In wealth, population, dignity and sanctity Benares was among the foremost city of Asia according to Macaulay. As the oldest and only living city in existence where the ancient and the modern meet together. It stretches its memories to the ages of prehistoric antiquity and has managed no inevitable ravages of time and every other destructive agency. Speaking of its antiquity Mr. Sherring in his ‘Sacred City of the Hindus’, observes: “Twenty-five centuries ago at the least, it was famous, “When Babylon was struggling with Nineveh for supremacy, “when Tyre was planting her colonies, when Athens was growing in strength, before Rome had become known, or “Greece had contested with Persia, or Cyrus had added luster to the Persian monarchy, or Nebuchadnezzar had captured Jerusalem and the inhabitants of Judaea had been carried away into captivity, she had already risen to greatness, if not glory.†To the world abroad Benares has been known as the place of the greatest religious sanctity in all India – that land, pre-eminently, where the religious element supervenes and transfuses itself into the most ordinary vocations of daily life. The author has put is fugitive recollection into writing and feels conscious, that a sketch like this may be of interest to those who proceed to that ancient place with an open mind and who have no definite notion as to what in reality to expect to find there. This book was first published in 1912, now brought in a new format with some excellent and mind blowing photographs of what once Benares was and is today, the city ‘immortal’.
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