THE mornings at Assi Ghat in Varanasi are vibrant with activity. Men and women set up stalls replete with ritual items – beads, incense, prayer books, and flowers – for the pilgrims, orange robed sadhus, and local women in bright saris who stream down the steps to bathe in the Ganga. The ghatiyas – the priests of the ghat – sit beneath unfurled umbrellas chanting Sanskrit verses to the faithful as the sound of a priest’s bell resounds throughout the tangled lanes of the neighbourhood. On the steps, children scurry up and down, their arms laden with baskets of diyas to sell to the pilgrims and foreign tourists emerging from their guesthouses and hotels. The tourists with cameras strewn around their necks make their way to the boats to be rowed out to watch the sunrise. Others buy a cup of chai from one of the tea shops dotting the neighbourhood.

The tea shops of Assi in Varanasi, located at the intersection of two kinds of cultures of consumption and sociability, offer a unique glimpse of the impact of economic development on the lifestyle, culture and pleasures of common people. ‘If you come here from 8 to 10 you’ll laugh from the inside. You won’t pretend. Where’s the laughter otherwise? Laughing and smiling have gone. In Delhi, there are some laughter clubs where people go and laugh, but that’s not natural,’ says P. Rana, sipping chai at Pappu Chai, one of the oldest tea shops in the city. The shop sells over a thousand glasses a day, requiring almost fifty litres of milk to brew enough creamy chai. Although the shop merely has a few rough benches and chairs scattered around a tiny room, the art historian Rana, who works in nearby Banaras Hindu University, calls coming here a ‘social addiction’.

‘When you drink chai with someone, you want to help them,’ he explains. He calls the tea shop a ‘mini parliament’ where people can talk about everything from local politics to tensions at work and at home. They can also linger here for hours – cursing, singing, and laughing.

Govind Singh, a local artist who has lived in Assi since 1984, remembers the joy residents found in simple things at the tea shop. One day, he tells me, as the conversation turned from problems at the university to power cuts, it started to rain outside and a blind man who was a regular visitor started singing and everyone drummed on the tables. ‘That kind of joy you can’t get anywhere else,’ he says. ‘Sometimes, just by talking to people in the shop your problems are solved. One time I needed a driving license and someone told me where to go. You could discuss every problem and help each other out. That’s why I was a regular visitor there.’

It is this particular joie de vivre associated with the residents of Varanasi that locals feel was once unique to them. They call it Banarasipan. Banarasipan is carefreeness, joy, simplicity and contentment. It is also a love for certain things Banarasi – paan, bhang, malai, and natural beauty. For a Banarasi, living the good life meant a sense of freedom from everyday worries, because Banarasis never felt enslaved by work. True Banarasis would act like lords even if they had very little money – and a culture of irreverence towards wealth and status was ingrained in their very attitude to life.

A politician in the shop tells me a little more. One day, he says, the milkman arrived late on his bicycle. And the tea shop owner asked him, ‘Why are you late today?’ The doodhwala, taking umbrage, replied: ‘Should I come at the time you choose or in my own time?’

‘You see, everybody was free in Banaras,’ he explains. People controlled the way they used their time and labour and this made relationships feel equal, even though they were in fact unequal in other ways. Even when people struggled to make ends meet, people were ‘free in their minds’. Although there were always status distinctions, even the rich wore simpler clothes, and bathed in the Ganga and drank chai with their poorer fellow-Banarasis.

 

Yet, increasingly, the disparity between the rich and the poor has become more visible. And only academics like Rana, politicians, and artists have the luxury to while away their time at Pappu Chai. The sources of people’s joy have also changed, explains retired government employee Robi Upadhyay: ‘The laughter of three decades ago and the laughter of now is different. The laughter of three decades ago was internal masti and now it is external masti because of the economic changes. That’s the main difference between the past and now. In the past people purchased goods for their utility, now they are eager to consume. This change is reflected in their masti.’

22-year-old Rajan Nishaad, a boatman’s son, says that people have also changed. In the mornings Rajan makes chai in a makeshift shack his parents set up on the banks of the Ganga decades ago. In the afternoons he works as a computer designer. He tells me it was great being in the shop because his friends, brothers and uncles would come.

‘When we had a shop, 200 to 250 people used to come to meet each other. Everybody had time. But now only 10 to 15 people come. We need to take time to meet each other. Now everyone is concerned with money. They are always worried about it. What’s the point? If my child gets sick, people won’t help. Earlier, if someone was sick, everybody would come and help. That doesn’t happen anymore.’

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘People don’t have time. Everyone wants to become better than the next person. They all want to become rich. They don’t realize that money isn’t everything.’

 

Yet the Banarasis I spoke to feel that the cohesion of any community depends on people’s willingness to help each other out spontaneously. As the journalist Keshav Yadav told me, ‘If you go to Mumbai and ask someone how to get somewhere, nobody will tell you. If you go to Delhi, one or two people will help you. If you came here about 20 years ago, they would have taken you on their motorbike and left you where you needed to go. Now people will tell you where to go, but earlier they would have taken you to their homes and even fed you. Money is preventing us from relating to other people closely. The problem is not money, but showing it off.’

