The jewelled earring

Walk down into it now.

At the middle of the crescent, where the body of God is the navel, the stone steps descend into smoke that never clears. This is Manikarnika, the supreme cremation ground of Kashi, and it is the still centre of everything this treatise has been circling. The fires burn day and night, in tiers up the slope of the ghat. Stacked cordwood rises in great walls behind them, sold by weight. Bodies wrapped in bright cloth wait their turn along the steps, and the families sit with them, and the smoke goes up, and above it all, a little back from the river, lies a quiet green pool that is older than any of it.

To understand why this is the holiest dying-ground in the Hindu world, and to see it truly rather than as the horror or the postcard the outside world makes of it, you have to begin with that pool, and with the name.

The jewelled earring

Mani-karnika means “the jewelled earring”, and the Kashi Khanda tells how the name was earned. It is a story about the making of a world.

When Shiva and the Goddess first brought Kashi into being, before the rest of the cosmos existed, Shiva gave Vishnu the task of creating everything else. To gain the power for so vast a labour, Vishnu came to this very spot and performed tapasya, austerity, for an age of the world. With his discus, the Sudarshana Chakra, he dug a pool in the ground, and he filled it with the sweat of his devotion, and it was first called the Chakra-Pushkarini, the lotus-pool dug by the discus. So great was the intensity of Vishnu’s austerity that Shiva himself came with Parvati to witness it, and Shiva was so moved, the text says, that as he trembled or shook his head in wonder, the jewelled earring slipped from his ear and fell into the pool. He decreed that the pool should carry the name of that fallen jewel forever. Manikarnika. The pool where the earring fell.

An honest account should note that the tellings vary. The dominant version in the Kashi Khanda has the earring fall from Shiva. Popular retellings sometimes make it two ornaments, Shiva’s jewel and Parvati’s earring together, and a quite separate tradition ties the spot to the earring of Sati, fusing this story with the great myth of the dismembered Goddess and the Shakta Pithas. Those are later blendings, and this treatise follows the Kashi Khanda’s own dialogue, in which the jewel is Shiva’s. But keep hold of the core of the tale, whichever ornament fell, because the core is the thing that matters. This pool was dug in the labour of creating a world.

The navel where two worlds meet

And that is the fact that transforms Manikarnika from a place of horror into the deepest symbol in the city.

Because this same water, the pool that Vishnu dug in the effort of making the cosmos, is the water beside which, every hour of every day and every night, the dissolution of individual lives is enacted in fire. Creation began here. And here, ceaselessly, things end. The navel of the city is the one point on earth where the world is spun out and drawn back at the same address, where the effort of beginning and the fact of ending sit on a single step of stone.

The tradition marks the meeting physically. Beside the green tank of Manikarnika Kund, set into a small marble shrine at the water’s edge, are footprints, the Charana Paduka, the footprints of Vishnu pressed into the stone at the place of his world-making austerity. The living come down to bathe in the kund, in the very pool of creation, a few dozen steps from the pyres of dissolution. Birth-water and death-fire, the making and the unmaking, are laid within sight of each other at the navel of the city, and the pilgrim moves between them in a single afternoon.

This is why the tradition reads Manikarnika not as a place of endings alone but as the axis where beginning and ending turn into each other. The navel is the cosmogonic point, the place from which the lotus of the world rose from Vishnu’s own body in the old creation-image. To make the crossing here, at the navel, is not to fall out of the world into nothing. It is to be drawn back into the point from which the world itself came, the still centre where creation and dissolution are one motion.

The great cremation ground

The city has a name for itself that gathers all of this, and it is the hardest of its names. Kashi is the Mahasmashana, the Great Cremation Ground.

The name is not only about Manikarnika. It is a cosmic claim. The tradition imagines that at the end of an age, in the pralaya, the whole universe is drawn back into fire and dissolved, and that Kashi is the cremation ground of the entire world, the place where all things at last are given to the flame. When that final dissolution comes, we have already seen, Shiva lifts the city clear on the tip of his trident and holds it above the burning, so that Kashi alone survives to witness the unmaking of everything else. The whole world is a corpse at the last, and Kashi is its burning ground, and Shiva is the mourner who does not himself burn.

