The City That
Taught the World
to Listen

In Indian philosophy, the concept of Naad Brahma holds that the universe itself is made of sound — that at the deepest level of creation, before matter and before light, there was vibration. It is an idea that modern physics, with its string theories and wave equations, circles around without quite naming. But in Varanasi, this is not philosophy. It is lived experience. The city is, and has been for three thousand years, an instrument through which the universe sounds itself.

The Banaras Gharana — the school of classical music that grew in Varanasi’s temples, courtyards, and royal courts — is one of the great traditions of Indian classical music. It is distinguished by its earthiness, its depth, its refusal of the ornamental in favor of the essential. The tabla style that emerged from Banaras is the most grounded of the major traditions — a drumming language built on the weight of the bass drum, the thump that grounds everything else in reality. The sitar and sarod work of the Banaras masters draws on the same philosophy: less decoration, more resonance.

Ravi Shankar, perhaps the most recognized Indian musician in the Western world — the man who sat with George Harrison and opened a generation of Americans to the idea that Indian music was as profound as anything in their own tradition — was formed in this world. So was Bismillah Khan, the shehnai virtuoso who played at India’s independence midnight celebrations and continued to play in Varanasi every morning until the day he died, because, he said, he could not imagine making music anywhere else. So was Girija Devi, whose thumri — the intimate, devotional vocal form that is Varanasi’s gift to North Indian classical music — made her one of the most beloved voices of her generation.

For our community in Michigan, this tradition is not distant history. The members of UPAD who grew up in UP absorbed this musical culture in ways they may not even fully recognize — in the devotional songs at family functions, in the wedding music that still carries traces of the gharana, in the ear for rhythm that was trained before they ever consciously studied music. Our children, growing up in Detroit and Troy and Ann Arbor, are the inheritors of this tradition. What they do with that inheritance is one of the more interesting questions facing our community.

Every evening, as the sun descends toward the western bank and the Ganga begins to hold the color of the sky, something remarkable happens at Dashashwamedh Ghat. Priests in saffron robes take their positions on stone platforms at the river’s edge. The conch shells sound. The bells begin. And then the fire lamps — great brass diyas with multiple wicks, blazing with clarified butter — are lifted in slow, synchronized arcs, tracing circles in the darkening air above the river.

The Ganga Aarti of Varanasi is among the most extraordinary public rituals on earth. It is not a performance put on for tourists, though tourists come from every country to witness it. It is a daily act of gratitude — an offering made to the river that has sustained this city across three thousand years, that carries the ashes of its dead to the ocean, that has been called mother by every generation that has lived on her banks. The aarti is Varanasi saying thank you, every single evening, without exception.

What strikes visitors most is the collective nature of the experience. Thousands of people — pilgrims from across India, local residents who have watched this ritual their entire lives, curious travelers who wandered down to the ghat not quite knowing what they would find — all fall into the same silence as the lamps rise. Something in the combination of fire, water, sound, and darkness quiets the individual mind and opens it to something larger. This is what ritual does, at its best. This is what Varanasi has been doing, every evening, for millennia.

There is a saying in UP that a Banarasi saree is not woven — it is dreamed into being. The craftspeople who produce them, many from families that have practiced the art for generations, work on handlooms in small workshops tucked into the lanes of Varanasi’s old city. A single saree can take anywhere from fifteen days to six months to complete, depending on the complexity of its design. The finest examples are works of art that will outlast everyone in the room.

The characteristic feature of Banarasi silk is its zari — the metallic thread, traditionally gold or silver, woven into the fabric in patterns drawn from Mughal art, floral motifs, temple architecture, and mythological scenes. The effect is of cloth that catches light differently from every angle, that seems to glow from within. A bride who wears a Banarasi saree is wearing the accumulated artistry of a tradition that stretches back to the Mughal courts, and before that to the temple looms of ancient Kashi.

For UPAD families, this is personal. Most of us have at least one Banarasi saree in the household — a wedding saree, a puja saree, something brought from India with care and worn on occasions that matter. What we may not always think about is that each of those garments represents hundreds of hours of a craftsperson’s life, a family’s livelihood, and a tradition of beauty that Varanasi has maintained, through every disruption of history, because the city understands that some things must not be allowed to disappear.