Much like the rest of India, Assi has changed rapidly in the last three decades. In the eighties, Assi was merely a clay bank with a few ashrams, maths, houses, and shops where pilgrims, ascetics and scholars from Banaras Hindu University congregated. There was a simple puja and a few boats that ferried the occasional pilgrims. On festive days, people from the surrounding villages would come to bathe in the river. But as a result of the rapid socio-economic change of the past decades, Assi’s physical fabric is now completely unrecognizable when compared to its earlier state; the nature of the economy has also changed, now being almost exclusively driven by the tourist trade, which in turn, at Assi, caters primarily to foreigners.

 

The locals say that economic development began with the diversion of the polluted Assi river in 1982 – despite objections raised by local priests that this action would fundamentally alter the sacred geography of the city. According to myth, the two rivers Assi and Varuna, tributaries of the Ganga, were created by the gods to guard against evil and protect the sacred core of the city. People believed that when the Assi river dried up, the kaliyuga would begin. The diversion of the Assi river opened up the area for man-made development; the concrete landing and steps descending into the Ganga were built for the first time only in the 1980s. Street vendors began to set up stalls to sell incense, sacred beads, flowers, diyas, and snacks to the faithful who flocked every morning to bathe in the holy river. The pace of development accelerated with the opening up of the Indian economy in 1991 – it became easier to travel to India and set up businesses for tourists. By 1997, the number of foreign tourists had already doubled, with over 400,000 now visiting the city every year.

Varanasi has long been considered a site for refinement, learning, holiness and pleasure; and death within its hallowed precincts was believed to guarantee liberation. Hindus also believe that the realization of all four goals of human existence are enabled here: one’s moral and religious obligations (dharma); political and material gain (artha); sensual pleasures (kama); and finally liberation (moksha). Today the majority of the city’s 1.2 million residents remain dependent in some manner on the pilgrimage and tourist industries for their livelihood, with the city being marketed today, as in the past, as a locus of purity and self-transformation. Now the tourists come mainly from the UK, France and Germany between October and March every year, in search of a way of life they have lost; and Assi is the second most popular place for them to reside in the old city. The duration of their stay varies from a few days to several months, often spent studying yoga, Ayurveda, Sanskrit and music.

Yet this way of life is also gradually being eroded in the name of progress. With the influx of tourists, the economic landscape of Assi began to change as well. Ashrams and houses were converted into guesthouses and hotels, and cafes, shops, and other commercial enterprises catering to tourists mushroomed along the banks of the Ganga. New television channels also proliferated – streaming images of modern life elsewhere and goods worth aspiring for. And as in other Indian cities, the cost of living soon increased exponentially.

 

For those directly engaged in the tourism and pilgrimage industries, economic development brought benefits – a chance to make a living, greater economic security, and access to education. Rajan’s family now sells chai to more tourists than Banarasis. They were able to buy more boats to ferry foreigners to watch the sunrise on the Ganga, build a better house, and send their children to school. Since the boatmen – the mallahs – are classified among the Most Backward Castes, they also benefited from some of the government’s positive discrimination schemes. Nevertheless, the growth has been uneven, with the landowning upper castes generally benefiting more from liberalization than others.

There is also another side to economic development, as Arvind Dwivedi, a restaurant and hotel owner, points out. ‘In the path of development, Banarasipan is dying. It’s slowly getting commercialized. On the one hand that’s good, because the place is developed; on the other hand, Banarasi culture is going to die.’ Shailesh Tiwari, who comes from a long line of pujaris, echoes this sentiment. ‘A good life – you find that only in Varanasi. Not in Mumbai and Delhi. It’s a very simple life. It’s not fast paced. Even if you don’t go out for two days, you can survive with one day’s income. In Delhi and Mumbai, you can’t survive even a day without working.’

 

This slow pace of life also gave people time to take part in the city’s many fairs and religious festivals. According to tradition, the year was a cycle of seasons and months, each with their own characteristics and set of habits. In the spring, when the river was most beautiful, people closed shop for two weeks at a time, spending the nights outdoors. The onset of the monsoon was marked by various musical performances. And in the months of September and October, several boatloads of people would cross the river to Ramnagar every day to watch the thirty-one-day Ramlila, a re-enactment of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitamanas. Now only one boat makes its way across each day, and the play is mainly a source of entertainment for poor villagers, and a handful of elderly Banarasis who go in part as a religious duty, but also out of a sense of nostalgia.

In the past, it was possible for the self-employed or those engaged in task-oriented work (such as the boatmen or chaiwalas) to take time off when they desired; work did not have to begin at a certain hour or last any given length of time, and it was possible to work intensely for a period and cease work at will. The sense of freedom and enjoyment of life were closely linked, and derived from the fact that people had a mastery of the use of their own time and labour, and worked in a manner that allowed social interactions and work to be interconnected.

 

However, with the onset of economic development after liberalization, people’s lives are increasingly governed by a new rhythm of work. It is arguably only the self-employed artists or intellectuals in Pappu Chai who have the freedom to fill the interstices of their day with social interaction. For the common people of Assi, there is less time for the old, cherished cultural ways.

