This was my second visit to Varanasi in six months. Though the city oozes its own charm, it is heartbreaking to see how chaotic it remains. The entrance of the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor— more like a shopping mall—has been built with incongruent red sandstone, resembling the buildings of Lutyens’ Delhi, which itself was inspired by Mughal architecture. The result is that the area around this ancient temple, which is arguably Indian civilisation’s holiest site looks like a cross between the sarkari building of Mughal Delhi, Lutyens’ Delhi and an ill-designed shopping mall. Admittedly, it has widened the area and given some muchwanted space for congregation, but in the process has a building complex that sticks out like a sore thumb. With plain red stone walls, shopping centres and guest houses, it is the most Mughal looking building in this ancient city now. Even the infamous mosque, built by Aurangzeb over an ancient temple structure still retains the intricate carvings of the destroyed temple.
Despite its explosive political connotations, the late medieval structure built by a religious bigot looks more artistic than the modern complex. The existing temple inside this complex was built during Maharani Ahilyabai Holkar and this structure with its beautiful carvings, in contrast, stands with exquisite beauty. Apart from re-establishing and building the Kashi Vishwanath temple, the Maharani had rebuilt the Manikarnika Ghat, Shri Tarkeshwar temple, Dashashwamedh Ghat and many others, and undoubtedly, they are some of the few buildings in this crumbling city that exude architectural charm of a bygone era that valued aesthetics. With our resources, power and technology, why are we struggling to match the infrastructure that a queen of the 1780s could build with much ease? The kitsch temple corridor, a product of our lowest bidder in a tender, is the least of the problems of this ancient city.
On February 4, 1916, during the inauguration of Banaras Hindu University, Mahatma Gandhi expressed his disappointment at the filthiness in the city and the temple premises and said that nothing had changed from his first visit in 1902. If he was to come in 2025, he would find no difference even after a century and a quarter. The lanes around the temple, outside the corridor, remain incredibly filthy even now. ‘The swarming flies and the noise made by the shopkeepers and pilgrims were perfectly insufferable...where one expected an atmosphere of meditation and communion, it was conspicuous by its absence,’ that was Mahatma Gandhi writing in 1928 about the streets of Varanasi. After 97 years, we can say that the noise and cacophony has only increased. Constant honking, bhajans sung out of tune and rhythm and amplified through scratchy loud speakers, ambling cows, monkeys, stray dogs and beggars—the city is everything the western media loves to project as a stereotype of India. The shops that serve mouth-watering chaats, thandai and other condiments, unfortunately lack basic hygiene. The narrow lanes are filled with overflowing gutters, drainage water and plastic waste. The ghats, despite constant sweeping, gets filled with filth in no time. The holy Ganga, at least at the shores, is a black mucky diesel-and-oilstained stagnant water with rotting flowers and biological waste. Rickety boats ply with gay abandon, exuding dark fumes and leaving a trail of diesel and engine oil in its wake. The famous Ganga aarti, that looks picture perfect in videos and photos, is a chaotic affair, with people jostling to get into anchored boats with plastic chairs, people selling, negotiating, arguing for tea and condiments while the sacred aarti is going on with scratchy speakers blazing out chants to an indifferent public. What should have been a spiritually exalting and moving experience is just another commercial venture, a market place to sell chai, trinkets, samosa and the most important commodity—the belief. One has to be a true believer, without an iota of doubt or common sense, to find spirituality in such a mess.
Indians are touchy about criticism, but such callous attitude deserves nothing but condemnation and contempt. It isn’t a problem of Kashi alone, but most of the pilgrim places across the country. Even the queue for darshan is a place to fight, abuse, pull, shove, cut the queue and jostle. A year back, in Triambakeshwar temple of Nashik, while standing in queue for darshan, a well-dressed and seemingly educated family prodded their children to pee inside the temple premises. The crowd was indifferent to the sight of a group of children, aged from five to 10, wetting the temple walls with their urine. Many spat paan wherever they pleased inside the holy precincts of the temple. I don’t know any religion other than Hinduism which is so callous about hygiene and neatness.
Blaming the government and authorities is an easy task, but they didn’t descend from Mars. We elected them from among us. Most of our ancient cities are now a cluster of hotchpotch buildings, unpainted, unwashed and crumbling. In Varanasi, it was heartbreaking to see the condition of the building where Tulsidas had written the Vinaya Patrika of Ramcharitmanas. The building is a crumbling concrete structure, mostly built during the 1970s, in a narrow lane, filled with garbage. The original building must have been rebuilt over time. All the old kothis of Varanasi, with their intricate carved pillars, doors and courtyards have vanished behind box-type concrete structures. This gentrification to featureless, tasteless concrete buildings is true about most heritage cities of India.
Ideally, we should be recreating and rebuilding the ancient structures and lanes of our historical cities like Kashi from the earliest available paintings and photographs like how Europe rebuilt its ancient monuments after the World War II. Instead, we are happy building kitschy corridors and putting LED boards proclaiming the greatness of our political leaders. Everything is perfect in New India, in forwarded WhatsApp videos. The reality outside is another story.