Benares – Varanasi, Kashi – is not merely a city on the map of India. It is a vortex, a tear in the veil, a living paradox where the river of time seems to slow, thicken, and become palpable as the muddy, sacred waters of Mother Ganga. For centuries, the West, particularly the English literary imagination, has been drawn to this luminous wound in the mundane fabric of the world, seeking not just spectacle, but a glimpse of the ‘Mystical India’ whispered of in dusty tomes and traveler’s tales. Their pens of ink met the city’s indelible stain of faith and decay, producing narratives that oscillate between profound awe and colonial incomprehension, forever trying to capture the scent of marigolds mixed with woodsmoke and mortality.
Think of the early emissaries, soldiers and administrators stepping off barges onto the ghats, their stiff collars wilting in the humid haze. Their reports back to London spoke of bewildering rites, of bodies burning openly, of ascetics smeared in ash performing impossible feats. It was chaos, yes, but a chaos that hummed with an unfamiliar, unsettling power. They saw not mysticism, perhaps, but idolatry and superstition – yet the sheer intensity of belief, the way life and death embraced so publicly on the stone steps descending into the holy river, seeped into their consciousness. It was a challenge to the ordered, rational world they represented, a constant, pungent reminder of forces beyond ledger books and cannon fire.
Then came the seekers, the Romantics and later the Victorians, hearts hungry for transcendence beyond the grey confines of industrial England. Like moths drawn to a sacred flame, they arrived with Shelley’s yearning for the sublime or Tennyson’s quest for the “far-off divine event.” Benares offered a stage where the divine drama played out daily, raw and unscripted. They walked the narrow galis, senses assaulted – the clang of temple bells competing with the cries of chai-wallahs, the heady scent of incense battling the acrid tang of funeral pyres at Manikarnika Ghat. Here, they tried to reconcile the beauty of dawn prayers, the golden light spilling over thousands of bowed heads, with the stark reality of disease and destitution they were ill-equipped to process.
The city, therefore, became a powerful metaphor in Western writing. It was often the endpoint of a spiritual journey, the place where Eastern wisdom either profoundly healed the Western soul or completely broke its ability to rationalize the world. Rudyard Kipling, for example, captured the relentless, non-human scale of India’s existence, where the cycle of life and death, so visible in Benares, dwarfed individual human endeavor. Later, writers like E. M. Forster, though focusing on other aspects of Indian life, used this spiritual intensity as a backdrop against which British formality seemed brittle and inadequate.
In contemporary literature and travel writing, Varanasi remains the ultimate crucible. The modern traveler, armed with a camera and perhaps a post-colonial guilt, still seeks the authentic, untainted experience. Yet, the city simply absorbs them into its continuous, overwhelming present. The Ganges remains the enduring character, the silent witness to every transaction—spiritual, commercial, mortal. Benares does not yield its secrets easily; it merely presents the ultimate paradox of faith and finality laid bare, challenging every observer, past or present, to define the line between the sacred and the profane, a line which, in this city, dissolves with every drop of water that flows towards the sea