The learned city

There is a danger in a book like this one. Chapter after chapter of fire and death and the crossing can leave a reader with the impression that Kashi is a vast and beautiful machine for dying, a city with its face turned entirely toward the far shore. It is time to correct that impression firmly, because for a thousand years Kashi has been something else as well, something that has nothing to do with death and everything to do with the sharpest and most rigorous exercise of the living mind. It has been the greatest school in India.

The pandit is as much a figure of Kashi as the ash-smeared ascetic, and far more numerous. The city that carries the dead to the fire has also, for a millennium, been the place a scholar had to come to be made, and the place a doctrine had to survive to be believed.

The arena of debate

The heart of that intellectual life was argument, formal and public and merciless. The tradition calls it shastrartha, “the meaning of the scriptures”, the disciplined debate in which two learned men, or two schools, contended over a point of philosophy or grammar or ritual before an audience of their peers, until one was defeated and the position was settled. And Kashi was the supreme arena of it. To win a debate at Banaras was to win the tradition’s highest recognition; to lose one there was to be marked. A scholar from anywhere in India might build a reputation at home, but it was not fully real until it had been tested in the city, in the presence of the pandits who had heard every argument and were impressed by none.

Around that arena grew a dense ecosystem of learning: the traditional schools, the pathshalas, where boys memorised the Veda and the grammar of Panini and the logic of the Nyaya before they were old enough to shave; the great disciplines held in living transmission, teacher to student, for centuries, the grammarians and the logicians and the ritualists and the philosophers of the six schools; the households of pandits where a single family might carry a specialty for twenty generations. Kashi did not merely preserve the Sanskrit learning of India. It was the place that learning came to argue itself into shape, the forge and the proving-ground of the whole intellectual tradition, and it held that role, unbroken, through every one of the destructions and rebuildings this treatise has recorded. The temple could be pulled down. The debate went on in the next lane.

The giants of the schools

Names make it real, and two will stand for the many.

Madhusudana Sarasvati, who lived and taught in the sixteenth century, was one of the towering intellects of Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual philosophy of Shankara. His great work, the Advaita Siddhi, is a formidable defence of non-dualism against its critics, one of the most rigorous works of philosophy the tradition produced, and it was in the world of Kashi’s debate that such a work was forged and defended. He was also, in one of the tender paradoxes the city specialises in, a fervent devotee of Krishna, a man who could dismantle every notion of a personal God on the logical field and then weep before the image of one, holding the highest philosophy and the deepest devotion in the same heart.

Bhaskararaya Makhin, who lived across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the supreme scholar of the Shakta and Shrividya tradition, the Tantric worship of the Goddess, and by the tradition’s account there was no pandit in Banaras he could not defeat in debate. His commentaries on the great texts of Goddess-worship, the Lalita Sahasranama and the rest, remain the standard by which that whole tradition is read, and it is no accident that a scholar of his stature was a man of Kashi, because the city was where a Tantric learning that the orthodox often frowned on could nonetheless command the highest intellectual respect. Between Madhusudana the Vedantin and Bhaskararaya the Tantric, the range of the city’s mind is on display: the most austere non-dualism and the most elaborate Goddess-worship, both defended at the highest level, in the same city, in the same debating halls.

And this points to something the death-chapters could not show. Kashi is not only the city of bhakti, of loving devotion, and not only the city of vairagya, of renunciation. It is pre-eminently the city of jnana, of knowledge, and the tradition holds knowledge to be one of the great roads to the far shore in its own right, the path of the philosopher who reasons and studies and finally sees his way to liberation. The pandit bent over his palm-leaf manuscript is on the same journey as the ascetic in the ash and the pilgrim in the river. He is crossing by the road of the mind.

The old city in a modern robe

That ancient life of learning did not fossilise. In the modern age it put on a new robe without taking off the old one, and the man who tailored the new robe was a Kashi pandit turned nation-builder.

