A lot of the journey to Varanasi was about the place, and how much of the place we could observe, absorb and take back with us. For a lot of people, Varanasi was about the ghats, after all, one of the defining traits of the place are the ghats.

A quick introduction to the ghats; they’re a place where a lot of people find employment, from becoming boatmen and guides to tea-vendors, sadhus and priests.  A significant portion of the city derives an income from the ghats.  A Ghat literally means the banks of the river. In this case, the ghats are the livelihood of a large portion of the people of Varansi. The river holds incredible importance. Not only as a religiously significant place but also as a way for people on the other bank of the Ganga to cross over and conduct business in order to earn a living. It also serves as one of the few waterways in India that is actually used to transport material and people in large quantities.

As part of my personal project, I decided to observe the by-lanes of Varanasi with a specific focus on two lanes with two very different religious inclinations, along with seeing how the same relationship plays out on the ghats. The names of these lanes were Dalmandi and Katchodi Gali. Dalmandi is a dominantly Muslim area while Katchodi Gali is predominantly a Hindu area.

What I found out was quite interesting. First off, the structures of these by-lanes are very different from each other. While most by-lanes run either parallel to the streets of Varanasi, Katchodi Gali extends like a snake inwards and outwards, occasionally meeting the roads and then curving back into the darkness of the galis, which inevitably lead to the ghats. Dalmandi on the other hand is one long, straight gali, which runs ram-rod straight for about three hundred meters and then forks in two different directions, towards the right, it goes towards a mosque and many small street side stalls.

While these two different streets are so nearby, the difference in them is immediately apparent; one only has to visit each of these galis once to understand what I’m trying to say. While Katchodi gali is predominantly about sweet shops and places to buy incense and food. The place is almost always dark, it seems to feel overcast all the time thanks to the multitudes of wires, cloth and plastic draped between two buildings on either side of you.

In contrast, Dalmandi is much, much more commercial, i.e., the streets are lined with plenty of electronics stores selling cheap knock offs of famous brands with different names, there are also different stores selling spices with smells that will definitely mess with your nose.

One of the more curious things I found in both the by-lanes was that while religion is such an important part of the city, you’d find that within Katchodi Gali there are close to three to four temples in close proximity to each other in a single lane while Dalmandi has quite literally a single mosque in an obscure lane of the entire area. It’s fairly easy for me to make an uninformed observation about this by saying that it’s because the city itself is predominantly a Hindu city however plausible this theory sounds. In truth, I wasn’t able to find enough information from people regarding the place. However, personally, it did feel like the overwhelming, in-your-face presence of temples in Katchodi Gali was a show of power and justification of Hindu superiority in the city despite the fact that many different faiths reside in the place.  Or perhaps more simply, it could be a simple lack of space in Dalmandi. While all of this seems like theory, most of it sounds plausible considering the fact that a lot of the temples in Katchodi gali I realized were privately owned, i.e., they were technically part of someone’s household but open to all. Which is an interesting community practice itself. It is indicative of the type of people you will find in Varanasi.