The City of Light

Before the treatise begins

There is one city on earth that Hindus travel to in order to die.

Not to be healed. To die. They come in old age and in sickness, from every part of India, and they come on purpose, because the tradition holds that to die within the sacred bounds of this city is to be released, finally, from the long wheel of birth and death and birth again. The city is Kashi. Varanasi on the maps, Banaras in its own mouth, and Kashi, the City of Light, in the oldest and most loaded of its names.

But it would be only half the truth to call it the city you go to die in. The dying come to die. The living come, in far greater numbers, to wake. For every pilgrim carried here at the end of a life, the city has held a hundred who came to live in it as a discipline, seekers and renunciates and students of the sacred word, because the release the dying are promised at the crossing is held to be available, here, to the living who realise it while they still breathe. The tradition calls that liberation-in-life jivanmukti, and it is the deeper of Kashi’s two promises. Death is the startling face of this city. Awakening is its heart.

This treatise is the walking of that promise in both its forms, and of everything that hangs from it.

Because a great deal hangs from it. If death here is a door, someone must guard the door, and someone must carry the fire, and there must be a reason the door stands in this city and no other. There is a god, Shiva, who is said to whisper the crossing into the ear of the dying, and a fierce guardian who settles the accounts, and a river that turns north to face its own source, and a burning ground whose fires never rest, and a whole geography of shrines that the tradition reads as a map of the human body. There is a real history under the myth, of a city torn down and raised again more times than anyone can count. And there is a living city on top of it all, ferociously alive, a city of weavers and pandits and musicians and poets, holy at once to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and the saints who mocked all three.

The organising idea, held from the first chapter to the last, is this: Kashi is the whole of Sanatana Dharma folded into one walkable ground, and it is also a map of the inner life. The city on the river and the point between the brows, the tradition says, are in the end one place. What death completes at the crossing, liberation can complete inwardly in a life fully awake.

A word on method, because it governs every chapter. Two things stand behind Kashi, and most accounts blur them. There is the tradition: the Puranic praise-literature, above all the Kashi Khanda of the Skanda Purana, and the older Upanishadic and Vedic material beneath it. And there is the documentary record: the archaeology, the dated destructions, the historians’ account of how the stone city we see was actually assembled. This treatise keeps the two distinct, on the page, every time. Where the sources agree it speaks plainly. Where they diverge it names the divergence. Where the record runs out it says so. And where the popular literature has exaggerated, it corrects: the “eternal flame”, the “oldest city on earth”, the lurid picture of the ascetics, the certainty about a whispered mantra whose wording the texts never fix.

The tradition does not need this treatise. The city has been holy for two and a half thousand years without it. The map is offered anyway, in humility, for the reader who wants to walk back to the source.

Twenty-three chapters, in nine movements, from the idea of a city built around death, through its making, its guardians, its gods, its river, its burning ground, its ascetics and its saints, to the ferociously living city that surrounds it all. Begin at the beginning, with the one fact that startles every newcomer.