A city made of gods

Past the guardian at the gate, the pilgrim walks into a city so thick with gods that a lifetime is not enough to greet them all. The tradition does not exaggerate lightly, but here it says, and means, that every deity worth worshipping in India is present somewhere in Kashi, seated in some lane or tank or riverside shrine, so that the whole pantheon of a subcontinent is gathered onto a few square miles of the Ganges bank. To walk the city is to walk among the gods the way you would walk among a crowd.

But it is not a formless crowd. The gods of Kashi are arranged, and the arrangement is the point. At the centre stands one shrine, and around it, ring upon ring, stand the guardians.

The lord and the queen

The centre is Shiva as Vishveshvara, the Lord of All, worshipped as Vishwanath in the temple the whole city walks to, in the form of the Jyotirlinga, the pillar of light. Everything the last chapters have said about the city gathers here. This is the ground Shiva will not leave, the still point of the mandala, the shrine at the inmost of the concentric circuits. When a Banarsi speaks simply of “darshan”, the seeing and being seen by the deity, without naming a god, this is the god he means.

Beside him rules his queen, and she answers the city’s most human need. Kashi is the city of Annapurna, Parvati in the form of the goddess “full of food”, who feeds every creature that comes to her. The tradition tells the tenderest of its stories about the two of them together. Shiva, the lord of the entire universe, the owner of everything there is, takes up a begging bowl in his own city and holds it out, and receives his meal from the hand of Annapurna, so that no one in Kashi should ever go hungry while even God himself begs and is fed. The image is not an idle flourish. It says something the whole city means: that here the highest bows to be nourished, and that liberation and a full stomach are both, in their way, the goddess’s gift. Seekers come to Kashi to be freed. They also come to be fed, and the same queen sees to both.

The goddess of many names

And she is present far beyond that one temple, because Kashi is a city of the Goddess as much as of Shiva, and reading it only as a Shaiva city misses half of it.

She sits, first, as Vishalakshi, “the wide-eyed one”, in a shrine the tradition counts among the Shakta Pithas, the sacred sites scattered across the subcontinent where, in the great myth of the dismembered Sati, a part of the Goddess’s own body is said to have fallen to earth. To stand before Vishalakshi is to stand at one of the places where the Goddess is not merely worshipped but physically present, a fragment of her body making the ground itself divine. A Shaiva city carries, at its heart, a piece of the Goddess’s body.

She sits, too, as the guardian of the city’s southern approach, in the red-ochre temple beside the great tank of Durga Kund, where the image of Durga is held to be swayambhu, self-manifested rather than carved by any hand. Tradition credits the building of the temple to the eighteenth-century Bengali queen Rani Bhabani, and that patronage is the common account, though it should be held as tradition rather than firm record. What is not in doubt is the role. Durga stands as one of the fierce protectresses of the sacred field, a goddess-guardian to set beside the Bhairava of the last chapter.

And she multiplies, as the powers of Kashi always do, into ordered rings. The tradition counts nine forms of Gauri, the bright goddess, and nine of Durga, the fierce one, set as circuits of shrines through the city, so that the Goddess too rings the centre in nines, her own concentric wards laid over the god’s. Kashi is not a city with a goddess in it. It is a city built, at every scale, of the god and the goddess together.

A hundred Shivas

Turn back to Shiva and the multiplication is the same. There is not one Shiva in Kashi. There are hundreds, seated under a hundred names, each a lingam with its own story, its own well, its own particular gift, and three of them are worth meeting because they show how precisely the city divides its labour.

There is Mrityunjaya Mahadev, Shiva as the Conqueror of Death, and his shrine is the exact theological twin of the burning ground we are walking toward. Manikarnika promises a good death, the death that liberates. Mrityunjaya guards against the bad one, the apamrityu, the untimely, violent, unripe death that snatches a person before their work is done. His is the shrine of the great death-conquering mantra we heard in the first chapter, the Mahamrityunjaya verse, and beside it the sacred well the tradition calls Dharma Kupa, where the healing waters are said to gather. To the one god the city brings two opposite prayers: let my death, when it comes, be the ripe one that sets me free, and until then, keep the unripe one from my door.

There is Trilochan Mahadev, the “three-eyed”, among the most ancient lingams in the city, a shrine already prominent in the Gahadavala centuries before the medieval destructions, one of the genuine old bones of Kashi under all the eighteenth-century stone.

And there is Tilbhandeshwar, the beloved local marvel, a self-manifest lingam that the devout hold to grow, imperceptibly, by the breadth of a sesame seed, a til, every year. That is devotional belief and this account marks it as such, but it is exactly the kind of intimate, particular miracle that binds a neighbourhood to its god: not the grand cosmic claim of the mahatmya, but a small, tender, local one, a stone that is quietly alive.

A hundred Shivas, each with a task. The city does not worship a god in the abstract. It worships him at a thousand precise addresses, each answering a specific human need, from the fear of a bad death to the hope of a child.

The rings of guardians

Which brings us back, one last time, to the circuits, because now we can see them peopled.

We met them first as geometry, the concentric rings of the cosmogram, and then as myth, the emissaries who came to spy for Shiva and stayed to guard his city. Now walk them as they actually stand. The outermost wards are the fifty-six Vinayakas, the fifty-six forms of Ganesha, the remover of obstacles, set in ring after ring around Kashi so that no evil crosses into the sacred field without passing the elephant-headed guardian. Within and among them stand the twelve Adityas, the twelve suns, the solar shrines that the Divodasa story remembers as the Suns who went to spy and stayed to shine.

One of those suns is worth stopping at, because it opens a layer of Kashi older than its Shaiva fame. At Lolark Kund, the “trembling sun”, a deep and ancient stepwell descends to the water, and at the festival of Lolarka Shashti childless couples come down into it to bathe, and make a vow that is peculiar and moving: to give up, for the rest of their lives, one fruit or one vegetable, surrendering a small pleasure forever in exchange for the boon of a child. The sun-worship here is a survival from a stratum beneath the city’s Shiva-centrism, a reminder that Kashi was holy to the Adityas before it was Shiva’s, and that under the topmost layer of any old sacred place lie older ones. The seekers who climb down into Lolark’s water are not thinking of death or liberation at all. They have come, in the city of the crossing, for the most ordinary and life-affirming of gifts, a child, and the city has a shrine ready for exactly that prayer too.

The whole pantheon in one place

Stand back from all of it, and the density resolves into a design.

Kashi is a mandala with Shiva at the centre, in the temple of the Lord of All, and around him the goddess in her nines, the hundred Shivas at their hundred addresses, the fifty-six Ganeshas and the twelve suns in their rings, the Bhairavas at the eight directions, and beyond them, folded into the city’s own map, the representatives of every other holy place in India. It is the pantheon of a whole civilisation, arranged as a single, walkable, concentric figure, with the never-forsaken ground at its heart.

And here is the thing to carry out of this chapter, because it corrects the shadow this treatise has been living under. For all the talk of the crossing and the burning ground, the gods of Kashi are, overwhelmingly, gods the living come to. They come to Annapurna to be fed, to Mrityunjaya to be shielded from an early death, to Durga for protection, to Lolark for a child, to Vishwanath for the daily darshan that steadies a life. The shrines are not memorials. They are the working machinery of a living devotion, thronged every morning by people who have come not to die but to ask the ordinary, urgent things of a human life, and to stand for a moment in the presence of a god who is held to be really, unbrokenly here.

Above and around the whole crowded pantheon, though, moves one deity who is not a statue in any of these shrines, and who is worshipped by the whole city at once, every dawn, at the water’s edge. She is older than most of the gods along her banks, and she is the reason the city stands where it stands. The next chapter leaves the temples for the river, and meets the goddess who flows.