‘Aag Aur Pani’: Hindi writer Vyomesh Shukla draws an authentic portrait of eternal Banaras

“There is a strange kinship between Venice and Varanasi…both cities are like portals in time; they seem to draw you into lost ways of life. And in both cities, as nowhere else in the world, you become aware of mortality.” Amitav Ghosh writes in his book Gun Island.

Banaras, or Varanasi, or Kashi evokes a sense of the eternal, a city older than history itself, as Mark Twain once observed. It is a place where opposites coexist tradition and modernity, the mundane and the divine, life and death. A well-known poet, translator and prose writer Vyomesh Shukla, in his masterful work Aag Aur Pani: Banaras Par Ekagra Gadya, includes this paradoxical essence of the city, which blends the philosophical, cultural and quotidian elements of one of the oldest living cities on Earth.

The eternal dance of the opposites

The title Aag Aur Pani reflects the inherent contradictions of Banaras, a city that thrives on the interplay of extremes. Vyomesh Shukla’s anecdotal narrative revolves around these binaries, using the metaphor of fire for the city’s spiritual intensity and water for the flowing, adaptive nature of the Ganga. Banaras is portrayed as a city that consumes and purifies, simultaneously rooted in the ancient and open to the new.

Like Ghosh’s depiction of Banaras as a...

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