Songs of Varanasi: the street musicians whose melodies travel home

The first time I heard a sarangi in Varanasi, it was not on a stage but on a stone step beside the ghats, where a thin man in a faded kurta tucked the instrument under his chin and let the bow lean into a single note. A woman selling marigolds stopped counting her garlands. A toddler leaned forward from his father's arms. Three boys on a school trip forgot their phones. That is what street music in this city does: it rearranges the room you are standing in.

Varanasi gets called India's spiritual capital, but that phrase flattens what makes the place genuinely strange. Pilgrims bathe in the river. Funeral pyres smoulder along the upper ghats. Stray cattle watch the procession with the patience of pensioners. The music threads through all of this, neither sacred nor secular, simply present. For travellers from Australian cities where busking is regulated to the decibel, the unbuttoned quality of these performances feels like a small revelation.

I had arrived a few days earlier, jet-lagged after a long-haul flight that crossed the Indian Ocean before swinging north over the subcontinent. By the second morning my notebook had filled with sketches of sound rather than sight. The musicians themselves were less easy to pin down: they moved between corners, between crowds, between shifting winds. What stayed was the music, and the way it kept finding me.

Where the river wakes before the city

Long before sunrise the Ganges begins to move. Pilgrims descend the stone steps with brass lotas in their hands, and a chain of boats nudges the silt. The first musicians appear with them: an elderly pair on the upper ghats, one with a dholak drum, the other singing something close to a bhajan but unhurried. They have been here, locals say, for as long as anyone can remember.

For Australians used to the orderly hum of an early commute in Sydney or Melbourne, this dawn soundscape can feel like stepping into a film. There is no real equivalent in the suburbs of Parramatta or the train corridors of Brisbane. Yet it shares a thread with the buskers who set up at Queen Victoria Market before the coffee kiosks open. Music at the start of a working day seems to belong to anyone willing to claim it.

The sarangi player who knew every wedding song

He had set himself up near a small shrine where the yellow paint was peeling in long curls, and his instrument rested on his knee like an old dog. A sarangi is one of the most physically difficult instruments in Hindustani classical music. The strings are nudged sideways with the fingernails, while a set of sympathetic strings buzz beneath them, giving the sound its particular shimmer of grief.

He played through the morning, moving from one raga to another without speaking to anyone. When I asked what he was working on, he tapped the wood and said only that it was for a wedding in a village three hours away. The family would hear the recording. That is how songs still travel in Varanasi: through memory, through ear, through a small cassette passed hand to hand.

Bamboo flutes under the old silk shops

A few streets back from the water, in lanes where silk weavers used to keep their workshops, the bansuri players gather in the afternoons. The flute is deceptively simple: a length of bamboo with a handful of holes. In serious hands it can imitate the wind in a forest, or the way a particular bird turns before landing.

I bought a small length of bamboo from a woodturner near Vishwanath Gali for less than the price of a flat white in Sydney, and a young flute player spent twenty minutes showing me how to make even a basic sound. He was seventeen, he said, and he had been practising since he was nine. He expected to be playing professionally by twenty-two. The confidence in that, on a Tuesday afternoon in a dusty lane, struck me as something I would not have heard from a teenager waiting outside a Centrelink office back home.

Drummers between the funeral pyres

Walk past Manikarnika Ghat in the afternoon and the air changes. The pyres smoke. Priests call to families. Tourists cluster at safe distances with their hats pulled down. And at the corner near a small chai stall, two drummers were playing a dhol and a nagara, both heavy, both apparently cheerful.

It would be wrong to describe this as inappropriate. Hindu funeral traditions in Varanasi are not hush affairs. The dead, the living and the music exist in the same long afternoon. The drummers were not playing for the pyres but in spite of them, the way anyone might play at a community festival in regional Victoria where the brass band has run overtime. The sound is rhythm without permission. It does not require a ticket.

Instruments, lineages and the colour of afternoon sound

Varanasi is sometimes called the city of music, but the title earns itself slowly. The instruments themselves — sarangi, sitar, tabla, bansuri, shehnai — all have workshops and families attached to them. Some musicians are eleventh-generation players. Some picked up a second-hand drum from a market stall in Chowk and never let it go.

For visitors with light suitcases, navigating this field can be overwhelming. The note I scribbled to myself, and which I later filed under pre-trip planning, was to learn the names and sounds of a few local instruments before going. Knowing what a shehnai sounds like — warm, slightly nasal, reed-like — changes the way you recognise it on the street. You stop hearing noise and start hearing a craft.

Cassettes, postcards and the small trade in memory

Beyond the performers, Varanasi has a quieter trade in the memory of music. Small cassette shops, almost unchanged in thirty years, line the alleys near the main ghats. They sell raga compilations, wedding playlists, devotional tracks. A shopkeeper in his sixties pressed a tape into my hand and said, simply, that it had been recorded by his brother.

Australians who buy Indian music usually do so through streaming platforms, which keeps the process clean but loses the texture. The dust on the cassette case, the conversation about who played on it, the moment when the shopkeeper produces a deeper shelf of stock — none of that arrives through a phone. I bought three tapes and a small wooden flute, paid in rupees I had changed at the airport (the rate sat around fifty-four to the Australian dollar at the time), and carried the lot home in a soft cotton bag.

What the music does once you unpack

Back in my share-house kitchen in Fitzroy, with the August wind rattling the window and a Coles bag of Indian groceries on the bench, I played one of those cassettes almost every morning for a month. The sound was imperfect. One track had been recorded from a balcony. Another had a wedding crowd laughing through the middle. Those flaws were the point.

The street musicians of Varanasi do not record in studios. They record in lanes, on steps, near rivers. The noises around them become part of the music. Listening at home, I could hear the boats, the bells, the kettle, the children. It was less a song than a small map of where the song had lived.

Months later I had assembled a small archive — receipts, printed labels from cassette sleeves, the folded paper slip the shopkeeper had pressed into my hand. Friends who came for dinner would leaf through the pile, slightly puzzled, and then someone would put on a track and the room would go quiet. The sound had followed me home, all the way to a kitchen bench in Fitzroy, and it did not seem in any hurry to leave.

A handful of ways to keep that music alive once you are home

• Learn the name of one Indian instrument before the flight, and a single fact about it.
• Carry low-denomination rupees, and tip the street musicians who genuinely move you.
• Ask before recording, even for a few seconds, and never post footage without consent.
• Bring back a cassette or a hand-made postcard rather than only digital files.
• Find a local Indian music night at home, perhaps through a community hall in Springvale or in Adelaide's southern suburbs, and show up.
• Read at least one short field record of Indian street music before leaving Australia.
• Treat the memory like a small currency: spend it on friends, not on newsfeeds.

The river keeps moving, and so do those who sing beside it. What remains is the strange, persistent sensation that a song begun in Varanasi is still, somewhere, finishing its phrase in your own kitchen — through a tinny speaker, through a memory, through a city that has not stopped listening to itself in several thousand years.