Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  Below the temples, palaces and monasteries, where once a curving earthen bluff stretched for several miles, a giant amphitheater of buff-colored stone steps comes all the way down to the water’s edge. These are the much-photographed ghats (literally, “banks”) built mainly from the 1700s onward by the pious rich. Their severe lines are softened by mushroom-shaped umbrellas, octagonal pavilions, pillared shrines, palace balconies, and, above all, by the masses of pilgrims from all over India who congregate here daily in ever-changing formations to bathe, to pray, and to cremate their dead.

  The mighty Ganges River, it is believed, fell from heaven with torrential force. As it headed toward earth, Shiva caught it in his locks, tamed it, then let it proceed on its journey. The waterfront at Banaras was as sacred three thousand years ago as it is today. “If you bottle Ganges water, it will stay clear and pure forever,” my boatman says. “The same cannot be said of our Banaras tap water.”

  Banaras ghats

  As I travel upstream and then down, passing one ghat after another, the drama before me seems both medieval and eternal. It starts before dawn and plays itself out, impervious to the hundreds of photographers who come here to “capture” it. Women stand waist-deep in water, fully clothed, some with their heads covered by bright saris. They offer marigolds, roses, and water lilies to the rising sun, asking it for a share of its glory and wisdom in return. Then, filling little brass pots with the holy water, they climb the ghat steps, their bodies demurely covered yet revealed by their clinging saris. Soon they will change, discreetly, right there on the steps, and perhaps carry the Ganges water up to a temple to pour over a deity. Or they might take the water home. I once saw a lady, in a chauffeur-driven car, carefully balancing a very full pot on her knee. It could have been intended for someone sick—a few drops can work wonders—or for use in the kitchen. Several Banarasi ladies informed me that tea made with anything but Ganges water tastes quite horrible. And the Maharajah of Banaras says that his palace uses only Ganges water for cooking and drinking. (He quietly added that the water was collected farther upstream. Much, much farther. From another town!)

  The men at the river are often more athletic than the women. Wearing skimpy loincloths, they wrestle, dive, swim, and contort their bodies into advanced yoga positions—yoga being another path to spiritual revelation. Some brush their teeth with bitter twigs, then push two fingers vigorously down their gullets in quick succession, both acts part of their daily ablutions. Some, old and frail, stand quietly in the water, praying and chanting. All the while temple bells ring and the deep sound of conch shells reverberates over the river.

  The city fascinated me and repelled me, like Yoga, like India. It was no good pretending the repulsion did not exist: Benaras is an incarnation of the Hindu mind, full of shocks and surprises. You cannot view her through the eyes of the flesh, or if you do you will want to shut them. Her real life burns in the Unconscious.

  —F. Yeats Brown, Bengal Lancer, quoted by Peter Yapp in The Travellers’ Dictionary of Quotations

  Each ghat has its own character. One is used mainly by South Indians, another by Bengalis. One ghat is for fishermen, one for laundrymen. But the real show-stoppers for tourists are the two ghats used for cremations.

  Most cremation grounds in India are walled, and built on the outskirts of cities because of pollution. But Banaras is Shiva’s city. In his capacity as Destroyer, Shiva reigns over the cremation grounds. One of the most hallowed spots on the river is Manikarnika Ghat, so named because Shiva’s wife, Parvati, is thought to have dropped a jeweled earring here. It is believed that the world was created here, and here, one day, it will be destroyed. Death does not pollute here, it liberates. So bodies are cremated out in the open for all to see.

  Biers, traditionally made of green bamboo, are deftly maneuvered through the narrow lanes of the inner city where carriers chant “God’s name is the Truth, speak Truth, Truth is.” When a body enters Manikarnika Ghat it is in the kingdom of the Dom Rajas. Though they are untouchable by caste, the Doms have a monopoly: they control the prices of funeral wood, of shroud cloths and of the aromatic chips and resins that are scattered over the pyre. Even the eternal flame, without which no pyre may be lit, is for sale, priced according to the purse of the deceased.

