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The people of Banaras—and I mean those living by the river—are one of the happiest people on earth. Unhurried and unworried, living and letting live, helping themselves to a small dose of bhang, or cannabis, every evening to celebrate the extension of their existence on this planet by one more day, they come across as sages who have answers to life’s square puzzles.
After a few days in the city, it is not difficult to see why they are the way they are.
So in Banaras, where thousands come each day to seek answers to life’s square puzzles, you realise that life isn’t a puzzle after all. It’s pretty much a straight line, starting with birth and ending with death.
Brahma Murari surachita lingam nirmala bhasita shobhita lingam
janmaja dukkha vinashaka lingam tat-pranamami Sadashiva lingam…
More than Shiva, it is the idea of Shiva in which I believe. Shiva’s is an attitude you can aspire to. The day you walk around a cremation ground with the same sense of belonging that a young couple experiences on a tour of a house they expect to own soon, you’ve become Shiva.
The other is a culture, a way of life, inhabited by citizens whose betel-stuffed mouths will tell you how foolish it is to chase material success at the cost of everlasting happiness.
I can’t help think about the strangeness of the world we share: one in which the wealthy exercise so that they can burn what they’ve eaten, while the poor exercise so that they get to eat.
VARANASI IS THE fusion of Varuna and Asi, the two rivers that meet the Ganga here, their confluences barely seven kilometres apart.
‘Banaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.’
In Banaras, how old is old depends on whether you are looking at its vintage in terms of the physical or metaphysical.
‘To find Banaras, lose yourself in the galis of Banaras’
BANARAS, IT IS said, rests on the trident of Shiva. It surely rests on a trident whose three prongs are fact, fiction and faith.
The sunrise in Banaras is a picture-postcard one: that’s an unquestionable fact, not a story.
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. And in Banaras, something is always going on. Only that here, because of the halo that hangs over its ghats, even the mundane can be a spectacle:
And in Banaras, something is always going on. Only that here, because of the halo that hangs over its ghats, even the mundane can be a spectacle:
Banaras may not be beautiful, but it is photogenic.
‘Dimag, dil aur ling—head, heart and dick—when they synchronise, you become Shiva.’
‘Banaras is a complex
subject which can take many lifetimes to understand.’
BANARAS IS AN open book. You can turn its pages, go through the sentences and paragraphs over and over again, read between the lines if you like, and yet it is unlikely that you will fully grasp the city.
Ramnagar and Banaras, two towns on the opposite sides of the Ganga: one is a settlement, the other a civilisation.
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.
To have a plan is to be distracted from Banaras, whose heart beats at a leisurely rhythm, best palpated with aimless walks along its ghats.
a plan is to be distracted from Banaras, whose heart beats at a leisurely rhythm, best palpated with aimless walks along its ghats.
‘What is Banaras? Banaras is bana ras, juice that is ready. Keep sipping on the juice, sir. Keep sipping!’
Temsutula Imsong—she is thirty-two—born in a village called Ungma in Nagaland. She studied in Shillong, went on to work in Delhi, and in 2012 came to Ghazipur, near Banaras, to join an NGO started by her friend—an ex-Navy man—who is now her husband. That’s how she first set eyes on the ghats of Banaras.
Banaras ne mujhe seekhna sikhaya.
When you learn something new, you go back to being a student, you feel young all over again. If you live in Banaras, you stay young forever.’
To understand what people mean when they say time flies, you only have to look at the rising or setting sun and then look away for a few moments. When you return your gaze to the sun, you will find it to have moved several notches higher in the sky—that’s the flight of time. Banaras, however, remains untouched by time. Invaders came and went, rulers changed, the earth went around the sun a few thousand times, but this riverside settlement has remained the one-stop shop for seekers of salvation longer than time.
The boat is a good place to gauge the diversity of India: pilgrims come from every corner, bringing along their colours and distinct mannerisms. In Banaras, the much worn-out expression—colours of India—rings real.
Buffaloes are a common sight in Banaras, but their presence at Manikarnika serves as a reminder that the buffalo happens to be the mount of Yama, the god of death.
In India, faith in rituals often outweighs faith in God.
Everybody has to die one day, but you don’t want to be reminded of that, do you? It is, however, not the thought of your own death that makes the sight of the biers so terrifying: it is actually the thought of your near and dear ones being carried away in that fashion. It is a thought you consider secretly in the deepest crevices of your heart, not even sharing it aloud with your own self.’
They are so narrow that they can barely hold five adults shoulder to shoulder, but they cradle a culture whose reputation has reached round the world.
Very few places on earth are as comforting as a bookshop, and the rate at which their number is shrinking accords a special charm to those still standing.
‘Har Har Mahadev’ and ‘bhosrikay’ are the two most common greetings in Banaras: while the first needs to be said with some force,
the second rolls off the tongue easily.
the sun appears remote when viewed across the sea. In Banaras, the ascending orange ball is part of the setting, as if hired to give an exclusive performance to the city every morning.
poet-saint Kabir, another Banarasi, wrote these lines: Dekh tamasha lakdi ka jeete lakdi marte lakdi. Behold the spectacle of wood wood when you’re alive wood when you’re dead.
Banaras has merely followed the mysterious pattern you find in the growth of cities. 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.
In Banaras they cleanse their souls—in addition to clothes and buffaloes—in the river all day and in the evening wave lights at it. Those lamps are pyres of irony.
All one can determine is that Manikarnika continues to be driven by the oldest discovery in the history of mankind: fire.
Banaras, clearly, is not a stranger to destruction. Invaders have come and gone, regimes installed and toppled, edifices built and razed, but Banaras has gone on. It will go on.
‘Yeh ajeeb sheher hai, bada mast sheher hai’—Banaras is a strange city, but one that is happy-go-lucky.
If the train to moksha departs from Banaras, then Godowlia is the lone ticket window where a few thousand hands are shoved in at all times—you can imagine the noise.
‘People talk of being settled. How can one settle when you are not even sure of your next breath?
All highly respected men of science, but at the same time revered as men of God. This, too, is Banaras.
