The city of four faiths

This treatise has called Kashi, again and again, the holiest city in Hindu India, and that is true. But it is not the whole truth, and Kabir’s death at Magahar, which set off a quarrel between Hindus and Muslims over his own body, forces the question the book has quietly deferred from the beginning. Whose city is Kashi, really?

The honest answer is that it belongs to more than one faith, and has for as long as it has been holy at all. On this one bend of one river, four traditions found their ground, and the same water has washed the Hindu pilgrim, the Buddhist monk, the Jain ascetic, the Muslim weaver, and the casteless saint who belonged to none of them. To tell Kashi as a single-faith monument is to shrink it. It is a shared city, and it has been shared in both the beautiful and the bitter senses of that word.

The wheel turned in the deer park

Begin with the current that rose within a morning’s walk of Shiva’s own ghats. A short ride north of the city lies Sarnath, and it is one of the four holiest places on earth to something like half a billion people, because it is where the Buddha set his teaching in motion.

The story is among the best-attested in the Buddhist canon. After his enlightenment the Buddha came to the deer park at Isipatana, the Mrigadava, near Kashi, and there, to five ascetics who had once been his companions, he preached his first sermon, the Dhammacakkappavattana, “the turning of the wheel of the Dharma”, the sermon of the four noble truths and the middle way. That first teaching, given around the fifth century before the Common Era, is the beginning of Buddhism as a taught path in the world. It happened here, in a deer park on the edge of the city of Shiva.

The ground remembers it in stone. Two centuries later the emperor Ashoka, newly turned to the Dharma, raised a pillar at Sarnath, and the magnificent lion capital that crowned it is the very emblem that independent India took for its own, the four lions that stand today on the nation’s currency and its seal. The great Dhamek Stupa still rises over the site, though an honest visitor should know that the standing monument is a later Gupta-age structure, of around the fifth century after Christ, built up over an Ashokan core, so the stone you see is a thousand years younger than the sermon it marks. Once a year, at Buddha Purnima, the Buddhist world comes back to Sarnath. Two of the great religious currents of humanity, the devotion of Shiva and the path of the Buddha, rose within sight of each other on this one stretch of the Ganges, and have faced each other across a few miles of the same sacred landscape ever since.

The birthplace of the ford-makers

The second current is older and quieter, and it turns on a beautiful coincidence of language. Kashi is a tirtha, a crossing-place, a ford. And in Jainism the supreme teachers, the enlightened ones who show the way across the ocean of rebirth, are called tirthankaras, the “ford-makers”, the ones who build the crossing. And Kashi, the great ford, is the birthplace of ford-makers.

The Jain tradition holds that Parshvanatha, the twenty-third of the twenty-four tirthankaras of this age, and the one many historians regard as standing at the edge of documented history, was born in Varanasi, in what is now the Bhelupur quarter of the city, some centuries before the Common Era. An earlier tirthankara, Suparshvanatha, the seventh, is also held by the tradition to have been born here. So Kashi is not merely a place Jains revere from afar. It is a cradle of their tradition, the birth-ground of the ford-makers, and Jain temples in the city mark the spots to this day. The city of the crossing gave the tradition of the crossing-makers two of its own.

The saints of no name

The third current we have already met, and it is the one that belongs, deliberately, to no single faith at all. It is the tradition of the nirguna saints, the singers of a God without form and without name, and its two greatest voices were born in Kashi.

Kabir, the weaver, we have followed to Magahar. In his life he refused every label, mocking the Hindu at his idol and the Muslim at his mosque with the same affectionate scorn, and pointing both past their forms to a formless truth. And the legend of his death captures the whole of what he was. When he died at Magahar, the story goes, his Hindu followers wished to cremate him and his Muslim followers to bury him, and as they quarreled over the body and lifted the shroud, they found beneath it only a heap of flowers, which they divided between them, the Hindus to burn and the Muslims to inter. The tale is legend, and this account marks it as such, but it is legend that tells a truth: Kabir belonged to everyone and to no one, and both faiths claimed him because he had, in the end, transcended them both. His verses are sung by Hindus, honoured by Muslims, and gathered into the sacred scripture of the Sikhs, the Guru Granth Sahib, so that a weaver of Kashi became a saint of three religions at once.

