Varanasi

For other uses, see Varanasi (disambiguation).
"Kāshi" redirects here. For other uses, see Kashi.
"Banaras" and "Benares" redirect here. For other uses, see Banaras (disambiguation) and Benares (restaurant).

Varanasi
Vārāṇasī
Benares, Banaras, Kashi
Metropolis
Left to right, top to bottom: Manikarnika Ghat, the holy cremation ground on the Ganges river front; Kashi Vishwanath Temple; Faculty of Arts, Benares Hindu University; Goswami Tulsidas, composer of the Ramcharitmanas; weaving silk brocade; Benares Sanskrit College, India's oldest Sanskrit college (founded in 1791); and Munshi Ghat
Nickname: 
"Religious Capital of India"[1]
Map
Interactive map of Varanasi
Coordinates: 25°19′08″N 83°00′46″E / 25.31889°N 83.01278°E / 25.31889; 83.01278
Country India
StateUttar Pradesh
DivisionVaranasi
DistrictVaranasi
Government
 • TypeMunicipal Corporation
 • BodyVaranasi Municipal Corporation
 • MayorAshok Tiwari[3] (BJP)
 • Municipal CommissionerPranay Singh, IAS
Area
[4]
 • Metropolis
82 km2 (32 sq mi)
 • Metro
[5]
163.8 km2 (63.2 sq mi)
Elevation
80.71 m (264.80 ft)
Population
 (2011)
 • Metropolis
1,212,610[2]
 • Rank30th
 • Density37,500/km2 (97,000/sq mi)
 • Metro
[6]
1,432,280 (32nd)
DemonymBanarasi
Language
 • OfficialHindi[7]
 • Additional officialUrdu[7]
 • RegionalBhojpuri
Time zoneUTC+5:30 (IST)
PIN
221 001 to** (** area code)
Telephone code0542
Vehicle registrationUP-65
GDP$3.8 billion (2019–20)[8]
Per capita incomeINR 1,93 616[9]
International AirportLal Bahadur Shastri International Airport
Rapid TransitVaranasi Metro
Sex ratio0.926 (2011) ♂/♀
Literacy (2011)80.31%[10]
HDI0.812[11]
Websitevaranasi.nic.in

Varanasi (ISO: Vārāṇasī, Hindi: [ʋaːˈraːɳəsi] ⓘ;[a] also Benares, Banaras (Banārasa [bəˈnaːrəs] ⓘ)[13][14][15] or Kashi (Kāśī [ˈka:ʃi] ⓘ)[16]) is a city on the Ganges river in northern India that has a central place in the traditions of pilgrimage, death, and mourning in the Hindu world.[17][b] The city has a syncretic tradition of Islamic artisanship that underpins its religious tourism.[20] Located in the middle-Ganges valley in the southeastern part of the state of Uttar Pradesh, Varanasi lies on the left bank of the river. It is 692 kilometres (430 mi) to the southeast of India's capital New Delhi and 320 kilometres (200 mi) to the southeast of the state capital, Lucknow. It lies 121 kilometres (75 mi) downstream of Prayagraj, where the confluence with the Yamuna river is another major Hindu pilgrimage site.

