I felt that the festival of Deep Deepawali deserved an entry entirely to itself as it’s one of the things that makes Varanasi, Varanasi. The entire festival of Deep Deepawali is based around the slaying of the great demon Tripurasura by an incarnation of Lord Shiva Tr. Tripurasura, it is said was the collective name of three demons, Vidyunmali, Tarakaksha and Viryavana, according to Hindu mythology.

It is said that Tripurasura had conquered the entire world and defeated the gods, when an incarnation of Lord Shiva, Tripurataka managed to slay the mighty demon the gods were overjoyed and declared the day as a festival of illuminations. Hence, the festival is also known as Dev-Diwali, the Diwali of gods.

We realized that during our trip to Varanasi, we would be fortunate enough to witness the celebration of this particular festival that brings an entire city, especially one as busy as Varanasi to a complete stand still. When we visited the ghats on the day of the festival it was a sight to see. I’ve never seen so many people in one place at one time in my life, despite the fact that I’ve lived in one of the crowded cities in India for close to fourteen years. The crowd was enormous and the beauty of it all was that the entire night was lit up by the amount of tiny lamps that decorated the steps of the ghats, close to every inch of the steps were carpeted in tiny lamps. In one particular stretch of the ghats, there were massive bowls of coal with fires burning in them. Fun fact, Deep Deepawali always happens at the time of Kartik Poornima, which is fifteen days after Diwali and occurs on the full moon in the month of Kartik.

It more than interesting to see how so many people can gather in what is simply a thin stretch of land that separates the streets from the river. What I found most unusual was that in all these celebrations the pyres of Varanasi continued to burn. Perhaps what surprised me was that through out all the merry-making, there were still a couple of morose faces. Quite understandable, considering a couple of the people at the ghats where they burn bodies were in mourning. It comes as quite a shock to see people having fun right next to a place where they burn the bodies of the dead. Perhaps it can be called insensitivity, that being said, the ritual of burning bodies is close to  four thousand years old in Varanasi and I think it is only natural for the people here to have become used to.

There are very specific parts of the ghats where movement is heavily restricted thanks to the design of that particular ghat. For example, near one of the ghats, the path becomes really narrow. The thing is, this particular place is actually a key area, and leads to some of the larger and more important ghats. As we were trying to get through I noticed that there were close to eight people in a single line trying to push their way through in the opposite direction, note that there are close to a hundred and fifty people trying to move in one direction on a platform that is quite literally only 3 meters across, at the most.

The ghats tend to get really really crowded during this particular festival. Not a single ghat stays empty during this time. You’ll see many people in some of the ghats that have more space selling chat or selling cheap toys. In other ghats you’ll see people playing cricket along a tiny strip of the ghats.  At this time of the year, on the full moon night, it feels like daytime.

The beauty of this festival is seeing how everyone in the city comes together to celebrate this festival. Overall, the point of being in such a place is not to try and explain the reason behind it all but to rather soak it in and become immersed in it, take in the pI felt that the festival of Deep Deepawali deserved a blog post entirely to itself as it’s one of the things that makes Varanasi, Varanasi. The entire festival of Deep Deepawali is based around the slaying of the great demon Tripurasura by an incarnation of Lord Shiva Tr. Tripurasura, it is said was the collective name of three demons, Vidyunmali, Tarakaksha and Viryavana, according to Hindu mythology.

It is said that Tripurasura had conquered the entire world and defeated the gods, when an incarnation of Lord Shiva, Tripurataka managed to slay the mighty demon the gods were overjoyed and declared the day as a festival of illuminations. Hence, the festival is also known as Dev-Diwali, the Diwali of gods.

We realized that during our trip to Varanasi, we would be fortunate enough to witness the celebration of this particular festival that brings an entire city, especially one as busy as Varanasi to a complete stand still. When we visited the ghats on the day of the festival it was a sight to see. I’ve never seen so many people in one place at one time in my life, despite the fact that I’ve lived in one of the crowded cities in India for close to fourteen years. The crowd was enormous and the beauty of it all was that the entire night was lit up by the amount of tiny lamps that decorated the steps of the ghats, close to every inch of the steps were carpeted in tiny lamps. In one particular stretch of the ghats, there were massive bowls of coal with fires burning in them. Fun fact, Deep Deepawali always happens at the time of Kartik Poornima, which is fifteen days after Diwali and occurs on the full moon in the month of Kartik.

