Varanasi

Sacred geography and myth

Hindu tradition holds that Kāśī was founded by Śiva as his own eternal dwelling, and that the city stands outside the ordinary cycle of cosmic dissolution — a place called avimukta, "never abandoned," that survives even when the universe itself is destroyed. The Kāśī Khaṇḍa, a lengthy section of the Skanda Purāṇa devoted entirely to the city's sanctity, describes it as older than creation. Pilgrims hold that dying in Varanasi, or having one's ashes given to the Ganga there, brings mokṣa, release from rebirth — a belief that has drawn the dying and their families to the city for centuries and still shapes its economy and its daily rhythm.

The city sits at the confluence of three living religious traditions. For Jains, it is linked to Pārśvanātha, the twenty-third Tīrthaṅkara, traditionally dated to around the eighth or ninth century BCE and said to have been born here. For Buddhists, the nearby Deer Park at Sarnath is where the Buddha is traditionally held to have preached his first sermon after enlightenment, setting out the Four Noble Truths and turning what tradition calls the Wheel of Dharma; Ashoka later raised a monolithic pillar there whose lion capital was adopted, more than two thousand years afterward, as the state emblem of the Republic of India.

Early history

Archaeological excavation at the Rajghat mound, on the northern edge of the old city, has traced settlement back to around the early first millennium BCE, associated with the Painted Grey Ware culture and, in later strata, Northern Black Polished Ware — placing Varanasi among the longest continuously inhabited urban sites in the world, though claims of settlement reaching back to the second millennium BCE go beyond what the excavated evidence directly supports. By the sixth century BCE, when the Buddhist Jātaka tales were taking shape, the kingdom of Kāśī was reckoned among the sixteen great states (mahājanapadas) of northern India, and the Jātakas repeatedly describe the city as a centre of trade and fine craftsmanship, particularly textiles. The Mahābhārata mentions Kāśī's temples and ghats as an already-established place of pilgrimage, reflecting its reputation by the time the epic reached something like its present form.

Varanasi's fame for cloth persisted for well over a millennium: its silk and fine muslin were prized across northern India and, by the medieval period, across much of Asia, a reputation that survives today in the Banarasi sari, now protected as a Geographical Indication product.

Seat of learning

Alongside Takṣaśilā (Taxila) in the northwest and Ujjayinī in central India, Varanasi was one of ancient India's great centres of learning, though its scholarship was bound tightly to religion rather than separate from it. It was a principal site for Vedic recitation and Sanskrit ritual study, and later became a stronghold of the classical philosophical schools — Advaita Vedānta, Nyāya, and Mīmāṃsā all had teaching lineages here. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, visiting in the seventh century CE, described a city thick with temples and flourishing in scholarship. Centuries later, the Advaita philosopher Madhusūdana Sarasvatī composed major works while resident in the city; the poet-saint Kabīr, born into a family of weavers here in the fifteenth century, and the Bhakti poet Raidās (Ravidās), born into a leather-working family in the same period, both grew out of Varanasi's dense religious and artisanal life. Tulsīdās composed much of his Awadhi Rāmcaritmānas in the city from the 1570s onward.

Ritual life and the ghats

Varanasi's identity is inseparable from its ghats — some eighty stone stairways descending to the Ganga along the city's crescent riverfront. Manikarnika and Harishchandra Ghats are the city's cremation grounds, where funeral pyres are said to have burned without interruption for centuries; Dashashwamedh Ghat, traditionally the site where Brahmā performed ten horse sacrifices, is the city's principal ceremonial ghat and the setting for the nightly Gaṅgā Ārtī. The Kāśī Viśvanātha Temple, dedicated to Śiva as one of the twelve jyotirliṅgas, has stood at the centre of the city's devotional life for centuries, its present structure dating only to 1780, when it was rebuilt under the patronage of Ahilyābāī Holkar, the Maratha regent of the Holkar state of Indore — the latest of several rebuildings after a long history of destruction. Annual observances — Dev Deepawali, when the ghats are lit with thousands of lamps on the full moon of Kārtik, and the Mahāśivarātri processions — continue practices described in the Purāṇas.

Conquest, destruction, and rebuilding

Varanasi's temples were repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt across the medieval period. Following the Ghurid conquest of the Gangetic plain, forces under Quṭb al-Dīn Aibak sacked the city and destroyed its temples in 1194; the Viśvanātha shrine was rebuilt and later damaged again under the Delhi Sultanate. In 1669, on the order of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb — recorded in the contemporary chronicle Maʾāsir-i ʿĀlamgīrī — the temple was demolished and the Gyanvapi Mosque built adjoining the site, a juxtaposition that remains a subject of dispute in India today. Temple-building activity resumed under later Maratha patronage in the eighteenth century, culminating in Ahilyābāī Holkar's 1780 reconstruction, and pilgrimage and Sanskrit scholarship both revived under the patronage of the Kāśī Narēśh, the traditional Maharajas of Benares, whose ceremonial role in the city's festivals continues into the present.

Colonial and modern Varanasi

British administrators were struck by the city's antiquity from their first sustained contact with it. James Prinsep, who worked at the Benares mint in the 1820s, documented the city's architecture and inscriptions before going on, after his move to Calcutta, to decipher the Brahmi script in 1837. The American writer Mark Twain, visiting in 1896, wrote that Benares was "older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together" — a much-quoted line, though one describing an impression rather than an archaeological fact.

In 1916, Mahatma Gandhi delivered one of his first major public addresses in India at the founding ceremony of Banaras Hindu University, established that year by the nationalist leader and educationist Madan Mohan Malaviya; the university became, and remains, a major centre of both traditional Sanskrit scholarship and modern higher education. Varanasi's weaving industry, Ganga-front pilgrimage economy, and role as a living centre of Hindu ritual practice have all continued alongside this modern institutional growth, and the city has remained in continuous religious use and habitation through every political change that has passed over it.