Kaal Bhairav, Kashi

Kotwal is a worldly word — the police chief of a town — and Kashi means it. The Kashi Khanda has Shiva tell Bhairav that he alone will chastise those who sin here, and that Chitragupta keeps no register in this city; the district portal of Varanasi puts it plainly — without his permission no one can stay in Kashi. So the pilgrim presents himself at the Kotwal's court, before Vishwanath's darshan or after it, and Kashi holds a yatra incomplete without that leave.

The offerings are his own: mustard oil above all, with black sesame and flowers, the oil often passed over the devotee's own head before it is given, an utaara, a lifting-away of misfortune. A braided black thread blessed at the shrine — the Bhairav raksha sutra — is tied at wrist or neck against illness and ill will. One of the priests holds the danda, the club of peacock feathers the god carries in his images, and to be lightly dusted with it is the blessing people come for; dogs lie about the doorway, fed by pilgrims, for the dog is his mount.

Tuesdays and Sundays are his days. The year's great occasion is Bhairav Ashtami — Kaal Bhairav Jayanti, the eighth of the dark fortnight of Margashirsha — when the queue runs deep into the lanes; Maha Shivaratri and the Annakut after Diwali bring their own shringar. What is asked of him is protection, health and freedom from fear: liberation is Vishwanath's gift, and Bhairav guards the ground on which it is sought.

Kaal Bhairav keeps his court in Vishweshwarganj, in the crowded northern lanes of the old city near the Head Post Office, a kilometre and a half from Kashi Vishwanath. Kaal means at once time, death and the colour black; Bhairav is Shiva in his terrible aspect, and the quarter around the temple has taken his name — Bhaironath.

The story is told in the Kashi Khanda of the Skanda Purana. Brahma and Vishnu disputed which of them was supreme; when the Vedas testified for Shiva, Brahma's fifth head spoke on in arrogance, and from Shiva's wrath came Kalabhairav, who took off that head with the nail of his left hand. The sin of brahmahatya followed him through the three worlds until he reached Kashi, which it could not enter; at the tirtha of Kapalamochana the skull fell from his hand, and Shiva gave him the overlordship of the city.

The courtyard temple standing today was raised in 1817 by the Maratha Peshwa Baji Rao II, a date recorded in a stone inscription on the rear wall of the inner courtyard, though popular accounts date a shrine here to the seventeenth century and earlier. Twenty families hold hereditary rights in its management and sell black cloth, thread and offerings to pilgrims from the arcade.

From the street a doorway watched by Bhairav's dog opens into an arcaded rectangle of about seventeen by thirteen metres, a small shrine at its centre turned almost exactly north, with a pillared porch to stand on for darshan. Only the silver face, garlanded with flowers, shows through the sanctum doorway; the rest of the image — pot-bellied, seated on his dog, holding the trident — stays behind a cloth drapery.

The sanctum door is framed by Batuka Bhairav, Shmashana Bhairav and Kalamadhava, a form of Vishnu visited on Kashi's Shodash Vishnu yatra. Round the courtyard stand shrines to Devi, Hanuman, Krishna and Radha, Parvati and Ganesha, and a large Navagraha slab where each planetary house has its own figure and altar — a god of times and seasons, of this shore rather than the far one.