The renovation of Manikarnika Ghat keeps the storytellers busy these days.
Kashi is a city used to treating the world as a theatre for celebrating the timeless cycle of Life and Death. And Death, as Walter Benjamin says, is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. The storytellers of Kashi are spread over various ghats, the oldest being Manikarnika Ghat. On the steps of these ghats, and at the tea shops and kiosks that line the roads leading to them, sit the garrulous denizens of this timeless city, ready with a story that, you later discover, was the preface to a deeper philosophical point. Or not. Because Kashi also has a great, somewhat brackish sense of humour.
The renovation of Manikarnika Ghat keeps the storytellers busy these days. But the rebuilding, and renaming of ghats, has been going on for a long time. The mercurial eastern rivers often wash away the earth under the structures, so the steps and bathing areas begin to show cracks and crumble. This holy work was mostly financed by rich pilgrims, such as the 18th-century trader Vacchhraja and Raja Man Singh of Amber in the 16th century. In the 19th century, the famed Jarasandh Ghat was restored by Meer Rustam Ali, the police head for Kashi, and renamed Meer Ghat.
The recent furore over the rebuilding and expansion of the area around Manikarnika Ghat arose over the removal of several small temples and the statue of Maratha queen Ahilyabai Holkar, who built and restored many holy sites and temples, including the present-day Kashi Vishwanath temple. Ahilyabai’s statue was shown in some widely circulated clips as lying among the debris. The Holkar family of Indore sent a note of protest and other groups, alleging the desecration of several temples, also jumped into the fray. The Chief Minister then visited the site and told the media that the queen’s statue and some others were safe and would be reinstalled after the “Manikarnika Teerth Corridor” was rebuilt. He also asserted that the original demand for expanding and rebuilding the cremation grounds and the ghats had been made to the Prime Minister by the Dom Raja whose family has controlled the area for generations.
The area where the cremation grounds and sundry temples stand, the storytellers will tell you, predates history. Once upon a time, it was a dark place where the river banks ended and a dense forest began. The forests have since disappeared. A densely packed pilgrimage centre began surrounding what was once a secretive and sacrosanct space haunted only by sadhus, relatives of the dead waiting for cremation and, of course, the restless souls of the dead.
Till the time of Alauddin Khilji, Hindus were free to build temples to various manifestations of Lord Shiva. Later, when under the Lodhis of Delhi and the Sharqi sultans of Jaunpur, assertive Islam knocked at Kashi’s doors, there was considerable destruction of old buildings. But the city had a great power to bounce back and rebuild. By the 17th century, a sort of ceasefire was declared.
During the decline and fall of the great Mughal Empire, the court of the Maharaja of Benaras, his Nagar Kotwal Meer Rustam Ali, and later the British Resident’s house, became centres of classical discourses on oriental culture among the pandits, the Muslim nobility and the British orientalists. By 1734, the Maratha lords began a furious rebuilding of Kashi’s holy ghats and temples. At the same time, quarrels and litigation over sharing taxes levied at the cremation ghats were common. One Kashmirimal, miffed by the greed of the Doms of Dashashwamedha Ghat, brought his mother’s body for cremation to Manikarnika and by way of gratitude rebuilt the ghat and started paying regular wages to the keepers.
Those days are gone. As one old singer, Pyare Ustad, sang: “Nahin rahe woh Dara Sikandar, do din ki afsaree rahi/ Chale gaye sub Mulk e Adam ko, na khushki rahi, na taree rahi (Those great stalwarts are no more, their rule lasted but two days. Ultimately all left for Adam’s final abode, after them things have been neither dry nor wet).”
The writer is former chairperson, Prasar Bharati
Curated by Dr. Elena Rodriguez
