Grief at the Ghats
Photo: Karan Madhok
For centuries, Varanasi has welcomed all visitors into the same all-encompassing embrace. With aggressive forces of politics and religion threatening to segregate his hometown, Karan Madhok argues for the need to preserve the city’s true harmonious spirit.
The posters were displayed across the ghats of Varanasi, in this ancient city where religion and politics meet for a complex confluence, by the banks of the country’s most beloved river. Written in Hindi, their message left little room for nuance or misinterpretation.
Non-Hindus are prohibited from visiting the Ganga’s bank in Varanasi.
Followed by and even more direct statement of purpose:
This is a warning, not a request.
Varanasi is the city of my birth, childhood, and continuing close family ties, and this news seemed unbelievable at first. It was a shocking declaration of the immunity that India’s majority now enjoys, even as such declarations—and even worse actions—have found a comfortable home in the new cultural fabric of India. It’s a cultural fabric where schools are segregated by choice of attire, where minority places of worship have been ransacked and violated, where any criticism of the government has often been answered with threats and violence. It’s a fabric where, a few hundred kilometres west in Haridwar—by the banks of the same Ganga River—a ‘hate assembly’ was organised where open calls for genocide hardly caused a flutter among the leaders of our national ruling party.
The face of that ruling party—and our nation’s prime minister—actually chose to run from Varanasi as his home constituency in 2014, and then once more in 2019. Varanasi is the centre of Hindu spirituality, located in India’s most-populous and politically-decisive state, where the BJP has held a local stronghold for years. Narendra Modi had no trouble winning the contest both times.
These posters were first put up on January 6 by members of two right-wing Hindu groups in close association with the BJP: the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal. Hundreds of the posters were found in various ghats across the length of the river, including the two most popular stops for visitors (Dashashwamedh Ghat and Assi Ghat), the biggest cremation spot by the riverside (Manikarnika Ghat), and the Panchganga ghat, which is venerated by Hindus for the mythical union of five holy rivers, and by Muslims for the Alamgir mosque nearby.
A VHP member further underlined the intended segregation of the message when he told reporters. “This is not everyone’s ghat… It’s a ghat for the Hindus. Muslims, Christians or others don’t belong here… We welcome Hindus and those of the Sanatan Dharma, but not anyone else.” The Bajrang Dal’s Varanasi coordinator added, “River Ganga is our mother, it is not a picnic spot. Those who consider the Ganga a picnic spot should stay away from it. If they do not, Bajrang Dal will make sure they do.”
These are personalities that defy religious, cultural, and sometimes even economic barriers. Or often, we find those personifying the most typical Banarasi paradox: the intellectual everyman, an eternal sceptic of every development—human or divine—while simultaneously remaining unworried and unhurried.
It took a few days before the Varanasi police arrested two persons linked to the Bajrang Dal under 107/16 of Code of Criminal Procedure, an act targeting those likely to “commit a breach of the peace or disturb the public tranquillity.” Both were released soon after the submission of a personal bond of ₹5 lakh each.
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Now, there continues to hang a certain new density to the thick riverside air, the weight of tension, clouds waiting to burst before the next clash of communities.
70 percent of Varanasi’s population identifies as Hindu, and about 29 percent as Muslim, with other religions (Christians, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhist) making up the smaller, remaining fraction of the local populace. For most of the year, this duopoly of religions generally exists in peace. It’s a lifestyle exemplifying the Ganja-Jamuna ‘tehzeeb’ of North India, where many of us are raised in some fusion of the two cultures, with laddoos for Diwali and kheer for Id, with Hindi literature and Urdu poetry, within a world where Muslim bunkars weave the saris worn by Hindu brides on their wedding day.
It is that fusion of cultures that many of us from Varanasi treasure, for there is a particular Pucca Banarasi personality trait that shades us in deeper dyes, a trait often stronger than religious identities. This city is one of the oldest continuously-living civilizations in the world, thriving in a comfortable confluence of the past and the present. A typical Banarasi, over all, is known for being mast, in a certain state of passive enjoyment and relaxation, a Banarasi who prefers conversation over confrontation, the poetic one-upmanship of sher-o-shayari over aggressive arguments, who believes there is hardly a controversy that can’t be resolved over a cup of chai.
