Ingvar Oja | March, 2002

Swedish journalist Ingvar Oja shares his personal thoughts about Varanasi.

My driver Ramesh was waiting for me at the crack of dawn outside the main doors of the Varanasi hotel.

We moved slowly along the narrow lanes of the holy city, driving as close to the Ganga as possible. And then alighting from the three-wheeler to find our way by foot, in semi-darkness, passing a number of shapeless piles of cloth lying on the floor. Ramesh explained:

	Crowds jostle in the narrow lanes of the old city

"They're old people who've come here to wait for death. Varanasi is said to be the best place to meet death."

His use of the English language inadvertently suggested he did not believe in the holiness of the Ganges. But as soon as we crossed over a high threshold, out onto Kedar Ghat, he performed a ritual that demonstrated his reverence toward the befouled waterway where Hindu believers perform dips - bowing their heads toward the sun now rising on the eastern banks.

"Do you usually go down to the river to bathe?" I asked Ramesh.

He immediately understood why I'm asking.

"Sure, but not so often these days, because the water is so filthy. And I never take the water in my mouth. The river may be holy, but not the bacteria. You know that. I saw that you wrote down what Mahant ji had to say about the Ganges and the filth that flows by here," says Ramesh with a smile.

Ah yes, Mahant ji.

A few days earlier we had visited Dr. Veer Bhadra Mishra, the Mahant (religious leader) of an illustrious temple near the Ganga. This hereditary calling has been in his family for over 400 years.

But Dr. Mishra is not only a Mahant; he is also Professor of Hydrology at the famous Benaras Hindu University in Varanasi. That night Ramesh and I listened intensely as Dr. Mishra presented revealing statistics about Ganga pollution; statistics coming from a learned man who knows a lot about spiritual purity, and even more about man's tendency to befoul his own environment.

The business of death
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?

Priests along the ghats await the arrival of the devout

The oarsmen who row the tourist boats boat 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.

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.

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

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."


For many years Ingvar Oja has written about Asian affairs for the Swedish morning daily "Dagens Nyheter" in Stockholm