The Enchanting Allure of Varanasi: A Literary and Cinematic Exploration
Varanasi, also known as Benares or Kashi, is an Indian city that has captivated writers, artists, philosophers, and filmmakers for centuries. This ancient spiritual hub on the banks of the sacred Ganges River is considered one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Revered in Hinduism as the city of Shiva, it holds a central place in the religious and cultural imagination of India. Pilgrims flock here to perform rituals, seek blessings, or end their lives in the hope of attaining moksha—liberation from the cycle of rebirth. But beyond its religious importance, Varanasi continues to exert a powerful symbolic force on the global artistic consciousness.
The city’s mystique has been beautifully portrayed in various literary works and cinematic representations, most notably in the Italian documentary Verso Benares. Directed by G.Vignali in 2022, the film stands out as a poignant and visually stunning exploration of the city. It shuns traditional narrative in favor of an observational style, allowing the viewer to absorb the rhythms of daily life along the Ganges—the chants of morning prayers, the procession of mourners, the flickering flames of cremation pyres, and the ever-present sound of temple bells. Through its meditative pacing and poetic visual language, the documentary invites viewers not just to observe Varanasi, but to experience it viscerally.
What makes Verso Benares unique is its lack of voiceover or didactic framing. The film offers no translation of chants or contextualization of rituals. Instead, it trusts the images and ambient sounds to carry the emotional and spiritual weight. This cinematic choice mirrors the experience of entering a deeply spiritual environment: there is no need to understand everything intellectually—presence alone is transformative. In doing so, the documentary breaks from the conventional Western gaze that often seeks to explain the “other” and instead cultivates a sacred kind of attention.
Pierre Loti and the Search for the Sacred
Varanasi was also a source of deep inspiration for Pierre Loti, the 19th-century French novelist and naval officer whose literary voice combined Romanticism, exoticism, and melancholia. In his travel memoir L’Inde (sans les Anglais), published in 1903, Loti recounts his journey through India while consciously avoiding areas heavily influenced by British colonial presence. His fascination with Varanasi—then Benares—was immediate and intense. The city, with its funeral pyres burning by the river and its ceaseless spiritual activities, struck a chord with his existential longing for the sacred.
Loti described Varanasi as a place where death was not feared but ritualized, accepted, and woven into daily life. For a Western mind shaped by Cartesian logic and institutionalized religion, this intimate proximity to mortality and transcendence felt both unsettling and magnetic. He found beauty in the incense smoke drifting over the river, in the chanting of pilgrims at sunrise, and in the aged faces of sadhus lost in meditation. In Loti’s words, Varanasi wasn’t simply a religious city—it was a living metaphor for the eternal cycle of life and death.
His narrative, deeply introspective and at times melancholic, highlighted not only the allure of the East but also the emotional gap between the observer and the observed. While deeply moved by the spirituality he encountered, Loti never claimed to understand it fully. Instead, he wrote from a place of wonder and respectful distance, offering a rare form of travel writing—one that doesn’t conquer but contemplates.
Cultural Mirror: Varanasi as a Universal Symbol
What unites both Verso Benares and Pierre Loti’s memoir is their depiction of Varanasi as not merely a geographic location but a spiritual condition. In both film and text, the city serves as a mirror—reflecting the yearnings, doubts, and spiritual emptiness of the modern Western soul. For Loti, Varanasi was a place of truth and clarity; for the filmmakers, it was a place of unfiltered presence.
This duality—Varanasi as both concrete and symbolic—explains why it continues to attract global attention. In literature, it is a recurring setting for narratives of transformation, death, and enlightenment. In cinema, it has inspired a variety of treatments, from Jean Renoir’s The River (1951) to Indian films like Banaras: A Mystic Love Story (2006), each using the city as more than backdrop—rather, as a central character with its own emotional and spiritual gravity.
More recently, Varanasi has also become a focal point for documentary filmmakers and spiritual seekers, serving as a canvas onto which questions of faith, mortality, and cultural identity are projected. Unlike the frenetic pace of global cities, Varanasi operates on a cyclical rhythm, aligning more with natural and cosmic patterns than with modern linear time. This makes it a rare cultural artifact—a city that still holds space for transcendence in a world increasingly distracted.
Conclusion: The Timeless Spell of Varanasi
Whether through the lens of a camera or the pen of a writer, Varanasi retains a kind of timeless magnetism. Its mysticism is not invented—it is lived, felt, and constantly renewed by those who walk its ghats and chant its prayers. Verso Benares and L’Inde (sans les Anglais) remind us that the sacred is not just found in temples or texts but in silence, smoke, water, and fire—the elemental languages of human spirituality.
In a world ever more defined by digital noise and spiritual disconnection, Varanasi continues to speak—quietly, insistently, and profoundly. It is a place where the spiritual and the material, the ancient and the immediate, coexist without contradiction. And for artists like Loti and filmmakers like the Pratas, it remains a beacon of mystery, reminding us that to witness deeply is already a kind of prayer.