  Once the cremation has been completed, little children from the Dom’s household sift through the ashes, scooping up the odd piece of gold or jewelry. Then the remains are consigned to the river. If a family cannot afford enough firewood, partially burned corpses are slipped into the water.

  One time, a corpse like this, just barely singed, attached itself to the stern of our boat. For the next two hours it stayed with us, rising and falling with the waves, moving when we did and stopping whenever we paused to go ashore. All this time the boatman, his boy assistant, and my guide, as well as the hundreds of people bathing and praying in the river an arm’s length away, paid it no attention whatsoever.

  It occurred to me then that the corpse was just one of millions that had used this waterway. Indeed, the Ganges has carried the ashes of almost every ancestor of mine, including my mother and father. (My parents were cremated privately in Delhi, and their ashes scattered in the Ganges at a more northern point.) If the sight of the open cremations here was so unsettling for me, a Hindu, what effect could they have on Westerners, who keep the business of death so totally separated from the business of life? Is Banaras, then, only for the strong-stomached traveler? Yet all around me, almost crowding out the pilgrims, were the boats of tourists—German, French, English, American.Was it just ghoulish fascination, or was something else happening here?

  Actually, the concentrated spectacle of life and death on the ghats, so openly displayed, is almost cathartic. A traveler’s exultation at the vision of a golden dawn quickly turns to agitation at the sight of the cremations. This is generally followed by an uneasy calm, when a thoughtful visitor is apt to begin searching for answers and meanings.

  As I watched, as in a silently moving play, the skin grew black and cracked, the tongue protruded and a leg fell off where it had burned through at the knee joint; the fingers curled. I could smell the disintegrating flesh and ashes blew into my face, so I moved away, rather full of awe and a feeling of submissiveness that the living could so matter-of-factly yet with respect, handle the dead. And I thought how frail we are, how easily we die, how minute is the line existing between light and utter darkness, and how meaningless is the body once life had departed from it. And I thought with shame of my own country and how frightened and revolted we are by death and wished we could all come, one by one, to stand learning beside the burning ghats.

  —Karen Eberhardt, “Banaras: Holy City”

  The waterfront is, in some ways, just the face of the city. To understand its heart, soul, and muscle, one must look elsewhere. Such a task might take a lifetime—or several lifetimes, as Hindus say. Banaras, throughout its long history, has taken pride in catering to those who wish to try. Ever since it was founded, the city has been a center of learning, drawing some of the worthiest national and international scholars—art historians, grammarians, theologians, philosophers. Today much of the scholarship is attached to two major centers: the Banaras Hindu University, set in thirteen hundred leafy acres and containing one of India’s best museums, the Bjarat Kala Bhawan, and the Sanskrit University, which is housed, amusingly enough, in a grand Gothic extravaganza.

  But a more ancient method of teaching and learning doggedly survives. This is the system of gurus—individual teachers and spiritual guides.“The great gurus,” a young Banarasi lady once told me with conviction, “will even sacrifice their own liberation at death, coming back for as many lifetimes as needed to guide their pupils to salvation.” Pupils, as many as a guru wishes, learn at his feet whatever and whenever he wishes to teach. There are gurus who can explain the intricacies of the scriptures, gurus for yoga, for music (sitarist Ravi Shankar and Bismillah Khan, India’s greatest shehnai player, are both from Banaras), f
or weaving, and for fortune-telling.

  Banaras also has some eminent minds who can turn into short-term gurus. When it became known that I would be writing about the city, suggestions poured in about the “knowledgeable ones” I should see: Priya Devi, the Sanskrit scholar who lives simply in a monastery by the water; Supakar, who runs the weavers’ center; Ram Shankar Tripathi, head priest of Banaras’s important Vishwanath Temple, who is a scholar, spiritual leader, university man, and (this was added for my particular benefit) a very good cook, and Professor Anand Krishna of Banaras Hindu University, aristocrat, art historian, Banaras incarnate.

