The book of the city

We have now heard Kashi described as a city on a trident and as a city of dated brick, and a careful reader is entitled to ask an awkward question. Where does the first account come from? When the tradition says that to die here is liberation, that Shiva raised the city above the flood of dissolution, that a king was led to renounce his throne by a disguised god, who exactly is saying so, and in what book, and when was it written?

Every claim in this treatise about what Kashi means, as opposed to what happened to it, rests on a body of literature. Before we walk any further into the city, we should open that literature and learn what kind of thing it is. Because the book the city wrote about itself is not a history, and it was never trying to be, and to read it as one is to misunderstand the city at the root.

A book inside a book

The single most important source is a text called the Kashi Khanda, and its name tells you its shape. A khanda is a “section” or “book”, and the Kashi Khanda is one book of a much larger work, the Skanda Purana, which is the most sprawling of all the eighteen great Puranas, a vast, loose, many-layered anthology of myth, ritual, genealogy and sacred geography. Tucked inside that anthology is this one long section given over entirely to the praise of a single city, thousands of verses of it, and it is from here that nearly everything ahead in this treatise flows: the death that liberates, the never-forsaken ground, the story of Divodasa, the origin of the terrible guardian we are about to meet, the glory of the burning ground.

Like most Puranic literature it is cast as a conversation. The sage Agastya, longing for Kashi and unable to reach it, is told the city’s greatness by Skanda, the warrior son of Shiva, and inside that frame sit further dialogues, Shiva instructing Parvati, one voice handing the tale to the next, in the nested way these texts prefer. An English reader can follow the whole of it in the translation by G. V. Tagare, an Indian scholar whose rendering of the Skanda Purana for the Motilal Banarsidass series is the standard door into the text, and it is his wording this treatise quotes when it quotes the Kashi Khanda at all.

And here is the fact that must be held steadily, because the tradition tends to blur it. The Kashi Khanda is late. Scholars who have studied its language and its references, the Banaras historian Kubernath Sukul among them, place its crystallisation into the form we have around the thirteenth or fourteenth century of the Common Era, accepted as authoritative by the fourteenth. That does not make it shallow. It is the late gathering of devotion far older than itself, the same way a hymnbook printed last year can carry songs a thousand years old. But it means that when someone says “the scriptures declare that death in Kashi is liberation”, the scripture they mean took its shape roughly seven hundred years ago, in a specific time and place, for specific reasons. It is not Vedic. It is not timeless. It is a medieval masterpiece of a very particular kind of writing.

What a mahatmya is for

That particular kind of writing has a name, and knowing the name changes how you read every promise in it. The Kashi Khanda is a mahatmya, a “glorification”, and the mahatmya is one of the great functional genres of Sanskrit literature.

A mahatmya exists to establish and broadcast the sanctity of a place. It does this by making promises, precise ones, in the currency the tradition trades in, which is merit and liberation. Bathe at this ford and the sins of a lifetime fall away. Circumambulate this shrine and gain the fruit of a thousand sacrifices. Die within these bounds and cross over the ocean of rebirth. Give here, fast here, walk here on this day of the moon, and here is exactly what you will win. The text is, among other things, an instrument, a way of drawing the devout to a place and organising what they do when they arrive, and behind it, quietly, stands the whole economy of pilgrimage, the priests and boatmen and lodging-houses that a great sacred city lives on.

The historian Romila Thapar has taught a generation to read this genre for what it is. A mahatmya is not a chronicle and does not answer to a chronicle’s rules of evidence. It is a statement of faith and a carrier of cultural memory, a text whose truth is ritual and devotional truth, the truth of what a place means and does for those who believe in it, not the truth of what measurably occurred. To ask of the Kashi Khanda “but is it factually the case that this city floats on a trident” is to ask a question the text was never built to take. It would be like demanding the tax records behind a love poem.

Reading it honestly

So this treatise reads the Kashi Khanda in two registers at once, and keeps them apart on the page, exactly as it has tried to do with the city itself.

When the text speaks of what Kashi means, the liberation it gives, the presence of Shiva, the inner Avimukta, this treatise reports it as the tradition’s own voice, quoted faithfully and attributed clearly to the tradition, neither endorsed as fact nor sneered at, simply presented as what the devout hold and why. When the text can be checked against the record, the dates of temples, the shape of the city, the events of its history, it is checked, and where it and the record diverge, the divergence is named.

And there is a third thing an honest reader does with a mahatmya, which is to let it betray its own date. The Kashi Khanda is a period document, and it wears its period. It carries, alongside its soaring vision of a city where liberation is free to all, prescriptions that belong unmistakably to the medieval world that produced it, including hard and narrow rulings about the conduct of widows that no one would mistake for a timeless charter of equality. Those passages are not an embarrassment to be hidden. They are evidence. They are the fingerprints that tell you the hand was thirteenth-century, and they are a useful corrective to the sentimental idea, common online, that the city’s promise of liberation “regardless of caste or creed” was some ancient social utopia. The soteriology is radical. The society the text assumes around it is of its time. A mature reading holds both.

The library behind the book

And the Kashi Khanda, for all its size, is not the whole of the city’s literature. It is the largest book in a library that grew across many centuries.

There is the Kashi Rahasya, the “secret of Kashi”, a more esoteric, tantric-flavoured text that reads the city through the inner map we met two chapters ago. There are the older, shorter praises of Kashi scattered through earlier Puranas, the Matsya, the Padma, the Linga, which show the city’s fame already established well before the Kashi Khanda gathered it into one great poem. And there is the literature of the pilgrimage rites themselves, above all the Tristhali Setu, the “bridge to the three sacred places”, composed in the sixteenth century by the great Banaras scholar Narayana Bhatta, a learned digest that codified how the rites of the dead were to be performed across the circuit of Prayag, Kashi and Gaya. In the modern age this whole inheritance was documented afresh by Indian scholars of the city, Sukul chief among them, whose Varanasi Down the Ages remains the great record of how the sacred topography was actually assembled and named.

Taken together this is not a book. It is a conversation across a thousand years, each generation of the city’s devout and learned adding to the account, correcting it, deepening it, so that “the book of the city” is really the long, layered self-description of a place that never stopped writing itself. When this treatise cites “the tradition”, this is the library it means: primary, layered, argued over, and Indian to its roots.

The book that built the city

Which leads to the quiet, important recognition this chapter has been building toward.

The literature did not merely describe Kashi. It made it. A muddy bend of a river becomes the holiest ground on earth not by geology but by a claim, repeated, elaborated, and believed, until the claim reorganises the place around itself: draws the temples, sets the routes, fills the lodging-houses, carries the dead across the country to one riverbank. The mahatmya is the engine of that transformation. The book is how the city became the city.

And notice, finally, whom the book is addressed to. Its verses are overwhelmingly instructions for the living. Come and bathe. Come and circle the shrine. Come and give, and fast, and walk the circuit, and dwell. The literature of Kashi is, at bottom, a manual for practice, a set of things a breathing person is to do in a real place on real mornings, in the hope of the release we have been tracing. Even the death it promises is the far end of a life of such practice. The book is not an epitaph for a city of the dead. It is a rulebook for a city of seekers.

We can read that book now. We know what kind of thing it is, when it was written, what it is for, and how to weigh it. So it is time to stop describing the city from the outside and step into it, and meet the first of the powers the book describes. He is the one who stands at the gate of the whole system, the one who, the Kashi Khanda says, holds the very authority of the city and settles the accounts of everyone who dies in it. He is Shiva in his most terrible form, and no pilgrim, the tradition insists, truly enters Kashi without first reporting to him.