Warm, yellow, early
sun rays on
steps of stone,
Cold, turquoise, early
Ganga water;
early, sleepy echoes all around;
I,
alone,
not lonely,
daily drifting, quite out of the river.
Vermilion, late, reflected,
warm, green: stone steps,
water, temples, river, air,
later, resting echoes all around;
I,
between
stone and water.
From: GloMag June 2020
This post is not a book review. Although it’s about Banaras: City of Light by Diana L. Eck (and I will not repeat “as far as I know”, or “by my judgement” every time I praise it), it’s more about its effect on me and less about what it actually is. I had first read it when I was a student, nearly two decades ago. I had borrowed it from Sayaji Rao Gaekwad Library, Banaras Hindu University. I had actually just stumbled upon it while browsing through titles of different streams.
After reading the first few pages, a sense of inadequacy combined with that of guilt had enveloped me. Professor Eck had written about a city that the eyes of a Westerner could only see materially, and she had praised Hindus who saw it in its deeper level instinctively. Well, there I was, born and brought up a Hindu, that too in Banaras/Kashi/Varanasi, and all I had seen of my own city till then was its external form.
It would take a true banarsi to show me what I had been blind to till then, and Professor Eck was that person. I fell in love with my city while reading her wonderful and insightful writing. She obviously knew more facts about my city than I did, and that was expected of her. What touched me the most strongly was the way she wrote about the city she was not born in, about a city she had embraced, seen and understood, and loved. She wrote with humility, and with a willingness to learn more and more about the city of light.
Her book gave me the first glimpse of and introduction to the wonderful nineteenth century sketches of my city from James Prinsep’s Benares Illustrated (1831). Her simplified map of the ponds and lakes of the city and her magical weaving of the story of Matsyodari tirth are behind my interest in the water bodies of the city. In fact I went in (a futile) search of Bakariya Kund, and of Uttarark, only because I had seen Prinsep’s map of the water bodies of Varanasi in Eck’s book, and had read their description. I discovered many ponds hidden in the deep layers of labyrinthine lanes. I also found out that many of them have disappeared and found out how urbanization and the pressure of population, in conjunction with the loss of faith and misguided cutting of spiritual roots were behind their disappearance.
The book gave me the knowledge of how Prinsep had altered the water-map of my city back then, therefore it also gave me that disapproval of the great man to whom the city and an adjoining district owe so much. Although I am an admirer of the man, and the genius, I still think he could have dealt with the traditional form of the city in a more judicious manner.
It was through Professor Eck’s book that I was introduced to the once famous temples of Omkareshwara, Kritivaseshwara and Bindu Madhava, that were either destroyed by Muslim rulers/invaders or have lost their old glory now. I went in search of them and I still remember the forlorn looking Omkareshwar temple atop a hillock surrounded by graves at its base, and the only trace of the once important Kritivaseshwara as a lingam in the courtyard of a mosque.
Omkareshwar atop a hillock
Kritivaseshwara in a mosque
Her book showed me how generations of Western travellers had responded to my city. I still remember the name of Herman Keyserling and his description of faith alive in the city as quoted by Eck. She wrote about “Seeing Kashi Through Hindu Eyes” and filled the pages with words like devotion, faith, religion etc. and there I was, a person theoretically disqulified to even dip his little finger in that Ganga of words.
She told me stories that even my grand mother, who had told me so many stories in my childhood, had missed telling. I was introduced to Divodasa in one such story. That great king remained as a strong presence in my mind in the years that followed. In fact, I went to one of the chief and definitely the longest version of that story in Kashi Khanda of Skandamahapuran later in my life.
I still remember having copied carefully the cycle of fairs and festivals with their corresponding months from the Hindu calendar from Appendix VI. I did not know much about most of it back then. I haven’t covered most of them even now. Every year I make plans to be present in a given month, on a given tithi and every year I fail to keep the commitment.
Eck, Diana L. Banaras: City of Light. New Delhi: Penguin, 1993. Print.
Filth, they call it ubiquitous; obnoxious,
on the streets, in heaps, in lanes, scattered.
Life goes daily, usually on,
oblivious of filth, or death, goes on
with ease. Unfettered feet, undaunted —
of pilgrims, of people, with purpose,
or strollers, the timeless lanes, narrow,
space ample for all who come,
who live and die there. Disgusting,
the filth, reflected sometimes, on faces.
Cow dung, house waste, refuse and grime,
scattered, removed, then scattered again,
repeat performance, seen and felt on skin,
in nose, on feet through eyes.
Yet feet go on, undaunted, eternally,
as time and life run to death,
from flesh to fire to ashes.
