Varanasi: the Eternal City on the Ganges

Of all the cities that have ever existed on this earth, very few can claim to have endured without interruption for as long as Varanasi. Known through the millennia as Kashi, as Benares, and by its current name Varanasi, this ancient city rests on the western bank of the Ganges River in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, and it has been inhabited without break for at least three thousand years — and by many scholarly accounts, for considerably longer. Conservative archaeological estimates place continuous human settlement here to around 1200 to 1000 BCE, coinciding with the later Vedic period of Indian civilization, but the layers of religious and cultural life that have accumulated over this place suggest a depth of human presence that no calendar can fully contain. Mark Twain, who visited in 1896, searched for language adequate to describe it and settled on this: Varanasi is "older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together." It was an exaggeration, perhaps, but only a small one. No living city on earth has been continuously venerated, continuously inhabited, and continuously transformed for as long as this one.

Varanasi is a city of approximately 1.2 million people within its municipal limits, and roughly three million in the wider metropolitan area. It sits in the central Gangetic plain of northern India, and its climate is subtropical, with scorching summers, a dramatic monsoon season between June and September, and mild winters that draw pilgrims and travelers from across the subcontinent and the world. But climate and geography are almost beside the point when speaking of Varanasi, because this city is defined not by its physical coordinates but by its cosmic ones. In the Hindu understanding of sacred space, Varanasi occupies a position unlike any other place on the face of the earth. It is the earthly abode of Shiva, the great god of creation and destruction, the transformer and regenerator. It is the city where, according to Hindu scripture, the very first light of creation appeared. It is the place where to die is to be liberated — not merely blessed, not merely elevated in the scale of rebirth, but entirely freed from the endless cycle of death and reincarnation altogether. Varanasi is not merely a holy city in the way that many cities are called holy. It is the holiest city on earth in the Shaivite Hindu tradition, and its sacredness is written into the architecture of the cosmos itself.

The Name and Sacred Geography of Varanasi

The name Varanasi is ancient, and its origin is itself a piece of sacred geography. The city takes its name from two rivers: the Varuna, which flows along its northern boundary, and the Assi, a small stream that marks its southern edge. The city thus occupies the triangular zone between these two tributaries and the mighty Ganges itself — a configuration known in Hindu religious geography as the Varanasi triangle. This triangular bounded zone is known in Sanskrit texts as the Antargriha, or "inner sanctuary," and every inch of it is considered sacred ground. To walk across Varanasi in any direction is, in a sense, to walk across a living temple.

The city's most ancient name, Kashi, carries its own meaning: "the luminous one," or "the city of light." The Puranas, those vast encyclopedic Hindu religious texts, describe Kashi as the place where Shiva and his consort Parvati came to dwell after their cosmic wandering, choosing this particular bend in the Ganges as the site of their eternal habitation. According to the Kashi Khanda, one of the major sections of the Skanda Purana, the entire city rests not on the earth itself but on the trident of Shiva — elevated above the ordinary world, immune from the floods and upheavals that will someday destroy everything else. When the great dissolution of the universe arrives and the waters of cosmic annihilation rise over all of creation, Varanasi alone, in this understanding, will remain.

The Ganges River, known in Hindi as the Ganga and personified as the goddess Ganga, is inseparable from Varanasi's identity. In Hindu cosmology, the Ganges is a heavenly river brought down to earth by the sage Bhagiratha to purify the ashes of his ancestors. It flows through the matted hair of Shiva before descending to the world, which is why the river is understood not merely as water but as a flowing manifestation of divine grace. At Varanasi, the river curves in a wide crescent from south to north — an anomaly, since the Ganges generally flows eastward here. This northward-facing curve means that at Varanasi, the rising sun shines directly onto the western bank where the city is built, illuminating the ghats each morning in a spectacle of light and reflection that has been described by travelers from antiquity to the present day as one of the most visually arresting sights on earth.

The City in History

Varanasi enters recorded history during the era of the Vedic civilization, the culture of the ancient Indo-Aryan peoples whose sacred hymns, collected as the Rigveda and the other Vedas, form the oldest surviving religious literature of India. The Rigveda mentions Varanasi, and by the time of the later Vedic texts and the Upanishads — philosophical compositions of profound depth and originality — the city was already established as a major center of Sanskrit learning and religious life. By the sixth century BCE, during the lifetime of the historical Siddhartha Gautama, Varanasi was the capital of the kingdom of Kashi, one of the sixteen mahajanapadas or great territorial states of ancient India. The kingdom of Kashi was prosperous, culturally sophisticated, and well known for its fine textiles, its philosophy, and its religious institutions.