  I began to see Banaras anew through the eyes of the “knowledgeable ones.” I learned that waves of Aryans from the Ural Mountains and the Caucasus had swept into India through the northwest passes in ancient times, settling first in the Indus Valley and then in the Gangetic plains. They probably reached Banaras about thirty-five hundred years ago. Professor Anand Krishna theorizes that the Dom Rajas at the cremation grounds might well have been the local rulers at the time, until they were conquered by the Aryans, enslaved, and given the menial tasks they have today.

  Banaras sat on two major trade routes, the Ganges River and what is now the Grand Trunk Road. By 1000 B.C. the city was a thriving commercial center, where millionaires did business with sacks of gold, and bazaars offered emeralds, ivories, peacocks, and gossamer-fine fabrics. In its wooded site dotted with sacred ponds, lakes, and wells, Banaras was also called the Forest of Bliss. All manner of sages and philosophers were drawn here to set up retreats and ashrams, where they passed on their learning to their pupils. It was here, to the Deer Park named Sarnath, that Buddha came after his enlightenment—to preach his first sermon, make his first converts and start his new religion. By the twelfth century, both Hinduism and Buddhism flourished here, along with spiritualism and commerce.

  It was at this stage that armies of Muslims came charging in from the same northwest passes the Aryans had used, destroying all the temples of “unbelievers” in their path. Under the command of their general, Qutub-ud-din Aibak, they proudly hacked down about one thousand temples in Banaras, using fourteen hundred camels to haul away their loot. The beautiful Sarnath complex, with its monasteries, pavilions, stupas, and exquisite statuary—here, a gently smiling Buddha draped in the sheerest of fabrics; there, a pillar from the third century B.C. topped with four magnificent lions—lay scattered in the dust. Buddhism in India never recovered from the attacks; Hinduism proved more resilient.

  To an outsider and, indeed, to most Hindus, the city may appear as a disordered, crowded jungle of temples. But to those Hindus whose vision is recorded in the mahatmyas of Kashi—those who see the city as a mandala—these temples are all part of an ordered whole, a structured universe with its own divine functionaries and its own constellations of deities. And their vision is embodied in the sacred geography of the city.

  —Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light

  Muslim rulers kept a firm grip on India until the early eighteenth century. When they happened to be tolerant—or busy elsewhere—some Hindu temples were allowed to be rebuilt, but generally with a lower profile. Then a hard-liner would arrive, and with him another onslaught of destruction. The greatest indignity was reserved for the most sacred temples—they were razed, and then mosques were built on their rubble, sometimes (as in the Gyanvapi Mosque) using an old, very Hindu wall for support. There were many conversions as well, and today a good quarter of the city is Muslim; religious disharmony remains a constant threat. One of Banaras’s greatest sages and poets, Kabir, a Muslim, arose in the fifteenth century to cry out that there was only one God for all mankind, whether we called Him Allah or Rama. Kabir is still read in every Indian school, but his message is largely ignored.

  The next rulers in Banaras were the British. They set up an English system of education (it was they who built the Gothic university), considered the view from the Ganges quite grand (especially when a slight haze filtered out its more undesirable aspects), but thought the Hindu temples lacked both age and grandeur. They dismissed the “idols” as primitive, if not lewd. Many of the British showed their disrespect by tramping through holy precincts with their shoes on. Hoping that Christianity would save Banaras, they set up missions, but Banarasis refused to budge. Little did the British know that years later, in fair return, Banaras would be exporting its own Vedantic philosophers and Ravi Shankars to capture the minds and hearts of the West.

  In the end, the British and the Indians seemed to live together in peace. When the Prince of Wales visited here in 1876 the Maharajah of Banaras lit up the sky with welcoming fireworks, then floated thousands of small, glittering oil lamps in the Ganges River. “It seemed as though a starry sky were passing between banks of gold,” wrote an almost delirious correspondent of the London Times.

