Varanasi

Varanasi: Where Death Has a Permanent Address

Arrive by train from the west and you first see Varanasi as a smear of haze over the Ganges plain – nothing that prepares you for the riverbank. The city sits on the western shore and is best understood from a wooden boat: looking back at the ghats, you see the layered medieval city stacked behind the stone stairways, temple spires breaking the skyline, smoke from the cremation pyres rising white into the morning air. It is one of the most visually distinctive urban landscapes in the world, and the reason is not architecture or landscape so much as the fact that this city has conducted its religious life in public, continuously, for approximately 3,000 years.

Varanasi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth. Hindus believe dying here ensures moksha – liberation from the cycle of rebirth – and the city does not keep this belief at a tasteful remove. The cremation ghats operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the pyres are visible from the river and from the street. That visibility is not morbidity; it is the point. The relationship between life, ritual, and death here is more honest than almost anywhere most Western visitors have encountered.

The Ghats

The city’s 88 named ghats stretch roughly 6 kilometres along the Ganges, each serving different religious or practical purposes. The best way to understand them is from the water.

Dashashwamedh Ghat is the main ghat and the site of the Ganga Aarti ceremony – a nightly fire ritual where coordinated priests perform with large brass lamps, incense, and conch shells to audiences ranging from a few hundred to several thousand. Viewing boats on the river fill an hour before sunset. Arrive early by boat or you spend the ceremony looking at the back of someone’s head. The ceremony lasts about 45 minutes, and the fact that it functions simultaneously as religious ritual and tourist attraction does not make it less real on either count.

Manikarnika Ghat is the principal cremation site. Approximately 100 bodies are cremated there daily, every day of the year. Photography is strictly prohibited and the prohibition should be respected without exception. This is not a heritage site you observe from a comfortable distance; it is someone’s death and someone’s grief. Behave accordingly.

Assi Ghat, at the southern end of the main stretch, is where many guesthouses catering to longer-stay visitors concentrate. Quieter than Dashashwamedh, with its own smaller morning aarti and riverside cafes where travellers consistently stay longer than planned. The one-week stay that becomes three weeks usually begins here.

The Kashi Vishwanath Temple Corridor

The Kashi Vishwanath Temple is one of Hinduism’s 12 Jyotirlinga shrines and among the most important pilgrimage sites in the faith. In December 2021, a major infrastructure project inaugurated a wide pedestrian corridor directly connecting the temple with Lalita Ghat on the Ganges, displacing hundreds of households and shops but opening up a direct ritual axis that pilgrims had previously navigated through very narrow lanes. The project remains controversial – the demolitions were significant – but the result is that the approach to the temple from the river is now legible in a way it was not before. Phase 2 expansion continues. Non-Hindu visitors are now admitted to the outer courtyard and some inner sections; bags must be left at security checkpoints outside.

Sarnath

Ten kilometres north of Varanasi, 30 minutes by auto-rickshaw (Rs 150-200 one way). The site is where the Buddha delivered his first sermon after enlightenment, setting what Buddhists call the turning of the Dharma wheel. The Dhamek Stupa, a cylindrical brick structure built in 500 CE, marks the spot. The Archaeological Museum holds the original Ashoka lion capital from the 3rd century BCE, the four-lion image that became India’s national emblem. The site is completely different in atmosphere from Varanasi: quiet, orderly, with pilgrims from across East and Southeast Asia. It is the better half of a day spent productively.

Food

Varanasi is strongly vegetarian. The kachauri-sabzi breakfast – fried dough with spiced lentils and potato curry – from street vendors near the ghats costs Rs 30-50 and is the right way to start any morning here. Kashi Chaat Bhandar on Godowlia is the reference point for chaat: aloo tikki, gol gappa, dahi puri in the Rs 40-80 range.

Malaiyo, available only from November through February, is a frothy milk-and-saffron sweet that dissolves immediately on the tongue and is made nowhere else in India. If you are visiting in winter, try it. It is one of those foods that exists so specifically in one time and place that it functions more as a memory than a meal.

Brown Bread Bakery on Tripura Bhairavi Road, established by a German-Indian couple, has served the long-stay traveller community for decades. The thalis at Assi Ghat restaurants run Rs 120-200.

Practical Notes

The Ganges at Varanasi is heavily polluted; do not swim in it. November through February is the coolest and most comfortable period. Festivals change the city’s intensity dramatically: Diwali, Kartik Purnima, and Maha Shivaratri each bring enormous additional crowds to the ghats. The monsoon from July through September brings rain and a river that rises to cover the lower ghats entirely, which is either a reason to avoid those months or a reason to come precisely then, depending on what you are after.