Varanasi: the Eternal City on the Ganges

Of all the cities that have ever existed on this earth, very few can claim to have endured without interruption for as long as Varanasi. Known through the millennia as Kashi, as Benares, and by its current name Varanasi, this ancient city rests on the western bank of the Ganges River in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, and it has been inhabited without break for at least three thousand years — and by many scholarly accounts, for considerably longer. Conservative archaeological estimates place continuous human settlement here to around 1200 to 1000 BCE, coinciding with the later Vedic period of Indian civilization, but the layers of religious and cultural life that have accumulated over this place suggest a depth of human presence that no calendar can fully contain. Mark Twain, who visited in 1896, searched for language adequate to describe it and settled on this: Varanasi is "older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together." It was an exaggeration, perhaps, but only a small one. No living city on earth has been continuously venerated, continuously inhabited, and continuously transformed for as long as this one.

Varanasi is a city of approximately 1.2 million people within its municipal limits, and roughly three million in the wider metropolitan area. It sits in the central Gangetic plain of northern India, and its climate is subtropical, with scorching summers, a dramatic monsoon season between June and September, and mild winters that draw pilgrims and travelers from across the subcontinent and the world. But climate and geography are almost beside the point when speaking of Varanasi, because this city is defined not by its physical coordinates but by its cosmic ones. In the Hindu understanding of sacred space, Varanasi occupies a position unlike any other place on the face of the earth. It is the earthly abode of Shiva, the great god of creation and destruction, the transformer and regenerator. It is the city where, according to Hindu scripture, the very first light of creation appeared. It is the place where to die is to be liberated — not merely blessed, not merely elevated in the scale of rebirth, but entirely freed from the endless cycle of death and reincarnation altogether. Varanasi is not merely a holy city in the way that many cities are called holy. It is the holiest city on earth in the Shaivite Hindu tradition, and its sacredness is written into the architecture of the cosmos itself.

The Name and Sacred Geography of Varanasi

The name Varanasi is ancient, and its origin is itself a piece of sacred geography. The city takes its name from two rivers: the Varuna, which flows along its northern boundary, and the Assi, a small stream that marks its southern edge. The city thus occupies the triangular zone between these two tributaries and the mighty Ganges itself — a configuration known in Hindu religious geography as the Varanasi triangle. This triangular bounded zone is known in Sanskrit texts as the Antargriha, or "inner sanctuary," and every inch of it is considered sacred ground. To walk across Varanasi in any direction is, in a sense, to walk across a living temple.

The city's most ancient name, Kashi, carries its own meaning: "the luminous one," or "the city of light." The Puranas, those vast encyclopedic Hindu religious texts, describe Kashi as the place where Shiva and his consort Parvati came to dwell after their cosmic wandering, choosing this particular bend in the Ganges as the site of their eternal habitation. According to the Kashi Khanda, one of the major sections of the Skanda Purana, the entire city rests not on the earth itself but on the trident of Shiva — elevated above the ordinary world, immune from the floods and upheavals that will someday destroy everything else. When the great dissolution of the universe arrives and the waters of cosmic annihilation rise over all of creation, Varanasi alone, in this understanding, will remain.

The Ganges River, known in Hindi as the Ganga and personified as the goddess Ganga, is inseparable from Varanasi's identity. In Hindu cosmology, the Ganges is a heavenly river brought down to earth by the sage Bhagiratha to purify the ashes of his ancestors. It flows through the matted hair of Shiva before descending to the world, which is why the river is understood not merely as water but as a flowing manifestation of divine grace. At Varanasi, the river curves in a wide crescent from south to north — an anomaly, since the Ganges generally flows eastward here. This northward-facing curve means that at Varanasi, the rising sun shines directly onto the western bank where the city is built, illuminating the ghats each morning in a spectacle of light and reflection that has been described by travelers from antiquity to the present day as one of the most visually arresting sights on earth.

The City in History