It was in the vicinity of this city that one of the pivotal events in the history of world religion took place. Siddhartha Gautama, having attained enlightenment under the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya in Bihar (the traditional date given is around 528 BCE), made his way westward to the Deer Park at a place called Isipatana, known today as Sarnath, located approximately ten kilometers northeast of the center of Varanasi. There, in the cool shade of a grove, he delivered his first sermon — the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the "Discourse on the Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Dhamma" — to his first five disciples. This moment is known in Buddhist tradition as the First Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma, and it marks the effective founding of Buddhism as a religious tradition. Sarnath thus became one of the four holiest places in Buddhism, alongside Bodh Gaya, Kushinagar (the site of the Buddha's death), and Lumbini (his birthplace). The great Dhamek Stupa at Sarnath, a massive cylindrical tower of brick and stone rising approximately 43.6 meters, marks the traditional spot of this first sermon. The stupa was constructed during the Gupta period, in the fifth and sixth centuries CE, but it incorporates earlier Mauryan-era work from the time of the emperor Ashoka, who visited Sarnath in the third century BCE and erected a magnificent pillar there, the capital of which — the famous Ashoka Lion Capital — became the national emblem of independent India.

Varanasi's Hindu religious prestige survived and deepened through the centuries of ancient and medieval Indian history. The city appears in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the two great Sanskrit epics that form the foundation of Hindu narrative and ethical imagination. The Puranas describe it in loving and elaborate detail. The city was a center of the Shaiva tradition — the worship of Shiva — but it also housed important temples and centers of learning devoted to Vishnu, the great god of preservation, and to the goddess in her many forms. Pilgrims came from every corner of the subcontinent to bathe in the Ganges, to visit the Kashi Vishwanath temple, and to seek moksha through death within the city limits.

The political history of Varanasi, however, was not always peaceful or continuous. In 1194 CE, forces under the command of Qutb-ud-Din Aibak, the general of the Ghurid sultan Muhammad of Ghor and later the first sultan of the Delhi Sultanate, swept through the city and destroyed many of its greatest temples, constructing mosques on or near their foundations. This was a catastrophic blow to the city's religious and architectural heritage, and it was the beginning of a long period during which Hindu temple construction in Varanasi was repeatedly disrupted by successive Muslim rulers. The city's Hindu population proved remarkably resilient, however, continuing to rebuild and restore their sacred places in the spaces and opportunities that opened to them.

The Mughal period brought both further destruction and, at times, relative tolerance. The emperor Akbar, who reigned from 1556 to 1605, was genuinely interested in Hindu religious thought and permitted considerable freedom of religious expression. Several important temples were constructed or restored during his reign. His great-grandson Aurangzeb, however, who ruled from 1658 to 1707, was a very different kind of ruler — deeply orthodox in his Sunni Islamic faith and hostile to Hindu religious expression. In 1669, Aurangzeb ordered the demolition of the Kashi Vishwanath temple, the most sacred Shiva shrine in Varanasi, and constructed the Gyanvapi Mosque (the "mosque of the well of knowledge") on part of its site. The mosque's rear wall is built directly against the back wall of the original temple, portions of which are still visible today. This mosque-temple complex remains one of the most sensitive religious sites in modern India, subject to ongoing legal disputes and periodic political controversy.

Following Aurangzeb's death in 1707, the Mughal empire entered a long decline, and the Maratha confederacy gradually extended its power across much of India, including the Gangetic plain. Maratha leaders became major patrons of Varanasi's Hindu institutions, funding temple construction and restoration on a large scale. The most celebrated act of this restoration was the rebuilding of the Kashi Vishwanath temple in 1780 by Rani Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore, one of the most capable and humane rulers of eighteenth-century India. Ahilyabai was deeply religious and devoted a large portion of her treasury to the construction, restoration, and maintenance of temples across India. The temple she built in Varanasi stands today, substantially as she left it. A few decades later, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the founder of the Sikh empire in the Punjab, donated approximately one thousand kilograms of gold to be hammered into sheets and applied to the shikhara, or spire, of the Kashi Vishwanath temple, creating the gleaming golden dome that gives the temple its common name: the Golden Temple. The sight of this gold dome catching the morning light above the rooftops of the old city is one of the defining visual experiences of Varanasi.

The British East India Company gradually extended its authority over the region during the eighteenth century, and by 1775, Varanasi was effectively under British control, governed as a nominally independent state by local rajas under British supervision. The city continued to function as a major center of Hindu religious life and Sanskrit scholarship throughout the colonial period, and British administrators, despite their own religious and cultural differences, generally recognized the city's unique importance and took steps to manage it with some sensitivity to its traditions.

The Ghats of Varanasi

The defining physical feature of Varanasi, the one that has made it one of the most photographed and most written-about landscapes in Asia, is its river frontage: the long, curving line of stone steps known as ghats that descend from the city's riverbank buildings to the edge of the Ganges. The word "ghat" simply means a series of steps or a landing stage at the edge of a body of water, but in Varanasi the ghats have evolved over many centuries into something far more than a practical convenience. They are stages for ritual, places of prayer, sites of cremation, launching points for the sacred immersion of the body in holy water, and gathering spaces for the entire spectrum of human life in a deeply religious city.

