The other bank

Stand on any ghat at dawn and look across the river, and you will see the strangest thing about the geography of Kashi. The near bank, under your feet, is a two-mile wall of stone and temple and palace, packed with the most concentrated sacred life on earth. The far bank, directly opposite, is empty. A wide, bare stretch of sand and scrub, uninhabited, unbuilt, blank. The holiest city in Hindu India faces, across a few hundred metres of water, a shore on which almost nothing stands.

That emptiness is not an accident of drainage or flood. It is theology, and it holds one of the most revealing beliefs in the whole tradition, and one of the greatest acts of protest that belief ever provoked.

The empty shore

The sacred city, we have seen, sits on the inside of the great northward bend of the Ganga, on the concave western bank. The tradition holds that this is the auspicious side, the bank the river embraces as she curves, and that the sanctity of Kashi belongs to it and to the sacred zone marked out around it, the field bounded by the great pilgrimage circuit of the Panchakroshi. What lies inside that boundary is Kashi, the ground of liberation. What lies outside it is ordinary earth. And the eastern shore, directly across the water, lies outside.

So the far bank is left bare on purpose. To build a city there, to live and die there, would be to live and die outside the sacred field, a stone’s throw from liberation and yet across the line from it, and the tradition regards that as a strange and unlucky place to be. The result is the arresting asymmetry that every visitor notices and few have explained: a river with a heaven on one side and an emptiness on the other, the crowded ghats gazing across at a shore deliberately kept vacant, the sacred and the profane laid out face to face with only the water between them.

The cursed side

The belief hardens, at its edges, into something sharper and stranger. If to die within Kashi’s bounds is to win liberation, then to die outside them is held to forfeit it, and the folk tradition puts the loss in a vivid and humbling image. To die on the ordinary ground beyond the sacred line, or worst of all at a place the tradition marks as cursed, is said to condemn the soul to be reborn not in some middling human birth but as a donkey, the lowly, burdened, beaten beast of the Indian road.

The place that carries this curse most heavily is a town called Magahar, and it is worth being exact about where it stands, because this is a fact that even careful writers on Kashi have got wrong. Magahar is not across the river. It lies about a hundred and sixty kilometres almost due north of the ghats, on the Ami, a small tributary of the Rapti, in what was then Basti district and is now Sant Kabir Nagar, some twenty five kilometres west of Gorakhpur. It is on the same side of the Ganga as the city, and it is nowhere in sight of it. To reach it was a journey of days on the road. Its reputation is the exact negative of Kashi’s. Where Kashi grants liberation, Magahar, the folk belief holds, grants the donkey’s rebirth. It is the anti-Kashi, the cautionary opposite, the place a devout Hindu of the region was taught to fear dying in as much as he longed to die in Kashi. Between the two lay the whole geography of the good and the bad death drawn onto the map: die here and be free, die there and come back a beast of burden.

It is exactly the kind of belief that a mechanical, literal reading of the death-liberation promise produces, and we have already seen where that reading leads. It led, in the last chapters, to the mumukshu’s careful ripening on the right side of the line, and to the desperate reach of the Kashi Karvat. Here it produces its most superstitious form: liberation as pure geography, a matter of which patch of ground your body happens to lie on when the breath leaves it. And it was against exactly this, against the reduction of God’s grace to a map, that the greatest of Kashi’s own poets made the most famous gesture of his life.

Kabir leaves the city

Kabir, the weaver-saint, was born in Kashi, in the holiest Hindu city, and he spent his life mocking its complacency. He scorned the idea that holiness could be bought with ritual, or inherited with caste, or secured by the accident of where one was born or where one died. He pointed, always, past every outward form, Hindu and Muslim alike, to a formless God reached only through inward love. And at the end of his life, by the tradition’s account, he did the most provocative thing a holy man of Kashi could possibly do. He got up and left the sacred city, deliberately, and went to die at Magahar. At the cursed place. Outside the line. He did not step over a boundary to do it. He was an old man and by the tradition’s account he was carried, and the road to Magahar runs north for the better part of a fortnight. He had a long time in which to change his mind, and he did not.

