The city of Rama

For all its fire, Kashi is not, in its daily heart, a grim city. The ascetic in the ash is rare. The far more common devotion of the city runs in the opposite direction entirely, toward warmth, toward a God with a human face and a story that can make a grown man weep, toward song and festival and the sweetness the tradition calls bhakti, loving devotion. And in Kashi that devotion has a name above all others. It is the city of Shiva. It is also, and just as deeply, the city of Rama.

The paradox is real and worth holding. The most Shaiva city in India, the ground where Shiva will not leave, is at the same time one of the great homes of the worship of Rama, the seventh descent of Vishnu, the perfect king and the perfect man. And the reason is largely one poet.

The poet and his book

In the sixteenth century there lived in Kashi a man named Tulsidas, and he did something that changed the religious life of the whole of northern India. He took the ancient Sanskrit epic of Rama, the Ramayana, a text locked away in a language only the learned could read, and he retold it in Awadhi, the everyday speech of the people, so that the story of Rama could be sung, and understood, and loved, by anyone at all. His retelling is the Ramcharitmanas, “the lake of the deeds of Rama”, and it became, and remains, the single most beloved devotional book of northern India, recited in villages and temples and homes across a vast region, known by heart by people who can read nothing else.

An honest account should be exact about where it was made, because the tradition tends to hand the whole of it to Kashi. Tulsidas began the Ramcharitmanas, by the traditional reckoning, at Ayodhya, Rama’s own birthplace, in the year 1574, and its composition ran across Ayodhya and Kashi and Chitrakoot over the years that followed. It is not, in the strict sense, a book “written at Kashi” from first line to last. But Tulsidas lived and worked in Kashi, at the ghat that still bears his name, Tulsi Ghat, and it is Kashi that claims him, and the city carried and copied and sang his work until it belonged to the whole north. To this day the tradition credits him also with the Hanuman Chalisa, the forty-verse hymn to Hanuman that is very likely the most recited devotional poem in all of India, though that attribution is traditional rather than certain.

What Tulsidas did was democratic in the deepest sense. He put the highest thing, the story of God walking the earth as a man, into the mouth of the poorest, and in doing so he made Kashi, the city of the learned brahmin and the Sanskrit pandit, also the capital of a devotion that needed no Sanskrit and no learning at all.

The remover of troubles

Tulsidas’s Rama comes with a companion, and in Kashi that companion has one of his most beloved homes. The tradition holds that Tulsidas himself, granted a vision of Hanuman, the monkey-god who is Rama’s perfect servant and the embodiment of devotion, established the temple that stands today as Sankat Mochan, “the remover of troubles”. The name is a promise. Hanuman is the god you go to when you are in sankat, in danger or distress or difficulty, the strong and faithful one who lifts the trouble from your shoulders, and his temple in the south of the city, set among trees and famously full of the monkeys that are held to be his own, is one of the most loved and most crowded shrines in Kashi.

And it is a musical temple. Once a year, around the birthday of Hanuman, Sankat Mochan hosts the Sankat Mochan Sangeet Samaroh, a festival of Indian classical music held over several nights within the temple itself, where the greatest musicians in the country come to play, for free, as an offering, through the night, to the god of devotion. It is one of the most storied gatherings of classical music anywhere in India, and it says something about Kashi that its temple of the servant-god is also a temple of song, and that in this city the worship of God and the perfection of an art are not two different things.

The city that becomes the epic

Once a year the devotion to Rama does something even larger. It takes over the land itself, and the whole story of the epic is played out, not on a stage, but across a living landscape, for a month.