There are approximately 88 ghats in Varanasi, running for roughly seven kilometers along the western bank of the Ganges from the Adi Keshava Ghat at the northern end to the Assi Ghat at the southern end. Each ghat has its own name, its own history, and often its own presiding deity or religious association. Many were constructed or substantially rebuilt by the Maratha rulers and other wealthy patrons in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, giving much of the current river frontage its present appearance. But the practice of bathing at the ghats is far older, going back to the earliest periods of the city's religious history.

The most important ghat in terms of daily religious activity is the Dashashwamedh Ghat, which stands near the center of the ghat sequence and is closely associated with the Kashi Vishwanath temple, from which it is only a short walk through the narrow lanes of the old city. The name Dashashwamedh means "ten horse sacrifice," and according to Hindu legend, this is the spot where the creator god Brahma performed a great ten-horse yajna (fire sacrifice) to welcome Shiva to Varanasi. The ghat is one of the five "Panchatirthi" ghats — the five most meritorious bathing places — and it is always alive with activity: pilgrims bathing at dawn, priests conducting puja on the steps, vendors selling flowers and incense and small clay lamps, boats carrying early-morning worshippers out onto the river to watch the sunrise. But it is in the evening that the Dashashwamedh Ghat reaches its greatest moment of spectacle and ritual beauty.

Every evening at dusk, the Ganga Aarti ceremony is performed at the Dashashwamedh Ghat by a group of trained priests who were selected and trained specifically for this purpose. The ceremony is an elaborate ritual of fire worship in which large brass lamps, multi-tiered and holding dozens of wicks burning with ghee, are waved in sweeping circular patterns before the river, accompanied by bells, conch shells, chanting, and devotional music. The priests are dressed in fine silk garments, and the ceremony is choreographed and precisely timed. As the lamps spin and sweep through the darkening air, their light reflected in the black water below and the smoke of incense rising into the night sky, the effect is one of extraordinary visual and sensory power. Thousands of people gather on the ghat steps and on boats moored in the river to watch the ceremony each evening, and it draws visitors from every corner of India and from countries around the world. The Ganga Aarti is simultaneously a genuine act of Hindu religious devotion and one of the most memorable public spectacles in all of Asia.

The Assi Ghat, at the southern end of the ghat sequence, marks the boundary of the sacred Varanasi zone — the point where the Assi stream meets the Ganges. Bathing here, especially during certain auspicious moments in the Hindu calendar, is considered highly meritorious. The ghat is also a gathering place for pilgrims who have completed the Panchakroshi Yatra, the great circumambulatory pilgrimage around the outer boundary of Varanasi, which covers approximately 88 kilometers and involves visits to 108 sacred sites. Completing this pilgrimage on foot is considered one of the most meritorious acts a Hindu can perform, and it is traditionally undertaken over a period of five days.

At the northern end of the sequence, the Adi Keshava Ghat marks the spot where the god Vishnu is said to have arrived in Varanasi to prepare the city for Shiva's residence. Near here, on a small island in the middle of the Ganges, is the Ramnagar Fort, the seat of the former Maharaja of Varanasi, which contains a museum of antique weapons, royal paraphernalia, and ancient manuscripts. The fort itself dates largely to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Between these anchoring points, the ghats offer every register of human experience along their stone steps. There are ghats for bathing and ghats for washing clothes. There are ghats reserved for specific Hindu communities, and ghats associated with particular festivals. There is a ghat where the body of the revered philosopher and teacher Tulsidas, who composed the Ramcharitmanas — the great Hindi retelling of the Ramayana — is said to have been cremated in 1623. There is a ghat where Adi Shankaracharya, the eighth-century philosopher who re-energized Hindu thought after centuries of Buddhist dominance, is said to have received the darshan of Shiva himself. The ghats are an archive of Hindu religious history written in stone and running water.

Manikarnika Ghat and the Sacred Cremation Grounds

Of all the ghats of Varanasi, none carries a heavier weight of meaning than the Manikarnika Ghat, the principal burning ghat and one of the most powerful and uncanny places in the world. Manikarnika sits near the center of the ghat sequence, a few hundred meters from the Dashashwamedh, and it is the site where cremations have been conducted with almost complete continuity for at least three and a half millennia, though the traditional claim is that the sacred fire here has burned without interruption since the very beginning of time.

The name Manikarnika refers to an earring — "mani" meaning jewel and "karnika" meaning ear ornament. According to Hindu legend, this is the spot where the earring of Sati, the divine consort of Shiva, fell when her body was being carried by a grief-stricken Shiva after her death. The site is thus a Shakti Pitha, one of the sacred spots on earth sanctified by the body parts of the goddess Sati, making it holy in both the Shaiva and the Shakta traditions of Hinduism simultaneously.