Manikarnika is that vast cosmic ending brought down to human scale and rehearsed, without pause, in full view of the living. Every pyre on the ghat is the end of the world in miniature, and the fact that the fires never stop means that the dissolution is being enacted here continuously, a perpetual small pralaya at the navel of the city. The anthropologist Jonathan Parry, who studied the ground closely, saw in this the reason the tradition can call the cremation a kind of sacrifice that renews the cosmos: because the burning never ceases, creation is, in a sense, being continually replayed here, the world unmade and the possibility of its remaking held open, every hour, on these steps.

The fire told truly

Which brings us to the famous claim that the fire at Manikarnika is eternal, and to the duty this treatise has taken on itself, which is to tell such things truly.

The devotional statement is that a single sacred fire has burned here unbroken since the beginning of the world, never once extinguished. What can honestly be said is smaller and, in its own way, more moving. Cremation at Manikarnika never stops. There is no hour of the day or night when the ghat is cold. And by long custom each new pyre is kindled from an existing one, the fire passed from the dead to the dead, so that a flame is, in plain fact, always present on the ground. The unbroken millennia are devotional belief, and this account marks them as such. The ceaseless fire is simply true. Something has been burning here, continuously, for longer than anyone can measure, because the dying have never stopped coming, and that is remarkable enough without the miracle.

And here a second duty. Manikarnika is described, from the outside, in two false ways, and both must be refused. The first is the horror: the reeking, squalid pit of nightmare, filmed for shock, a place of degradation. The second is the sanitised abstraction: a clean spiritual symbol with the actual death washed out of it. The truth is neither, and it is more dignified than either. Manikarnika is a working cremation ground, and it is exactly what that means: there is smoke, and ash, and the smell of woodfire, and for those who can afford it fragrant woods, sandalwood among them, and above all there is order, a fixed and unhurried sequence of rites carried out by people who have done this work, in this place, for a hundred generations. It is grave. It is busy. It is treated by everyone present as sacred labour. Death is handled here in the open, at the water’s edge, with care and without concealment, which is a thing almost the whole of the modern world has arranged never to have to see. To flinch from it as a horror, or to prettify it into a symbol, are two ways of refusing to look at the one thing the city is trying to make you look at.

The last darshan

Stand, then, at the navel, and see what Manikarnika actually is.

It is the place where the tradition stages, ceaselessly and in full public view, the truth it built the whole city to teach. That dissolution is a doorway and not a wall. That the fire is a crossing. That the end of a life, handled in the open, at the water, in the presence of God, is not a thing to be hidden in a back room and hurried past, but the last and in some ways the greatest darshan, the final seeing and being seen, the moment the taraka mantra is whispered and the ferry pushes off. The city carries the dying here from a thousand miles away for this: to end, not in a curtained ward, but at the navel of the world, in sight of the pool where creation began, given to a fire that has never gone out.

There is a reason this treatise held Manikarnika for its centre and would not describe it in passing. Everything else in the city, the never-forsaken ground, the guardian who settles the accounts, the river fallen from heaven, the whole crowded pantheon, exists to make good on what happens on these steps. Here the promise stops being a doctrine and becomes a fire, and a body, and a family’s grief, and a crossing made in smoke at the edge of a moving river.

But the fire is not tended by the priests, and it is not owned by the great temple, and it is not in the keeping of the brahmins at all. The perpetual flame of Manikarnika, the fire from which every pyre in the holiest dying-ground in the Hindu world is lit, is held, by ancient and unbreakable right, by a community that orthodox society calls untouchable. To understand Manikarnika you have to understand the keepers of its fire, and their strange and absolute power over the machinery of liberation. The next chapter is theirs.