In 1916, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya founded the Banaras Hindu University on the southern edge of the city, and it grew into one of the largest universities in Asia, a vast modern campus of science and engineering and medicine and the arts, set down beside the oldest seat of traditional learning in the land. The old Sanskrit learning kept its own institutions too, in the venerable Sanskrit college that became Sampurnanand Sanskrit University, one of the oldest centres of its kind. And the movement to revive the Hindi language and the Devanagari script that carried it found its home here as well, in the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, founded in 1893, which did much to make modern Hindi a language of literature and learning.

Malaviya’s university carried a reforming impulse that is worth marking, because it speaks to the caste tensions this treatise has had to hold throughout. On the BHU campus rises a new temple of Vishwanath, a twentieth-century re-imagining of the great shrine, and unlike the ancient temple in its guarded medieval lanes, the new one was built open to all, admitting worshippers of every caste, the untouchable and the brahmin at the same threshold. It was a deliberate answer, in stone, to the exclusions of the old order, the same city that kept the Doms from its temples now raising a Vishwanath that turned no one away.

The map that is a temple

And the city’s genius for the strange and the new produced, in this modern age, a temple unlike any other on earth, and it belongs in this chapter because it is a temple of knowledge and of the nation rather than of any god.

It is the Bharat Mata Mandir, the temple of Mother India, and it enshrines no image of a deity at all. In its sanctum, where an idol would ordinarily stand, there is instead a vast relief map of the whole of undivided India, carved in white Makrana marble to exact scale, mountains and rivers and plains rendered in stone, the subcontinent itself laid out as the object of worship. It was built by the freedom-fighter Shiv Prasad Gupta and inaugurated by Mahatma Gandhi in 1936, and Gandhi understood exactly what it was: a temple, he said, with no statues, only a map of India, meant as a platform open to people of every religion, a shrine to the land itself and to all who lived on it. Only Kashi, the city that had spent three thousand years imagining sacred geography, that read its own streets as the body of God and its river as a goddess, could have produced a temple whose deity is a map.

The learned city produced modern writers too, giants of the new literature. Munshi Premchand, born in a village on the city’s edge, became the greatest novelist of Hindi and Urdu, the writer who turned the ordinary suffering of the Indian village and the small town into serious literature. Jaishankar Prasad, born in the city itself, became one of the leading poets of the Chhayavaad, the great romantic movement of modern Hindi verse. The city of the Sanskrit pandit became, without missing a step, a city of the modern novel and the modern poem, the old learning and the new flowing through the same lanes.

The city of the mind

So set the learned city beside the dying city, and see the whole of Kashi at last.

It is the burning ground and it is the debating hall. It is the taraka whispered to the dying and it is the Advaita Siddhi argued line by remorseless line. It is the ascetic who has renounced all thought and the pandit who has spent sixty years perfecting it. The tradition does not experience these as opposites, because it holds three great roads to the one far shore, and the city keeps all three open at once: the road of devotion, which we walked with Tulsidas; the road of renunciation, which we walked into the ash; and the road of knowledge, the jnana of the pandit reasoning his way to the truth that the ascetic feels and the devotee loves. Kashi is the capital of all three. It is where India came to love its gods, and to renounce its attachments, and to think its hardest thoughts, and it held the three together in one crowded, brilliant, argumentative city for longer than most nations have existed.

And it held them, remarkably, while renewing itself the whole time. The learned city was never a museum. It argued its old philosophy in new debates, it built a modern university beside its ancient schools, it raised a Vishwanath open to the castes the old one shut out, and it made a temple whose god is a map. A city that can do that, that can carry a tradition three thousand years old and still build something genuinely new out of it, is not a relic. It is alive, and thinking, and unfinished.

Which raises one last question, and it is the one that has stood at the edge of this whole treatise. We have described Kashi from the inside, as the tradition sees it and as its own scholars have known it. But the city has also been seen, endlessly, from the outside, by travellers and conquerors and colonial photographers and foreign poets, and the image they made of it, the Kashi held in the mirror of the outsider’s gaze, is a story of its own, and not always a true one. Before we come to rest, we should look at the city in that mirror, and ask what the outside world has seen when it looked at the City of Light, and what it has missed.