Aimless in Banaras: Wanderings in India's Holiest City

by Bishwanath Ghosh

Bells suddenly clang, drowning her whines. M.S. Subbulakshmi’s Suprabhatam begins to play on the temple speakers. The time is 3.45. A new day has begun in Banaras. The queue begins finally to move. I wait for my turn to touch Shiva.

I also find a number of books on Banaras; only one, the young man who runs the shop tells me, sells like hot cakes: Diana L. Eck’s Banaras—City of Light.

India is a country of bystanders. What’s going on?—nowhere else does this question arouse so much curiosity as in this part of the world.

Banaras may not be beautiful, but it is photogenic.

now there is the smartphone—the biggest-ever distraction afflicting mankind—which would have surely diminished the appetite for such traditional forms of entertainment. Even a sunrise or sunset is no longer relished by the eyes; it is instead captured on the phone. Several attempts are made to get the perfect shot and by then the sun has either risen too high or disappeared behind the horizon.

There are books and there are books. One is an afterthought, when you look back at a segment of your life to realise you’ve accumulated sufficient material; the other is planned, when you already have a subject in mind and then set out to fill the pages with people and places.

But even planned books rarely go as per plan. I’ve so far written four books about places, and in each case the final manuscript has vastly differed from the initial synopsis submitted to the publisher—the difference reflecting the expanded horizons of the writer in the course of his research.

Life isn’t easy for young, single women in a small town in the Hindi heartland. Their actions are invariably guided by the second-biggest worry afflicting Indians (the first being the lack of money): what will people say?

In India, faith in rituals often outweighs faith in God.

A city, once it is born, grows southwards, and as times passes, the south becomes upscale and north down-market. Then one fine day someone recognises the heritage value of the north and people begin flocking to it as part of conducted tours.

Satisfaction is the most important thing in life. If you have satisfaction, you have everything.’