Varanasi is one of the world's oldest continually inhabited cities.[21][22][23] Kashi, its ancient name, was associated with a kingdom of the same name of 2,500 years ago. The Lion capital of Ashoka at nearby Sarnath has been interpreted to be a commemoration of the Buddha's first sermon there in the fifth century BCE.[24][25] In the 8th century, Adi Shankara established the worship of Shiva as an official sect of Varanasi. Tulsidas wrote his Awadhi language epic, the Ramcharitmanas, a Bhakti movement reworking of the Sanskrit Ramayana, in Varanasi. Several other major figures of the Bhakti movement were born in Varanasi, including Kabir and Ravidas.[26] In the 16th century, Rajput nobles in the service of the courts and armies of the Mughal emperor Akbar, sponsored the building or further enhancement of the major Shiva temple in the city; they also built other temples, all displaying an empire-wide architectural style.[27][28] In 1740, the Banaras State, a zamindari estate was established in the city.[29] Under the Treaty of Faizabad, the East India Company acquired Benares in 1775.[30][31] The city was later annexed under the Benares Division of the Ceded and Conquered Provinces in 1805, the North-Western Provinces in 1836, United Provinces in 1902, and after India's independence of Uttar Pradesh in 1950.[32]

Silk weaving, carpets, crafts and tourism employ a significant number of the local population, as do the Banaras Locomotive Works and Bharat Heavy Electricals. The city is known worldwide for its many ghats, steps leading down the steep river bank to the water, where pilgrims perform rituals. Of particular note are the Dashashwamedh Ghat, the Panchganga Ghat, the Manikarnika Ghat, and the Harishchandra Ghat, the last two being where Hindus cremate their dead. The Hindu genealogy registers at Varanasi are kept here. Among the notable temples in Varanasi are the Kashi Vishwanath Temple of Shiva, the Sankat Mochan Hanuman Temple, and the Durga Temple.

The city has long been an educational and musical centre: many prominent Indian philosophers, poets, writers, and musicians live or have lived in the city, and it was the place where the Benares gharana form of Hindustani classical music was developed. In the 20th-century, the Hindi-Urdu writer Premchand and the shehnai player Bismillah Khan were associated with the city. India's oldest Sanskrit college, the Benares Sanskrit College, was founded by Jonathan Duncan, the resident of the East India Company in 1791. Later, education in Benares was greatly influenced by the rise of Indian nationalism in the late 19th-century. Annie Besant founded the Central Hindu College in 1898. In 1916, she and Madan Mohan Malviya founded the Banaras Hindu University, India's first modern residential university. Kashi Vidyapith was established in 1921, a response to Mahatma Gandhi's non-cooperation movement.

  1. ^ "Varanasi – The Religious Capital of India". 24 July 2015.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference urban was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Dikshit, Rajeev (13 May 2023). "In Varanasi BJP's Ashok Tiwari defeats SP by 1.33L votes". The Times of India. Retrieved 21 May 2023.
  4. ^ "Varanasi City". 7 January 2022. Archived from the original on 19 August 2021. Retrieved 21 November 2020.
  5. ^ "District Census Handbook Varanasi" (PDF). censusindia.gov.in. Archived (PDF) from the original on 25 November 2020. Retrieved 23 December 2020.
  6. ^ "Urban Agglomerations/Cities having population 1 lakh and above" (PDF). Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India. Archived (PDF) from the original on 17 October 2013. Retrieved 12 May 2014.
  7. ^ a b "52nd Report of the Commissioner for Linguistic Minorities in India" (PDF). nclm.nic.in. Ministry of Minority Affairs. Archived from the original (PDF) on 25 May 2017. Retrieved 26 December 2018.
  8. ^ "Yogi Adityanath is right. Route to UP's $1 trillion GDP goal passes through hinterland". Retrieved 25 September 2019.[permanent dead link‍]
  9. ^ "Executive Summary" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 19 August 2019. Retrieved 29 December 2019.
  10. ^ "Slum Free City Plan of Action Varanasi" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 28 June 2020. Retrieved 28 June 2020.
  11. ^ Chaurasia, Aalok Ranjan (26 July 2023). "Human Development in Districts of India 2019–2021". Indian Journal of Human Development. 17 (2): 219–252. doi:10.1177/09737030231178362. Retrieved 11 May 2024.
  12. ^ San Chirico, Kerry P. C. (2012), "Banaras", in Juergensmeyer, Mark; Roof, Wade Clark (eds.), Encyclopedia of Global Religion, Volume 1, pp. 114–116, ISBN 9780761927297, Varanasi is the city's revived, post-independence designation, which combines the names of two rivers on either side of it.
  13. ^ "Varanasi", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1 September 2021, retrieved 14 December 2021, Varanasi, also called Benares, Banaras, or Kashi, city, southeastern Uttar Pradesh state, northern India.