At Manikarnika, cremations take place twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, without pause. By day and by night, the fires burn on the stone platforms above the water's edge, attended by the hereditary workers known as Doms, who belong to a specific caste whose hereditary occupation is managing the cremation ground. It is estimated that between 80 and 200 bodies are cremated here daily, with the variation depending on the season and the auspiciousness of particular days in the Hindu calendar. Certain days see many more cremations because of their particular religious significance. The wood used for cremation — typically sandalwood for those wealthy enough to afford it, and various other woods for most — is stacked in large piles on the ghat. The entire space smells of smoke and burning, and the ash and embers from thousands of fires over the centuries have accumulated in the river and on the platforms.

The theological significance of dying in Varanasi is difficult to overstate in the context of Hindu religious thought. In Hinduism, the ordinary human soul is subject to samsara — the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth governed by karma, the accumulated weight of actions across past and present lives. Liberation from this cycle, moksha, is the ultimate spiritual goal of Hindu practice, typically requiring many lifetimes of virtuous action, devotion, and spiritual discipline. But Hindu scripture, particularly the texts related to Varanasi, teaches that death within the boundaries of the sacred city bypasses this ordinary karmic process entirely. Shiva himself, according to the Kashi Khanda, whispers the taraka mantra — the liberation formula — into the ear of every person who dies within Varanasi, and this whispered mantra, regardless of the dead person's previous karma, achievements, or sins, grants immediate and final liberation of the soul. This means that to die in Varanasi is to achieve in a single moment what might otherwise require countless more lifetimes of effort.

This belief draws tens of thousands of dying Hindus to Varanasi each year, carried by their families to spend their final days in the city, so that death may find them on its sacred soil. The Kashi Labh Mukti Bhavan, one of the most notable establishments of this kind, is a house that accepts dying people for a stay of limited duration. If the person does not die within the allotted time, they must leave and return later. The families that come to Varanasi with their dying relatives, walking through the lanes of the old city behind a bamboo funeral bier draped in marigolds and gold cloth, chanting "Ram naam satya hai" (the name of Ram is truth), are participating in one of the oldest and most continuous human religious practices on earth.

A few hundred meters south of Manikarnika is the Harishchandra Ghat, the second of the two burning ghats of Varanasi. Named after the legendary King Harishchandra, who is celebrated in Hindu tradition as the exemplar of truth-telling and was said to have worked as a cremation-ground attendant as a divine test of his virtue, this ghat handles a smaller volume of cremations than Manikarnika but is equally sacred in symbolic terms.

The Kashi Vishwanath Temple

At the spiritual center of Varanasi, in terms of its religious significance and its influence on the life of the city, stands the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, the most sacred Shiva temple in all of Hinduism. The temple's presiding deity is Vishwanath — the Lord of the Universe — one of the most potent and reverenced forms of Shiva. The temple houses a jyotirlinga, one of twelve spots in India where Shiva is said to have manifested as a pillar of fire (jyotis means "radiance" or "flame," linga refers to the iconic cylindrical form representing Shiva's creative energy). Of the twelve jyotirlingas, the one at Kashi Vishwanath is considered the most important, and it draws millions of pilgrims each year from across India and the Hindu diaspora worldwide.

The original Kashi Vishwanath temple was ancient, predating any historical records. The temple was destroyed by Qutb-ud-Din Aibak's forces in 1194, rebuilt, destroyed again in the sixteenth century by Mughal forces, and was rebuilt once more before Aurangzeb demolished the standing structure in 1669. For over a century after that demolition, worship continued in improvised and informal ways in the vicinity of the site. Then, in 1780, Rani Ahilyabai Holkar of the Maratha-aligned Holkar dynasty of Indore undertook the construction of the current temple building, located adjacent to the site of the demolished original. Her temple, built in the traditional North Indian shikhara style, became the focus of Varanasi's Shaiva religious life and has remained so ever since.

The gold plating of the shikhara — the tower above the main sanctum — was donated by Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Sikh empire in 1853, when approximately one thousand kilograms of gold were applied to the structure. This gift from the founder of Sikhism's greatest political power to the holiest shrine of Shiva was a gesture of religious solidarity and pan-Indian patriotism that is still remembered and celebrated. The golden dome is visible from the river, particularly at dawn and dusk when the light catches it at oblique angles and sets it blazing above the dense roofline of the old city.

The temple complex is located in the Vishwanath Gali, the narrow lane of the temple, in the heart of the oldest part of Varanasi. Access is restricted to Hindus. Non-Hindus may view the exterior from a nearby building that overlooks the compound, but the sanctum sanctorum where the jyotirlinga is housed is accessible only to those of the Hindu faith. The management of the temple and the conduct of its many daily rituals is governed by the Kashi Vishwanath Temple Trust, established by the government of Uttar Pradesh. The temple receives an estimated three million pilgrims annually, with much higher numbers during festival periods such as Maha Shivaratri (the great night of Shiva, celebrated in February or March) and the Shravan month (July–August), when devotees of Shiva walk hundreds of kilometers carrying pots of holy water from the Ganges to pour over Shiva lingas throughout northern India.