This is the Ramlila, the “play of Rama”, the traditional dramatic enactment of the Ramayana, and the greatest of them all is staged across the river at Ramnagar, on the far bank, under the patronage of the Maharaja of Banaras, the Kashi Naresh. For roughly a month, night after night, the episodes of the epic are performed at different sites scattered across the town and its surroundings, each location standing for a place in the story, so that the audience follows Rama’s exile and war and return by physically moving, evening after evening, from one scene to the next across a real landscape that has become, for the season, the world of the epic. The Maharaja himself takes part, arriving at the great episodes in state, on an elephant, a living king honouring the divine one. The Ramnagar Ramlila has run in an unbroken tradition for some two centuries, and it is recognised by UNESCO as a masterpiece of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

Around it cluster the other great civic dramas of the Kashi year: the Bharat Milap, the intensely moving reenactment of the meeting of Rama and his brother Bharata after the long exile, which draws enormous crowds and the Maharaja himself, and the river-play of Nag Nathaiya at Tulsi Ghat, where the boy-Krishna dances on the serpent. For weeks the whole city and its sister-town across the water become a stage on which the gods walk again, and the line between the audience and the worshipper, the play and the pilgrimage, dissolves entirely. To watch the Ramlila at Ramnagar is not to watch a performance of a sacred story. It is, for the devout, to be present at the thing itself.

The devotion of the people

Behind all of this stands a revolution, and Kashi was one of its capitals.

Across the medieval centuries a great movement swept through Hindu devotion, the bhakti movement, which held that God is reached not through the Sanskrit learning and the ritual precision that only the high castes commanded, but through love, direct, personal, and open to anyone, of any birth, in their own language. In Kashi the fountainhead was Ramananda, the teacher whose seat was at Panchganga Ghat, and from his circle, by tradition, ran the lines of some of the most extraordinary religious figures India ever produced. Tulsidas belongs to one stream of it, the saguna devotion, the worship of God with form and name and story, God as Rama, as Krishna, as a face you can love.

But the same city and the same movement produced the other stream too, the nirguna, the worship of a God with no form and no image at all, and its two greatest voices were born in Kashi. There was Kabir, the weaver, who mocked the empty ritual of Hindu and Muslim alike and pointed past every form and every temple to a formless truth beyond names. And there was Ravidas, the leather-worker, a man of the very caste that orthodox society called untouchable, whose songs of a casteless divine love were so pure that they were later gathered into the sacred scripture of the Sikhs. These two we will meet properly in later chapters, because their reach runs beyond Hinduism and their stories carry us to the far bank of the river and into the city’s life as a place holy to more than one faith. Note them here only as what they were: the most radical children of the same devotional revolution that gave Tulsidas his Rama, proof that the city of the people’s God produced, at once, the sweetest devotion to God-with-a-face and the fiercest devotion to God-with-no-face, and held both.

That is the deep point about the bhakti city. It made the highest thing available to the lowest. The Sanskrit epic became a village song. The story of God became a month-long play the whole town could walk through. The path to the divine was thrown open to the weaver and the leather-worker and the illiterate grandmother, no learning required, no birth required, only love. In a treatise that has had to be honest about the hard hierarchies of caste woven through Kashi’s sacred life, this is the counter-current, and it is a mighty one: the same city that kept the Doms outside its temples produced the poet-saints who declared that God belonged to everyone and needed no temple at all.

Love and the fire

So hold the two halves of the city together, because they are the truth of it.

Kashi is the burning ground, and Kashi is the Ramlila. It is the ash-smeared ascetic breaking the fear of death, and it is the crowd of ten thousand weeping with joy as Rama meets his brother after fourteen years. It is the taraka whispered to the dying, and it is the Hanuman Chalisa sung by a frightened child at night. The same city holds the fiercest confrontation with death and the tenderest devotion of love, the grimmest discipline and the sweetest song, and it does not experience them as a contradiction, because in the tradition’s understanding they are two channels of one river, two ways to the one far shore. You can cross by the terror, unlearning the fear of death in the ash. You can cross by the love, losing yourself in devotion to a God with a human face. Kashi keeps both roads open, and most of its people, sensibly, walk the second.

The Ramlila, though, is staged across the water, at Ramnagar, on the far eastern bank, the empty bank, the shore this treatise has twice now called deliberately bare and promised to explain. And one of the very saints this chapter has named, Kabir the weaver, at the end of his life did the most provocative thing a holy man of Kashi could do: he left the sacred city on purpose and went to die on the wrong side of the line, to prove a point about the whole promise the city rests on. Both of those lead to the same place, the far bank across the river, and it is time at last to cross to it. The next chapter is about the other bank.