What the Manikarnika Ghat Redevelopment Debate Reveals About Memory, Infrastructure and the Politics of Faith in Kashi

✍️ Written by Saket Suman

Kashi is unlike most other cities of India, even the religious ones, as it rarely impresses you at the first glance. It simply receives you, like an old river receives everything without pretending those things, like flowers and ash or meditation and commerce, are exact opposites. This is why every attempt to “fix” Kashi is bound to culminate into public anxiety. People are defending a feeling, they are defending the right of an ancient place to remain unflattened by modern categories.

In the last few days, short videos of heavy redevelopment work around one of the most sacred burning grounds in Kashi have travelled faster than the truth that might explain them. Bulldozers, broken stones, disturbed idols and dust rising where centuries have settled. 

Manikarnika Ghat, Kashi by James Prinsep 1832. Via: Yaduvam

The images are blunt and therefore effective. They first invited panic, then outrage, then politics. The state’s response has been equally blunt: that old damaged idols are being circulated online to manufacture chaos, that some videos may be manipulated or even AI-generated, that artefacts found during excavation have been preserved and will be reinstalled after construction, and that the work is primarily meant to improve facilities, especially in the monsoon when waterlogging disrupts cremations and forces indignities that no civilised society should accept. 

All of this can be simultaneously true, and that is precisely why Kashi is also such a good teacher. It refuses easy moral binaries. It does not allow us to be lazy. Development is needed. Heritage must be protected. Misinformation is real. So is lived local anger. Politics feeds on confusion. So does social media. And, in the middle of all of it, is a city that is not a museum, not a theme park, not a stage set for civilisational pride, but a living and breathing cosmology where people come not to “see” the past but to step into a rhythm that dissolves the ego.

I have always believed that Kashi deserves better infrastructure. Not because the city needs to be made “world-class” in the way airports are world-class but because the city carries an impossible human load with a dignity that deserves support rather than neglect. A place where death is handled in public, daily, without flinching, cannot be left to rot in broken drains and improvised pathways. 

If anything, the argument for redevelopment in Kashi is moral before it is aesthetic. A civilisation that claims spiritual depth must prove it first in how it treats the most vulnerable moments of life. The last rites are the final privacy. When facilities collapse in the rains, when the river is forced to carry what should have been handled with care, it is a civilisational embarrassment for all of us. The state has said the work at the burning ghat is meant to address precisely these problems. 

But Kashi also deserves something else, something harder, something that machines cannot pour into concrete. It deserves humility because the danger in “redeveloping” Kashi is the risk of conceptual damage. The risk of mistaking scale for sanctity. The risk of believing that widening the lanes will eventually widen the soul.

If you have ever stood at Manikarnika at the hour when the light begins to leave the river, you must have already known by now what I mean. The place does not “feel” like a tourist destination but it feels like a nerve ending of the universe. 

The pyres burn with an unhurried certainty. Conversations there are shorter, quieter. Even those who come with cameras often find their confidence shrinking out of sudden perspective changes. Death has a way of stripping language down to essentials because everything performative sounds ridiculous in its presence.

But in recent years, performative instincts have tried very hard to colonise even this. Kashi has become a national symbol in a way that would have been unimaginable to the Kashi of my childhood imagination. The city is now asked to carry the narrative of politics. It must represent civilisational resurgence, national pride, cultural confidence and strategic branding.

None of these are inherently illegitimate. A country like us which has lived through colonial contempt has the right to restore what was diminished. A culture that has been caricatured has the right to show its depth on the world stage. Kashi, with its architecture, ritual life, music, Sanskrit, and metaphysical imagination, is global human heritage thus.

But the problem begins when restoration becomes replacement. When pride becomes a substitute for practice. When the city is treated like a backdrop for slogans rather than a living ecosystem of faith, livelihoods, and grief. Kashi is intimate economies, inherited roles, fragile neighbourhoods, small shrines tucked into corners, old houses that hold more memory than their walls can contain. 

It is also the right to doubt and still belong, the right to come to the river confused and leave without being instructed what to feel.

That is why the current controversy is absurd. The loudest voices are not arguing about drainage or monsoon access. They are arguing about meaning. One side is certain that redevelopment is desecration, that heritage is being bulldozed in the name of progress, that the city’s soul is being rearranged for optics. The other is equally certain that rumours are being weaponised to provoke religious sentiment, that conspiracies are being manufactured through misleading images, and that public anger is being harvested for political gain. 

The tragedy is that both camps, in their own way, are willing to treat Kashi as a trophy.

This is where our politics feels hollowed. Politicians lie brazenly these days because the public sphere has lost the patience for complexity. We have become a country that processes sacred places the way we process viral clips.

There is another layer, too, and it is even more darker. The state itself has now warned people to be cautious about AI-generated or manipulated content aimed at provoking emotions. Kashi sits at the intersection of faith and identity, and identity, to my mind, is the easiest place to light a fire.

This is surely not an argument for blind trust in official versions. Sacred sites demand public accountability precisely because they are public inheritance not government properties or somebody's playground to write their legacy on. 

If artefacts are removed, citizens have a right to know where they are kept and how they will be restored. If construction is undertaken, there must be transparent conservation protocols and continuous consultation with those who live by the ghats and serve the rituals. If the goal is dignity in last rites, the metric cannot be a glossy before-and-after photograph. 

It must be whether grief becomes easier to carry, whether the river is protected, whether the poor are not pushed further into invisibility, and above all, whether the city can remain itself.

Kashi can handle redevelopment. It has survived far worse than these but what it cannot survive is the conversion of sacredness into branding. It cannot survive being reduced into a binary that says it is either pristine heritage frozen in time or a shiny modern infrastructure that should be built at any cost. 

Kashi’s genius has always been its ability to contain contradictions without breaking the two ends apart. It is old and immediate, intimate and cosmic, messy and metaphysical. It is a lived experience.

If there is a forward-looking way to think about this moment, it is to treat redevelopment as a civilisational test rather than a political project. A test of whether India can build without humiliating memory, whether we can improve facilities while preserving the porous, living texture that makes Kashi more than a destination. If this is done well, Kashi will not only sit on the world map as a tourist attraction but also stand as proof that an ancient culture can upgrade its public life without turning its sacred places into national stage props.

In the end, our end, the river will continue. The pyres will burn. People will arrive carrying their dead, their prayers, and their questions and Kashi will continue to absorb our arguments the way it absorbs everything else.