Every art form in India carries within it the memory of the place that shaped it. The classical traditions of Varanasi grew at the temple and on the ghat — and they carry the energy of Shiva, the devotion of the pilgrim, the power of a city that has never confused beauty with softness. The Banaras Gharana is not merely a school of classical arts. It is the living artistic expression of Sanatan Dharma itself.

The defining quality of Banaras Kathak is its Natwari spirit — the dance of Natwar, one of Krishna’s names — devotional at its core, rooted in the energy of the temple rather than the refinement of the court. Where other schools prize delicacy and surface elegance, the Banaras school prizes something older and more powerful.

The signature is the Tatkaar — the footwork. The Banaras dancer uses the full sole of the foot, driving it into the earth with force and rhythm. It is the sound of Shiva’s cosmic dance, Tandava, made visible in a human body. The long rhythmic cycles, the powerful stamps, the energy that rises from the ground up — this is Kathak as a form of worship rather than performance.

Pandit Sitara Devi, born in Varanasi in 1920, was the greatest exponent of this tradition. She performed at Carnegie Hall. She danced before multiple Prime Ministers. She was offered the Padma Bhushan and refused it, saying it came too late. She never abandoned the Banaras style. The earth of Kashi was in her feet, and she was proud of it.

The Banaras Tabla Gharana is unlike any other school of percussion in India. It was founded by Pandit Ram Sahai with a specific and remarkable intention: to create a complete tabla style that could accompany any form of music — vocal, instrumental, or dance — with equal mastery. Other gharanas specialized. Banaras synthesized. The result is a style that is at once the most versatile and the most distinctively powerful of all the tabla schools.

The defining feature is the use of the Gajra — the outer ring of the tabla — far more than any other tradition. This creates a resonant, open, carrying sound: the kind of sound that could travel across the Ganga at dawn, reach the far bank, and return as echo. In a city where music has always been an offering to the river as much as to the audience, this was not an accident of style. It was a deliberate act of devotion.

Pandit Kishan Maharaj, Bharat Ratna and the undisputed master of the Banaras style, was known for his lion-like presence on stage — a force of nature at the tabla that made audiences feel the percussion not just in the ears but in the chest. His student and peer Pandit Samta Prasad, known as Gudai Maharaj, carried the same tradition forward with equal authority. Between them they placed the Banaras tabla on the world stage, where it remains the most recognizable sound of Indian classical percussion.

Varanasi is the undisputed home of Thumri — the semi-classical vocal form that sits at the intersection of devotion and emotion, raga and poetry, the sacred and the deeply personal. The Banaras school practices Bol-Banao Thumri: the art of making the words. A singer takes a single line — perhaps two words — and improvises on it endlessly, finding in each repetition a new shade of meaning, a new emotional color, a new way the syllables can carry Bhaav, the essential feeling. It is not about the composition. It is about what a human voice can do with a single moment of devotion, stretched across time.

Girija Devi, born in Varanasi in 1929 and known as Appaji to her students, was the living definition of this tradition. Her recordings of Banaras Thumri — particularly her bhajans and dadras — are among the most emotionally powerful documents in the entire history of Indian classical music. Pandit Rajan and Sajan Mishra, the Varanasi-born vocalist duo, carried the same tradition into the present with a combined presence on the classical stage that has no equal.

Before it became a concert instrument, the Shehnai was the voice of the temple. Every morning at the Kashi Vishwanath mandir, the Shehnai would sound at the moment of the first aarti — its piercing, luminous tone cutting through the pre-dawn darkness and announcing to the city that the Lord had awakened. It was not music in the concert sense. It was a call. A signal that the sacred had opened itself to the day.

The Shehnai tradition of Varanasi elevated this folk and devotional instrument to the highest levels of classical recognition. The instrument’s unique quality — its ability to sustain a note with extraordinary expressiveness, to bend and color a single tone the way a human voice bends in grief or joy — made it the perfect vehicle for the Banarasi aesthetic of deep feeling over surface decoration.

For generations, the Shehnai has been played at every significant threshold in a Hindu life — birth, sacred thread ceremony, marriage, the departure of a soul. In Varanasi it sounds at the ghats, in the temples, at the river’s edge. It is the instrument that most perfectly captures what Kashi is: ancient, devotional, rooted in the soil and the water, and completely indifferent to fashion.