Varanasi & Spiritual India

Why Varanasi & Spiritual India works

Varanasi, also known as Benares or Kashi, sits on the left bank of the Ganges in the southeastern part of Uttar Pradesh, about 692 kilometres southeast of New Delhi and 121 kilometres downstream of Prayagraj, where the Ganges meets the Yamuna at another major pilgrimage site. It holds a central place in Hindu traditions of pilgrimage, death, and mourning, and is counted among the world's oldest continually inhabited cities, its ancient name of Kashi tied to a kingdom of the same name recorded in the first millennium BCE. Excavations near the city have turned up artefacts dating back as far as 1800 BCE, and when the Chinese traveller Xuanzang visited around 635 CE he described a city about five kilometres long along the Ganges, already home to some thirty temples and Buddhist monks.

In Hindu tradition, Varanasi's sanctity traces to a myth in which Shiva, in a conflict with Brahma, tore off one of Brahma's five heads and carried it with him until it fell and disappeared into the ground upon his arrival in the city, an act said to have made Varanasi one of the Sapta Puri, the seven Hindu cities believed capable of granting moksha, liberation from the cycle of rebirth. The city's religious authority deepened in the eighth century when the philosopher Adi Shankara formally established Shiva worship as an official sect here, and in the mid-second millennium, figures of the Bhakti movement born in Varanasi, including Kabir and Tulsidas, went on to shape devotional traditions across Hinduism, Sikhism, and Sufism; Tulsidas wrote his Awadhi-language Ramcharitmanas, a widely read vernacular retelling of the Ramayana, during this period. Nearby Sarnath, where the Lion Capital of Ashoka has been interpreted as commemorating the Buddha's first sermon in the fifth century BCE, adds a Buddhist pilgrimage circuit to the city's Hindu one.

The riverfront ghats are what most visitors experience first: Varanasi has at least 84 of these stone-stepped embankments along the Ganges, most used for ritual bathing, with the Dashashwamedh Ghat, believed to be the city's oldest and built where Brahma is said to have welcomed Shiva after sacrificing ten horses, drawing evening Agni Pooja fire ceremonies performed by groups of priests. The Manikarnika Ghat, mentioned in Gupta-period inscriptions from the fourth century and rebuilt as a permanent embankment in 1302, functions as the city's primary Hindu cremation site. Among the roughly 23,000 temples in Varanasi, the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, one of twelve Jyotirlinga shrines to Shiva, is the most visited, rebuilt in its current form in 1780 by Queen Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore after repeated earlier destructions, with its gilded pinnacles added in 1839 by Ranjit Singh, the ruler of Punjab; the Sankat Mochan Hanuman Temple and the Durga Temple, the latter known for the monkeys living in its surrounding trees, round out the city's most-visited shrines.

Varanasi has a humid subtropical climate with sharp seasonal swings: a dry summer from April to June sees temperatures climbing as high as 46 degrees Celsius, the monsoon runs from July to October and brings most of the city's roughly 1,110 millimetres of annual rainfall, and winters, from December to February, bring cold nights alongside cold waves sweeping down from the Himalayas, with morning fog common and hot, dry winds known locally as loo blowing through in summer. Set in the fertile Indo-Gangetic Plain, the city sits between the Ganges' confluences with the smaller Varuna and Assi rivers, a stretch of riverbank that itself forms a sacred pilgrimage route ending at the Sakshi Vinayak Temple.

Tourism is Varanasi's second most important industry after its long-standing silk-weaving and crafts trade, and the city's visitor patterns split clearly by origin: domestic tourists, drawn mostly from Bihar, West Bengal, and elsewhere in Uttar Pradesh, come primarily for religious purposes, while foreign visitors, most commonly from Sri Lanka and Japan, are drawn to the ghats along the Ganges and to Sarnath, with the peak season running from October to March. A morning boat ride past the ghats remains one of the most established ways to see the riverfront, taking in the tiers of shrines, temples, and palaces that rise directly from the water's edge along a stretch of bank shaped over centuries by patrons including the Maratha rulers who funded many of the ghats still standing today.

• Varanasi — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

Trip Snapshot

Highlights

Suitable For