BENARES or KASI, the holy city of the Hindus, which gives its name to a district and division in the United Provinces of India. It ranks in the affection and reverence of the Hindus as Mecca does for the Muslims : and to western eyes its great antiquity and its unique picturesqueness invest it with an interest all its own. Hsiian Tsang, the celebrated Chinese pilgrim, visited Benares in the 7th century A.D. and described it as containing 3o Buddhist monasteries, with about 3,00o monks, and about Ioo temples of Hindu gods. Hinduism has long supplanted Buddhism, and the modern temples number upwards of ',soo. The Ganges here forms a fine sweep of about 4m. in length, the city rising on the high northern bank on the outside of the curve, and forming a magnificent panorama of buildings in many varieties of oriental architecture with the minarets of the mosque of Aurangzeb towering above all. The bank of the river is entirely lined with stone, and there are many very fine ghats or landing-places built by pious devotees, and highly ornamented. These are generally crowded with bathers and worshippers, who come to wash away their sins in the sacred river Ganges; and among them constantly rises the smoke of funeral pyres, for to the pious Hindu death on the bank of the stream is the door to salvation. Shrines and temples, and palaces belonging to great Hindu nobles and princes rise tier over tier from the water's edge ; but few of the present buildings are of high antiquity. Among the most conspicuous are the mosque of Arangzeb, built in the middle of the Hindu quarter; the Bisheshwar or Golden Temple, important less through archi tectural beauty than through its rank as the holiest spot in the holy city; and the Durga temple, which, like most of the other principal temples, is a Mahratta building of the 17th century. The temples are mostly small, placed in the angles of the streets, under the shadow of the lofty houses; and many of them are covered with beautiful and elaborate carvings of flowers, animals and palm branches. The observatory of Raja Jai Singh is a notable building of the year 1693. The internal streets of the town are so winding and narrow that there is not room for a carriage to pass, and it is difficult to penetrate them even on horse back. The level of the roadway is considerably lower than the ground-floors of the houses, which have generally arched rooms in front, with little shops behind them, and above these they are richly embellished with verandahs, galleries, projecting oriel win dows, and very broad overhanging eaves supported by carved brackets. The houses are often painted a deep red and covered with pictures of flowers, men, women, bulls, elephants and gods and goddesses in all the many forms known in Hindu mythology.
The sacred area of Benares is bounded by a road 5om. in circuit, which it is the hope of every Hindu to tread once in his life. Many thousands make the pilgrimage every year, after bathing in the sacred river. Besides the immense resort to Benares of poor pilgrims from every part of India, as well as from Tibet and Burma, numbers of rich Hindus in the decline of life go there for religious salvation. These devotees lavish large sums in in discriminate charity, and it is the hope of sharing in such pious distributions that brings together a repulsive concourse of religious mendicants from all quarters of the country, many of them de formed, as a voluntary badge of their calling, by every form of physical distortion. At the other extreme of the human scale are large numbers of Brahmans of noted sanctity and learning, to whose feet flock disciples from all over India, and who make Benares the most famous centre of Sanskritic studies.
The city had a population in 1931 of 201,037. The European quarter lies west of the native town, on both sides of the river Barna. Here is the cantonment of Sikraul, no longer of much military importance, and the suburb of Sigra, the seat of the chief missionary institutions. The principal modern buildings are the Prince of Wales' hospital (commemorating the visit of King Edward VII. to the city in 1876), the town hall and the old Mint now occupied by the maharajah. The Benares college, in cluding a first-grade and a Sanskrit college, was opened in 1791, but its fine buildings date from 1852. The Central Hindu college was opened in 1898, and was moved some 20 years later to a fine site on the river opposite Ramnagar. The buildings erected there are now the home of the Benares Hindu university, the first private and sectarian university to be established by law in India. Benares is well served by rail, and is a busy trading centre. Its chief manufactures are silk brocades, gold and silver thread, gold filigree work, German-silver work, embossed brass vessels and lacquered toys ; but the brasswork for which it used to be famous has greatly degenerated.
The Hindu kingdom of Benares is said to have been founded by Kas Raja about 1200 B.C. Subsequently it became part of the kingdom of Kanauj, which in A.D. 1193 was conquered by Mo hammed of Ghor. On the dismemberment of the Delhi empire, it was seized by Safdar Jang, the nawab wazir of Oudh, by whose grandson it was ceded to the East India company by the treaty of The DISTRICT OF BENARES extends over both sides of the Ganges and has an area of 1,093 square miles. The surface of the country is remarkably level, with numerous deep ravines in the calcareous conglomerate. The soil is a clayey or a sandy loam, and very fertile except where there is a saline efflorescence known as reh or usar. The principal rivers are the Ganges, Karamnasa, Gumti and Barna. The principal crops are barley, rice, wheat, other f ood-grains, pulse, sugar-cane and (formerly) opium. The population in 1931 was 1,016,378.