Along the Ghats of Varanasi

Parts of this Article • Fear & Loathing • The Business of Death

Related Resources • About Varanasi • Varanasi Fact Sheet • Death & Dying • Pilgrimage Tip

For all its filth, the Ganga is indeed the "river of heaven" for Hindus. And some of this sanctity reaches out to the tourists and everybody else. But why, really, are we in Varanasi? Is it not perhaps to experience the closeness of death and its frightening everyday character?

The oarsmen who row the tourist boats know what their customers want to see. In my own case, I was rowed past the most famous cremation grounds where huge dark piles of wood seemed to be moving in the heat beyond the smoke from the fires. The boatman pointed to the wood salesmen while I stared at the fires where pale extremities were jutting out.

"Many poor people can't afford to buy enough wood, so many half-burnt bodies are thrown into the river," he said. I think he wanted to shock me, rather than reacting to the injustice of a society that follows its citizens even beyond death.

The ghat-scape of Varanasi, as viewed from downstream. The impressive bridge was built in the 1880s

Death is everywhere. And so spectacular in Varanasi that it becomes a marketing stunt for the tourist industry. In one of the alleys I saw an advertisement for a hotel trying to attract guests with the slogan: "close to a cremation site".

After the boat trip I walk from one ghat to the next. I pause beside a small temple not far from the electric crematorium where the burning of a dead body is far less expensive than at the wood burning sites. The crematorium is out of order.

In fact I spent an entire week exploring the ghats and alleyways until I began to feel that my value judgements had been jolted. At times I felt something akin to panic, and decided to leave Varanasi earlier than planned. On my last day I found a well-stocked bookstore in the southern part of the city not far from the university. I bought a copy of Plato's The Republic and Raja Rao's Allegory from Banaras.

Later, on the train to Patna, I read Rao, who maintains that "virtue does not grow easily in Banaras. And vice has no better place. For all come here to burn."