In Varanasi, Politics And Pilgrimage Go Hand In Hand

Like a committed pilgrim, Varanasi wakes up early. At four-thirty in the morning, on the road leading to the Dashashwamedh Ghat, the owner of a food stall slaps dosa batter on a griddle; several customers stand outside a bright paan shop; a street vendor, selling pooja paraphernalia, drones on, “10 ka, 10 ka, 10 ka.” At the Ghat, the hawk-like hawkers swoop in on foreign tourists, pitching varied services: a free locker, a boat ride, a neck massage. More than 100 people have assembled at the Ghat, and amid a cluster of boats, diyas and devotees bob on the Ganga. A fount of contradictory stories inundate Dashashwamedh: two men sleeping on a platform, a young woman applying a lip liner, a bare-chested man getting his head shaved, pilgrims frolicking in the river, an old man tolling the Ghat bells, and an Angry Hanuman flag fluttering on a boat. All under morning twilight—unlike Varanasi, the sun takes its time.

The city’s ghats are eternal. So are the rituals around them. But less than a kilometre away, its Member of Parliament (MP), Narendra Modi, has begun to sculpt Varanasi in his own image. His passion project, a complex around the Kashi Vishwanath temple—constructed by the Maratha ruler Ahilyabai Kolkar a century after Aurganzeb had demolished it—began in early 2019. Preceding the Ram temple construction, it inverted the Hindutva war cry, “Ayodhya toh sirf jhaanki hai, Kashi aur Mathura baaki hai” (Ayodhya is just a glimpse, the whole view—of Kashi and Mathura—is unfinished).

Both projects have created palatial complexes, displaced residents, and imposed uniform aesthetics, right down to the shops’ boards on the revamped roads, which have the same colour, design, and font. Years after the inaugural show, most boards in Varanasi, with random missing letters, refuse to pretend: “Vastralay” doesn’t have an L; “Garment” doesn’t have an N; “Store” has become “Sore”, and “Gandhi” “Gadhi”.

Like the Ram temple, the Kashi Vishwanath corridor mixes business and devotion. It has a food court, a bookstore, a multipurpose hall (available on rent for “Upanayan, haldi, and Vedic marriage”). HDFC Bank powers donation boxes; SBI and Canara Bank provide ATMs; LIC free drinking water. Connecting the Manikarnika Ghat to the main temple, via the riverbank steps and canopy-shaped shelters, the plush corridor can make you forget that you just crossed what used to be someone’s bedroom, shop, or temple. Some signs of that destruction are still visible: adjacent to the Kashi Vishwanath complex lies a disfigured ashram and a school.

The neighbouring Gyanvapi mosque, with dilapidated domes, looks paler. Two cops, around 50 metres from each other, forbid me from entering the mosque, parroting the same reason: that the disputed property isn’t open to Hindus. The local Muslims can pray inside, but the cops check the IDs—sometimes even Aadhar Cards—of “suspicious” Muslims, whose faces they don’t recognise or who reveal signs of being an outsider, such as not knowing, or asking for, directions. I, too, asked for multiple directions to enter the temple—mostly from cops—but I never became a suspect. You can be a lost Hindu in Varanasi, not a lost Muslim.

Like the different forms of Shiva—a creator and a destroyer, a hermit and a husband, cave-dwelling and bhang-guzzling—his city is a paean to multiplicity. Just take the two-kilometre stretch from Dashashwamedh to Assi Ghat, where you’ll find an astounding diversity of architectures, origins, regions, religions, castes, and customs. There’s a Jain Ghat, a Nishad Ghat, a Tulsi Ghat, a Janki Ghat. They’re quiet and clean, with toilets, dustbins, and changing rooms—including one floating on the river—at regular intervals. “Modi does what he promises [such as building the temple corridor and repairing the Ramnagar bridge],” says a 72-year-old priest at Dashashwamedh Ghat. “I haven’t seen a PM like this ever in my life, son. It feels like, in the last 10 years, we’ve found a God.”

Not far from Tiwari sits an 18-year-old boy behind a board that says “20 year experience, lifetime practitioner, Banaras Hindu University”. Like his guru, Ayush Shukla is pursuing Vedic studies, hoping to be an astrologer. He praises Modi renovating the ghats—especially the “changing rooms for our mothers and sisters”—then launches into a charged monologue: about a shivling found in Gyanvapi; Hindus “lacking unity as compared to Muslims”; and how after Ayodhya and Varanasi, it’s now “Mathura’s turn”. Sitting close to him, a bespectacled man, Gyan Chandra, starts singing his own tune (quite literally, comprising shlokas from the Ramcharitmanas) and explaining the etymology of the word mandir and calling Modi “a guide for Hindus”.