In recent years, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi undertook a major redevelopment project known as the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, inaugurated in 2021, which cleared land around the temple to create a wide, ceremonial approach from the river, with new prayer halls, facilities for pilgrims, and a dramatically improved view of the temple from the Ganges. The project involved the demolition of many old buildings and was controversial among heritage conservationists, but it significantly increased the temple's accessibility and its capacity to handle the enormous volumes of pilgrims who visit each year.

Varanasi as a Center of Learning

Varanasi has been a seat of Sanskrit scholarship and Hindu philosophical inquiry for at least two and a half thousand years, and in this capacity it has produced, housed, and trained some of the most important thinkers in the history of Indian civilization. The city's identity as a center of learning is inseparable from its identity as a center of religion — in the Brahmanical tradition, the pursuit of sacred knowledge and the practice of devotion are aspects of the same fundamental engagement with the divine.

The tradition of Sanskrit scholarship in Varanasi is rooted in the ancient gurukulam system, in which students (shishyas) would attach themselves to a learned teacher (guru) and receive instruction through close personal association over many years. Varanasi attracted scholars because of its religious prestige, its wealthy patrons, and the sheer density of learned men who gathered there. By the medieval period, the city had become the preeminent center of Sanskrit learning in India, a reputation it held for centuries. Scholars from every corner of the subcontinent traveled to Varanasi to study grammar, philosophy, logic, and the various branches of sacred knowledge. The city's Sanskrit scholars maintained active traditions of debate, commentary, and original composition, and the tradition of Sanskrit scholarship in Varanasi continues into the present day, supported by institutions both ancient and modern.

The most important modern institution of learning in Varanasi is Banaras Hindu University, known as BHU, which was founded in 1916 by the nationalist leader and educational visionary Madan Mohan Malaviya, with the support of prominent figures including Annie Besant and the Maharaja of Darbhanga. The foundation stone of the main campus was laid on February 4, 1916, by Lord Hardinge, the then Viceroy of India, in a ceremony attended by thousands of people. Malaviya's vision was to create a university that would bring together the best of Western scientific and academic education with the deep traditions of Sanskrit learning and Hindu culture — a university where engineering students and Sanskrit scholars, medical researchers and Vedic students, would share a campus and cross-fertilize each other's work.

BHU is today one of the largest residential universities in Asia. Its campus spreads across approximately 1,300 acres in the southern part of Varanasi, and it houses more than twenty thousand students in its various colleges and institutes. The university has faculties of science, social sciences, arts, education, medicine, engineering, technology, visual arts, and performing arts, as well as a dedicated faculty of Sanskrit Vidya Dharm Vigyan that preserves and advances Sanskrit scholarship. The campus contains the New Kashi Vishwanath Temple, built in white marble by the industrialist Birla family in a style that combines traditional temple architecture with certain modernist elements. The temple is open to people of all religions and castes, in deliberate contrast to the old Kashi Vishwanath temple, which is restricted to Hindus.

The library at BHU holds one of the largest collections of manuscripts in India, including thousands of palm-leaf and paper manuscripts in Sanskrit, Hindi, Persian, and other languages. Scholars from around the world come to Varanasi to work with these collections, and the university has been a center for the digital preservation and publication of manuscript materials that might otherwise be lost.

Beyond BHU, Varanasi houses numerous other institutions of traditional and modern learning. The Sampurnanand Sanskrit University, established in 1958 on the foundations of an earlier Sanskrit college founded in 1791 by the British East India Company, is one of the oldest institutions for Sanskrit education in the modern world. The Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies at Sarnath is another example of Varanasi's role as a center for diverse but related traditions of South Asian scholarship.

The Musical Tradition of Varanasi

If Varanasi is the holiest city in Hinduism and the center of its most ancient scholarly traditions, it is also one of the most musically rich cities in India — a country whose classical music traditions rank among the most sophisticated and complex in the world. The city has been associated with music for millennia: the Puranas describe Shiva as the lord of music and dance, and his divine consort Parvati as the first musician, so it is entirely fitting that the city of Shiva should be a city of music.

The Benaras gharana (literally, "the household of Benares") is one of the major gharanas, or schools of transmission, of North Indian classical music. In the Indian classical tradition, musical knowledge and technique are passed from teacher to student over long periods of intimate study, and the gharana system groups together musicians who trace their stylistic lineage to a common ancestor or tradition. The Benaras gharana is particularly associated with thumri and dadra, two forms of semi-classical North Indian vocal music characterized by their emotional expressiveness, their lyrical content (often drawn from the devotional poetry of Vaishnavism, particularly themes associated with the god Krishna), and their relatively relaxed approach to raga rules compared to the more austere forms of khayal and dhrupad. The Benaras thumri style is known for its languorous sensuality, its elaborate ornamentation, and the way in which a master singer can expand a single phrase over many minutes of improvisation without losing the emotional thread.

