The city in the mirror

Everything this treatise has done so far has been an attempt to see Kashi from the inside, as the tradition sees it and as its own scholars and saints have known it. But Kashi is one of the most looked-at cities on earth, and most of the looking has come from outside, from travellers and conquerors and colonial officials and photographers and poets who arrived from elsewhere and made an image of the place to carry away. That image, the Kashi held in the mirror of the outsider’s gaze, is a story of its own. It is worth telling, near the end, because it shows us both what the city gives to a stranger and what the stranger almost always misses.

The travellers’ awe

The first thing the mirror records is awe. Kashi has stopped visitors in their tracks for as long as visitors have come, and the reaction is remarkably consistent across the centuries: a sense of standing before something older and stranger and more intensely alive than anything the traveller’s own world had prepared him for.

We have already borrowed the most famous line. Mark Twain, weary and unsentimental, came up the river in 1896 and wrote that “Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” He was wrong about the literal age, as we have seen, and right about the feeling, which is the usual fate of the outsider at Kashi: to miss the fact and catch the atmosphere. Twain stands at the head of a long line of the overwhelmed, the travellers who reached for their biggest words and found them too small. The awe is genuine, and it is the truest thing in the outside record, because it registers something real about the concentration of the place, even when it understands nothing of the theology behind it.

The Orientalist mirror

But awe curdles easily into a particular colonial way of seeing, and the mirror of the nineteenth century is clouded with it. To the Orientalist eye, Kashi became the very emblem of a certain idea of India: timeless, unchanging, frozen, a living museum of a fossilised past. It was the trope we have already dismantled in the chapter on the city’s real history, the fantasy of an eternal, static India standing still while the West moved, and Kashi, with its ancient rites and its crowded ghats, was made its supreme symbol. The gaze that produced this image was often condescending, sometimes repelled, forever exoticising, seeing in the burning ground and the ash-smeared ascetic a proof of Indian strangeness rather than a coherent view of death and release.

And yet the colonial mirror was not all condescension, and honesty requires naming the outsiders who looked with rigour and with love. The finest of them was James Prinsep, who lived in Banaras in the 1820s and 30s as an officer of the mint, and who fell so thoroughly under the city’s spell that he drew it, street by street and ghat by ghat, in a series of exquisite illustrations that remain one of the most beautiful records ever made of the place, and studied its antiquities with real devotion. The same Prinsep went on, later, to one of the great intellectual feats of the age: the decipherment of the ancient Brahmi script, the lost alphabet in which the edicts of Ashoka were written, unlocking centuries of India’s own history that Indians and Europeans alike had been unable to read. Here was an outsider whose looking was a gift, who gave India back the ability to read its own oldest stones. The mirror, at its best, was held by people like Prinsep, who came to Kashi wanting to understand it rather than to consume it, and who left the city and the country richer for their looking.

The photographed city

Then came the camera, and Kashi became one of the most photographed places on the face of the earth.

When photography reached India in the nineteenth century, the ghats of Banaras were among the first and most irresistible subjects, and the great early photographers, Felice Beato in the 1850s, Samuel Bourne in the 1860s, and many after them, made images of the crescent of steps and temples that travelled around the world and fixed, in the global imagination, a picture of Kashi that persists to this day. The long arc of stone at dawn, the pilgrims in the river, the leaning temples, the smoke of the burning ground: this became the visual shorthand for sacred India itself, reproduced on a million postcards and book covers and screens. The image is genuinely beautiful, and it is not false, exactly. But it is a surface, composed for the eye, and the camera that made it could record the stone and the smoke and the light on the water while remaining perfectly blind to the one thing that made any of it matter, which was the meaning the people in the frame were living inside.

The pilgrim and the tourist

Which brings the mirror down to our own moment, and to a tension the city now lives with every day: the difference between the pilgrim’s Kashi and the tourist’s.

The pilgrim comes to the city to do something, to bathe, to pray, to mourn, to die, to give the rites to a dead father, to seek release. The tourist comes to see it, to photograph the ghats at sunrise from a hired boat, to watch the aarti as a spectacle, and, at the darkest edge of it, to point a camera at a stranger’s cremation as though a family’s grief were a piece of scenery. The gaze of the tourist consumes; it takes the image and gives nothing, and at the burning ground it can become a genuine violation, the reduction of the most sacred and most private thing a family ever does to a backdrop for a holiday photograph. The city that has borne so much has learned to bear this too, the daily stream of the curious who come to look at death as though it were a show, and it mostly bears it with a patience that is itself a kind of teaching.

And here is what the touristic mirror, at both its beautiful and its ghoulish extremes, consistently misses. It sees the picturesque, the lovely dawn on the water, or it sees the macabre, the burning bodies, and it fixes on one or the other, and it misses entirely the vast, ordinary, unbroken thing in the middle: the actual devotion, the old woman murmuring her prayer as she has every morning for sixty years, the priest who is not performing for a camera, the grief that is real, the release that is longed for, the theology that gives the smoke and the light their sense. The outsider photographs the surface of Kashi because the surface is all the camera can reach. The substance is invisible to the lens, because the substance is meaning, and meaning does not photograph.

The map and the ground

So the mirror shows us the limit of all outside seeing, and it is a limit this treatise has to turn, at the end, upon itself.

Because this book, too, is a kind of looking from outside. It has tried to look with rigour and with love, in the tradition of Prinsep rather than of the holiday photographer, to understand rather than to consume, to keep the tradition’s meaning at the centre where the camera leaves it out. But it remains a map, and a map is not the ground. Everything in these chapters, the trident and the taraka, the Doms and the ghats, the Aghori and the pandit, the four faiths and the burning fire, is a description of a living thing by someone standing, in the end, at one remove from the life of it. The tradition does not need this account. It has been carrying itself, dawn after dawn and pyre after pyre, for three thousand years, and it would go on exactly as it is if every book about it, this one included, were lost tomorrow.

That is the humility the whole treatise has tried to keep, and it belongs most of all here, at the edge of the ending. The best that any account of Kashi can do, whether it is Prinsep’s drawings or Eck’s great study or these chapters, is to stand at the rim of a living thing and describe its shape faithfully, and then to point past the description toward the thing itself, and fall silent. The map is offered. The reader is pointed, gently, toward the ground.

And the ground is best reached the way the city itself has always reached it, less by studying Kashi than by standing in it, at dawn, on the steps, as the sun comes up across the water and the whole living city turns to the river one more time. The mirror can show the crescent of stone. It cannot show what it feels like to be a small part of a devotion three thousand years old, unbroken, greeting the light. For that you have to close the book and go down to the river. The last chapter tries to stand there, in the living city, and to ask the final question: what is it that keeps Kashi, after everything, so fiercely and so unstoppably alive?