It more than interesting to see how so many people can gather in what is simply a thin stretch of land that separates the streets from the river. What I found most unusual was that in all these celebrations the pyres of Varanasi continued to burn. Perhaps what surprised me was that through out all the merry-making, there were still a couple of morose faces. Quite understandable, considering a couple of the people at the ghats where they burn bodies were in mourning. It comes as quite a shock to see people having fun right next to a place where they burn the bodies of the dead. Perhaps it can be called insensitivity, that being said, the ritual of burning bodies is close to  four thousand years old in Varanasi and I think it is only natural for the people here to have become used to.

There are very specific parts of the ghats where movement is heavily restricted thanks to the design of that particular ghat. For example, near one of the ghats, the path becomes really narrow. The thing is, this particular place is actually a key area, and leads to some of the larger and more important ghats. As we were trying to get through I noticed that there were close to eight people in a single line trying to push their way through in the opposite direction, note that there are close to a hundred and fifty people trying to move in one direction on a platform that is quite literally only 3 meters across, at the most.

The ghats tend to get really really crowded during this particular festival. Not a single ghat stays empty during this time. You’ll see many people in some of the ghats that have more space selling chat or selling cheap toys. In other ghats you’ll see people playing cricket along a tiny strip of the ghats.  At this time of the year, on the full moon night, it feels like daytime.

The beauty of this festival is seeing how everyone in the city comes together to celebrate this festival. Overall, the point of being in such a place is not to try and explain the reason behind it all but to rather soak it in and become immersed in it, take in the place, live it and breathe it.

Often people say that the journey is more important than the destination. This holds true for a lot of things, including the process of completing projects related to places we’ve visited.

Most of our work in Varanasi was based on talking to people and getting to know about the place. All our work was supposed to be about the people and how they have shaped their lives around a five thousand year old city filled to the brim with history. While most people had a clear idea what they wanted to do, I was still a little confused as to what exactly I wanted to achieve out of this social ecology trip. What I found out about myself was this, I’m a person who needs to know why people tick. Thus, I decided to put a twist to that desire to know and related it to the places in which people live and thus I had some kind of notion as to what was to be done.

The entrance to one of the many temples in Katchodi Gali

However, while most people spoke to people about the place and their roles in it, I found myself unable to do so. Primarily because I’m not exactly what one would call a socially outgoing person, secondly because I noticed that most people in the place had very generic and standard answers to any questions you asked them. Those weren’t the kind of answers I was looking for. A lot of my inquiry was about observing people and their behaviour in their own surroundings. I’ve noticed that often, when you simply sit and watch people, you’ll find out more about people than they’re willing to tell you and that is an interesting experience in itself. 

For example, in Dalmandi, you’ll see hundreds of people milling about and almost all these people are known to the people who run the shops, definitely not by name but certainly by face. It almost feels like a close-knit community the moment you enter that alley. On the other hand, when you enter Katchodi Gali you’ll see people sitting around, everyone doing their own thing, the sense of community isn’t as strong as you’d expect in a lane populated by Hindus. Another interesting fact, police presence in Katchodi Gali is extreme to the degree that you will not go past a single alley without at least seeing a pair of policemen. Perhaps is due to the fact that the Kashi Vishwanath Temple has four gates that go into the temple complex and two of them are in Katchodi Gali. Funnily enough, right next to the temple is the Gyanvapy mosque. It stands next to the temple and was made by Babar when he invaded the city and had many of the temples in the city razed to the ground. It was said that before the coming of Babar, that there were more temples in Kashi than there were priests to tend to them.

One of the more deserted parts of Dalmandi

I can recall one time in the lanes, as we were walking around, we had stopped to ask for directions at a store that did book bindings. When we asked for directions the man more than happily told us the way. However,

We decided to stay on for a while and talk to the man. We asked him about the place and how the lane had come to be known as Katchodi gali, he told us that twenty years or so prior to our visit the lanes in the area had been filled with Katchodi’s, and now thanks to more economic avenues opening up, a lot of the katchodi shops had shut down, people had begun searching for better paying jobs and thus the lack of katchodis as compared to the days of old.  As we spoke to him, we also asked him about the significance of the upcoming festival that was going to happen in the next couple of days, Deep Depavali, one that we were fortunate enough to be present for. He explained that it was celebrated as a festival of light. As were leaving, another man was walking by with a cup of tea in his hand; he looked like a frail man, with barely any teeth in his mouth and walking with a slight stoop. However, as the man passed, the shop keeper that we had been speaking to hailed him and asked him to explain the significance of the festival as well as the importance of the month of Kartik, which is a month in the Hindu calendar, that runs at a slightly different yearly cycle than the Gregorian calendar that we all follow.