The city is also closely associated with the development of tabla, the paired drum that forms the percussion foundation of most North Indian classical music. The Varanasi (Purab) baj, or Varanasi style of tabla playing, is distinguished by its rich, resonant sound and its elaborate solo compositions, and it has produced some of the greatest tabla players in the history of Indian music.

But if one figure above all others embodies the musical spirit of Varanasi, it is Ustad Bismillah Khan, the shehnai master who was born in 1916 and died in 2006, spending most of his life in the city he loved above all others. The shehnai is a reed instrument of ancient Indian origin, related to the oboe family, with a conical bore and a piercing, soulful sound that has been associated from time immemorial with auspicious occasions — weddings, religious festivals, the opening of temples. In the hands of Bismillah Khan, the shehnai was elevated from a folk instrument primarily heard at local ceremonies to a concert instrument of the highest classical order, capable of expressing the full emotional and spiritual range of North Indian classical music.

Bismillah Khan grew up in Varanasi, learning the shehnai from his maternal uncle and gradually developing a mastery that was recognized as without precedent. He played the shehnai at the Kashi Vishwanath temple, at the ghats at dawn, and at the great festivals of Varanasi for decades. He was chosen to play the shehnai on the occasion of Indian independence on August 15, 1947, playing from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi as the Indian flag was unfurled — one of the most memorable musical moments in modern Indian history. He received the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honor, in 2001, and he remained in Varanasi until his death, insisting that he could not leave the city because only in Varanasi could the river and the ghats inspire him to play the music he heard in his heart.

Varanasi today remains a city alive with music. Classical concerts are given regularly at BHU and at venues across the city. Young musicians continue to seek out the masters of the various gharanas for tuition and apprenticeship. The annual Sankat Mochan Sangeet Samaroh, a five-day classical music festival held at the Sankat Mochan Hanuman temple in the spring, draws performers and audiences from across India and attracts some of the greatest names in Indian classical music to perform in the open air before an audience that includes as many neighborhood residents as it does connoisseurs and aficionados.

The Weaving Tradition and Banarasi Silk

Varanasi has been associated with fine textile production for more than two thousand years. The city's silk and cotton fabrics were mentioned by ancient Greek and Roman writers, who knew Benares as a source of fine cloth traded across the ancient world. By the time of the Mughal empire, Varanasi had become the preeminent center for the production of the most luxurious woven textiles in India, with the Mughal courts providing patronage and the trade routes of the Mughal empire providing markets that extended from Central Asia to Southeast Asia.

The signature product of Varanasi's weaving tradition is the Banarasi sari, the most celebrated variety of silk sari in India, instantly recognizable by its heavy, lustrous silk fabric, its elaborate woven patterns of flowers, leaves, vines, and geometric motifs, and its distinctive brocade work in gold and silver thread (known as zari). A fine Banarasi sari may contain thousands of individual threads of pure gold or silver woven into its fabric by hand, and the creation of the most elaborate designs can take a master weaver anywhere from fifteen days to six months of concentrated work on a handloom. Banarasi saris are the traditional wedding garment of Hindu brides across North India and are considered among the most precious wearable objects in Indian culture — passed down from mother to daughter across generations.

The weaving community of Varanasi is largely Muslim, a legacy of the Mughal period when skilled weavers from Persia and Central Asia came to the city and blended their techniques and design vocabularies with the existing Hindu craft traditions. This mingling of Persian floral motifs, Mughal geometric patterns, and ancient Indian weaving techniques produced the distinctive visual language of Banarasi silk, which is neither purely Persian nor purely Indian but a synthesis that is entirely its own. Today, the weaving neighborhoods of Varanasi — areas like Madanpura, Lallapura, and Saraiya — are still home to tens of thousands of weavers, most of whom work on handlooms in their homes or in small workshops. The industry employs an estimated one to one and a half million people in and around Varanasi when the full supply chain — silk thread dyeing, loom operation, finishing, and trade — is accounted for.

Banarasi silk received the Geographical Indication (GI) designation under Indian law, meaning that only textiles produced in the Varanasi region using traditional methods can legally be marketed as "Banarasi." This designation was a response to the growing problem of machine-made imitations produced elsewhere in India and in countries like China, which undercut the prices of genuine handloom Banarasi products and threatened the livelihoods of the traditional weaving community. The GI tag helps protect the market for authentic Banarasi textiles, though enforcement remains a challenge in a vast and complex marketplace.