And those cups of chai… Aah! The chai-wallahs of Varanasi are their own version of the ancient Agora of Athens, where Socrates and Plato contemplated the meaning of life; or the cafés of Paris where Sartre and de Beauvoir discussed existentialist thought. In Varanasi, the chai-stalls become a sangam for the widest variety of local personalities. These are personalities that defy religious, cultural, and sometimes even economic barriers. Or often, we find those personifying the most typical Banarasi paradox: the intellectual everyman, an eternal sceptic of every development—human or divine—while simultaneously remaining unworried and unhurried. They aren’t easily disturbed—and they don't easily disturb their neighbours, either.
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My own grandfather was one such local personality, who believed in that sangam, in that Ganga-Yamuna Tehzeeb of the city. Born originally in Lahore in 1930 to a Hindu family, Amrit Lal Madhok moved to Shimla right before Partition, where he would eventually marry my grandmother, a Sikh woman. He remained heavily influenced by traditionally Islamic poetry and culture, enriched with the shayari performances from childhood, and carried the love of wordplay with him his whole life. Later, the poetic tradition influenced his academic and professional decisions too: he studied the Persian language, Urdu, and Persian History in the 1950s and was eventually sent to Tehran to learn and teach Persian. Upon his return to India in the 60s, he moved to Varanasi where he received a PhD at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and became a professor of Persian, Persian History and Urdu.
He adopted what Urdu poets call a takhallus—a pen name—for himself: Ishrat, the Urdu word for ‘joy’, or ‘delight’. And as Ishrat, he embodied the joy of the city itself, penning dozens of ghazals in Urdu literary magazines from the region. He kept close ties with both these identities, the identity of his birth and of his adoption, of Madhok and Ishrat, professor and poet, Hindu and Muslim.
‘Ishrat’ passed away in 1989 of a brain tumour. I was four-years-old, left only with fleeting glimpses of memory of my grandfather. But the years that followed helped me understand the man and his art. Now, decades since his death, an interfaith mushaira is held every year, bringing together many of the country’s best shayars for a social gathering of ghazal, poetry, humour to help build religious bridges.
Varanasi is teeming with men and women like my grandfather, individuals raised with the city’s true local spirit of tolerance and camaraderie, of shared space and shared arts. Being historically an important cultural, educational, and economic centre, Varanasi has ended up being a city of migrants, attracting communities from all over the country. There are some bastis known for its Bengali population, some for its Sikhs, some for the Tamils, some for its Muslims, some for the Buddhists who revere the nearby town of Sarnath, some for the Marathis. But over the generations, Varanasi makes them all of Her own, welcoming every visitor into the same all-encompassing embrace.
And yet, every election season comes the familiar itch of division, where that embrace is pulled apart, opening the fissures between cultures, castes, communities, and religions.
The run-up to the 2022 Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly elections has proven to be no different. Voting began in the state on February 10, and this drama of democracy will conclude with the final phase on March 7—which is the date that Varanasi, too, will descend to the polling stations.
The result of this election could define the direction of India’s long-term destiny, for the country’s economy, its ideology, and the very core of its moral personality. The state’s incumbent chief minister has already made multiple speeches drawing the religious lines between Hindus and Muslims. Parties have descended with their manifestoes and promises, from farmers’ issues to student’s concerns, employment to inflation, masjids to mandirs.
The crown jewel of the BJP’s theatre of religiosity was the new, expanded corridor of the Kashi Vishwanath Temple in the heart of the city, close to the ghats and gullies and the Ganga. The prime minster inaugurated this upgraded, expensive corridor—a ₹7000 crore project—to breathless coverage by national news in mid-December.
Less than four weeks later, the posters appeared in the ghat near the new corridor.
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Even beyond the countless physical temples by the riverside and in the gullies, these ghats are, undoubtedly, deeply entrenched in Hindu lifestyle and tradition. There are hundreds of holy men found by the steps, passing on thousands of years of Vedic knowledge. There are holy trees, holy stones, and oral histories and mythologies teeming around every nook and cranny. The Ganga is worshipped as a goddess herself. And then there’s Manikarnika ghat, near a kund (water reservoir) known as the spot where Shiva danced to give form to this specific cosmos. The riverbank here is the most significant site for Hindu cremations, where it is said that the soul is finally freed from the series of reincarnations, achieving moksha.
