10 photos from Varanasi: India’s city of the dead

Photos copyright Matjaž Tančič. Words copyright Jamie Fullerton.

Before our big India reporting trip ground to a halt in Goa, Matjaz and I spent a month zipping around the country garnering stories from barefoot skateboarders, graffiti artists, flamingos and camels.

Places we visited, when the idea of spending 12 hours in a packed train carriage seemed exciting rather than terrifying, included Mumbai, rural Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chennai, Pondicherry and Auroville. But it was Varanasi that stuck to us most.

We did a story there for The Telegraph, about the opening of a café staffed by female acid attack survivors. Beyond that we mainly walked around the city’s ghats: stone staircases leading down from windy residential lanes to the brown murk of the Ganges river.

Varanasi is known as India’s city of the dead. The title attracts tourists chasing more Instagram edge than the Taj Mahal can offer, and, in greater numbers, Hindus giving dead or dying family members a perfect holy send-off. Pilgrims believe that rather than keeping you in a squatting position for a week, bathing in the sewage and animal corpse-ridden river purifies the body, washing away sins.

Some ghats serve as crematoriums, with a constant crackle of bonfire corpse-burning taking place on them. “Donation”-seeking scammers, claiming to be bereaved family members, point to real mourners who are too busy piling wood around their parents to shoo them away. For many, being cremated in the ancient holy city is the only way to spend your ashes, and demand for a torching spot is high.

Many people plan ahead to ensure they’re not in the wrong city when they expire. The manager of a small hospice told me that 14,862 people had died in his venue since it opened in 1958. They travel from all over India on their last legs, and are allowed to bed down for free on thin sheets laid out on the stone floor for up to two weeks. If they are still alive after that time they are asked to move back to the world of the living, and perhaps return when they are certain they won’t be walking out.

That a tourist industry has been built from these ashes can feel awkward, even if you’re not one of the boat trippers sneaking photos while guides calmly repeat that taking snaps of funerals isn’t cool. We preferred to split our time between walking among the backstreets with the cows and hanging with the friendly wrestlers in orange pants.

If you get to Varanasi, drop local guide Karan (+918791179505) a WhatsApp and ask him to take you on the same trip he took us on, before all this Covid-19 chaos.