Varanasi

The city's oldest name, Kashi, City of Light, appears in the Mahabharata and in early Buddhist texts as the seat of an ancient kingdom on the Ganges, and archaeological evidence supports settlement stretching back roughly three thousand years, among the longest unbroken urban histories anywhere. Its name Varanasi is usually explained as a compound of the Varuna and Assi, two streams once thought to bound the old town, though the etymology is not settled beyond that general sense.

The city's temples were repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt under successive rulers; the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb demolished the original Vishwanath temple in 1669 and built the Gyanvapi Mosque on part of the site, a juxtaposition, mosque beside the eighteenth century Kashi Vishwanath temple rebuilt nearby under Maratha patronage, that remains a point of legal and political dispute in India today. British colonial administration renamed the city Benares, the form still used in some English sources and in the name Banaras Hindu University, until the Indian government formally restored Varanasi in 1956. Diana Eck's Banaras: City of Light remains a standard modern study of the city across this long and repeatedly renamed history.

Banaras Hindu University, founded in 1916 by the nationalist leader Madan Mohan Malaviya, grew into one of Asia's largest residential universities and includes the New Vishwanath Temple, built on campus in the twentieth century and open, unlike the old Kashi Vishwanath temple in the city, to visitors of every faith. The university sits alongside older centers of Sanskrit scholarship that made Varanasi a seat of traditional Hindu learning long before it, drawing students and pandits from across India.

The city is equally known for the Banarasi silk sari, woven on handlooms by families that are, in large part, Muslim, a craft economy that binds Varanasi's two largest religious communities together in daily commerce even where their sacred geography stays separate. Varanasi's classical music lineage, the Banaras gharana, produced the sitar player Ravi Shankar and the shehnai player Ustad Bismillah Khan, both born in the city and both closely identified with its riverside temples, since the shehnai was traditionally played at the Vishwanath temple itself. Ten kilometres north, the town of Sarnath, where the Buddha is said to have preached his first sermon in the deer park after his enlightenment, is administratively separate but functions as part of greater Varanasi's pilgrimage economy today.