He did it to break the superstition on his own body. His challenge, preserved in the sayings attributed to him, cuts straight to the root: if Kashi grants liberation to anyone who dies in it, then what is devotion to God even worth, and if a true devotee of God is condemned to a donkey’s rebirth merely for dying at Magahar, then what is God’s grace worth? Either the location saves you, in which case God and love and the whole inner life are beside the point, or God saves you, in which case the location is beside the point. Kabir chose God, and he chose him by lying down to die in the one place the map said would damn him, confident that a life given to the divine is liberated anywhere, even at cursed Magahar, even twelve days’ road beyond the holy line.

It is one of the great acts of religious protest in Indian history, and its target is precisely the thing this treatise has been circling since its first chapter. Kabir was not attacking Kashi’s sanctity. He was attacking the flattening of that sanctity into a mechanism, the idea that liberation is a matter of coordinates rather than of the heart. And in doing so he was, though he would have hated the comparison, saying exactly what the deepest layer of the tradition had said all along: that the true Avimukta, the real never-forsaken ground, is not a bank of the river at all. It is inner. A man who has found it carries it with him, and can die free at Magahar or anywhere else, because the crossing he makes is an interior one. He proved it by going as far from the sacred ground as a dying man could be carried.

The king across the water

The far bank is not entirely empty, though. One great thing stands on it, and it completes the strange symmetry of the two shores. At Ramnagar, directly across from the city, rises a fort, built in the eighteenth century, and it is the seat of the Kashi Naresh, the Maharaja of Banaras, the titular king of the holy city.

Consider the arrangement, because it is a remarkable one. The god of Kashi, Shiva, dwells on the sacred western bank, in the crowded city of the liberated. The king of Kashi dwells across the water, on the profane eastern bank, in a fort among the ordinary fields. The god and the king face each other across the river, the sacred and the worldly power each on its own shore. And yet the king is no ordinary ruler in the city’s imagination. The Kashi Naresh is treated with a reverence that borders on the divine, a living sovereign who in the great festivals stands almost as Shiva’s earthly counterpart, and it is he, from his fort on the far bank, who is the patron and presiding figure of the Ramlila we watched in the last chapter, arriving at the epic’s great scenes in royal state, on an elephant, a mortal king honouring the divine one across the water. His fort holds a museum of the old kingship, the palanquins and the arms and a famous and intricate astronomical clock, a whole world of vanished royal ceremony preserved on the shore the tradition otherwise leaves bare.

So the far bank, the empty and unlucky shore, turns out to hold the one power the sacred city does not: the king. The god keeps the west bank and the promise of liberation. The king keeps the east bank and the memory of earthly rule. And the river runs between them, the boundary of the sacred, with heaven on one side and the world on the other.

The mirror bank

Look back across the water one more time, and the empty shore reveals what it is for. It is the mirror of the holy city, and it teaches by being everything Kashi is not.

Kashi is crowded; the far bank is empty. Kashi is blessed; the far bank is not. Kashi holds the god; the far bank holds the king. Kashi is where you long to die; the far bank is where you dread to. The two shores are a single diagram of the tradition’s whole geography of value, the sacred and the profane, the crossing and the failure to cross, laid out along one river so that you cannot look at the one without seeing the other across the water.

And the deepest thing the far bank teaches is a smaller version of what Kabir proved at greater cost. The emptiness across the water is a standing invitation to superstition, to the belief that everything depends on which side of a line you happen to die on. Kabir answered that invitation by dying far outside the line, on purpose, to prove that it was false, that grace goes where the heart is and not where the map says, that the real Avimukta is carried within and cannot be left behind on a road. The far bank, in the end, makes the same point the whole treatise has been making. The crossing is interior. The city on the water is the sign of it, and the empty shore opposite is the reminder that the sign is not the thing.

Kabir made that point as a man who belonged, fully, to no single faith, and his death set off a famous quarrel over his body between the Hindus and the Muslims who both claimed him. That quarrel opens the last great question about Kashi, the question of whose city it really is. For the ground we have been calling, throughout, the holiest city in Hindu India is also holy to the Buddhists, and to the Jains, and to the Muslims who have woven their lives into it for centuries, and to the casteless saints who belonged to none of them. The next chapter asks the question the whole treatise has quietly deferred. Whose city is Kashi?