Whose Varanasi Is It?

October 01, 2022

I first travelled to Varanasi in 2015. We had flown in to Kashi as group of music students on 8th April to witness the Sankat Mochan Sangeet Samaroh, one of the oldest music festivals in India. My teacher, who had grown up studying music in Varanasi, showed us the city through local eyes: rasgullas at a corner shop in a gali; international tourists gawking at dilapidated havelis as we made our way to the mandir; boat rides at the ghat where we would see the Ganga aarti from the water, hundreds of diyas and their wavy reflections glimmering in the dark.

This is the Banaras that Simar Preet Kaur speaks of in her Nat Geo Traveller article “The Musical Sounds of Varanasi”. She regales her story of meeting many musicians and her interaction with sound and music wherever she went. It never transformed into a cacophony for her. Rather, each musician remained a vacuum universe from step to step as Kaur made her way down to the ghat.

My Varanasi was full of smells, not all of them pleasant. As Indian villages are wont to do (even metropolitan ones), there are heaps of rotting garbage that grow in frequency as you move deeper into the galis. The narrow straits that the locals call roads are full of people touching, pushing, squeezing past you in a permanent traffic jam, especially near the crossroads where the Kashi Vishwanath mandir stands. You will feel each layer of skin rubbed away, until you have been marked in the colours of Kashi by its people.

This is the mutating Kashi that Saurabh Sharma speaks of in his Reuter’s article “Indian court limits Muslim gatherings at mosque after Hindu idols found, lawyer says.” Following a script similar to what happened in 2019, Muslims are no longer allowed to pray in group of more than 20 in the Gyanvapi mosque. All of this, while Muslim and Hindu musicians alike engage in riyaaz over every inch of this sprawling, TARDIS of a city – each room contains more than you think it does. This is idea of each place containing hidden treasure is rooted deep inside the minds of “hardline Hindu groups tied to Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)” that Sharma evokes. They “demand to excavate inside some mosques and to permit searches in the Taj Mahal mausoleum”.

This is not the Varanasi I know.

Modi ji is persistent in his vision of uniting India, as he launches various food schemes and discussions around pedagogic policy, and yet he says nothing of a mosque under curfew. Of course, he says nothing. The Reuters news article is two months old by the time PM Modi launches the Akshaya Patra Mid-Day Meal Kitchen in July ’22: old news bears no new attention. Yet, on Sep 13 ’22, a district judge agreed to hear the petition of Hindu women for permission to worship inside the mosque.

This has never been the Varanasi I thought I knew.

Nor has it been Mirza Ghalib’s, as he paints verbose pictures of lakes and healing in Chiragh-e-Dair.