SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES AND VARANASI

For some reason, most every write-up on Benaras (or Kashi as I prefer to call her – sounds so much more romantic!) starts with what dear Mark Twain had to say. Apparently, it is older than history and legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together!

Twainji forgot to mention that it also still lives somewhere in the old days – when credit cards and ATM machines did not work.  Even today, Benaras is home to some 330 million Gods – no kidding! The temples and their rituals are still the same, the shops, the mindset of the people, everyone raves about the same thandai, from the same shops, the famous banarasi paan, the same jalebi, the banarasi weaves, the locals who are still fascinated by the white-skinned firangs, the mauj and the masti…

Now don’t get me wrong. Kashi still living in the depths of history is somehow also strangely comforting. Every poet, artist, musician, holy man that one can think of, has somehow had a connection with Benaras. It has a nostalgic and romantic feel, and amazing richness in the cultural, spiritual, social and architectural fabric. One feels like one has been here before, lain under the stars in the moonlight by the Ganga, and watched the boats float by. The ghats are hallowed by the innumerable holy men and women who have walked upon these stones and connected with the Supreme. This is, after all, Rudravasa, the city of Shiva -“Kashi ke har kankar me Shiv Shankar”.

The addition of the various historical, cultural, religious and spiritual layers over time has given Benaras a rich, chaotic, vibrant, messy, Hindu, peaceful, dirty, old, sacred, smelly, crowded, accomodating, noisy, colourful, traditional, religious uniqueness all its own. What I don’t know about Kashi would fill volumes of very interesting books. But that’s not the purpose of this blog.

My blog here talks of how my trip to Kashi sparked something in me – a new learning, a new way of seeing India, a different face of India, of Hinduism, of Life itself. I’ll admit I was influenced by the romantic notions of a naga-sadhu infested Benaras by the glossies, primarily directed towards luring the firang tourist. Plus, I am a Hindu Indian, fed on a diet of amazing stories of the Hindu Gods from when we were kids (and now Sadhguru and Devdutt Pattanaik!).

However, after Benaras, I realized that as a city-bred Delhiite, I am very far removed from the way a small city works; ancient in its origins, and still somewhat unchanged at heart, struggling to accommodate the new into the old way of life. Those stories of Shiv and Shakti were not only stories after all… they speak profoundly of life, and balance, of the male and the female principle, of creation, of the duality that is at the core of all life. Those stories of Radha-Krishna and his raas-leela teach the realities of life, how to live it, enjoy it, partake of the pleasure principle, and drink of the divine. To be together in spirit, but not in body with the divine beloved; and vice versa. The divine is everywhere, in everything living and non, in you and me. The divine is perfect, and so are we. Everything is in perfection, always. I am Divine.

What I saw and experienced in Benaras, I am still processing, internalizing. My understanding is evolving, and so am I. I am not an artist of words, but pictures and colours. To express my feelings in sentences does not come easy to me. So I sketch.

The lanes of Benaras seem to have a mind of their own… they go where they want, and stop whenever suits them. Temples of all shapes and sizes spring up anywhere they find space, and I’m guessing, a suitable pujari. The river, ghats and the crazy maze-y lanes make up the fabric of Varanasi – the land that lies between the rivers Varuna, and Assi. So of course, the artist/architect in me cannot resist sketching a ghat or so; thereby participating in and owning a little of piece of Varanasi.

Here too, every new angle forces me to establish new points of perspective on my drawing sheet. Every angle has its own story to tell, its own mystery that I want to solve, its own perfection that I want to draw. Every picture has its own exuberance and colours…and I want to sketch it all, the raas in the leela. I am impatient to unravel it all, let it sink into me…the Shakti into the Shiv. And as I sketch, trying to establish the many perspective points in my drawing, and make sense of the exuberant scene before me, it dawns on me – was it not so with my time in Benaras too? Has Benaras not changed my perspective on Life and the Divine as I knew it? Has it not changed me?