Boundless faith, timeless city

Sleepy tourists follow singing pilgrims on the road to the Ganga. At this wee hour, a handful of pilgrims and vendors keep alive this road, which was a river of cycle rickshaws last evening. The motley crowd takes a detour at one of the entrances to the Vishwanatha temple, the famed destination in Kashi aka Varanasi aka Banaras. Their bhajans will wake up the deity, Shiva. Then they will visit the nearby Sakshi Vinayak temple, where Ganesha the elephant god keeps an attendance register for the devotees of his father.

Farther down the street, priests and boatmen wait for more pilgrims and tourists at Dasaswamedha ghat. Beyond them the legendary Ganga flows in the darkness. Bathing ghats or stepped embankments are already crowded. Sages and sinners compete each other for a spot amid the moored boats. A dip in the river from the Himalayas would purify them. The heavenly river was brought to earth by the penance of three generations of kings to wash away their ancestors’ sins. Ganga owes its mythical origin to King Bhageeratha and his father and grandfather.

As a group of foreigners follow their tour operator onto a waiting boat, a frail boatman in many layers of clothes finds his first customer in me. He offers to show me all the ghats in Varanasi and tell me the stories attached to it. As we fix the price, he beckons a boy, who rows a boat to the ghats. Lallu Boatwalle has 40 such boats on the ghats, the oarsman says. Oarsmen could hire it after finding a customer. Half the earnings go to the owner. I ask the oarsman’s name. He says it’s not important. Always ask the boat owner’s name.

Sampath has come to Varanasi from Ghazipur. His father too had been rowing boats in the Ganga. The experienced tourist guide mixes the tales of the ghats with his own. “Oarsmen of Varanasi know many things about the place. You ask anyone about us. We take whatever you give us. But half of it goes to the boat owner,” he repeats. It is a tough job, especially in the harsh winter of northern India. Like rikshawallahs, most of the old oarsmen retire to a world of hunger and tuberculosis.

As Sampath rows downstream, the chilling black turns a pale gray. Traces of dawn appear beyond the eastern sandbank, where makeshift change rooms are built for the occasional pilgrim. The vast river is drowned in mist, like the day when a sage mated with the oarswoman on a drifting boat, siring the legendary clan of Kauravas and Pandavas. The Ganga nurtured India’s mythology and history. On its banks were the epics wrote. On its banks the mahajanapadas (city states) of the Iron Age flourished. Kashi was one among them.

Earthen lamps floating in the river are now dim. Sampath bows at the first sight of the red sun. So do the pilgrims at the ghats and in the river. A large group of Japanese tourists on a boat recite prayers with folded hands. They release fish to the Ganga. Sun, the first god, still presides over the Asian pantheon of deities. Pilgrims worship the sun and the mighty river with as much fear and reverence as Vishnu and Shiva, the gods of preservation and destruction respectively in the divine trinity of Hinduism.

Varanasi, 700 odd kilometers from New Delhi, is central to every pilgrim circuit. The ghats dotting the western bank of the Ganga are memorials of the patrons of faith. Every prince sought a space to build a ghat to immortalise his name. If you have money, build a ghat and be famous, Sampath tells me as he describes each of the ghats till the Malavya Bridge. In monsoon, the furious river conquers the ghats. We row past a leaning tower. Even now, the river is over 100 feet deep here, he tells me.

While some of the ghats resound with myths, most of the embankments bear the names of Maharajas of Jaipur, Udaipur, Gwalior, Indore and other princely states, who built it. Manikarnika, a burning ghat, is the last on a five-stop pilgrim itinerary that begins from Asi Ghat and covers Dasaswamedha, Harishchandra and Panchaganga Ghats in that order. Another five-day pilgrimage, in a circular route, begins at Manikarnika ghat and ends at Varuna ghat, where the Varuna river joins the Ganga.

Smoke rises from pyres at Manikarnika and Jalasayin ghats. Faith brings the living and the dead to Varanasi. There are people who come to the holy town to die. Their bodies will be burned at its designated ghats and their ashes immersed in the Ganga. Priests and undertakers wait for the dead amid stacks of firewood at these ghats. These men, like death, are forever at work. The Ganga has been bearing a sin with all its dirt and a soul with its remnant ashes for centuries. Miraculously, the sacred river is still blue.

I leave Sampath at Dasaswamedha Ghat, where ten horses were sacrificed in ancient times. This is the busiest and easily accessible ghat in Varanasi. I walk past priests under big umbrellas. Their agents accost me. Holy men, who bless the pilgrims and recite prayers for them, are always in demand. Earlier in the river, two foreign women on another boat had bowed to me with folded hands. Either they took my saffron bandana for a symbol of spiritualism or they recognised hitherto untapped holiness!

Certain ghats seem to have a regional flavour. Pilgrims from non-Hindi speaking states are concentrated in ghats where priests who speak their languages are at service. Differences of language, ritual and sect are levelled in the waters of Ganga. Varanasi is every pilgrim’s must-see destination. Groups of villagers from different parts of India come to bathe in the holy waters. A boatful of pilgrims sings paeans to the gods. Fish, gulls, goats and dogs feast on the offerings made to the river.

Varanasi’s ghats are open-air gyms too. Shape is as much a concern as spirit. Every morning, dozens of men - young and old, wrestlers and shopkeepers - flex their muscles at the ghats. A 68-year-old man is exercising with younger comrades. Ask his name and he says he is the namesake of the late Devilal, the wrestler-politician. The bond between spiritual life and a strong body is nothing new. Several ancient houses of sages grew as physical forces. Even now, sages from certain sects do incredible feats.

At Harishchandra Ghat, two pyres are burning. Amid buffaloes and goats grazing on the naked bank, a strange figure - a saffron-clad sage with his eyeballs rolled over - stands guard to a burning pyre, like Harishchandra, the just king who became a gravedigger. The shamshan (crematorium) ghat is named after the king whose legend of ultimate faith and self-negation is a leitmotif of the holy town. This is the second important burning ghat in Varanasi after Manikarnika.

Upstream, a huge water plant purifies Ganga water for the denizens of Varanasi. Even Gangajal, which purifies the soul, needs municipal clarification. Somewhere near Asi Ghat, I crossed the Asi river and never knew about it. I took it for a discharge canal from the town. Varanasi, sandwiched between the Varuna and the Asi, got its name from the two tributaries of the Ganga. Between the two streams, 52 ghats, in a five-kilometre stretch, line the Ganga.

Wonders of Varanasi are still unexplored. Countless temples dedicated to almost every deity in the Hindu pantheon dot the town. There is even a temple dedicated to Bharata Mata (Mother India), opened by Mahatma Gandhi in 1936. A hub of culture, where once lived Buddha and Mahavira, Tulsidas and Adi Shankara, Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh, Dayananda Saraswati and Vivekananda, Varanasi has centuries’ imprint on it. Banaras Hindu University, Kashi Vidyapeeth and Sanskrit University are its temples of education.

Ganga, through which Varanasi’s craftsmen traded their creation to other parts of India, still keeps the town alive with an unending flow of pilgrims. The town is famous for its trademark Banaras Silk. Trade route has changed, but Banaras silk and brocades are still a sought-after commodity. At noon, bazaars of Varanasi are maddeningly crowded and noisy. Rickshaws have once again conquered the streets. Every alley is throbbing with commerce. It’s said Varanasi was a busy town since the beginning of time. But the hundreds of pilgrims descending on the town everyday will keep it busy till the end of time.

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