Who ruled Varanasi?

Varanasi, also known as Benares, Banaras or by its ancient name Kashi, lies on the left bank of the Ganges in the south-east of Uttar Pradesh, India. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and the holiest city of Hinduism, central to Hindu traditions of pilgrimage, death and mourning. It has also been a centre of Sanskrit learning, music and crafts for many centuries, and it is now a city of well over a million people.

Hindu scripture holds that the god Shiva founded Kashi, and the city is counted among the seven sacred cities that can grant liberation from rebirth. The epic Mahabharata tells of the heroes' marriages to princesses of Kashi. The traditional explanation of the name Varanasi links it to two small rivers, the Varuna and the Assi, which bound the old city to the north and south.

Archaeology confirms great age, if not the legends. Excavations in 2014 found material from around 800 BCE, and digs at Aktha and Ramnagar nearby have produced objects dating back to about 1800 BCE. In the time of the Buddha, in the fifth century BCE, the city belonged to the kingdom of Kashi, and the Buddha delivered his first sermon at Sarnath, just outside it. Ashoka's lion capital found at Sarnath has been interpreted as a memorial of that event.

When the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang visited around 635 CE, he described a centre of religion and the arts stretching about five kilometres along the river. In the eighth century the philosopher Adi Shankara is credited with establishing the worship of Shiva as the city's official cult.

In 1033 Ahmad Nialtagin, a subordinate of Mahmud of Ghazni, made a sudden raid on the city, looting its markets and damaging temples before withdrawing the same day. A second Ghaznavid force sent a year or two later was defeated nearby, possibly by the Kalachuri king Gangeyadeva, though its surviving followers were allowed to settle north of the city.

Through the Middle Ages Varanasi remained a centre of theology and learning. Several leading figures of the devotional Bhakti movement were born or lived here, among them the poet Kabir, born in 1389, and the reformer Ravidas in the fifteenth century. Another, Tulsidas, wrote the Ramcharitmanas, a widely loved retelling of the Ramayana in the Awadhi language. Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, visited in 1507.

The Mughal emperor Akbar sacked Varanasi around 1567, but later Rajput nobles in his service, notably Raja Man Singh of Amber, rebuilt temples and ghats, the stepped bathing places along the river. Under Aurangzeb, many temples were destroyed and mosques built in their place, a setback for the city. As the Mughal Empire weakened in the eighteenth century, much of the modern riverfront was built with money from the Maratha rulers and from local Bhumihar landholders. The Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah had an astronomical observatory built beside Man Mandir Ghat in the same century.

A local landholding family rose to power in this period. In 1740 Balwant Singh of the Narayan dynasty declared himself Maharaja of Benares, and his troops fought a long guerrilla struggle against his nominal overlord, the Nawab of Awadh. Under the Treaty of Faizabad in 1775 the region passed to the East India Company, with the Benares rajas kept on as subordinate rulers.

In 1791 the Company's resident, Jonathan Duncan, founded the Benares Sanskrit College. The city was placed in the Ceded and Conquered Provinces in 1805, moved to the North-Western Provinces in 1836 and to the United Provinces in 1902. A census by James Prinsep in the 1830s counted around a thousand temples. The rajas, based at Ramnagar Fort across the river, were given a princely state in 1911, though it had no authority over the city itself. Rising nationalism shaped education: In 1898 Annie Besant established the Central Hindu College, and in 1916 she joined Madan Mohan Malviya in creating Banaras Hindu University.

Varanasi became part of independent India in 1947, and the maharaja, Vibhuti Narayan Singh, merged his territory into the United Provinces in 1949; the state was renamed Uttar Pradesh in 1950. The 2011 census counted about 1.4 million people in the urban area. The city's ghats, temples and lanes, together with its crafts and its own style of tabla playing, continue to draw pilgrims and visitors from across India and the world.