Banaras – City of Light

Title: Banaras – City of Light
Author: Diana L. Eck
Publisher: Penguin, 2015 (First published 1983)
ISBN: 9780140190793
Pages: 427

The root of the Sanskrit word ‘Kashi’ (Banaras) is ‘kash’ which means luminant. Literally, this may refer to the legendary jyotirlinga which is said to have filled the city in the beginning of time. Setting aside the myth, Kashi was the source of light that illuminated the religious life of Hindu India. People from all walks of life flock to Varanasi for pilgrimage. If they could die in the city, moksha was guaranteed to them. Hundreds of temples, ashrams, ghats and religious seminaries sprang up in due course of time. This refreshing book is a study and interpretation of Banaras from the standpoint of one who acts as a bridge between the Hindu and Western academic and religious traditions. It examines all origin myths connected to the birth of the city, the temples for their significance to specific rituals or legends, the practices and objectives of pilgrims and also how this city, liberating one from the ties and knots of life repeating again and again, is reconciled with the general philosophical outlook of Hinduism. Diana L. Eck was professor of comparative religion and Indian studies in the department of South Asian studies at Harvard University. She has written three other books on Hindu religious tradition. She has also worked commendably for American religious pluralism.

India is very diverse and has had political unity only for a very short time in its history spanning several millennia. But one thing Hindu India has held in common is a shared sense of its sacred geography (p.38). There are pilgrims who would carry a pot of Ganges water from the Himalayas all the way to Rameshwaram in the South in order to pour that water on the Shiva linga there. And from Rameshwaram they would carry the sands of the seashore back to deposit in the Ganges on their return north. Pilgrims who visit Kashi stand in a place empowered by the whole of India’s sacred geography as it is a single place that embodies all tirthas of India. The rise and sanctity of Kashi is simply beyond easy comprehension. Eck quotes a missionary who commented on it and put in such a way that it can’t be improved upon. His remark was that ‘when Babylon was struggling with Nineveh for supremacy; when Tyre was planting her colonies; when Athens was growing in strength; before Rome had become known or Greece had contended with Persia; or Cyrus had added lustre to the Persian monarchy or Nebuchadnezzar had captured Jerusalem and the inhabitants of Judaea had been carried into captivity, Varanasi had already risen to greatness, if not to glory’.

The author has gone into the details of worship of deities in Kashi. The number of deities is considerably small even though they are adored in numerous aspects relevant to a tale or incident in the epics. It is generally accepted that Kashi is the city of Shiva where the other gods have no jurisdiction. Even the god of death Yama is powerless here and Shiva himself is believed to chant the sacred mantra to cross the ocean of worldly ways to attain bliss into the ears of the dying. Anyone who dies in Kashi is said to attain nirvana straight away. However, it is not the city of Shiva alone. He shares the place with the whole pantheon of gods without rancour. The so-called Shaivism and Vaishnavism go hand in hand here. To an outsider, Kashi may appear as a disordered, crowded jungle of temples. But to those Hindus whose vision is recorded in the mahatmyas of Kashi, these temples are all part of an ordered whole with its divine functionaries and its own constellation of deities. Their vision is embodied in the sacred geography of the city. The deities of Varanasi envelope the entire spectrum of Hinduism which even contains goddesses or yoginis whose origins were non-Vedic and non-Brahminical. These are found in abundance here.

While remaining the most important religious centre of Hinduism, Varanasi was also a place of substance for Buddhists where Buddha had delivered his first sermon at Sarnath. It had a significant Buddhist presence until the twelfth century CE, when Qutb ud-din Aibak’s armies demolished Sarnath as well as Varanasi’s great temples. While the Hindus recovered from the blow, the Buddhist tradition which was dependent entirely upon its monks, monasteries and centres of learning was virtually eliminated (p.57). The book then glances upon the devastating centuries in which Muslim powers ruled over the ancient city and either destroyed or converted many ancient temples as mosques. In a classic case of understatement, Eck remarks that ‘the Muslim centuries were for the most part hard’ (p.83). The temples of Kashi were destroyed at least six times during these years. Muhammad Ghuri, Firuz Shah Tughlaq, Mahmud Shah Sharqi of Jaunpur, Sikandar Lodi, Shah Jehan and Aurangzeb destroyed the temples on a large scale. Aurangzeb was very particular in razing prominent temples including Vishweshwara, Krittivasa and Bindu Madhava. Their sites were forever sealed from Hindu access by the construction of mosques. Aurangzeb even named the city Mahmudabad but the name didn’t stick (p.83). The situation is so pathetic that there is no religious sanctuary in Varanasi now that predates the time of Aurangzeb. So exhaustive was the destruction wrought by this Mughal.

