The ground under the ground

The myth gave Kashi a founding fit for a city on a trident. Now set the trident down, and the emissaries with it, and ask the question a surveyor would ask, on ordinary evidence, in ordinary dated time. How old is this city, really? And what has actually happened to it?

The answer is more interesting than the legend, and less flattering, and it needs to be told plainly, because Kashi attracts superlatives the way the river attracts pilgrims, and most of them will not bear weight.

Older than history, and how much older

The famous claim is that Varanasi is the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth. It is repeated in guidebooks, on temple websites, in the mouths of pilgrims, and it cannot be proven, because it is not really an archaeological statement at all. Two other cities, Damascus and Jericho, carry the same claim on better-documented grounds, and the title turns entirely on how you define a city and how you define “continuous”. The honest form of the sentence is smaller and still remarkable: Kashi is among the oldest living cities in the world.

What the spade actually finds is this. On the plateau at Rajghat, at the northern edge of the old city where the Varana meets the Ganga, excavation has reached the layers of settled urban life, and the archaeologists place the founding of that settlement at roughly the eighth century before the Common Era. Call it three thousand years of continuous habitation, give or take. That is a very long time, long enough to make Kashi one of the genuinely ancient living cities of the world. It is not the five thousand years of the devotional literature, and it is not proof of a title no one can win. The tradition’s instinct that the place is fabulously old is sound. The specific superlative is a flourish.

And Kashi is old in the older record too, the literary one. The Kashis appear as a people in the world of the later Veda. By the time of the Buddha the city is one of the sixteen great states, the mahajanapadas, that the Ganges plain broke into during India’s second age of cities, around the sixth and fifth centuries before the Common Era. It sits thick in the Buddhist storybooks, the Jatakas, where “the king of Benares” is almost a fixed epithet, a byword for a great and prosperous capital. Kashi was a real and important city of the first millennium before Christ, and then, as kingdoms do, it was swallowed, absorbed by Kosala and then by the rising power of Magadha, and it settled into the long role it has held ever since. Less a seat of kings than a seat of the sacred.

So the antiquity is real. What has to be corrected is the idea that goes with it: that a city this old must be, in its stones, unchanged. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Kashi a pilgrim walks today is, for the most part, startlingly recent.

The wound in the temple

To see why, you have to follow the one building whose story cannot be told without the wound in it: the central temple of Shiva as Vishveshvara, the Lord of All, the shrine the whole city walks to.

It has been destroyed and rebuilt more times than anyone can count, and the destructions are dated events, not legends. The great temple of the Gahadavala kings, who ruled here in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and made Kashi a capital of temple-building, fell in the wave of conquest that swept the Ganges plain around 1194, when the Ghurid armies broke the Gahadavalas and their generals pulled down the shrines of the defeated. It was raised again, and struck again under the sultanates that followed, most likely under Sikandar Lodi around the turn of the sixteenth century. And then, most famously and most bitterly, it was demolished on the order of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1669, an act recorded in the court chronicle of his own reign. On part of the razed temple’s footprint the Gyanvapi mosque was built, and fragments of the older temple’s fabric remain visible in its walls to this day.

This account names that history and stops there. The site of the old temple is the subject of a live and sensitive legal dispute in the present, and it is not the business of a treatise on the sacred meaning of the city to adjudicate it. What can be said without controversy is the plain sequence: a temple, destroyed under Aurangzeb in 1669, a mosque raised beside and partly upon its remains, and the question of that ground carried, unhealed, into the courts of our own time. The wound is real. This book neither reopens it nor pretends it is closed.

The city that was rebuilt

Here is the correction that surprises even people who know Kashi well, and it comes from the historian Madhuri Desai, whose study of how the sacred city was actually assembled is the sober counterweight to every “unchanged for millennia” brochure.