And yet, despite the sacredness ascribed to many places along the ghats, most of these steps and riverbanks are also a public space. They don’t belong to a particular person, organisation, or religion. They are aam raasta for Indian citizens, for foreign visitors on Indian soil, for Banarasis and Non-Banarasis, for Hindus of all castes, for Muslims, Jains, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs. For Non-Believers, too.
The Ganga’s rising pollution has been emblematic of the priorities and bureaucratic fiascos… our administrations have only further polluted the city’s essence, where the religious pride that should urge Indians to save the river is the same one urging us to divide, segregate, and hate each other.
And then, there’s the river.
This Ganga has been a provider, a river of fertility that gave rise to this ancient civilization, to the population boom across north India’s Gangetic plains. Pilgrims visit Varanasi in millions every year to pay their respects to the river, to take home a flask of its presumed holy water and sprinkle the Ganga’s blessings to their loved ones across the country—and beyond.
But this Ganga is hardly the Ganga anymore. Upstream, dams have stunted the flow of the original waters descending from Gangotri, leaving a mix of other rivers and tributaries that finally arrive to Varanasi. Chemical and human waste have further polluted the waters in and around the city, giving it a toxic stench of urban plunder. As per a recent study by the Delhi-based NGO Toxics Link, there is now a high presence of microplastics in the Ganga—peaking in Varanasi itself. Past measurements have also demonstrated dangerously high fecal coliform counts in the water of the holy river.
The Ganga’s rising pollution—and failures by subsequent local, state, and central governments in handling its degradation—has only been emblematic of the priorities and bureaucratic fiascos in our nation: in its failure to protect the resources that its people claim to revere. Instead of dealing with the river’s pollution itself, our administrations have only further polluted the city’s essence, where the religious pride that should urge Indians to save the river is the same one urging us to divide, segregate, and hate each other.
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One can get to the ghats of Varanasi by car, parking close to stepwells that descend down to the Ganga at a couple of openings with easy motorable access across the ghats’ seven-kilometre length. But to truly experience the spirit of Varanasi, there is nothing quite like a walk through the gullies.
On days when I have time to explore and wander, my strategy is to start on foot at any one of the mouths that open into ancient, thin labyrinthine alleyways in the older part of the city. From here on, I secede free will to the city, allowing her to take over, to determine my journey ahead. All that is certain is that the main road back to the city lies west, and the banks of the Ganga are somewhere to the east. But there is no more certainty of direction in the gullies—especially for those who don’t live in the vicinity of these narrow, dense inner-lanes. The stone-cobbled path will take you in loops and curves, zig and zag, through long-winded digressions and unexpected sharp turns.
On the way to the ghats then, a pedestrian is guaranteed to come across the most intense extravaganza of Indian experiences, from the ubiquitous Shiv lings in honour of the city’s most-beloved godly patron, to artisans weaving the most intricate of zari garments; from vegetable markets and tiny bookshops, famous temples, grand mosques, bookshops, a protestant CNI church, government-approved bhang sellers and schools of spiritual knowledge—it’s all there, a potpourri of religion, culture, commerce, and actual pots of puri.
On January 8, just two days after the posters were first put up, the Assi ghat welcomed a special community event called Paigham-e-Mohabbat—Message of Love—organised by local interfaith groups campaigning for unity between the city’s various religious communities. The event featured music, ghazal, theatre, and more—an all-out assault of the arts.
It was the type of gathering that my grandfather would have adored, filled with poets and personalities of true, pucca Banarasis, those who chose art over violence, harmony over segregation.
One doesn’t have to be religious to feel a sense of awe for this mighty river and the ghats—and a sense of sorrow at their environmental and social degradation. Even for atheists like me, the ghats can offer a sense of spirituality. It’s a form of meditative bliss derived not just from the gods and their rituals, but in respect for the thousands of years of history that these riverbanks have overseen. It is this sense of shared humanity that gave the ghats and other old parts of Varanasi a feeling of something beyond religion, a celebration of our shared civilization.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. Karan’s debut novel A Beautiful Decay will be published by the Aleph Book Company in 2022. Twitter: @karanmadhok1