The author has visited all the religious places described in the book and asserts how effortlessly they blend with the cosmopolitan faith of the devotees. She confesses that ‘some of the temple I sought out, which had clearly been important in the era of the Sanskrit literature, no longer exists. Some such sites are now occupied by mosques’ (p.xiv). Despite its fame, today’s Vishwanatha temple has none of the magnificence, architectural splendour or antiquity as India’s great classical temples in Odisha or South India. Today, atop the ruins of old Vishwanatha temples, sit two different mosques, one built in the thirteenth century by Razia and one in the seventeenth century by Aurangzeb (p.120). The mosque of Aurangzeb is said to have transformed the old Hindu edifice without entirely purging its soul. One wall of the old temple is still standing, set like a Hindu ornament in the matrix of the mosque (p.127). The book also places on record the universal reverence the city of Kashi evoked from all parts of India. An inscription of twelfth century in South India records that a certain king of Karnataka set up a fund to help the pilgrims of his area pay the Muslim-imposed tax so that they could visit Vishweshwara in Varanasi (p.132).

It is a great blessing for Hindus to live and die in Varanasi. Then why doesn’t everybody live there? This book looks into the intricacies of lore and finds that Dandapani, a member of Shiva’s entourage, is the judge in this matter. He is the divine sheriff who sees into the many lifetimes through which a person has travelled. From Dandapani’s divinely advantaged point of view, the learned Brahmin may be no better than the poor beggar. Life and death are two simultaneous aspects of living in Varanasi and it is also a living and transforming symbol with double-edged power. Several tirthas with life-giving waters of creation and also the cremation grounds with its burning fires of destruction and liberation occur side by side here. One need not travel the globe in search of the sacred, for he has come to Kashi. Other sacred places of India are replicated in the city, be it tirthas, temples, lakes or even geography. Varanasi is witness to the union of Shiva and his Shakti and is a visible and earthly ford in the crossing to the far shore of liberation. The relevance of Kashi in the philosophical scenario of Hinduism is also examined. If one internalizes the truly luminous wisdom, he need not go on a pilgrimage anymore; and yet pilgrims continue to come to Kashi to walk on its streets, to bathe in the waters, to see the divine images and to see the city itself. Banaras is a good place to die and this fact makes it a good place to live. Moksha is only the last of the four stages of life. Only by ripening the fruit of life in each stage is one truly ready for the fruits of death. The throbbing heart of the book is the part which links Varanasi to the pulsating life of the society living within it. Kashi is not the city of moksha alone; it belongs to dharma and kama also. In India, kama is more than sexual pleasure. It is the attitude that informs all that people do for the sheer love of doing it, all that they enjoy simply because it is enjoyable. It is also the aesthetic enjoyment of music or art. Kashi is famous for its traditions of music and dance. Its courtesans in history were famous and wealthy right from the time of Buddha himself.

This book is a mandatory read for anyone who wants to understand the city better and to feel the spirit of the city in a meaningful way. A tourist to the place should read this book. So does a pilgrim, an administrator, a politician, a student or even a businessman. Whatever may be their field of specialty, everybody who treads the ancient streets and bylanes of Kashi should try to grasp something of the soul of Kashi, for which this book is absolutely essential. It observes that ‘there’s little in the world to compare with the splendour of Banaras, seen from the river at dawn’. Likewise, it provides other perspectives to comprehensively absorb the psyche of the city. It includes several illustrations of notable places of Varanasi made by James Princep, who was an archaeologist, numismatist and epigraphist, in the early nineteenth century. The book was first published 41 years ago in 1983, but due to its fame as the ‘eternal city of India’, all parts of the book and its descriptions stay relevant and applicable with little modification or revision.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 5 Star