Kashi Vishwanath

01Avimukta

Kashi is called Avimukta, the place never released, because Shiva and Parvati never leave it. The Skanda Purana’s Kashi Khanda says the city rests on Shiva’s trident and is not destroyed even at pralaya. At Manikarnika Shiva himself whispers the Taraka mantra, the name of Rama, into the ear of the dying. Every pilgrim to Kashi takes darshan of Vishwanath, then of Annapurna nearby, who feeds the city, and of Kal Bhairav, its kotwal, without whose leave no one stays.

021194, 1585, 1669

In 1194, after Muhammad Ghori defeated Jaichand Gahadavala at Chandawar, his army under Qutb-ud-din Aibak entered Banaras. Hasan Nizami’s Taj-ul-Maasir records that about a thousand temples were destroyed there and mosques raised on their foundations. Worship returned in smaller shrines. In 1585 Raja Todar Mal, Akbar’s revenue minister, rebuilt the great Vishwanath temple with the help of the scholar Narayan Bhatt. On 2 September 1669 news reached Aurangzeb’s court that, on his order, his officers had demolished the temple of Vishwanath at Kashi; the Maasir-i-Alamgiri records it. The Gyanvapi mosque was raised on the temple’s plinth, and its rear wall still shows the carved temple wall.

03Ahilyabai’s temple and the Dham

In 1780 Ahilyabai Holkar built the present temple a few steps from the old site. In 1835 Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab gave the gold that covers its two spires, and pilgrims still call it the Golden Temple of Kashi. The Nandi who faces the Gyanvapi well, looking at the mosque rather than the temple, has been a mute witness ever since. In 2023 the Archaeological Survey of India surveyed the Gyanvapi complex on the order of the Varanasi district court; its report, made public in January 2024, concluded that a large Hindu temple stood there before the mosque. The Kashi Vishwanath Dham, opening the temple to the Ganga, was inaugurated on 13 December 2021.

The life of this place