The man instantly transformed into someone barely out of their teens, he explained that the month means the most to Lord Shri Krishna and that Deep Deepawali is essentially the festival of the lights of the gods, all while prancing about the spot. He explained that the Deep Deepawali is celebrated as the day that one of the avatars of Lord Shiva, Tripurantaka,  the slayer of the demon Tripasura, hence the gods declared the day as a festival of illuminations. The festival always takes place on the night of the full moon, also known as the time of Kartik Poornima, in this case, November the 6^th, 2014. One must understand that this festival is exclusive to the city of Varanasi and no other city in the country. It’s also one of the few days in the year when close to the entire population of the city flocks to the ghats to make merry and celebrate this occasion, bringing the daily life of a lot of people to a screeching halt.

Brown Bread Bakery(pretty famous for its location)

It should be noted that despite the seemingly peaceful nature of the city and the galis, there is still a negative sentiment towards Muslims in the place. I could give an example from personal experience; me and a couple of friends were trying to get to Dalmandi for the first time, and this was in the middle of the afternoon, when Varanasi can get pretty hot, especially in November. Just after you step out of Dashashvamedh Ghat the road curves towards the right and then left after which it is cordoned off to allow only pedestrian traffic. Just before the road gets cordoned off, there’s a row of shops selling a variety of things on the right side of the road. We stopped at one particular store to ask for directions and some water. To our surprise, they told us that the place where we wanted to go was unsafe and that the place is normally like that and its never a good idea to go there, let alone people just visiting the city.  We were quite taken aback since we had just spoken to a very polite Muslim gentleman who told us that he’d take us to the lane if we would just follow him as he was going to have lunch at the same place. We thanked the shop owner and decided to re-affirm what the owner had said with a policeman. When we found one and asked him about the place and whether there had been any trouble there, he denied it with confidence. Despite this being an isolated incident I still found it rather troubling as to how, in a city that has seen rulers from so many different dynasties and religions in its five thousand years of existence still has problems with trivial things like this. Perhaps it’s a constant in a city like this, or maybe a constant in our country.

A lot of the journey to Varanasi was about the place, and how much of the place we could observe, absorb and take back with us. For a lot of people, Varanasi was about the ghats, after all, one of the defining traits of the place are the ghats.

A quick introduction to the ghats; they’re a place where a lot of people find employment, from becoming boatmen and guides to tea-vendors, sadhus and priests.  A significant portion of the city derives an income from the ghats.  A Ghat literally means the banks of the river. In this case, the ghats are the livelihood of a large portion of the people of Varansi. The river holds incredible importance. Not only as a religiously significant place but also as a way for people on the other bank of the Ganga to cross over and conduct business in order to earn a living. It also serves as one of the few waterways in India that is actually used to transport material and people in large quantities.

As part of my personal project, I decided to observe the by-lanes of Varanasi with a specific focus on two lanes with two very different religious inclinations, along with seeing how the same relationship plays out on the ghats. The names of these lanes were Dalmandi and Katchodi Gali. Dalmandi is a dominantly Muslim area while Katchodi Gali is predominantly a Hindu area.

What I found out was quite interesting. First off, the structures of these by-lanes are very different from each other. While most by-lanes run either parallel to the streets of Varanasi, Katchodi Gali extends like a snake inwards and outwards, occasionally meeting the roads and then curving back into the darkness of the galis, which inevitably lead to the ghats. Dalmandi on the other hand is one long, straight gali, which runs ram-rod straight for about three hundred meters and then forks in two different directions, towards the right, it goes towards a mosque and many small street side stalls.

While these two different streets are so nearby, the difference in them is immediately apparent; one only has to visit each of these galis once to understand what I’m trying to say. While Katchodi gali is predominantly about sweet shops and places to buy incense and food. The place is almost always dark, it seems to feel overcast all the time thanks to the multitudes of wires, cloth and plastic draped between two buildings on either side of you.

In contrast, Dalmandi is much, much more commercial, i.e., the streets are lined with plenty of electronics stores selling cheap knock offs of famous brands with different names, there are also different stores selling spices with smells that will definitely mess with your nose.