  14. ^ San Chirico, Kerry P. C. (2012). "Banaras". In Juergensmeyer, Mark; Roof, Wade Clark (eds.). Encyclopedia of Global Religion. Vol. 1. pp. 114–116. ISBN 9780761927297. The city was identified in the Pali language as Baranasi, from which emerged the corrupt form of the name, 'Banaras', by which the city is still widely known.
  15. ^ "Benares" is the name that appears in the 1909 official map of India.
  16. ^ San Chirico, Kerry P. C. (2012). "Banaras". In Juergensmeyer, Mark; Roof, Wade Clark (eds.). Encyclopedia of Global Religion. Vol. 1. pp. 114–116. ISBN 9780761927297. ... in the fifth century BCE, ... the Kingdom of Kashi was one of the 16 kingdoms to emerge from the ascendant Aryan tribes.
  17. ^ *Fouberg, Erin H.; Moseley, William G. (2018), Understanding World Geography, New York: John Wiley & Sons, p. 173, ISBN 9781119473169, OCLC 1066742384, The city of Varanasi, India, is central to the death tradition in Hinduism. Hindus see Varanasi as the world of death and life, and some make pilgrimages to Varanasi to die. In Hindu tradition, if a person dies in the holy city of Varanasi on the Ganges River, he or she is attains moksha, or freedom from the cycle of death and rebirth. Pilgrims travel to Varanasi to cremate their deceased relatives on the ghats along the river.
    • Eck, Diana (2013) [1981], Banaras, the City of Light, Alfred Knopf Inc, [Columbia University Press], p. 324, –No other city on earth is as famous for death as is Banāras. More than for her temples and magnificent ghāts, more than for her silks and brocades, Banāras, the Great Cremation Ground, is known for death. At the centre of the city along the riverfront is Manikarnikā, the sanctuary of death, with its ceaselessly smoking cremation pyres. The burning ghāt extends its influence and the sense of its presence throughout the city.
    • Parry, Jonathan P. (2000) [1994], Death in Banaras, Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, Cambridge University Press, p. 1, ISBN 9780521466257, As a place to die, to dispose of the physical remains of the deceased and to perform the rites which ensure that the departed attains a 'good state' after death, the north Indian city of Banaras attracts pilgrims and mourners from all over the Hindu world.
    • Singh, Ravi Nandan (2022). Dead in Banaras: An Ethnography of Funeral Travelling. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. The present-day Banaras, at first sign, is a new place. Rightly so, the baton must then pass on to an all new chronicling of the place. Yet, a connecting link, as always, may come into play, between the book's time and other times of Banaras. Let me give an example of what such a connection might look like. Jonathan Parry (1994) in his classic Death in Banaras laments in the preface to the book that he could not incorporate the coming in of the electric crematorium in his descriptions of the funerary organization in Banaras. Two decades later into my fieldwork, I found that it is in part, the efficiency of the open-air, manual cremation that Parry so effectively captures in his book that explains how a promising symbol of industrial modernity, the electric crematorium, falls short of the typecast. In the years between his book and my fieldwork, the electric crematorium sat lonely and was sparingly used against the cheer of the always-on, busy, manual pyres whose flames continue to dot the scene of the ghats in a contrasting relief. In this above sense, I believe, Parry already provides us a portrait of the electric crematorium's social imaginary in Banaras. The question of the shift from wooden pyres to the electric crematorium is then not about competing technologies but that of ethics with which the dead are tended to amidst the assemblies of funeral travellers.
  18. ^ Garces-Foley, Kathleen (2022), "At the Intersection of Death and Religion", in Garces-Foley, Kathleen (ed.), Death and Religion in a Changing World (2 ed.), London and New York: Routledge, p. 186, doi:10.4324/9781003126997, ISBN 978-0-367-64930-2, It is not uncommon for immigrants to discover that their long-established death practices are deemed unacceptable by civil authorities in their new home. We see this for example in the experiences of Sikhs and Hindus living in Sweden and the United States where open cremation pyres are not permitted. Market forces and social context also shape religious practices by limiting access to some goods and services while promoting others and offering new possibilities for action. ... The logistical difficulty of transporting a body from the United States or the UK to the auspicious city of Varanasi, India, for cremation is surmounted by entrepreneurial service providers who manage the process for Hindu customers.
