Music in Varanasi
Varanasi at 5 AM: Where Indian Classical Music Was Born
It is dark, and it is colder than you think India will be. You walk down stone steps worn smooth by three thousand years of feet. There is a thin mist on the river. A single bell rings somewhere — not for you, not for anyone in particular, just because someone is opening a temple.
And then, from a doorway you did not notice, you hear it: a tanpura. Four notes, drone-tuned, threading through the dark. Someone in that doorway has been practicing since 4:30, the way their teacher did, the way their teacher’s teacher did, all the way back to a 12th-century court whose name nobody remembers.
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Why Music Settled Here
Varanasi sits at the meeting point of three things: the Ganga, the trade routes between north and south India, and the oldest continuously inhabited religious community on earth. For two thousand years, every musician, scholar, monk, and merchant of consequence in northern India has passed through it.
By the 16th century, the city had become the unofficial capital of Hindustani vocal music. The Benares gharana — a stylistic lineage of singers — produced names that students still memorise: Pandit Mahadev Mishra, Pandita Siddheshwari Devi, Pandita Girija Devi.
The tabla tradition that bears the city’s name, the Benares baaj, was codified here in the 18th century by Pandit Ram Sahai. Every tabla student in the world plays at least one composition that traces back to a single room in this city.
What changes in your music when you live here
Three things, in my experience.
First, you stop being in a hurry. The river does not hurry. The bells do not hurry. The man selling marigolds at the corner of Bengali Tola has been doing it for forty years and does not hurry either. You sit down to practice and you realise you have been pushing your raga the way you push everything else in a modern life. You stop pushing.
Second, you start hearing the drone everywhere. Truck horns. The tanpura. Buffalo. The tanpura. Children. The tanpura. Eventually you stop noticing the drone as a drone. It just becomes the floor your music stands on.
Third, you become superstitious in small, harmless ways. You will not start a new piece on a Tuesday. You will touch the drum to your forehead before you play. You will leave a flower on the windowsill of your practice room. You will not be able to explain why. You will not feel the need to.
If you visit
Stay in the old city, not the new one. Find a guesthouse with a balcony over the river. Wake up at 4:45 for a full week, not just one day. Walk to Assi Ghat for the morning aarti. Sit on the steps. Do not film. Listen.
And if you would like to learn while you are here, our doors are open. The kettle is always on.