Annapurna Devi Mandir, Kashi

Varanasi is Shiva's city, but its nourishment is hers. Annapurna is the sovereign of Kashi's kitchen, and the city's old assurance is that within its bounds nobody goes hungry — a promise made concrete every afternoon at her annakshetra. Pilgrims commonly take her darshan straight after Vishwanath's: the lord who grants liberation and the goddess who grants food, moksha and anna in one quarter of lanes.

Adi Shankaracharya is remembered as having stood here; the twelve-verse Annapurna Stotra attributed to him is traditionally held to have been composed at this shrine. Its refrain is among the best-known lines of Sanskrit devotion — Annapurne sadapurne shankara-prana-vallabhe, jnana-vairagya-siddhyartham bhiksham dehi cha Parvati: Annapurna, ever full, beloved of Shankara, give me alms, that I may win knowledge and dispassion. It is Shiva's own gesture repeated — the hand held out, but not for food alone.

Her great darshan comes once a year. The image worshipped daily is of brass; above it, on the upper storey, stands the golden Annapurna, whose darbar opens only across the four or five days from Dhanteras to Annakut, when the queue runs down the gali. With it goes the khazana, the goddess's treasure: coins offered through the whole year are handed back to devotees with lava, puffed paddy, to be kept in the money box and the kitchen so that neither empties. At Sharad Navratri she takes her other place, as the Mahagauri of Kashi's Navadurga yatra, worshipped on the eighth day.

The story Kashi tells of her begins with an argument. Shiva, discoursing on the nature of things, called the world of matter — food among it — mere maya; and Parvati, to show what a world without her would be, withdrew from it. The rains failed, and gods and men went hungry. Then she relented, and set up her kitchen in Kashi as Annapurna — anna, food, and purna, filled — and there Shiva came at last with a begging bowl and took alms from her hand. The lord of renunciation depends on the goddess of nourishment: that is the lesson Kashi keeps, and it has held her ever since.

Her shrine stands in Vishwanath Gali, some fifteen metres north-west of the Kashi Vishwanath temple, deep in the old city's lanes. The worship is far older than any wall around it; the building now standing was raised by the Maratha Peshwa Baji Rao I, whose date the sources give variously as 1725 and 1729 — half a century before Ahilyabai Holkar built the Vishwanath temple next door. Small shrines to Kuber, Surya and Dhundhiraj Ganesh keep it company.

It is also a math, and its kitchens are its second life. What began in 1997 as a puri-sabzi service grew into the Annapurna annakshetra — one kitchen off Kalika Gali from 2003, a second at Bansphatak from 2014, the stoves lit at four in the morning and burning until midnight. The math reckons it feeds over twenty thousand people a day, and more than thirty-five thousand on Shivaratri.

From the lane the temple is easy to miss: a painted frontage with a verse to Bhavani above the grille, a low doorway under it, squat domes over the parapet. Inside it opens into the Nagara pattern of its century — a broad pillared porch before a modest sanctum, a courtyard around it, and an upper storey where the golden darbar is set out.

The goddess is shown seated and richly dressed, a ladle in one hand and a jewelled vessel of rice in the other — the only implements she needs. Barely fifteen metres off, the granite of the Kashi Vishwanath Dham, opened in 2021, begins; Annapurna's shrine kept its old gali frontage, and the gap between them is the gap between Kashi's two centuries.