  19. ^ Arnold, David (2021), Burning the Dead: Hindu Nationhood and the Global Construction of Indian Tradition, Oakland: University of California Press, p. 11, ISBN 9780520379343, LCCN 2020026923, While Benares is undeniably central to the performance and perception of modern Indian cremation, that history cannot be told from Benares alone. Rather, ... the narrative needs to encompass colonial India's two main metropolises, Bombay (Mumbai) and Calcutta (Kolkata), as well as the movement of Indians overseas and their memorialization abroad. ... The history of cremation in India is far more than the history of traditional rites and practices that it is conventionally taken to be—if tradition is assumed to mean "timeless" custom and immutable belief. On the contrary, cremation in modern India and across the South Asian diaspora is a history of contestation and change, of longing and denial, adaptation and innovation. India, too, has gifted to the world a modern cremation movement, though its meaning, form, and global resonance necessarily differed substantially from the Western cremation movement with which it was nearly contemporaneous.
  20. ^ *Williams, Philippa (17 January 2019). "Working Narratives of Intercommunity Harmony in Varanasi's Silk Sari Industry". In Jeffrey, Roger; Jeffrey, Craig; Lerche, Jens (eds.). Development Failure and Identity Politics in Uttar Pradesh. SAGE. pp. 211–238. ISBN 978-81-321-1663-9. 'Varanasi … is the city where Hindus and Muslims … are interwoven like threads as in the lovely silk saris for which Kashi (Varanasi) is so famous for (Puniyani, 2006).'(quoted) Varanasi is most often represented as a sacred Hindu pilgrimage centre (see Eck, 1983), as its social and cultural urban spaces have been often examined through the imagined and lived realities of Hinduism (Hertel and Humes, 1993; Parry, 1994; Singh and Rana, 2002). But it is also home to a sizeable Muslim population, which in 2001 comprised 30 per cent of the city's residents, significantly more than the percentage of Muslims in UP (Census of India, 2001). Unlike the city's majority Hindu inhabitants (63 per cent), who occupy a range of occupations in different economic sectors, Muslims in the city are predominantly involved in the production of silk fabrics, as well as other smaller artisanal industries (see Kumar, 1988). Muslims first settled in Varanasi in the eleventh century, when, following the defeat of an invading Muslim army, women, children and civilians were permitted to remain on the northern side of the city and serve the Hindu kings. Many learned the craft of weaving, incorporating their skills and designs into the fabrics. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, the French explorer and cultural anthropologist, visited Varanasi between 1660 and 1665 and reported that in the courtyard of a rest house in the Chowk area the trading of reshmi (silk) and suti (cotton) fabrics was taking place between Muslim karigars (artisans or craftsmen) and Hindu Mahajans (traders)
    • Puniyani, Ram (21 April 2006), "Tackling Terrorism – Varanasi, Jama Masjid Show the Way", CounterCurrents.Org, Varanasi, like many other cities of the country is the city where Hindus and Muslim of the city are interwoven like threads as in the lovely silk saris for which Kashi is so famous for. This town has hundreds and hundreds of Muslims artisans weaving the beautiful silk apparels, which are sold by the Hindu traders. This is also a city where on one hand we see the likes of Munshi Premchand, who wrote in Urdu as Nawab Rai and also crafted the acme of Hindi literature, which is not only progressive but is also a celebration of composite traditions of the country. This is also the city of the likes of Ustad Bismillah Khans, whose Shahanai begins with devotion to Hindu deities and hums the pleasant enchanting music into the ears of the whole nation. It is also the city which like most of the cities of the country, highlights the intercommunity amity in its most pleasant flavor.