The stories keep mutating on the way to Assi Ghat: a baba asks for Rs 1,100 for getting his photo clicked; a young blue-collar worker, swaying and slurring, asks for a cigarette; architecture students from a college in Gujarat examine the Tulsidas Ghat. The revamped Assi has a food street, wide shelters, and an LED screen displaying ads. Two guava sellers on the opposite ends of the ghat, Manab Pramanik and Chotu Biswas, admire the recent changes (and their architect, Modi): a booming business, a developing city, a fancy ghat (“which was just a drain before”). But they differ on one crucial issue. “[Gyanvapi’s] existing structure should remain intact,” says Pramanik. “You keep your religion, I keep mine.” Biswas: “The mosque won’t stay for long—and it shouldn’t.” He laughs. “Modi will make it vanish; he’s dabang.”

“Balwa ho jayega [a riot will erupt],” interrupts a man near him. Biswas replies, “Nothing will happen.” The man says, “Ayodhya is Ayodhya. But if something like that happens in Banaras, then you’ll fall and so will I. If I demolish your house and make a toilet there, how will you feel?”

Less than five minutes away is the Harmony Book Shop, whose owner, Rakesh Singh, has spent five decades in the city. He, too, has witnessed recent unparalleled changes: the loss of peace, the swelling of visitors, the “pilgrims to picnic” transformation, and the age of tourists—many in their early 20s. When they come to his shop, he asks them what brings them to Varanasi. “Most of them say two things: Instagram posts and reels.” One woman was more specific: “[The social media influencer] Beer Biceps.” Such attention on the city, he says, “doesn’t come from inside but through someone influencing your thinking. It’s romanticising something out of context.”

As Singh continues to talk, a few customers enter the store, take off their shoes near the entrance, and pick up books wrapped in plastic covers—all of it accompanied by the sounds of shehnai on the stereo. If people on the ghats, and elsewhere in the city, praise Modi and dismiss all concerns about those who lost their homes and shops—by saying “they got twice the original amount”—then Singh responds, “But they had to leave. They didn’t do it voluntarily.” Development, he adds, must be inclusive and balanced and holistic—“You can’t erase the past”. And the Banarasis who had to leave their homes must be suffering a “haunted nostalgia”, as they relocated to communities devoid of friends, ancestors, or memories. “It can’t be measured in monetary terms. Those who talk about [hefty] compensations are the ones who haven’t lost their own homes.”

But at least one thing in Varanasi has remained eternal: its gullies. Less than ten feet wide, their narrowness contradicts their ambition and chaos. At most times, they hold, besides shops on both sides, pedestrians, workers, cycles, scooters, bikes, Activas, cows, dogs, and anything else that can—and must—fit in this alternate universe of spatial and temporal disconnect. What makes it better (or worse): that the traffic in gullies runs both ways. You can’t walk straight for more than a few seconds. Something must distract and disorient you: You lurch left to give way to a bike, but what about the scooter coming from behind? An abrupt disturbance, such as a few dogs chasing a cow, can throw you on the wall. People race their bikes as if cruising on a six-lane highway, and amid all the claustrophobic clusterfuck, the beautiful murals—depicting key mythological scenes—prod you to slow down. The rules of the normal world don’t apply to Banarasis and their gullies—they’re truly made for each other.

Around a kilometre away from the Kashi Vishwanath temple lies a maze of such gullies—spilling stores, markets, and shopping plazas—in a locality, Daalmandi, where bagpacks, niqabs, and kurtas hang from tarpaulins jutting out from stores. A tea seller clangs ceramic plates while he walks; hawkers strain their lungs to attract customers (“Bees rupees mein kangan”, “bachchon ka kapda”, “make-up ka saamaan”—bangles for 20, clothes for kids, equipment for make-up), as a steady stream of men and women, wearing prayer caps and burqas, pass by. Barely any place to sit, stand, or stroll, and yet the lanes overflow with customers, business, desperation—and a message: a man covering his head with a saffron gamcha darts on a bike with a Jai Shri Ram flag.

In the decades before and after independence, according to locals, this chaos had consorts, and this market was a mehfil. Music rolled from the two-storey houses above the shops: an aalaap, a thumri, a tabla, a shehnai. Daalmandi produced doyennes of Hindustani classical music belonging to the Banaras gharana: Jaddan Bai, Husna Bai, Rasoolan Bai, Gauhar Jaan, Siddheshwari Devi, Nirmala Devi, and several others. But it all stopped by the early ’70s, when the tawaifs fell on hard times, and the cops, equating them to sex workers, ousted them.

Today, it’s difficult to even find their remnants in Daalmandi—the haveli of the great tabla player, Lachhu Maharaj, for example, is now a small shopping complex that sells mobile accessories—but one house still stands: Ustad Bismillah Khan’s. But finding it is not easy. The shopkeepers point to a series of gullies narrowing with each turn. Bikes and trash clog the lane outside his house (whose nameplate reads “Bharat Ratan Ustad Bismillah Khan”), and in a city prone to power outages, a street lamp glows at 2:50 in the afternoon. Fabled performers live as if they’d never die, but this run-down residence makes you believe Khan never lived.