The Gyanvapi Mosque and the Question of Sacred Space

One of the most legally and politically contested religious sites in modern India is located within Varanasi: the Gyanvapi Mosque, which stands on part of the site of the original Kashi Vishwanath temple demolished by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1669. The mosque, whose name means "well of knowledge," incorporates in its western and rear walls elements of the original Hindu temple, including carved columns, floral decorations, and sculptural details that are distinctly Hindu in style. A well within the mosque complex, known as the Gyanvapi Kund, is traditionally associated with the original temple.

For much of the colonial and early post-independence period, the site was managed under a kind of practical accommodation, with the mosque functioning for Muslim worshippers and the adjoining area providing space for Hindu devotional activity. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, a series of legal petitions was filed by Hindu groups claiming the right to worship at the site and asserting that a Hindu temple should be restored there. These cases wound through the Indian legal system over several decades, generating enormous political attention and periodic communal tension.

The legal situation became more acute in 2022 when a court-ordered survey of the mosque complex was conducted, during which what Hindu petitioners claimed was a Shiva linga was found in the mosque's wuzu (ablution) pool. Muslim authorities disputed this interpretation, arguing that the object was a fountain structure. The legal disputes over the interpretation of this finding and over the broader question of the site's ownership and use continue to occupy the Indian courts and to generate political debate. The Gyanvapi case is widely seen as a test of India's constitutional commitment to religious pluralism and the legal principle that prevents challenges to the ownership and status of religious places as they existed at the time of Indian independence.

Religious Life, Festivals, and the Rhythm of the Sacred Year

The religious life of Varanasi does not proceed in isolated moments of high ceremony separated by ordinary secular time. Rather, for the city's devout Hindu residents and for the millions of pilgrims who pass through it each year, the sacred and the everyday are woven together in a continuous fabric. Bathing in the Ganges at dawn is not an occasional ritual but a daily practice for hundreds of thousands of people. The temple bells that ring at the hours of worship — before dawn, at midday, in the late afternoon, and at dusk — punctuate the day the way the calls to prayer mark time in a Muslim city. The ghats are perpetually in use, perpetually alive with devotional activity.

The great festivals of the Hindu calendar each have their own specific expression in Varanasi. Maha Shivaratri, the great night of Shiva celebrated on the fourteenth day of the dark half of the month of Phalguna (February or March), is the city's supreme festival. Pilgrims arrive in hundreds of thousands in the days before the festival, and on the night itself the entire city vibrates with energy: elaborate processions move through the streets, the Kashi Vishwanath temple is opened for worship through the night, and the ghats glow with oil lamps and the flames of small fires. The festival celebrates the marriage of Shiva and Parvati, one of the central narratives of Hindu cosmology, and it has been observed in Varanasi for as long as there has been a city here.

Dev Deepawali, the festival of the gods on Diwali, celebrated on the full moon of the month of Kartika (October or November), fifteen days after the mainstream Diwali festival, is one of Varanasi's most visually extraordinary occasions. On this night, the entire riverfront — all 88 ghats — is illuminated with hundreds of thousands of small clay oil lamps placed on every step, every ledge, and every surface of the stone stairways. When viewed from a boat on the river, the effect is of the entire city's waterfront transformed into a shimmering galaxy of light reflected in the dark water of the Ganges. The Ganga Aarti on this night is particularly spectacular, and the waterborne view of a city glowing from end to end is one of the most extraordinary sights in all of India.

The month of Shravan, which falls in the monsoon season (July and August), is particularly sacred to Shiva, and during this period the Kashi Vishwanath temple is visited by enormous numbers of pilgrims, many of whom are kanwariyas — devotees who walk from distant sources of Ganges water carrying decorated bamboo poles with pots of sacred water hanging from each end, which they will pour over the Shiva linga. These processions of kanwariyas, often numbering in the millions across northern India during the Shravan month, converge on Varanasi and on other Shiva shrines in vast colorful columns, creating a phenomenon that is at once a logistical challenge and a spectacle of extraordinary collective devotion.

The Ganges: Sacred River, Polluted Water

The Ganges is the soul of Varanasi, and the health of the river is therefore both a practical and a spiritual matter of the deepest importance. For many centuries, the river was clean enough for the ritual bathing that forms the foundation of Varanasi's religious practice. But industrialization, population growth, agricultural runoff, and inadequate sewage treatment have combined to create a severe pollution crisis in the Ganges that has been recognized by scientists, government officials, and religious leaders alike.

The pollution of the Ganges in the Varanasi stretch comes from several sources. Domestic sewage from the city, much of it not adequately treated, enters the river. Industrial effluents from tanneries and other factories upstream contribute significant chemical pollution. Agricultural runoff containing pesticides and fertilizers adds to the burden. The river also receives the remains of partially cremated bodies, ritual offerings, and flower garlands that decompose in the water. The combined effect is that the water at many of the Varanasi ghats contains bacterial counts and chemical concentrations far above levels considered safe for bathing by international health standards.