    • Mallet, Victor (2017). River of Life, River of Death: The Ganges and India's Future. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198786177. LCCN 2017939064. Modi, however, went out of his way to court Varanasi's Muslims—they account for nearly a quarter of the city's 1.6 million voters—and to emphasize its multicultural, syncretic traditions when he was on the campaign trail in 2014. He praised not only Hindu but also Muslim cultural figures, including the musician Bismillah Khan, and said Khan was arguably the greatest symbol of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb (Ganga-Yamuna culture), a riverine phrase often used to describe the intertwined Hindu-Muslim culture of north India where those two rivers flow. Modi also targeted the important Muslim community of sari weavers in the district of Lallapura. Varanasi's silk wedding saris, lavishly designed and interwoven with gold thread, are much sought after by Indians from across the country and from overseas, and Modi promised to help the weavers acquire modern technology, quality raw materials and better marketing skills so they could compete with Chinese clothing manufacturers. 'The weavers of Varanasi are an integral part of the city's history', he wrote in a blog post on his nomination day. 'It is my resolve to ensure that they stand on their own feet with pride and their future generations have a bright future.' (pp. 51–52) An earlier great poet, son of Varanasi and symbol of north India's syncretic traditions, was the fifteenth-century Kabir, whose pithy lines in Hindi are still much quoted today by Indians over social media. Again, the legends surrounding his life are confused. He may have been born into a low-caste Muslim community of weavers or been a Hindu by birth. But he famously mocked the priesthoods and the rituals of both Muslims and Hindus, even to the extent of deliberately leaving holy Varanasi to die in an obscure town, when most north Indians would be heading in the other direction and yearning to expire within the boundaries of the city to find salvation. His contempt for organized religion is reflected in the legend of his death: Hindu and Muslim devotees argued over who should claim the poet's remains, but when the cloth covering his body was lifted, they found nothing underneath but a spray of flowers. (pp 60–61)
    • Kumar, Nita (2017) [1988], The Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880–1986, Princeton Legacy Library, Princeton University Press, pp. 15, 18, 137, ISBN 9781400886999, The simplicty of weavers' weddings is a contrast even to those of other Muslims, such as the Pathans. (p. 15) ... Contrary to the experience of most artisan production in modern times, the silk weaving industry has actually flourished, and remained the commercial backbone of the Hindu pilgrimage and religious centre of Banaras. (p. 18) The debate on how Muslims in other parts of South Asia adjust an "Islamic" identity with a territorial-cultural one which is heavily oriented towards local Hinduism is very instructive with regard to our material. The weaver of Banaras is as shaukeen a man as the Hindu and central to his life-style is the love of the outside, of akharas, and of music.(pp. 137–138)
    • San Chirico, Kerry P. C. (2012), "Banaras", in Juergensmeyer, Mark; Roof, Wade Clark (eds.), Encyclopedia of Global Religion, Volume 1, pp. 114–116, ISBN 9780761927297, This was the period in which an enduring cultural imprint was made in ... the establishment of muhallas or neighborhoods that exist to this day, in the presence of Sufi shrines dotting the landscape, and in the creation of a singular syncretic culture ... Today Islam accounts for more than one-third of Varanasi city's population. There are as many Muslims here as there are Brahmans, the majority of whom are weavers. The relationship between the Muslims who weave Banaras's famous saris and the Hindus who sell them explains in part by historically there has been less communal tension here than in other cities throughout South Asia.
  21. ^ San Chirico, Kerry P. C. (2012), "Banaras", in Juergensmeyer, Mark; Roof, Wade Clark (eds.), Encyclopedia of Global Religion, Volume 1, pp. 114–116, ISBN 9780761927297
  22. ^ Freitag, Sandria B. (1 January 1989). Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-06439-3.
  23. ^ Chatterji, Suniti Kumar (1963). Languages and Literatures of Modern India. Bengal Publishers.
  24. ^ Fogelin, Lars (2015). An Archaeological History of Indian Buddhism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 87–88. ISBN 978-0-1999-4821-5. In some specific cases the symbolism does seem specifically Buddhist. The capital at Sarnath, for example, has four wheels carved on its drum (see Figure 3.4). Critically, this is the only Mauryan capital that includes wheel motifs. It seems unlikely that it is merely coincidental that the capital was located at Sarnath—the location of the Buddha's first sermon, the place where the Buddha first turned the wheel of Dharma. Rather, it seems very likely that the wheel motif, at least at Sarnath, symbolized the wheel of Dharma in the specifically Buddhist sense of the term
  25. ^ "Varanasi", Encyclopaedia Britannica, 7 June 2022, retrieved 1 November 2022, It was the capital of the kingdom of Kashi during the time of the Buddha (6th century BCE), who gave his first sermon nearby at Sarnath.