Published at: http://www.pikerpress.com/article.php?aID=6758
Published at: https://classicalpoets.org/2017/11/08/rows-of-steps-by-rajnish-mishra/
I am rich in my losses. I lost my
home, river, lanes, neighbors,
boats, temples, pilgrims, conch shells,
the sun, the moon and ursa major
pyres, umbrellas, benches, stone steps,
people playing chess, carrom or cricket,
my walks along the riverfront
my mornings and evenings,
the pushing mad crowd,
vendors of fruits, of vegetables, of sweets, even barbers
small shops and big in the market near my river,
empty lanes and full, bicycle bells, horns of autos and bikes,
I lost them all when I left.
I see them stand, chat, smile, live; I can’t.
Like me they live in a city they were not born in,
yet call it their own.
Does their city not call them?
Does it not come in their dreams?
Mine comes rarely nowadays.
All I want to do today is to lie down
and slowly breathe my last breath, like Shelley did
in dejection near Naples. No, I’ve no past remembrance
of suicidal drifts. No, people don’t see such tendencies in me.
In fact, I hate death, my mortal enemy,
and every day of my life have been happily shrinking
away from its touch. There are times I forget my city.
Like when I drive like a maniac, which I always do.
When at the steering wheel, there’s only the man-machine,
no man, no machine, that races against time
and anyone else who dares to come on his way.
Only then, when all else is erased, and eternity fits in a moment,
I forget my loss, my ‘self’ and city.
For a moment or two, my two daughters lend me
the salve of oblivion too. While I write, I faintly forget my pain,
my loss, even the city I write about,
because I live at the tip of my finger then,
from where stream my thoughts on the page.
Writing heals, or, at least helps forget for a time,
while I make patterns that suck me in and siphon
all concerns away from the system.
My richness of loss has filled me a lot.
It has filled me with a vacuum.
I don’t know how I’ll live whole again,
for fate and time don’t favor the kind
of coward-victim-exile I am.
Published at: http://tuckmagazine.com/2017/10/20/poetry-1064/
One does not become a banarsi by just being born in Banaras. A banarsi is one who knows, belongs to and loves Banaras. One ought to have first-hand experience of the city to know it. Belonging to it is different. It’s true that being born in the city is an added advantage and it increases the probability of one’s belonging to the city, but it equally increases the probability of one’s hating one’s city of birth and distancing oneself from it. I’ve met many born-banarsis who hate Banaras and declare that they don’t belong to it. They are definitely not banarsis. Not everyone who claims to banarsi is one. They must know, feel and experience the city in order to be one.
Where am I going with all this analysis? Well, the analysis was the beginning. I want to assert here that Banaras belongs to banarsis, and the decision to make deep structural changes in the city ought to be theirs and theirs only. I can easily generalize from there:
The city belongs to the citizen, the one who knows, understands and loves the city, and only they ought to have make important decisions, especially those related to deep changes in the city.
Now, after having put it, I can move towards the reason behind this post: the Kashi Vishwanth Corridor Project. The decision makers, conceptualizers and executors are none of them banarsis. They are all outsiders, and they have permanently damaged the heart of the city. In fact, they have effectively erased one of the oldest living quarters of one of the oldest living cities of the world.
Why am I so worried about it, when had no material stake in the area and the way of life thus destroyed? I am worried because of two reasons: urballaghophobia and my love for the only city I call mine, the city I was born in, the city I grew in, the city in which my dreams are set: Banaras. I am a banarsi and the area razed to ground was the one labyrinth of lanes that I had taken many days to understand.
I was nearly sixteen then, when my eldest uncle from my mother’s side had told me of the mysterious series of lanes that started near my house at Hanuman Ghat and went unbroken up to Raj Ghat, the last popularly known ghat of Varanasi. I had only begun to look around and it was only a year ago that I was exposed to the charms of the dense, mysterious and magical (no exaggeration here) lanes of Varanasi. I had gone to Thatheri Bazaar Lane with my father the previous year and was immediately attracted to that strange place. There were several lanes that branched left and right from the main lane, and I wanted to explore them. So I asked the only person that I was sure knew all about them. He did, and being a true banarsi, my uncle gladly and with no little pride, gave me the beginner’s mental map of that veritable labyrinth. No, there’s no metaphor or exaggeration in the last word of the previous sentence. Even today, I am not very confident that I know those lanes, the very lanes I could confidently plunge into two decades ago. I had heard about that loss of confidence from old banarsi migrants, but only by experiencing it I understood how it feels when something like that happens.