The Kashi of the postcard, the long sweep of honey-coloured stone ghats, the temples above them, the whole magnificent riverfront that reads as the accumulation of ages, is very largely the work of the eighteenth century. After the destructions, and in the loosening grip of the late Mughal state, a new set of patrons rebuilt the sacred city almost from the waterline up, and almost all of them were Hindu powers from far outside it. The Marathas above all. The Peshwas and the Scindias and the Holkars poured wealth into Kashi, raising and facing the great stone ghats that give the city its present shape. In 1780 the Maratha queen Ahilyabai Holkar of Indore built the present Kashi Vishwanath temple beside the mosque, the shrine the city still walks to every morning. The Bengali queen Rani Bhabani endowed temples and tanks. A century and a half earlier Raja Man Singh of Amber had already raised the palace-ghat that bears his name and, on its roof, the stone astronomical observatory, the Jantar Mantar, that still stands there.

Desai’s point is not that Kashi is fake. It is that Kashi is resilient in a way the legend obscures. The sanctity is genuinely ancient. The stone that houses it is largely modern, rebuilt within the last three centuries by people who came from elsewhere precisely because the ground was too holy to leave in ruins. The eternal city is, in its visible body, an eighteenth-century reconstruction of an idea far older than any of its stones. That is a more remarkable thing than changelessness. It is a city that keeps being rebuilt because it refuses to be let go, which is, come to think of it, exactly what its oldest name has said all along.

The corridor

The rebuilding did not end in the eighteenth century. Its latest and largest chapter opened in our own decade, and it divides the people who love the city.

In 2021 the government completed the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, a sweeping redevelopment that cleared a broad ceremonial avenue from the temple down to the river, opening the shrine to the Ganga in a way it had not been for centuries and giving the millions who come each year room to move. To build it, something on the order of three hundred houses were bought and demolished and hundreds of families resettled, and as the old dense fabric came down, a startling thing emerged from inside it: dozens of small temples, some forty of them, that had been swallowed and hidden for generations within the walls of the packed houses, now standing free again in the cleared ground.

There are two honest ways to see this, and a fair account holds both. One sees grandeur and access restored, the god given back his river, the crowds given room, the buried shrines brought to light. The other, and Desai’s history sharpens it, sees a loss that cannot be rebuilt: the labyrinth of narrow lanes, the galis, the intimate, jostling, centuries-layered fabric in which the sacredness of Kashi was not a monument you viewed but a density you were immersed in, cleared away for a plaza. Something was recovered and something was razed. The city has done both before, many times. This account records the newest instance and, as with the older wound, does not pretend the question is simple.

What actually endures

Step back from three thousand years of it, and the pattern is unmistakable, and it is the pattern the very first chapter named.

The buildings of Kashi come and go. They have been raised and thrown down and raised again, by Gahadavala kings and Ghurid armies and Mughal emperors and Maratha queens and modern states, in a cycle that shows no sign of ending. If you went looking for the “eternity” of the eternal city in its stones, you would not find it. Most of the stones are younger than the United States.

What endures is not the architecture. It is the ritual life the architecture houses, and the sanctity of the ground it stands on. For three thousand years, through every destruction and every rebuilding, someone has walked down to the river at dawn to stand in the water and face the sun, and someone has carried the dead to the fire at dusk, and the walk and the fire have not stopped for a single generation. That is the continuity that is actually unbroken. Not the temple, which has fallen a dozen times. The practice, which has not.

This is why the honest historical account, far from puncturing the tradition, ends up agreeing with its oldest instinct. The tradition never located Kashi’s eternity in its buildings. It located it in Shiva’s refusal to leave the ground, and in the inner Avimukta that no army can reach. The stones were always going to fall. The ground was always going to be holy. The buildings come and go. The ground does not.

We have now heard the city’s story told twice, once in the register of myth and once in the register of the record, and a reader might reasonably ask how we can tell which is which, and where the tradition’s own account of itself even comes from. That is the next question. Before we can walk any further into Kashi, we have to open the book the city wrote about itself, and learn to read it: the great praise-poem called the Kashi Khanda, and the strange, powerful literature of the sacred place.