  26. ^ "When the spirit of Kabir took over the ancient ghats of Benares". The Sunday Guardian Live. 30 November 2019. Retrieved 29 December 2019.
  27. ^ Bose, Melia Belli (2017). "Royal Matronage and a Visual Vocabulary of Indian Queenship: Ahilyabai Holkar's Memorial Commissions". In Bose, Melia Belli (ed.). Women, Gender and Art in Asia, c. 1500–1900. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 9781351536554. Each time prior to Aurangzeb's razing, the temple was rebuilt by prominent Rajputs, such as Raja Todar Mal (d. 1586), finance minister and high-ranking courtier to Mughal Emperor Akbar, in 1585. Although he did not sponsor the temple's rebuilding, among the Kashi Vishvanath's most illustrious donors is Raja Man Singh Kachhwaha of Amber, who commissioned several other temples and ghats in the vicinity. ... Raja Man Singh ... was also closely associated with the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir, in whose armies and courts he served
  28. ^ Metcalf, Barbara (2009). "Introduction". In Metcalf, Barbara D. (ed.). Islam in South Asia in Practice. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1400831388. As Catherine Asher has argued, the temples of a Hindu noble like the Rajput Man Singh, built with Mughal patronage, should be seen as 'imperial projects,' reflecting bonds between nobles and the king and making empire-wide architectural styles.
  29. ^ Bayly, C. A. (19 May 1988). Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870. CUP Archive. pp. 17–. ISBN 978-0-521-31054-3. Archived from the original on 4 April 2023. Retrieved 7 June 2021.
  30. ^ Bourke, Richard (8 September 2015), Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke, Princeton University Press, p. 843, ISBN 9780691145112, Since 1724 Awadh, "in extent about the size of England," had enjoyed effective autonomy as a quasi-independent province within the Mughal Empire. It came to terms with the British after the Battle of Buxar in 1764, finally signing up to the Treaty of Benares in 1773. This imposed on the Wazir of Awadh, Shuja-ud-Daula, the obligation to accept troops stationed in his territory while paying a subsidy to the British for the privilege. The Wazir's successor, Asaf-ud-Daula, agreed to increase this subsidy under the Treaty of Faizabad in 1775, at the same time ceding Benares to the Company.
  31. ^ Markovitz, Claude (24 September 2004), "Birth of the British Empire in India (1765–1818)", in Markovits, Claude (ed.), A History of Modern India, 1480–1950, Anthem Press, ISBN 9781843311522, In the face of the hostility of all the dynamic forces of the country, the threat of the Marathas looming large on the frontiers, Asaf could count henceforth only on the help of the English, who exerted themselves to use this tumultuous situation to the full. In exchange for their military protection, the nawab granted them as early as 1775 the control of the region of Benares, in addition to a substantial increase in indemnity.
  32. ^ Bayly, Christopher (1983), Rulers, townsmen, and bazaars: north Indian society in the age of British expansion, 1770–1870, Cambridge University Press, pp. xii–xiii, ISBN 9780521229326, In 1801 a large area of Awadh situated in the Doab and Rohilkhand were ceded to the British. It was added to districts conquered from the Marathas in 1803–4 around Delhi and Agra to form the 'Conquered and Ceded Provinces' of the British Bengal Presidency. The term 'Western Provinces' and later 'North-Western Provinces' came into gradual use to describe this area and the adjoining Benares Division; ... In 1856 the remaining 'Reserved Dominions' of the ruler of Awadh were annexed to become the British Province of Oudh under a Chief Commissioner. In 1901 the two provinces were amalgamated to become the United Province of Agra and Oudh.


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