s armyies in 1194, and they say he destroyed over a thousand temples. When the Mughals arrived in the sixteenth century, Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal, ordered almost a hundred temples destroyed, and Aurangzeb accelerated this policy of persecution and bigotry. He reimposed the jazia, a tax that was specially levied on non-Muslims by the Mughal kings. He destroyed temples and placed many restrictions to wipe the already impoverished Hindu cultural institutions. He even forbade music at his court because it was idolatrous and seduced the people from their true end of contemplating Allah.

In 1659, Aurangzeb ordered the destruction of the holy temple of Krittivasa. In 1669, he ordered the destruction of two of the city’s most sacred temples, the Vishnu Temple of Bindu Madhava and the Kashi Vishwanath Temple. Mosques were immediately constructed upon the ruins. It is said that when the Vishwanath temple was being destroyed, even the ascetics and sadhus took up arms to battle the Mughal armies, but were ruthlessly slaughtered. The Alamgir Mosque, which dominates the northern skyline of the Ganga’s riverfront, stands on the site of the Temple of Bindu Madhava. At the site of Kashi Vishwanath, Aurangzeb had the Gyan Vapi mosque constructed. He even changed the city’s name to Muhammadabad and set up the royal mint there to issue coins bearing the new name. But the name never stuck and passed into history with his death.

But Kashi has risen and thrived through all the insanity of religious warfare. With characteristically Indian resurgence, the city incorporated every element that was thrown or thrust at it. HEr misfortunes only seem to have increased its sanctity. What keeps Sanatana Dharma so vibrant despite all that has happened is that it is not a centralized religious system. It is as much a way of life. The way a Hindu sits, eats or sleeps is as much Sanatana Dharma as the way he worships his deity. The Islamic invaders ailed to understand this and attempted to stamp out the Hindu way of life by attacking the sacred places, chief of which was Kashi. But whatever may change on the surface, Kashi goes on. As long as human beings seeking ultimate liberation exist, Kashi will stay alive it is said.

Kashi in the good ol’ days – the nineteenth century.

Eternal City

The old city stretches out from around the Chowk, the center, and goes down to the river. It is a maze of unmarked by lanes and narrow streets, wide enough for cows, goats, dogs and pedestrians – and crazy two-wheeler drivers. The houses crowd over these lanes and hid the sun itself! There is bustling activity, especially around the temples!

The city today is struggling under its creaking infrastructure today, and filth and trash stand by side with the temples and cultural heritage. But India’s new Prime Minister seems set to change all that. His poll promise to Varanasi – also the constituency that voted him into a parliament seat with landslide margins – was to turn the city into a smart city, a blend of modern and mystical. He recently concluded the Kashi-Kyoto pact with Japan, during his three-day visit to the country when he met Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Modi’s visit to Kyoto’s Toji temple, a UNESCO World Heritage site seems to have favorably impressed him, and he has requested Japan’s expertise in reconstructing Kashi, while retaining its Pauranik Swarup or ancient ethos.

Travel Info

Banarasis, the natives of the city are known for their carefree, kind of crazy attitude of abandon and good humor. The traffic chaos epitomizes this joie de vivre, and this love of good living and culture that is positively infectious. The city throbs with what the locals call masti.

Another specialty of Kashi is bhang, a decoction of hashish. The streets have plenty of stalls selling the stuff mixed in varius forms. In tea, in lassi or buttermilk, bhang kulfi or cones of ice cream, or as little pills. The availability of bhang is one reason why Kashi is frequented by foreigners today.

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