Beside him stands Ravidas, and his story cuts even deeper, because he was born into the caste that orthodox Hindu society called untouchable, a worker in leather, the most polluting of trades. And out of that despised birth came some of the purest devotional poetry India has ever produced, songs of a God who sees no caste and a love that levels every rank, so luminous that they too were gathered into the Sikhs’ holy book. Ravidas, the leather-worker of Kashi, is revered today across a vast community, a saint to the Sikhs and the founding light of the Ravidassia tradition, and his birthplace in the city is a place of pilgrimage for millions. In a treatise that has had to reckon honestly with the caste hierarchies woven through Kashi’s sacred life, from the Doms who keep the fire to the widows abandoned by the river, Ravidas is the answer the city gave to its own injustice: that from the very bottom of the order it produced a saint whose God had never heard of the order at all.

The Kaaba of Hindustan

And the fourth current is the one most likely to surprise a reader who has been told that Kashi is a Hindu city and nothing else. Islam has been woven into the life of Banaras for many centuries, not as an occupier at the gates but as a thread in the daily fabric of the place.

Consider the silk. The famous Banarasi saris, the brocades that have clothed Indian weddings for generations, the very emblem of Hindu ceremonial splendour, are woven very largely by Muslim hands, by the community of weavers, the Julahas and Ansaris, whose looms have clacked in the lanes of the city for centuries, and whose most famous son was Kabir the weaver himself. The most Hindu of garments is made by Muslim craftsmen, and has been for as long as anyone remembers.

Consider the music. The single most beloved musician Kashi ever produced was Ustad Bismillah Khan, the master of the shehnai, the reed instrument whose sound opens every auspicious Hindu occasion. Bismillah Khan was a devout Muslim, and he played, for a lifetime, at the temples of Kashi, at the shrine of the Vishwanath temple and by the Ganga, and he said, again and again, that he could not imagine his art apart from this city and its river, that the two were one thing. India gave him its highest civilian honour, and he remained, to his death, a Muslim who made his music at the doorstep of a Hindu god and saw no contradiction in it, because in Kashi there was none.

And consider the poetry. In the nineteenth century the greatest of all Urdu poets, Mirza Ghalib, a Muslim of Delhi, passed through Banaras and was so overcome by it that he wrote a long Persian poem in its praise, the Chiragh-e-Dair, “the Temple Lamp”, more than a hundred verses of rapture over a Hindu holy city, in which he called Banaras the Kaaba-e-Hindustan, the Mecca of India, the qibla toward which the whole subcontinent might turn. It is very likely the only great poem in Persian written by an Indian in praise of an Indian city, and it was written by a Muslim about the holiest city of the Hindus, and it called that city a Kaaba. There is no more concentrated image of the shared Kashi than a Muslim master naming Shiva’s city the Mecca of India.

Whose city

So whose city is Kashi? A treatise faithful to the record cannot give the easy, saccharine answer, that all faiths are one and Kashi proves it, because that would be to erase things that are real. The destructions of the temples were real, and dated, and grievous. The wound of the Gyanvapi site is unhealed and stands today in the courts. The quarrel over Kabir’s body was real before it turned to flowers. To pretend Kashi is a seamless harmony would be a lie of exactly the kind this book has refused throughout.

But the opposite lie, that Kashi is a single-faith fortress that others have only ever besieged, is a larger falsehood still, and the record will not bear it either. The truth is more difficult and more human than either. Kashi is a ground where, for two and a half thousand years, more than one path to the far shore has been walked, sometimes in rivalry and sometimes in bloodshed, but far more often in the ordinary, unremarkable coexistence of people who share a city: the Muslim weaver making the Hindu bride’s sari, the Muslim master playing his reed at the Hindu god’s door, the casteless saint whose songs three religions carried, the deer park of the Buddha within sight of the trident of Shiva. Whose city is Kashi? It is the city of the crossing, and the crossing was never the property of one people. It belongs, as it always has, to whoever comes to the river seeking the far shore, by whatever name they call it.

That is the generous truth of the place, and it is the true one. But the city that held so many faiths was also, for a thousand years, the place where they argued, where they taught, where they built the schools and fought the debates that made Kashi not only the holiest city of the Hindus but their greatest seat of learning. The next chapter leaves the temples and the tombs for the classroom, and meets the city of the pandits.