Varanasi

est. 1200 BC — the long account

Varanasi — Kashi, the Luminous, later Banaras — may be the oldest continuously inhabited city in India, settled on the Ganges' west bank by roughly the second millennium BC, named in texts as old as the Upanishads and celebrated in the Puranas as a place where dying releases the soul from rebirth. For centuries it was less a kingdom's capital than the subcontinent's capital of learning: philosophers, grammarians and priests argued in its schools, and around 528 BC the Buddha walked to Sarnath at its edge to give his first sermon, setting Buddhism in motion.

The city's standing fabric is paradoxically young. Temples that drew pilgrims for a thousand years were razed by successive Muslim powers — most severely in 1194 by Qutb ud-Din Aibak's armies, and again under Aurangzeb, who pulled down the principal Vishwanath temple in 1669 and raised the Gyanvapi mosque on its plinth. Varanasi's present face dates from the eighteenth century, when Maratha houses, Rajput rulers and Bengali zamindars, competitors in piety, rebuilt the riverfront in stone — the ghats you walk today are largely their gift, dynasty by dynasty.

The British period added a university rather than a cantonment: Banaras Hindu University, founded in 1916, made the old center of Sanskrit learning into a modern national institution. Varanasi's two economies — pilgrimage and Banarasi brocade, woven by Muslim families in Madanpura since Mughal times — still set its rhythm, and Manikarnika's cremation fires have reputedly not gone out in centuries. The city does not preserve its history in museums; it performs it daily, at dawn, on the steps.

Varanasi · Ganges