Let’s return to the main thread now. So, I explored those lanes of pakki mahaal and fell in love with them without ever realizing it. The Holy Ganga, ghats and lanes defined Varanasi for me, and I loved my city. I have been an exile from my city for last decade and half, and in this fast changing world, with friends, places and ways of life dying every day, my infrequent visits to my city gave me hope, courage and light. The new city changed alright, but the old quarters and ghats remained essentially the same. Every time I returned, I would make a quick tour of my lanes and ghats to ensure that my city did not change while I was away. It gave me an unexplainable pleasure when I saw no essential change at the heart of my city.
Here I must mention the worsening condition of Mother Ganga. Only a decade ago the breadth of the river and the number of stone steps at ghats indicated a healthy current and sand belts used to appear during the months of summer towards Assi Ghat only. In my last few visits, I regretfully witnessed a shrinking Ganga and sand belts facing ghats from where I could never see them back then. Somewhere, someone has been murdering my river slowly and definitely. I don’t know them but I am sure they are not the enemies of the river. They are powerful persons who are not attached to my river, because they don’t belong to it. They do things they like; things they benefit from. In doing so, if a river dies a slow death, why should they worry? They have other, larger concerns.
The same is true about what’s happening with my city, its lanes temples and people. It’s being done in the name of the newest god: development. Media hails it as a historical, desirable and positive event e.g. https://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/varanasi-come-2019-visitors-to-access-kashi-vishwanath-temple-directly-from-ganga-ghats/1384598/
The question is: for whom is that development so much talked about? It’s definitely not for many families displaced from the demolished houses. It’s not for the temples destroyed either. As news reports show, temples and residential buildings were one and the same in the lanes from which houses were acquired and destroyed, while making the claim that no temple was harmed. The reality is different. ( https://www.bbc.com/hindi/india-44890637 and https://www.patrika.com/varanasi-news/kashi-citizen-will-protest-to-unesco-for-save-banaras-heritage-1-2388254/ )
The poster below is one year old. It’s from a time when the residents of those lanes had hopes of saving their houses.
It reads like this:
We’ll Give life – not our houses
Ganga flees away from ghats, the governments sleep/ dams arrest its flow, it weeps inconsolably.
DBSS (Committee to Struggle for the Protection of Heritage, Kashi)
Source: patrika.com
What is people watching?
Well, Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines it as “the act of spending time looking at different kinds of people in a public place because you find this interesting”.
I stumbled upon this long-known, but undiscovered term through a friend’s mail about his indulging into the activity in his visit to a country in South-East Asia. I was acquainted with flânerie and drifting due to my interest in psychogeography, Baudelaire and the Arcades Project, but not with the new rage of the new age. I researched a little and reached to the link between flânerie and people watching. An article I particularly liked was about people watching in Paris.
Not only was I excited as I read more about it, I could actually see how visitors to my city have been people watching since they started visiting it. From Ralph Fitch, Tavernier and Bernier to Pierre Loti and Hermann Keyserling, visitors to the city wrote paragraph after wonderful paragraph of description that amounts to the central activity of people watching much before the term was used and acknowledged.
Here’s an example from a work of non-fiction from early twentieth century, from E. B. Havell’s Benares: The Sacred City:
It is amusing to see sometimes at Mogul Serai, the junction for the East Indian line, how the up-to-date Indian arriving from Calcutta, Bombay, or some other large Anglo-Indian city, will in an incredibly short time divest himself of his European environment and transform himself into the orthodox Hindu. You will see him first stepping out of the train, dressed in more or less correct European garb, and smoking a cigarette. He is accompanied by a servant, who deposits a steel trunk on the platform in front of him. Then, coram populo, but without the least suggestion of impropriety, he proceeds to take off coat, waistcoat, trousers, and boots, and taking out of the trunk a collection of spotless white drapery, speedily arrays himself in puggaree, dhotee, and the rest of the becoming costume of an Indian gentleman, while the cast-off garments are stowed away until his next return to European society.
Pierre Loti’s India is full of such examples. This one is from the beginning of his visit:
A young fakir, whose long hair falls upon his shoulders, stands by the abode of the dead in a rigid attitude, with his head turned towards the smoking heaps of wood and their gruesome burdens. Though covered with white dust he is still beautiful and muscular. His chest is decked with a garland of marigolds, such a garland as the people here cast upon the river’s breast. A little way above the funeral heaps some five or six persons crouch upon the frieze of an old palace, which fell into the river long ago. Their heads are wrapped in veils, and, like the fakir, they stare fixedly at their kinsman who is being burned.
