Dive Into the Colour and Chaos of Varanasi, India’s Most Spiritual City
“All the notes, all the pictures you take, you can’t explain Varanasi. It’s like a kaleidoscope. Every moment the picture is changing.”
Guide Devesh Agarwal is right, of course. My scribblings and snapshots can never hope to capture or comprehend India’s holiest city or its significance to the millions of believers who flock here.
Indians call it Benaras or Kashi – city of eternal light and spiritual knowledge. Sitting on the west bank of the river Ganges, it’s a place of arcane rites that promise nothing less than eternity to the faithful. Those souls fortunate enough to be cremated beside the Ganges are liberated from Hinduism’s cycles of reincarnation and sent straight to nirvana. But for the vast majority of pilgrims, Varanasi offers an opportunity to wash away their sins in the sacred water and pay their respects under the gilded domes of Kashi Vishwanath Temple, where some 180,000 daily visitors worship the city’s protector deity, Shiva.
For lay observers like me, the allure of this mesmerising destination, located roughly halfway between New Delhi and Kolkata, is its non-stop festival of colour and commerce, food and faith, life and death. Humanity in perpetual motion, unchanged for centuries.
Sadhus meditate on waterside platforms to cleanse their souls and achieve enlightenment. Enrobed and turbaned holy men and hucksters, their foreheads smeared with scarlet and saffron, sell blessings or seek alms from the faithful. Worshippers throng medieval laneways to pay homage at temples tucked between the crumbling palaces of kings and queens.
This is my fourth visit to Varanasi but the first time I’ve stayed at such an elite address as BrijRama Palace (below), a sculpted folly of buff-hued sandstone looming over the Ganges at Darbhanga Ghat. The interiors of the hotel’s 32 rooms tend towards the functional, however public areas are fabulously restored spaces where every surface has been carved, painted, inlaid, tiled or otherwise adorned in maximalist Mughal style.
Guests wake to the ethereal sounds of the santoor, a stringed percussion instrument whose harp-like notes fill the carved stone atrium outside my room. During the day, a white-robed scholar offers lessons in how to apply the teachings of the ancient Bhagavad Gita scripture to modern life. But there is no time to linger – Mr Agarwal is waiting.
Agarwal is regarded as Varanasi’s best guide. He has escorted Richard Gere three times and shows me photos on his phone of other famous clients including Hilary Clinton and Tina Turner (“she was very into essential oils”). He’s a gifted interpreter of India and, in a stroke of extremely good karma, he’s been assigned to me by my hosts, luxury travel operator Banyan Tours.
I follow blindly as he leads me deep into the labyrinthine streets, to unfamiliar worlds and hallowed spaces where I feel very much the odd man out. Crowds surge constantly but the mood is never less than euphoric, like a block party. The pilgrims are so thrilled to be here that it’s impossible not to share their excitement.
There is no bad time to visit Varanasi. I have been here in the middle of the monsoon when the ghats (river steps) are mostly submerged and it seems even more crowded than usual. But even in the relative calm of the winter months life is frenetic and trippy. It always feels like a celebration.
At dawn a boatman rows us alongside ghats already brimming with the devout. Bathing begins at around 3.30am, when it’s believed the atmosphere has the most “positive energy”, as Agarwal puts it. A time when mortals might meet the divine. “Especially for the poor, religion is very, very important,” he says as we drift along. “It gives them hope. For these people, it’s like a dream come true to be in Varanasi and bathing in the river Ganga.”
We spend a morning in nearby Sarnath, another revered site 10 kilometres north-east of Varanasi, where Buddha gave his first sermon after gaining enlightenment in Bodh Gaya in the sixth century BCE. In the evening we return to the shore for aarti, an elaborate nightly ceremony of thanksgiving to Mother Ganges. The crowd numbers thousands; Banyan Tours’ considerable clout gives me a front-row seat on a roof terrace right above the action.
Seven priests assume position on riverside daises at Dashashwamedh Ghat. A conch sounds. Butter lamps are lit “to burn away darkness and evil spirits”. Mantras are broadcast, the audience dutifully shouting their responses. Attendants strew the priests’ platforms with flowers until each is a boldly coloured stage. Then the show begins in earnest.
Devotional music blares over the speakers. Bells ring incessantly, setting a manic tempo with drums and chanting. Priests wave lamps and incense at the four cardinal points, trailing smoke as they rotate clockwise. It’s a spiritual sound-and-light show purportedly meant to send the goddess Ganga to sleep, though it’s a wonder she can get any rest with this nightly racket.
The ceremony ends with a shower of rose petals over the priests’ heads. All is beauty and colour and noise and action. Most of it impenetrable to outsiders but, as always in India, you can’t fail to be moved by the spectacle.