Adjoining it sits a 75-year-old shopkeeper, Nasibullah (“urf Kallu”), who, almost as old as India, talks about the city’s past and present, development and disenchantment. Like Singh, he explains how the corridor project has disrupted “sukoon”, increased traffic, and constricted progress to a small area around the Kashi Vishwanath temple. He cites Daalmandi’s decline as an example: a locality flowing with filth (“these lanes were swept twice a day—the gullies used to glow”), a market spiralling out of control (“from 100 to 2,000 shops”), and profits dwindling to a naught (leading to “bhookhmari”).

This Banaras doesn’t appear in Instagram reels or YouTube shorts. This Benaras doesn’t have “I ♥ Kashi”. This Banaras tried hopping on the vikas train and fell on the platform. On February 2, 2024, two days after the district court allowed Hindu prayers in the Gyanvapi cellar, a disconcerting stillness zipped through Daalmandi, as scores of stores remained shut. A month later, the municipal corporation shuttered 26 meat shops within the two-kilometre radius of the Kashi Vishwanath temple, including some in Daalmandi, implementing the Varanasi Nagar Nigam’s new proposal. Besides the meat ban, Councillor Indresh Singh suggested two more changes (which also got approved): widening the roads in Daalmandi, which would allow the Hindu pilgrims easy access to the temple, and increasing the rents of 145 shops in the locality. “The old tawaifs have left,” a shopkeeper said, “but the new ones have arrived.”

Like most Indian cities, Varanasi is no stranger to contradictions—old and new, dirty and swanky, neglected and developed—whose biggest example pops on the newest ghat, inaugurated less than two years ago, NaMo. Three bronze statues of folded hands (25-feet and 15-feet high) awe the tourists who mimic the pose and get their photos clicked. A fourth statue—bigger than all of them combined, at 75-feet—is under construction.

This Ghat also compels you to think about the man making and unmaking Varanasi, Modi, and his ultimate goal and competition. No, not with Nehru. Look somewhere else, read between the lines. Start with his constituency buzzing with the chants of “Har Har Mahadev”. For his 2019 election campaign, its MP substituted Mahadev with Modi. Even the “NaMo” Ghat works both ways: venerating Modi, via his acronym, and the Almighty via a Ganesh mantra (and sure enough, two vertical slabs bookending the statues read, “Namo Namah”).

The glitzy promenade—which also has a splash pool, inflatable castles, trampolines, and toy rides—contains enough distinctive features (complemented by aesthetic lights) that could produce appealing photos, making numerous people flash their phones. It makes sense: a government that has aced the social media game would know how to create selfie points. By blending ancient tradition and modern pomp, the NaMo Ghat does something else, too: making Hinduism cool. Especially for young Indians who constitute a large share of the country’s population who can be moulded by the pro-government influencers who, as an added incentive, received the National Creators Awards presented by Modi two months ago.

Even though Banaras is considered the city of Shiva, Ram isn’t absent here. You can listen to his bhajans playing at the ghats, see his large portraits in shops, and even hear the sporadic “Jai Shri Ram” chants outside the temple. What’s equally striking? On April 25, at least two cops guarding the Kashi Vishwanath gate had a saffron vermillion and a tilak on their foreheads. Exiting the same gate, another cop raised his hands gesturing pranaam, facing the temple.

A gold-coloured statue of the Nandi bull stood nearby wearing a garland and a loincloth. Devotees lined up near it, whispering their wishes in its ear, hoping they’d reach Shiva. It’s also believed that Nandi always faces the deity, and nothing can come between them. This Nandi, though, had its back towards the Kashi Vishwanath temple. What did it face instead? The place where many Hindus, including the Modi government, believe the actual shivling resides: the Gyanvapi mosque.

Right opposite Nandi, beyond the temple gate and the mosque grills, lay a Gyanvapi cellar—or “Vyasji Ka Tehkhana”. Large bulbs lit the basement; a saffron cloth, with more than a dozen Om signs, hung on the wall, and under it, three idols sat on an elevated platform. Many devotees stood outside, pressing their palms and closing their eyes. And in that instant, it felt as if the whole mosque had ceased to exist for them—and what stood in front, and in their minds, bodies, and souls, was a temple. Several Banarasis had told me that God lived inside them, that true faith could turn a stone into a deity, and that the word “mandir” itself came from the combination of “man”, which meant “heart”, and “dir, a place to stay”: “So where does the Lord stay? In our hearts.”

As the praying continued, three burly monkeys ran outside the temple and leapt into the mosque. A cop, sporting a handlebar moustache, said, “Kabhi bhi Hanuman-ji ka akraman ho sakta hai” (Lord Hanuman can attack us anytime). A man wearing a saffron cap peeked into the mosque and said, “Jai Bajrang Bali.” The monkeys glared at him, making him recoil. They kept jumping on the parapet, rippling a mini-panic among the pilgrims. Soon, they got down from the grills and ambled in the lane leading to a security checkpoint, as a bhajan played in the background: “Tu hi bigaade, tu hi sanwaare, Is jag ke saare kaam/Hey Ram, Hey Ram (You create, and you destroy this universe/Hey Ram, Hey Ram).”

Tanul Thakur in Varanasi

(This appeared in the print as 'Pilgrim's Politics')