This is a deeply painful paradox for the millions of Hindus for whom bathing in the Ganges is a religious imperative and for the millions more who drink the water in the belief that it carries healing and purifying power. Many Hindus maintain that the spiritual properties of Ganga water transcend its physical qualities — a position grounded in deep faith — while scientists and public health officials point to the real health risks associated with contact with heavily polluted water.

The Indian government has made repeated attempts to clean the river over the past several decades. The most ambitious of these is the Namami Gange programme, launched in 2014 with a budget of tens of thousands of crore rupees, which aims to combine sewage treatment infrastructure, industrial regulation, riverbank development, afforestation, and public awareness campaigns to reverse the river's degradation. The program has achieved some improvements in sewage treatment capacity and has developed the riverfront in several cities, but the scale of the challenge is immense and progress has been uneven. The full restoration of the Ganges to health is a generational project that will require sustained political will, technological investment, and a fundamental transformation in the way that the cities and industries along its banks manage their waste.

Modern Varanasi and Its Political Significance

Varanasi in the early twenty-first century is a city living simultaneously in multiple eras. The ancient religious city — the ghats, the temples, the Sanskrit learning, the weaving workshops, the music — continues its life largely as it has for centuries. But alongside this ancient core, a rapidly modernizing city is growing, with new universities and research institutions, expanding industries, a growing tourist infrastructure, and the social and political ferment of one of India's most dynamic states.

Varanasi has a particular significance in contemporary Indian politics. In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose the city as his parliamentary constituency, a choice freighted with enormous symbolic meaning. By standing for election from Varanasi — the holiest city in Hinduism, the city of Shiva, the eternal city — Modi was aligning himself with the deepest currents of Hindu religious nationalism in a way that went far beyond ordinary electoral politics. He won the constituency convincingly in 2014 and has retained it since, and his identification with the city has led to significant central government investment in its infrastructure, including the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor project, road widening, the development of a new ghats area, and improvements to transportation links.

The city has also been the stage for some of the most visible expressions of the Hindu nationalist political and cultural agenda that has defined much of Indian politics in recent years, including the controversies around the Gyanvapi mosque and the broader movement to assert the Hindu character of sites historically shared between communities or contested between religions. For many devout Hindus, these efforts represent a legitimate restoration of a religious heritage damaged by historical conquest. For India's Muslim community and for proponents of secular governance, they represent a troubling erosion of the constitutional principle of equal treatment of all religions.

Varanasi is thus not merely a city of ancient religion and timeless ritual. It is also a city where the most urgent questions of modern India — about history, identity, the relationship between religion and the state, and the meaning of a pluralist democracy in a country of extraordinary religious diversity — are being actively argued, litigated, and contested in real time.

Visiting Varanasi

For the traveler or pilgrim who comes to Varanasi, the experience is typically organized around the riverfront, the ghats, and the dawn boat ride. The most celebrated way to see the city is to hire a small wooden rowing boat before dawn and float along the length of the ghat sequence as the sun rises over the eastern bank, watching the city come to life on the western shore: the bathers immersed to their shoulders in the river, the priests conducting puja on the steps, the flowers and garlands floating downstream, the thin smoke rising from the burning ghats, the bells from the temples cascading over the water, and the extraordinary light of the Indian dawn changing from grey to gold to copper as the sun climbs above the horizon.

In the evening, the Ganga Aarti at the Dashashwamedh Ghat draws thousands of spectators to the riverbank and onto boats moored in the river, as the priests in their silk garments perform the elaborate lamp-waving ceremony to the accompaniment of bells and chanting. The effect, experienced from the water on a clear evening, is unforgettable.

The old city of Varanasi, the narrow lanes that run behind the ghats and connect the various temples with each other and with the main streets, is an experience in itself: a maze of alleyways barely wide enough for two people to pass, lined with shops selling flowers, incense, religious images, silk saris, and every variety of devotional object, with temples appearing at every turn, their bells ringing, their devotees coming and going in an unbroken stream. Getting lost in these lanes is almost inevitable for the first-time visitor, and almost always rewarding.

The journey to Sarnath, ten kilometers away, is essential for any understanding of Varanasi's full significance. The archaeological site of Sarnath contains the remains of the Mauryan stupa and pillar erected by Ashoka, the great Dhamek Stupa, and the ruins of multiple monasteries and temples that testify to Sarnath's importance as a center of Buddhist life for well over a thousand years after the Buddha's first sermon. The Sarnath Museum houses the Ashoka Lion Capital, the finest surviving example of Mauryan sculpture, along with other treasures from the site.

Varanasi, as Mark Twain understood, defies ordinary description. It is a place that produces not merely impressions but transformations in the people who spend time within it — a city where the proximity of birth and death, sacred and ordinary, ancient and present, produces a kind of accelerated encounter with the fundamental questions of human existence. It is, by any measure, one of the most remarkable places on earth.

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