Beyond the Ghats: A Slow Walk Through Banaras Lanes, Silk Looms and Morning Kachori
Almost every itinerary for Varanasi begins and ends at the ghats. Yet travellers who have spent a few unhurried days here tend to come back with a different memory: the narrow galis behind the riverfront, where the city's real texture is stitched together lane by lane. Step off Dashashwamedh or Assi and within minutes the crowd thins into corridors barely two arms wide. Small shrines appear in wall niches, some no larger than a shoebox, tended daily by families who have lived on the same lane for generations. Kashi is often described as a city of a thousand temples, and most of them are exactly this — modest, working, entirely unmarked on any map. Walking slowly, and asking rather than assuming, is the only real way to find them. North and east of the old city lies the other Banaras: the weaving quarters. The Banarasi silk sari carries a Geographical Indication tag, and behind that certification are thousands of handloom households in areas like Madanpura, Lallapura and Bajardiha. Watching a weaver work a brocade border — the zari lifted thread by thread against a pattern card — makes clear why a single sari can take weeks. Visitors buying directly from a weaver's workshop generally see better craft and fairer prices than in the tourist showrooms. And then there is the eating. A Banaras morning properly begins with kachori-sabzi and jalebi, moves to a clay kulhad of thick lassi by midday, takes chaat somewhere near Kashi Chat Bhandar in the afternoon, and closes with paan. In winter, malaiyo — the frothy, dew-set milk sweet — appears at dawn and vanishes by ten. Two or three days, on foot, at walking pace. That is Banaras at its best.
Compiled by HelloBanaras from public sources: