Varanasi

Varanasi grew where the Ganges swings north between the mouths of two small streams, the Varuna and the Assi, which are usually taken to give the city its name. Settlement around the site goes back to at least the first millennium BCE, and the city appears in the Mahabharata and in Buddhist and Jain texts as Kashi, the city of light, capital of one of the sixteen mahajanapadas. The Buddha preached at Sarnath just outside it, and two of the Jain tirthankaras are held to have been born here. Greek and Chinese travellers, including Xuanzang in the seventh century, described a crowded city of temples and scholarship.

From the twelfth century the city passed through repeated conquest under the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals, and its principal temples were destroyed and rebuilt more than once; the present Kashi Vishwanath temple dates only from 1780, when the Maratha queen Ahilyabai Holkar paid for it. Much of the riverfront seen today is younger still: Maratha, Rajput and Bengali rulers built the stone ghats and the palaces above them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which is why the bank is a patchwork of regional styles.

The Banaras State of the maharajas, based at Ramnagar, became a British protectorate in the late eighteenth century, and Varanasi became a centre of Sanskrit and Urdu learning, silk weaving and music. Banaras Hindu University was founded in 1916. Since independence the city has expanded well beyond the old lanes, and between 2019 and 2021 a wide corridor was cut between the Kashi Vishwanath temple and the river, clearing hundreds of buildings and changing the approach to the shrine.

For Hindus this is Kashi, the city of Shiva, where dying and being cremated beside the Ganges is believed to release the soul from rebirth. That belief governs the rhythm of the place: bathers and priests on the steps before sunrise, processions carrying the dead through the lanes at any hour, and the Ganga aarti of lamps and bells at Dashashwamedh each evening. Pilgrims walk the Panchkroshi route around the city, and widows, ascetics and the terminally ill come to live out their last years here.

It is also one of India's deepest reservoirs of classical culture. The Banaras gharana shaped Hindustani vocal music, tabla and shehnai — Ravi Shankar was born here and Bismillah Khan spent his life in the city — and the Sankat Mochan temple hosts a long-running music festival. Kabir and Tulsidas both lived and wrote in Varanasi, Tulsidas composing the Ramcharitmanas that the Ramnagar Ramlila still performs. Sanskrit scholarship continues in the old pathshalas and at Sampurnanand Sanskrit University.

Craft is the other strand. Banarasi silk saris, woven with gold and silver brocade, are made in workshops concentrated in the city's Muslim weaving neighbourhoods, and Hindu and Muslim families have long worked the same trade together. Local manners are direct and talkative, humour is famous and sharp, and the word banarasipan is used for a particular unhurried, pleasure-taking attitude to life that residents claim as their own.

About 1.2 million people live in the city and rather more in the wider urban area, on a densely built bank where the old wards remain among the most crowded in India. Life divides between the pilgrim economy — priests, boatmen, guides, flower and offering sellers, lodging houses — and older trades: silk weaving, brassware, wooden toys, and the shops and workshops of the lanes. The university, hospitals and government offices employ many others, and the Banaras Locomotive Works at the edge of the city is a long-standing industrial employer.

The day starts very early. Boats push off in the dark for sunrise, the ghats fill with bathers and laundry, shops in the lanes open late in the morning, and the crowd returns to the river in the evening for the aarti. Traffic in the newer areas around Godowlia, the Cantonment and Lanka is heavy and slow, and the contrast between the car-free lanes and the ring of congested main roads is sharp.

Persistent pressures shape daily life: the pollution of the Ganges, which has been the subject of national clean-up programmes for decades; winter air quality across the Ganges plain; and the building works that have reshaped the temple approach and the roads. Many young people leave for Delhi, Mumbai or the Gulf for work, and remittances matter to households across the surrounding districts. Varanasi has been a closely watched parliamentary seat since 2014, when Narendra Modi was first elected from it.

Varanasi eats early and eats fried. The standard breakfast is kachori sabzi — small puffed breads stuffed with lentils, served with a spiced potato curry, often followed by jalebi or a bowl of warm milk. Chaat is a serious local business: tamatar chaat, cooked down with spices and topped with crisp fried bread, and palak chaat, spinach leaves in batter with yoghurt and chutney, are both Banarasi forms of it. Food in the ghat lanes is overwhelmingly vegetarian, and onion and garlic are absent from many temple-adjacent kitchens.

Milk and sweets run through everything. Lassi is served thick in unglazed clay cups that are thrown away after use, and the city's sweet shops sell rabri, thickened reduced milk, and launglata, a pastry parcel pinned with a clove. In the cold months, vendors sell malaiyo, a froth of milk flavoured with cardamom and left out overnight to catch the dew, which collapses as soon as the weather turns warm. Bhang, a preparation of cannabis, is sold legally at government shops and mixed into thandai, particularly at Holi and Shivaratri.

Meals end with Banarasi paan, betel leaf folded around lime paste, areca nut and sweet fillings, its reputation spread far beyond the city by Hindi film songs. The Muslim quarters keep a separate meat tradition of kebabs, korma and biryani, and the student areas around Lanka add South Indian cafés and cheap thali houses to the mix.