One of the more curious things I found in both the by-lanes was that while religion is such an important part of the city, you’d find that within Katchodi Gali there are close to three to four temples in close proximity to each other in a single lane while Dalmandi has quite literally a single mosque in an obscure lane of the entire area. It’s fairly easy for me to make an uninformed observation about this by saying that it’s because the city itself is predominantly a Hindu city however plausible this theory sounds. In truth, I wasn’t able to find enough information from people regarding the place. However, personally, it did feel like the overwhelming, in-your-face presence of temples in Katchodi Gali was a show of power and justification of Hindu superiority in the city despite the fact that many different faiths reside in the place.  Or perhaps more simply, it could be a simple lack of space in Dalmandi. While all of this seems like theory, most of it sounds plausible considering the fact that a lot of the temples in Katchodi gali I realized were privately owned, i.e., they were technically part of someone’s household but open to all. Which is an interesting community practice itself. It is indicative of the type of people you will find in Varanasi.

Most places in India have something to offer you, especially when you’re going to a particular place for the first time. That being said, the best way to ruin an experience is to make sure you have to catch a flight to the capital of India at Six O’clock in the morning, which means you have to get up at the ungodly hour of Three O’clock in the morning. It gets worse when you know you have to take a connecting flight out of there in order to get to Varanasi.

Considering that sleep was the most important thing on my mind, the way to the guest house was a blur of heat and uncomfortable positions. We went out in the evening to the new Kashi Vishvanath Temple that is located inside the Benaras Hindu University campus. While the temple itself isn’t exactly a spectacular sight, it is an interesting piece of work considering various parts of the temple are influenced by different styles of architecture. The next day was quite interesting; we visited the famous ghats of Varanasi.

Serenity and peace. Two things that one of the holiest cities in the world is not. The bustle and life that the city of Varanasi exudes is something that is rarely seen in many other places. A lot of people begin their day very early in the morning. The boats that run the length of the ghats are almost always functioning. People cross the river to come and work in the city. Many people come down to the most revered river in India to bathe. Despite the fact that its probably the filthiest river in our country. Varanasi is not what I would call a holy city. The magic of this place is the people. People are the ones that make a city. At its very core, Varanasi is a place that has been defined, moulded and shaped by the people that have inhabited the place.

Architecture in the place is a general mix from different time periods across history. You have Mughal architecture, most apparent in the mosques and the palaces on the banks of the river. Next in line you have Maratha architecture, with circumstances and intricate designs seen mostly on the temples on the banks of the Ganga and inside the city. Perhaps the most recent type of architecture that can be detected is from the colonial times. Close to 200 years of servitude to a foreign power has had its influence on some of the old residential places.

Under no circumstance must an individual, even for a second believe that the friendly exterior of the people is an honest reflection of their beliefs. Religion in the city has unfortunately, been trivialized. Hostility towards foreigners is something that is something that is very common. Especially on the ghats. All one needs to do is ask any one of the locals about the many foreigners that roam the place in almost every season. Resentment is a strong sentiment in Varanasi. Especially in a city like this; one with a history of destruction and reconstruction over thousands of years.

Its not that every single person in this city expresses resentment about his or her life. People know their lives and how it pans out. And they're happy with it. As I've mentioned previously that the beauty of this city is not in the city but the people in it. People are so happy to share what little they have or what they know. I'm not sure how to explain people here. The language is a dialect of Hindi not seen anywhere else, along with a politeness, a sense of relaxation and happiness that is very difficult to find in people across our country.

If one absolutely needs to experience Varanasi, boat rides are the best. The nest time to take one is perhaps early in the morning. Since a lot of people who's livelihood is based on the ghats it is not difficult to find someone willing to take you down the river and back up. Over the course of the time that it takes you to do that it's possible to notice many things. For instance, different types of architecture all meant for those who could have them made at the time. Perhaps elsewhere you'll see a man or a lady, in the water, praying. Elsewhere you'll seen kids, as young as 5 jumping in to the water with a smile of absolute joy.   Maybe a father bathing his son. Or a person performing their daily ablutions. Perhaps a man teaching other children to swim. A necessary skill in this city. 

People here aren't what you would call ignorant. They aren't oblivious to the filth that floats in the river. They know it exists and they continue with their daily rituals. In fact, as an atheist I've come to feel a little jealous of the people who do believe in something they've never seen in their lives yet have an absolutely faith in that very power that their lives are based on that faith. A pillar of strength for them at all times. The city itself breathes religion. And sadly enough, with all religion comes the seeds of corruption. Deep underneath the smiles of the priests willing to bless you in the name of god is a man looking to make a quick buck off someone with particular beliefs.