Age-old beliefs and practices: Pilgrims at the Ganga Ghats
Benaras has always been the most inspirational of Indian cities. Thought to be the world’s oldest, boasting an unbroken habitation of 5,000 years, pilgrims and travellers have been irresistibly drawn to it, as have artists of the Raj and after. Recently, Manu Parekh paid a unique tribute to it in a series of 14 landscapes, 12 feet and more in width. In these mysterious, unpeopled panoramas, Benaras is seen as volatile and fearsome, a city of death. Shrines, atilt like tall-masted ships, bob on the turbulent water, and trees, black and foreboding, punctuate the riverbank. These are essentially mood pictures representing one of the great achievements of Indian Expressionist Art.
For those with a less imaginative eye, there are other
attractions, chief among them being
And this is where we were privileged to stay, courtesy
an on-off academic connection with Professor Surya Nath Pandey, Dean of the
Faculty of Arts, who offered us gracious hospitality and the invaluable
services of his P.A., Kedar Nath. Resourceful and quietly efficient, Kedar was
our ace problem solver, arranging lodgings and car hire, bargaining with
auto-rickshaw drivers for whom meters showing the fare are ornamental
accessories, and lending a strong hand to haul a bag of arthritic bones, myself
that is, over steep, slippery steps and stony pathways. Without him we would
have been lost.
Browsing through Bharat Kala Bhavan is a
museum-hopper’s delight. Just inside the entrance is a majestic stone sculpture
of Krishna from the Gupta period, standing more than two metres high, holding
up
Miniature paintings fill an entire room. The Rajasthani
style is substantially represented, and the lyrical idiom of the Pahari
schools; and there are Late Mughal and Company paintings too. Of particular
interest are the 18th century miniatures in the local tradition, an eclectic
mix of Mughal, Nepali, Rajasthani and even European influences, known
collectively as the Benaras School of Painting.
Exuberant
murals
The finest examples of this style are the murals at the
Mahamaya temple, a structure so nondescript from the outside that even the
locals hardly know it exists. Round and flat-roofed, the curved interior walls
are resplendent with tiers of paintings separated by bands of lotuses, leaves
and tendrils. There are flowering gardens with ponds and birds, panels peculiar
to each season of the year, a veritable pantheon of deities— Durga, Mahakali,
Varuna with consort—and animal-headed demons prancing about with evil intent. If
we had not chanced upon a fine essay by Prem Shankar Dwivedi, we would have
missed this little gem.
The Tulsi Manas temple of white marble was built, it is
said, over the spot where Tulsidas composed the Ramcharitamanasa. The entire
text is engraved on the walls and a series of puppet performances show the poet
writing, and brings to vivid life the major episodes in the story of Ram. Amid
a plethora of images some remain in the mind—Hanuman directing the building of
the great bridge in a flurry of simian activity, the tenderness and pathos of
the death of Jatayu, and poor Sita undergoing the agni-pareeksha, a sight to
make a feminist’s blood boil.
A crowd-puller is the great evening aarti held on the
banks of the holy river since time immemorial, with participants sitting on
tiered seats on the bank or in boats, floating their candlelit offerings on the
turbid water. And as the drums beat and the lights move in circles and the
age-old chants reverberate, one can only mourn the sad state of the river with
layers of sludge coating the surface. There are unexpected thrills and chills
as we row along, since the two camera fiends in our party keep darting from one
seat to another to get their pictures, and while the boat rocks and dips
alarmingly we pray silently to Lord Vishnu to preserve us from death by water.
The city’s most iconic personality is undoubtedly the
priest-scientist Dr. Veer Badhra Mishra, scion of a family of hereditary
mahants of the Sankat Mochan temple since the 16th century. The death of his
father catapulted him to a position of great authority while he was still in
school, and it was his mother who encouraged him to finish though no one else
in the family had been formally educated.
Refreshingly
different
Later, when he chose the science stream over more
“suitable” subjects such as Sanskrit or Philosophy, there was consternation,
but again this indomitable lady supported him, and he eventually became the
distinguished Head of the Civil Engineering Department at BHU. For the last 25
years he has made it his life’s mission to clean up the
And what a refreshingly unstuffy hero he is, friendly,
approachable and quite uninhibited by his world-wide reputation. When he
realised that a few of us were English teachers, he confessed endearingly that
he was shaky in the usage of punctuation and prepositions, reminding one of
Einstein of whom it was said, apocryphally perhaps, that he was constantly
troubled by the vagaries of English spelling!
Despite his contacts with anyone who matters in
His hair was jet black when he started his life’s work,
“and look at it now”, he says pointing to his snow white top. Yet his NGO
soldiers on, and perhaps some day his dream will be realised and the holiest of
rivers, the Omega of unnumbered lives through the ages, will return to a state
of pristine purity and flow again unsullied and unimpeded.
Quick facts
Also known as
Mark Twain once wrote, “Benaras is older than history,
older than tradition, older even than legend and looks twice as old as all of
them put together.”
Best time to visit: October to March
The popular evening Arati
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2009/05/24/stories/2009052450270800.htm
Photos: KR Deepak