Here’s another example of people watching, this time, from fiction, from Shivprasaad Singh’s Gali Age Mudti Hai (The Lane Turns Ahead):
[Varanasi] is a strange city. There’s not enough space to walk in the lanes, not enough even to pass if one person stops walking, yet, if a performer starts performing, people forget all work and problems and assemble to watch what he has to show…
Two mahuar players were competing against each other: moving in circles, challenging, taking stances with mouth full of air. They appeared to be from Rajasthan. They wore narrow cut, tight trousers and dirty vests. Both wore patterned headgear. One was young and the other older… They played the same tune from a very famous Hindi film, “Mann dole, mere tan dole…”.
The novel presents many paragraphs of equally rich description as the hero goes on his way and watches people.
In addition to modern English and Hindi prose, people watching is ever present, in one form or the other but not as the central concern of the piece, in Sanskrit writing on the city.
An hour before sunrise deep within the labyrinth of lanes near Kedareshwar Temple and Ghat, the movements of life start to register their presence. Although the lane had not gone to sleep before one very late at night, it started stirring by four in the morning. It leads to the temple of the central deity of the section, Lord Kedareshwar. Devotees of Lord Kedara and of Mother Ganga are men and women of confirmed habits. Change in seasons affects the rhythm of the life of the regulars only a little bit. They move through the same lanes to complete the same circuit with a constant rhythm throughout their life. Nothing can alter that, be it of personal, local, regional, national or international consequence. Life comes back to its norm-al self with a certainty that would make the poet who wrote the following lines proud:
I have two black and white photographs of a father posing with his sons in my family collection and one of them is older than I am. The first photograph has my grandfather and his four sons in it. In the background you can see the old and still functional dressing table at our ancestral house in Varanasi. My grandfather holds my youngest uncle in his arms. My eldest uncle, the one younger to him and my father stand from right to left. Look at the posture and the eyes of the three boys. They stand almost at attention and their eyes are locked with the lens of the camera. Probably that was how people responded to such a strange black box at their place or, they were told to look into the lens and stand in that manner. I’m sure there’s a story about the marigold garlands the three boys wear.
In the second photograph my eldest uncle poses gracefully with his three sons. Allow me a digression here. I think that my eldest uncle was the most handsome man in our family, his younger brother, my father, was a close second in his youth. We, the sons, got some of their features, that’s all. I can recognize the smile at the face of the eldest cousin of mine. He smiles like that even today, nearly forty years later. The boys at the front are at ease. Although they are very much conscious of the camera, they have not forgotten to smile. They are in a public place and not at their house. Probably that has reduced their camera shyness. They are mentally more prepared for the camera than the three boys of the previous photograph.
Where are the girls of the family? Well, my uncle has no daughters. That explains their absence from the photograph. My grandfather had two daughters, both elder than my youngest uncle who is right there, in the photograph. Then why are they not there? Before we proceed, here’s another photograph of the same family. In this photograph my grandmother poses for the camera with her eldest and youngest sons, and her two daughters.Yes, they are fully conscious of the camera. And yes, this photograph was definitely taken at a studio. I’m sure you have marked the absence of shoes at the feet of the two aunts of mine. Why have they not worn shoes or slippers while posing for the camera?
Moving on from the black and white photograph of an era long past towards the coloured family photograph, we reach my youngest uncle’s family.
There is a little tomb in Varanasi that Banarsis like to call the “Taj Mahal of Banaras”. It’s not a great tourist attraction as the well known circuits of the city don’t take one beyond the routine ghats, lanes, temples and Sarnath trips. The tomb of Lal Khan, or Lal Khan’s Rauza, is a late eighteenth century structure that stands by Shershah Suri Road near River Ganges at at Raj Ghat.
The famous Dufferin or Malviya Bridge can be seen at bottom left of the image above. This tomb is in an enclosure that also houses the excavation site of the ancient city of Kashi. There is a central building with a large dome and four minarets at the four corners of the structure. When the sun rises from behind the eastern minaret of the tomb, the view is full of peace.
The area around the tomb is full of greenery. Well maintained lawns and well shaped shrubs characterize the view. From near the eastern boundary wall one may have a glorious view of the river below and the complete view of the bridge with its shining girders to the south. The tomb’s walls and dome have patterns in glazed tiles that have lost their sheen in two centuries and more since the tomb was made. Just like the pinnacles on the minarets of the palace of King Chet Singh at Shivala Ghat, the pinnacles of the central structure of this tomb are in very bad condition and need care and repair.
The aura of the place is such that people are drawn towards it. In the morning one can see people walking the length of the pedestrian path all along the boundary wall, laughing, practicing asanas, or simply lounging on the grass. Rauza Lal Khan is a place worth visiting. More than that, it’s a place worth spending some time in introspection at.
rajnishmishravns 