These cultural losses that accompany globalization and economic growth are rarely spoken about. If we consider the pitfalls of development at all, we speak of human rights violations or the destruction of the environment. However, seminal studies like the World Bank’s Voices of the Poor remind us that the poor themselves frequently value both material and non-material well-being – laughter and happiness often matter as much to them as food and health. What happens when development leads to the rise of some aspects of well-being, while causing others to fade? To have economic growth, must we accept the accompanying changes to society and culture?

E.P. Thompson’s studies of the transition to industrial capitalism in 19th century England can offer us some insight. Thompson observed that ‘there is no such thing as economic growth, which is not, at the same time, growth and change of culture.’ As in Banaras today, Thompson found that in early industrial Britain, the irregularity of the work week was punctuated by traditional festivals and holidays which the lower classes would partake in. In contrast, in a mature capitalist society, being ‘idle’ was viewed with opprobrium, and popular culture, with its disregard for rule and authority, was considered degenerate; common people were often said to be ‘drunk with the cup of liberty’. Thompson states further that by the 1840s, an English industrial worker was distinguished not by his industriousness, but by the regularity of his work, and as importantly by the repression of his capacity for enjoyment in the ‘old, uninhibited ways’. In industrializing England, as in modern Banaras, rapid socio-economic change necessitated a change in the ‘art of living’, and the inculcation of habits such as punctuality, deference to authority, and discipline. But this erosion of the culture of leisure accompanying work was not a natural process, according to Thompson, but rather the outcome of generations of conflict.

 

For the common people in Varanasi, however, the new way of life is a choice – even as they regret the losses that accompany the choices they make. They feel compelled to work all the time, to earn more money, to consume more, and to take up jobs which limit aspects of their freedom. There are many reasons for this. An unprecedented degree of social mobility has made working more worthwhile for some. The cost of living has also risen sharply, and many people need to work more just to maintain the same standard of living. But even beyond that, new ‘needs’ have been created, in part by the images on television and the internet of a ‘better’ life elsewhere.

A preference for consumption has replaced one for leisure – people have chosen to increase their working hours in order to consume more. In the case of the more materially deprived inhabitants, the choice has not even been between a leisure preference and a consumption preference, but rather simply a matter of now having an opportunity to improve their material standards of living, which they have understandably – but also freely – chosen to seize.

 

Furthermore, the people of Varanasi want ‘progress’ too. They set their sights on Delhi, and even further to the West. As 23-year-old student Deepak, who comes from a poor family, says, ‘My definition of success is one thing – to have money. If I go to Delhi, I’ll make 5,000 rupees, but here I’d only make 500 rupees. In Delhi and the metro cities, people don’t have time to talk to each other, they lead busy lives. I’ll adjust to a busy life. It’ll become a habit. In Banaras whether you have 100,000 rupees, or just two, everyone’s happy. But happiness is important for living, not for progress.’

Why do Deepak and others value progress over happiness? And is his choice of the former completely free, or is it at least in part conditioned by narratives of progress circulating in India that are intrinsically connected to ideals of lifestyles in other parts of India and the world that are perceived as worth aspiring for – and for the sake of which happiness must be abandoned?

Access to these very aspirations were only made possible by the policies of liberalization and integration of India within a global economy and culture: transformations which were not chosen entirely freely by the people of Varanasi. The common people of Varanasi – as elsewhere in India – rarely have the freedom to decide what global forces structure their lives and condition their aspirations. While Deepak and other have certainly benefited materially from the economic changes of the past decades, and while they may freely choose to work harder in order to consume more, the growth of a consumption preference also begs the question as to whose interests these new consumer aspirations engendered by global consumer culture ultimately serve.

Furthermore, while there may be greater freedom to buy and sell, does this not coincide with a lack of freedom to dispose of one’s labour according to one’s wishes? If it is the case that the reasons why people value some things more than others might themselves not arise from freedom, but may, to some extent at least, derive from external forces that the people making apparently free choices are not free to control, then is it not possible that, as the late political philosopher G.A. Cohen suggested, ‘one is free to do what one is forced to do’ ? Cohen’s argument is that while ‘freedom to buy and sell is one freedom of which in capitalism there is a great deal’, this coincides with a lack of freedom to dispose of one’s labour according to one’s wishes, since unless one does so according to the dictates of the capitalist market, one loses the freedom to live, since there is no other means of living. In Banaras, while people now arguably have greater freedom to buy and sell, this has come at the cost of losing other freedoms, notably the freedom to dispose of their labour and time according to their will.

 

As I consider these questions sipping my fourth cup of tea in Pappu Chai, an old man sidles up to me. The others tell me he has lived in Assi most of his life. I ask him if there is a quality which distinguishes Assi from other places. He smiles. ‘The people of Assi – they eat paan, wander, drink chai, laugh,’ he says. ‘This is a problem for the government. For development they need people to work. But laughter is a form of democracy. It’s contagious. It spreads. You can’t control people if they are free and laughing.’

 

* Note that the names of the interviewees have been changed to preserve anonymity.