Varanasi

Varanasi — known also as Kashi and Banaras — is one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities and, for Hindus, the most sacred place on earth. Perched on the western bank of the river Ganga in eastern Uttar Pradesh, it has been a centre of learning, devotion, music and death-and-liberation ritual for well over two and a half millennia. To Hindus it is the eternal city of Lord Shiva, the place where the god is said to reside and where the cosmos itself is believed to have taken root. To Buddhists it is the gateway to Sarnath, where the Buddha turned the wheel of dharma. To Jains it is the birthplace of revered Tirthankaras. Few places on the planet compress so much faith, history and raw human intensity into so small a stretch of riverbank.

The city's soul is the Ganga and the crescent of ghats — the broad stone stairways — that line it for several kilometres. From before dawn, pilgrims descend these steps to bathe in the river they call Ganga Maiya, "Mother Ganga," in the belief that her waters purify sin and, for those who die here, grant moksha — release from the endless cycle of rebirth. That is the idea that shapes everything you will see: Varanasi is a city where life and death are lived openly, side by side and without apology. Priests chant, marigolds float on the current, laundry dries on the steps, boats glide past, and a short walk away pyres burn without pause at the cremation ghats. It is beautiful, overwhelming and, for many travellers, profoundly moving.

Above the river, the old city is a dense warren of narrow lanes — the famous galis — too tight for cars, where you weave between pilgrims, sadhus, cows, sweet-sellers, silk merchants and processions of mourners carrying the dead. At the heart of it stands the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, one of the twelve Jyotirlingas of Shiva and among the most important shrines in Hinduism, now approached through the grand Vishwanath Dham corridor that opened in 2021. Around it, the sensory intensity is total: temple bells and conch shells, the smell of incense, ghee lamps and river silt, the colour of powdered pigments and stacked bangles, the taste of clay-cup lassi and betel leaf.

Varanasi rewards the traveller who arrives with patience and respect. This is not a manicured monument-town but a working sacred city where real devotion and real grief unfold in public. Touts and self-appointed guides can be persistent, the lanes disorienting, the crowds thick, and the encounter with mortality unexpectedly direct. Yet the rewards are immense: a sunrise boat ride as mist lifts off the water, the fire-and-cymbal spectacle of the evening Ganga Aarti, a plate of kachori-sabzi in a lane that has served pilgrims for generations, the quiet of Sarnath's stupas. Give it two or three unhurried days, walk slowly, keep your camera down where it should be down, and let the oldest city on the river reveal itself. Kashi does not perform for visitors — it simply is, and you are invited to witness it.