A page of reflections on Banaras — its rivers, its rituals, its writing of a life. Notes from a scholar who is also a daughter of the city, returned again and again to its ghāṭs.
Kāśī is older than memory. The city sits on the Gaṅgā where the river, against the geography of the rest of India, turns north — uttara-vāhinī, "she who flows toward the source." Long before the Buddha walked at nearby Sārnāth, long before the Aghoris and the Tantrics named her in their texts, long before the Mughals and the British made their inventories, Kāśī was already a place where people came to learn how to live well, and how to die well.
For me, the city is not subject matter. It is grammar. The way Banaras orders its mornings — the boatmen before dawn, the chant from the Manikarṇikā ghāṭ, the smoke that does not stop — this is the order in which I learned to think. To write about Kāśī is to write in a language the city already speaks. काशी teaches you that nothing is ever quite finished, and that this is not a failure but a kind of grace.
What follows are notes — some scholarly, some personal, some still being written. They are offered not as a guidebook to the city but as a small return of what the city has given.
Hindu tradition counts seven cities (सप्तपुरी) as the most sacred in the subcontinent. Kāśī is among them — alongside Ayodhyā, Mathurā, Hardwār, Kāñcī, Ujjain, and Dvārakā. Each carries its own theology. These are three faces of Kāśī itself.
Kāśī's eighty-odd ghāṭs are not piers or promenades. They are the long stone descent from the city to the river, terraced in steps that hold the entire human cycle within a single morning — bathing, prayer, washing, study, cremation. To know the city is to know that all of life happens here, in plain view, without separation.
The Kāśī Viśvanātha temple is the city's iconic centre, but Banaras is shaped by an older topography — the Pañcakroṣī route, the dense network of small shrines, the household altars. The temples are less destinations than punctuation marks in a long sentence the city has been writing for itself across millennia.
Walk inland from the river and the city narrows. The galīs of Banaras are deliberate — too tight for vehicles, wide enough for conversation, paced for a slower kind of attention. They are where the city does its quiet work: the weaver's loom, the tea-stall's debate, the child's first reading lesson, the old book passed across a counter.
kāśyāṁ hi mriyate yastu sākṣād rudraḥ prabodhayet —
"Whoever passes from this life in Kāśī, Rudra himself awakens them."
A working register of recent essays, talks, and projects centred on Kāśī. The list grows as the work does. New entries are added as they appear in print or on stage.
This section is reserved for Dr. Mishra's own writing — a personal essay on what Kāśī has meant across a lifetime. It is being written. Until then, the river goes on.
kāvya — "the poem, the song, the made-thing"
A space here is held open for a poem of Dr. Mishra's own — a few lines about the city, in her own voice, when they are ready. This space will not be filled by anyone else.