Varanasi, India
- Julie-Anne Justus
- Nov 10, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Nov 11, 2025
Join us for a walk through Varanasi at 6 o'clock in the morning.
Why are we up so early? We're heading to the river, along with all these people, before sunrise. At the start of the day, people bathe in the river and/or pay their respects to the gods.
It's hard to imagine this city shutting down, ever.
Varanasi is India's most ancient city, and one of the world's oldest continually inhabited cities. Its ancient name was Kashi; the Mughals and the British called it Benares. There's a famous quote from Mark Twain, who visited in 1897: 'Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.' Yes, well.
We're in the state of Uttar Pradesh (again). When we visited Agra, we were in the far west of UP. We are now in the south east of UP. Varanasi is the last stop on this trip.
We're in Varanasi for two days, and we'll be seeing the river at sunrise and sunset. There are 88 ghats (the broad steps that go down into the river): two of these are cremation ghats, but more on those later. Most ghats are used for other purposes.
We climb down the stairs on one of the ghats. The sun is just rising.
We head off upriver on a boat bedecked with floral garlands.
The riverfront is lined with temples, old buildings and ancient ghats. There are scores of ghats; many of them are World Heritage Sites. And there are just as many, or even more, temples — some built five hundreds of years ago, others more recently. Some temples have gold pinnacles, others are built of white marble, others still are replicas of ancient temples in other cities. The monkey temple, aka Durga Temple (sacred to the goddess Durga — surprise!), has monkeys frolicking on the premises.
This is Varanasi. The ancient buildings stretch along the river for kilometres.
All along the ghats, the faithful bathe in the river, chant prayers and perform private devotions. It looked for a moment like this man (in the first photo below) was floating! But he's sitting on a ghat that extends far into the river. The river is high after all the rain upstream.
In the midst of the hurly-burly, we paused to remember a dear friend who had died very recently. A spiritual moment, whatever one's beliefs. This candle is for you, B.
As the day brightens, more people gather to wash clothes, practise yoga, eat breakfast, share the neighbourhood news (I assume) — but gradually everyday life picks up and the sacred merges into the mundane.
Our second trip on the river takes place in the late afternoon. We board our boat at a ghat called Namo Ghat, a project that was initiated recently by Prime Minister Modi, who happens to be the MP for Varanasi. As the sign says, Namo Ghat is intended to become an attraction for visitors. I've got better photos of this spanking new ghat, and the Namaste statues, after sunset when we return.
The late afternoon light is very different to the morning light.
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The impressive bridge that spans the Ganges is both a road and a rail bridge. Traffic travels over the top road; trains run along the rails on the bottom level. Here it is both as we go up the river, before sunset, and as we come down the river, after sunset ...
As we potter up the river, many people have gathered on the ghats and are bathing in the sacred river.
And so to death and cremation.
Varanasi is one of the seven holy cities in India. For Hindus, dying in Varanasi breaks the cycle of rebirth and reincarnation. If you die in Varanasi, your soul is liberated. If you are cremated on its banks and your ashes float down the Ganges, your sins will be cleansed and you will be carried to salvation.
I particularly wanted to visit Varanasi as I'm interested in the rituals around death and dying. In Varanasi, it's estimated around 40,000 bodies are cremated each year and the ashes deposited into the Ganges. The cremation ghats operate 24/7.
Manikarnika Ghat, one of the cremation ghats, is considered the holiest of all the ghats.
I think the videos are more interesting than the still shots. You get a much better sense of the busy-ness of the cremation ghats. Each pyre that is burning is one dead body, one cremation, one ceremony, one family — there are about 5 or 6 cremations happening at the same time. There is a chief mourner for each dead person; it's usually the eldest son. Traditionally only men are permitted in this role.
The chief mourner buys wood from the woodsellers on the side of the cremation ghat, and this is used for the fire. You can see the piles of wood to the left of this video below.
The people who facilitate the cremations (cremators) are artisans of a kind; the roles are hereditary and only certain castes are permitted to do this.
The person who dies is taken to be cremated in their clothes and jewellery, which the cremator removes and keeps — a coin for the ferryman. The corpse is then wrapped in plain cotton for the pyre and placed in the Ganges before being placed on the pyre. Wood is stacked above and below the dead body, and the fire is fed with ghee (clarified butter). Each pyre burns for about 8 hours.
Once the body is burned, the ashes are placed in a clay vessel and given to the chief mourner and the family. The vessel is then typically placed in the Ganges (not at this spot necessarily) where the clay returns to the river bed and the ashes are carried down the river to the sea.
We continue up the river for a while, and then we turn around as the sun gets lower. We pass the cremation ghat once again.
We arrive back at Namo Ghat after sunset ...
... in time for the evening Aarti ceremony. An Aarti ceremony is a Hindu ritual where monks and temple attendants sing prayers and wave lighted lamps in front of a idol. It's a ritual for the faithful to express gratitude, seek blessings and remove darkness.
The Aarti here in Varanasi has been performed for thousands of years. Every evening thousands of people gather to participate; in this particular spot, there were hundreds of locals and plenty of tourists. I was standing next to a pleasant young Indian-Australian woman who helped me by interpreting what was happening.
In the second video, you can see the waving of the lights. Every night the Aarti ceremony seeks to banish darkness; every night the darkness falls. All we can do is keep waving the lights.
From the river to the silk-weavers. One of the world’s great silk-weaving traditions has flourished in Varanasi for more than 500 years. This business still uses the historic Jacquard looms that aren't found in many places outside France, and even there, weaving has been mechanised.
Silk brocades from Varanasi are in high demand; by tradition, an Indian bride's trousseau must include one sari from Varanasi. It can take up to six months to weave the six metres of fabric required for the finest sari, which is often embroidered with gold or silver threads and embellished with beading; gorgeous and unique — and very expensive.
Like the marble inlay in Agra, and the silk carpet weaving in Jaipur, this is a skill that is handed down through generations. And like those skills, this one is challenged by mechanisation and changing lifestyles.
I asked the young owner (it's a family business) whether the business had been affected by tariffs. No, he said, their market is almost exclusively domestic. India has such a huge population — the biggest in the world — that they don't need to export their products.
Of course we had to buy something to bring home with us, but where to start?
And where to end?
Every minute in India has been engaging, stimulating and fascinating: I was constantly physically, sensorily, emotionally and intellectually challenged. We loved the food, the friendly people, the energy of everyone's daily business. The more I learned about India's history, the more fascinated I became, and the more I realised how little we had learned about India in our Western-focused education. Wiiliam Dalrymple, the Scottish historian who specialises in India, suggests that Britain intentionally downplayed India's contribution to world civilisation. You can't 'bring civilisation' to a country if you acknowledge that the country has already been civilised for thousands of years.
We loved our three weeks in India, and we're planning to go back. There's so much more to experience.
And, all of us, let's keep lighting and waving those lights.
This really looks better on a bigger screen. www.julie-anne.online
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