The Shades of Banaras

Mark Twain, arriving in 1896, wrote that Banaras was "older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together." He was right about the age. What he could not have known, is how young the city still looks every morning, how its colours are renewed daily by hands that have done the same work for centuries. The garland-seller restrings her marigolds. The weaver in Madanpura feeds a new length of gold into his loom. The boatman repaints a prow.

Banaras has a curious way of holding on to those who enter it. It does not announce itself so much as gather you in, and nowhere is that hold tenderer than its lanes. The narrow lanes that fold behind the ghats like the pleats of an old sari. Step into one, and the century seems to slip. A radio murmurs a song from another decade through a half-open window; an old man turns the pages of a newspaper as though he had all the time in the world; two neighbours lean across a threshold, mid-conversation, as they have perhaps every evening of their lives.

Here, in shops no wider than a doorway, families have stirred the same sweets for generations, and some of the finest food in the city awaits, unadvertised, beside a saree seller's folded silks and an artisan bent patiently over his work. In these lanes, one cannot quite tell whether Banaras is ancient or modern, whether it has changed or has declined to. Each turning seems to open onto a different hour of its long history, and, if one walks slowly enough, onto whatever it was one came here hoping to find.

The city answers to three names, and each seems to describe a different light. Varanasi, for the two rivers, the Varuna and the Assi, that cradle it between them. Banaras, the name of its lanes, its silks, and its paan. And Kashi, the oldest of all, often read as the luminous one, the city of light. What follows is a portrait of that light, broken, like a prism, into the shades it becomes.

1. Ganga at Dawn
   

   It begins with the river, as everything in Banaras must. The Ganga moves past more than 80 ghats here, flights of stone stairs descending into water that has received prayers and ashes, flowers and devotees, for longer than anyone can reckon. At dawn it holds a colour that is almost no colour at all: a grey-green softened by silt, the hue of something very old that has chosen, after everything, to remain serene.
   

   

   
   

   The boats are its nearest echo. Hewn from wood, painted and repainted until their surface read like palimpsests, they sit low in the current as though in quiet conversation with it. To stand upon a ghat at sunrise is to understand that none of this is scenery. It is the city's first ritual and its longest-running.

   
   

2. Gerua

   Gerua is the colour of renunciation, the burnt earth-orange of the ascetic's robe. In Banaras it is everywhere. It falls across the shoulders of sadhus walking the ghats at first light, and it rises in temple pennants lifted by the river wind. It dries in long lengths on the steps, and it gathers in the folds of cloth offered at the city's countless altars, until it seems less a colour than the city's own skin.
   

   

   The name draws itself from the earth and the ochre clay once used to dye it, and there is a quiet poetry in that. The colour of those who have relinquished the world is made from the very ground beneath it. Gerua is not bright in the manner of celebration. It is warm like ember: a colour that has already burned, and has chosen to keep glowing.

3. Genda

   If gerua is the colour of departure, genda, the marigold, is the colour of arrival. Banaras consumes marigolds basketful. They are gently strung into garlands along the lanes that lead to the Kashi Vishwanath temple, strewn across the steps, and set afloat at dusk in small leaf-boats, each cradling a single flame.

   
   

   

   
   

   The marigold is an unpretentious flower. It asks little tending and lingers long after it is cut, and perhaps that is why it has become the city's most faithful offering: within reach of every purse, and never out of season. Each evening at Dashashwamedh Ghat, as the Ganga aarti begins and great brass lamps are placed in slow arcs towards the river, the water carries away a drifting constellation of orange.

4. Bhasma

   There is a shade that Banaras wears more openly than any city on earth. Bhasma, sacred ash: the grey of what remains. At Manikarnika Ghat, the cremation fires are said to have burned without pause for centuries, and for many Hindus, to be cremated here is to be released from the cycle of rebirth. In Kashi, death is not hidden away. It is tended and carried through the lanes on bamboo biers; it is given to the fire in full view of the river.

   
   

   

   
   

   Ash is also the colour of Shiva, who is said to have made this city his home, and his devotees draw it across their foreheads in three horizontal lines. On the day after Rangbhari Ekadashi, a few days before Holi, they gather at Manikarnika and Harishchandra ghats to play not with coloured powder but with ash from the pyres, a tradition known as Masan Holi. To an outsider, it may seem startling. In Banaras it is simply honest: the gesture of a city that has gazed upon death for so long that it has learned to dance beside it.
   

5. Zari Gold And then there is the gold, the shade by which the world knows Banaras. In the weaving quarters of Madanpura, Lallapura and Peeli Kothi, looms still clatter behind half-open doors, and Banarasi brocade takes shape thread by thread: silk interlaced with zari; the metallic thread that transforms cloth into something nearer to jewellery.

   
   

   

   
   

   The craft flourished under Mughal patronage, when Persian motifs, the flowering creeper, paisley, arch, entered the weaver's vocabulary and never left. Its makers have long been, in large part, Muslim weaving families, while its most devoted wearers are Hindu brides and their mothers. A single Banarasi sari is therefore a quiet treaty between communities, renewed at every wedding. In 2009, Banaras brocades and saris were granted a GI tag, enshrining in law what the city has always known.
   

6. Gulabi Meena

   Not every shade of Banaras is ancient or solemn. Gulabi meenakari, pink enamelwork, is the city's most delicate colour: a blush of rose painted onto metal, usually against white, and fired until it gleams like glass. The craft is believed to have travelled from Persia, and in Banaras it acquired a gentleness entirely its own, in tiny boxes and brooches, in figurines of birds and elephants, painted by artisans whose numbers have dwindled.

   
   

   

   
   

   Gulabi meenakari received its own Geographical Indication tag in 2015, in part to shelter a craft that stood on the edge of disappearance. To hold a piece is to hold a whisper rather than a declaration: proof that a city of fire and ash still makes room for something as tender as pink.
   

7. Paan Red Banaras is celebrated for its paan, the betel leaf folded around areca nut, lime and kattha, and the deep crimson it leaves on the lips is among the most recognisable colours of the city. That red is born from kattha, an extract of acacia wood, which meets the lime and blooms into its characteristic stain.
   

   

   
   

   Here, paan is less a refreshment and more of punctuation. It closes a meal, seals a conversation, keeps company with a song. The great musicians of Banaras gharana are remembered, across tales with paan in hand. Paan red is the colour of the city's leisure, of its lingering, of its gracious refusal to hurry.
   

8. Gali Blue

   Turn away from the river and into the galis once more, and the palette changes. Here the walls are washed in blues, in faded greens and chalky pinks, layered and peeling, painted and repainted across generations. Doorways are framed in carved wood. Small shrines appear at knee height, daubed with vermilion.
   

   

   
   

   The blue of the galis is the most intimate shade in this portrait. It belongs not to temples or festivals but to homes. It is the colour of the city when it is not performing, when it is simply, quietly, living.

The Light That Returns

Once a year, on Kartik Purnima, Banaras illuminates its ghats for Dev Deepavali, the Diwali of the gods. Lamps are set on every step along the river's long crescent, until the city seems to float upon its own reflection. That night all eight shades appear to meet: the marigold and the gerua, the brass and the ash, the gold of the zari saris worn by the women who light the lamps, and the green-grey river receiving it all.

Kashi, the luminous one, never needed to be kept under glass. It keeps its archive in plain sight: in a boatman's paint, a weaver's thread, a garland restrung each morning. Every shade here is a memory still being practised. Next in the archive: how one designer carried Kashi onto the runway at Lakmé Fashion Week x FDCI 2026.