Varanasi, India — December 2020
By David Lombroso
I arrived in Varanasi at three in the morning, after a 36 hour train ride that was supposed to take less than half as long. What appeared in dead of night to be a sleepy, riverside cluster of homes and temples came breathtakingly alive with the crack of dawn across the Ganges. For it is there, in the world's oldest continuously inhabited city, that all of India exists in chaotic harmony, a place where Hindu pilgrims from across the vast sub-continent brush shoulders on the narrow alleyways that wind their way through town.
Over the course of two visits a year apart, I came to understand that Varanasi is India in microcosm--a place of ritual, tradition, spirit, and unfathomable density--where privacy is an afterthought and curiosity is a way of life. There is nowhere else in the world quite like Varanasi, a center of spiritual learning to which the world's seekers have been drawn for thousands of years. And to which, I'm sure, I too will one day return.
These photos were taken on two separate travels to India between 2018 and 2019.