  While Banaras is ancient, scarcely a single whole building here is more than four hundred years old. The greatness of the city’s temples—there are more than eight hundred of them, and hundreds of shrines and pilgrimage sites—has more to do with their perceived sacredness than their architecture. Almost every major god of the Indian pantheon has a temple. There is the blood-colored temple for Durga, the warrior god who rides a tiger and brandishes a sword. Large bands of monkeys have settled here, so children enjoy the visits as much as adults. Youngsters have even more fun at the Tulsi Manas Temple, dedicated to Rama, where scenes from the Ramayana are enacted by three-dimensional mechanical figures.

  The temple dedicated to Hanuman, the monkey god who frees people from troubles is good to visit on Tuesday, Hanuman’s day of worship. The Bharat Mata Temple has a large, informative relief map of Mother India as its central icon, thus offering pilgrims a sound lesson in geography as well as a chance for a quick prayer. There are shrines for Ganesha, the elephant-headed god, and for Lolarka, the sun god.

  But the primary god in the city is Shiva. Of the more than five hundred temples dedicated to him, the most sacred is the gold-steepled Temple of Vishwanath, considered to be the spiritual heart of Banaras. No non-Hindu is permitted to enter its silver portals. The temple was built, destroyed, and rebuilt several times, and the present edifice dates to the eighteenth century. But its lingam, the phallic stone symbol of Shiva, is of great antiquity, having been saved during one attack by a fast-thinking priest who flung it down the Well of Wisdom in the yard.

  Shiva as Nataraja (dancing)

  This temple can only be reached on foot, through lanes so narrow that two people often rub shoulders as they pass. The best approach, used by the pilgrims for centuries, is the medieval Vishwanath Gulley. Only dappled sunlight enters here, filtered through the cloth awnings of the shops on either side. In the stores you can buy cooling attar of khus (similar to sandalwood) for the summer, or warming attar of musk for chilly January days. There are also betel leaves, specially treated here with a secret formula so they turn pale white. And what pilgrim can resist a rosary? Each god seems to have a preference in beads: Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, likes dried lotus seeds; Saraswati, the goddess of learning, is inclined toward rock crystal.

  Then there are the clay and lacquer images of the gods. It is said in Banaras that each week has seven days and nine religious festivals, and new images must be bought for each festival. Would you like a painting on ivory? “Very little ivory comes from Kenya nowadays,” a shopkeeper complains, “so our great craftsmen are learning to do the same delicate carvings in sandalwood.” Would you care for a sandalwood Ganesha? Perhaps you are saving your money for a choice piece of Banarasi fabric?

  Ah, the fabric! No Indian bride worth her salt considers her trousseau complete without at least one Banarasi sari, at least one “splendid web” of silk and gold. It is said that the cloth chosen for Buddha’s shroud almost twenty-five years ago was a length of Banarasi cotton. It was soft and malleable and yet so tightly woven that oil would not pass through it.

  Today, much of the dyeing and weaving is done by families of Muslims, conv
erted over the centuries from Buddhism and Hinduism. To buy a sari the old-fashioned, traditional way, we head toward one of the weavers’ districts. It is almost dusk. Skeins of freshly dyed silk—peacock blues, rust reds, lichen greens, and silvery mauves—hang to dry on clotheslines. Behind every open doorway is a loom, set in a pit with one, perhaps two, naked bulbs suspended over it. Work will continue into the night.

  We come to a doorway where a board says “Kassim’s Silk Emporium.” Shoes are left outside. After navigating through several anterooms and courtyards where relatives lounge, we come to one of the main showrooms. The floor is covered with mattresses and sheets. There is no furniture, just steel cupboards against the walls and a few pillows to lean against. A ceiling fan whirs noisily. We are welcomed in.

  Social preliminaries, a part of business here, are carried out with leisurely formality. A thin gentleman with a hennaed beard offers us sweet, milky tea flavored with cardamom, and thandai, a local milk drink enriched with ground nuts, and cannabis, should we desire it. Betel leaves are consumed as we listen to gentle laments about the passing of better times when customers knew how to appreciate the finer points of fabrics. “Now they just look, lay down their money, grab their packets and leave.”