Varanasi Displayed – An Introduction

View on the city from the river Banaras – also known as Kashi (“City of Light”) or Varanasi – is for many the epitome of a Hindu pilgrimage centre, a city whose religious life is focused largely on a sacred river – the Ganges. The Sanskrit term for such a pilgrimage place is tirtha and originally refers to a ford, i.e. a place where one has access to water and can cross to the other side. In many respects Banaras is a place of crossings: here one meets the river goddess Ganga who traverses the three worlds – sky, earth and underworld. Here is the ideal place for dying, as whoever dies here is aware of the promise to immediately reach salvation. It is also a place to perform ancestor rituals and for every ordinary pilgrim who takes a ritual bath, it is a place of auspicious encounters with the other world.

The extraordinary position of Banaras among the Indian pilgrimage towns is linked to its special geographical position. The city of today with more than one million inhabitants lies on the western bank of the Ganges, which at this point flows in a light curve towards a north-eastern direction. This means that a person on the river front – whose segments are called ghats – is facing east, or south-east, looking towards the rising sun in the morning. Due to the bending course of the river, the western side with the embankment lies at a steep slope, from where the water is easily accessible even during the dry season. The eastern side, to the contrary, is a slip-off slope which is flooded during the monsoon, thus ruling out the construction of any kind of buildings. The view to the other side of the river is thus always a view from the urban, densely built environment towards the open, “empty” landscape.

View on the city from the river Favoured by this position, the banks of Banaras have become a unique urban landscape in the course of the citys history, marked by a rich temple architecture and the building activity at the river front. There have been times of destructions, such as during periods of Muslim rule since the 12th century, and so today there are virtually no buildings older than 250 years. But there is evidence that the river embankment – at least in its northern sections – has been part of urban life since long. Many public activities take place at the bathing ghats, the banks which during the last two centuries have been increasingly transformed into stone terraces with stair constructions. Here is the place for bathing and washing, for body exercises, for visiting temples and celebrating rituals. Ascetics meditate in the sun, vendors sell pilgrimage souvenirs, and boatmen look for customers.

However, Banaras is not only a centre of Hinduism. It is true that the city is primarily associated with Shiva: here, according to the Kasikhanda, an eulogical text from the 14th century, there is no spot without a lingam, the phallus-shaped emblem of Shiva. The most important temple in the city is that of Shiva as Vishvanatha, the “Lord of the Universe”: the Golden Temple. But there are also many shrines dedicated to other gods and goddesses, and there are mosques and Buddhist temples testifying to the rich and multiple tradition of this city. Kashi the Luminous, the ancient Crossing, the City of Death, the place of Hindu-Muslim encounter and syncretism, the cosmopolitan centre of learning – there does exist a great variety of sometimes competing images of Banaras that contribute to how the city is experienced by its inhabitants and visitors.

Some of these views on Varanasi are represented in the thematically arranged photo gallery by Thomas Effinger. In addition, the Banaras Bibliography – updated and enlarged in the course of the Varanasi Research Project at the South Asia Institute – grants access to the great variety of literature that has been produced about the city. In the scientific community Varanasi is often labelled as one of the most well-researched Indian cities, a fact that underlines that the specific character of this city does attract scholarly attention until today.

PD Dr. Jörg Gengnagel,
South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg