Aimless in Banaras

Aimless in Banaras: Wanderings in India’s Holiest City

Bishwanath Ghosh

Tranquebar, 2019

ISBN 9789389152005

Thanks are due to the team at First Post.

Couple of months ago, as I discussed Banaras with a friend, she referred to its famed Ganga Jamni tehzeeb. The violence and acrimony we come across today is not what the place stood for, she added. Hatred, I agreed with her, was not what the town represented. However, I argued that the town was also not only about love and harmony, and that people existed between the two extremes. This other side of the story, in sync with society’s shying away from difficult topics attitude, is seldom discussed. Hatred.  

During school years, I used to accompany mumi to her parents’ place each summer. There, at the heart of the town, it seemed that all the reverence was reserved for the sounds emerging from the temple. The calls from masjid were frowned upon, and decidedly so. While the Pandit was suffixed with a Ji, the Mullah was prefixed with a Hindi slur. The other day, I asked mumi if anyone in her family had muslim friends. She was uncharacteristically quick in responding with a “no”.

Today, I live in an old, large campus in Banaras, which also houses a Mazar. The language used by some of my colleagues to refer to Muslims on a regular basis, will not find place on this platform. It was only the other day that a colleague mentioned how the demolition of buildings near the Kashi Vishwanath Temple had led to a sad situation. As I wondered why, he added that it had enhanced the visibility of the Gyanvapi Mosque abutting the temple. The mosque was better hidden, he said.

Talking of caste, the privileged young I came across in Gujarat used to pretend it did not exist. In Banaras they are proud and loud about it.

Ghosh, to his credit, does not shy from talking about this side of the town in his book Aimless in Banaras: Wanderings in India’s Holiest City. He mentions how they Babri Masjid demolition, and the period that followed, changed the fabric of the town. He takes note of the razing of homes for a corridor that will connect the Kashi Vishwanath temple to the river. He also touches upon Pujaris flying across the globe to conduct rituals, and looking down upon other pujaris. And, of course caste. All these he does in a straight forward manner.

Ghosh isn’t afraid of referring to the much-hyped and praised evening arati on the river as “a sham”. The arati – as it is currently performed on select ghats - is an act Banaras can do without.

Ghosh quoting someone, who stayed in the town for few years, writes “Banaras taught me lessons which no book could ever have taught”. This line holds true for me as well as it perhaps does for many others. The town is special, and depending on how one experiences it, it is a place for music, religion, faith, history, mythology, exotica, Sanskrit, spirituality, and much else.  Few remain untouched by it; most are deeply influenced by it in myriad ways.

Unsurprisingly, much has been written about Banaras. To touch upon a few - Diana L Eck’s ‘Banaras: City of Light’ remains a seminal book on the town. Besides, Pankaj Mishra’s ‘The Romantics’ too is popular. There, of course, is Kashinath Singh’s ‘Kashi Ka Assi’, considered a bona fide modern-day classic on the subject. Amongst those published in recent years, Saba Dewan’s ‘Tawaifnama’ has received favourable reviews, while Aatish Taseer’s ‘The Twice Born’ failed to make the cut somehow. Varsha’s Varanasi, by Chitra Soundar, a book primarily catering to children, proved to be a disappointment as well. Evidently, reading a good book on Banaras is fascinating, but writing one is anything but easy.  

In case of Aimless in Banaras: Wanderings in India’s Holiest City, the book not only seem to suffer from a lack of attention to detail but also from Ghosh’s affinity for the clichéd. When Ghosh writes about the Ramleela he generalizes, “typically takes place over nine nights . . but in Banaras performances are spread over a month”.  Generalization seldom works. Similarly, when he writes about sarees, he appears to have not taken the pain to delve deeper into the subject. He also generously uses superlatives about a place which, to put mildly, is not easy to comprehend; “the oldest”, “the newest”, “the most popular” and “the best-known”.

As I looked up the book at a book-store that I frequent in town, two people there mentioned an error it carried. Banarasis, from the little I know, take themselves and their town seriously. They pointed out that Ghosh has mistakenly mentioned Gaya Singh as the only character in Kashinath Singh’s Kashi Ka Assi whose original name has been retained. They dispute this claim made by Ghosh by adding that the original names of most characters have been retained in Singh’s book. I corroborated this claim by looking up online review, a couple of which pointed to the error.

Talking of ghats he writes, “There is something depressing about the ghats that lie north of Dashashwamedh. . . They are poorly maintained . . This segment is also Benaras, but this is not where all the actions take place”. My regular walks along the ghats bring out that this is the less touristy stretch. Friends from the town, I walk with, add that this stretch is what remains of the asli Banaras. Some of the lines appear outright strange. “I have never come across a human swimming across its entire breadth, at least in Banaras” or “In Banaras no one preaches to you”. And one wonders why he could not stay away from the, too oft-repeated, quote by Mark Twain.

Varun Grover, during a recent interview, mentioned that Banaras has always been viewed through the eyes of the white man. You need time to break through the clichés that we have been fed through this gaze. Ghosh appears to have fallen in this trap.

The other day, a friend and I walked the lanes of Banaras to our destination in the Chowk locality for some malaiyo. He asked how, in the famed labyrinth of these lanes, I find my way. Do I seek help from maps on the web or had I learnt to identify landmarks amidst the maze or else? None, I responded; Banaras gets into one’s system. Learning to find one’s way in its lanes is akin to learning to cycle or swim. Once you know the lanes they take you around. Perphas , in the case of Ghosh, Banaras has not gotten into his system.