Sankat Mochan Hanuman Mandir, Kashi

Hanuman is shown here as he is best understood — turned towards Rama. The murti faces the Lord it serves, thick with sindoor and hung with marigold, and what is asked of it is what the name promises: the lifting of trouble. Devotees come with the Hanuman Chalisa and the Sundarkand on their lips, and Tuesdays and Saturdays are his days, when the queue runs out past the gateway and the doors stay open until midnight.

The bhog is besan ke laddoo, bought at the stalls inside the compound and offered before it is carried home — the sweet Varanasi ties to Sankat Mochan above every other. The compound belongs as much to its monkeys, whom the district's own listing of the city's temples names in the same breath as the shrine; they hold the walls and roof-lines, fed by the hands that bring the laddoo in. The grove around the sanctum, the temple says, has been kept since the founding.

Once a year the courtyard becomes a concert hall. The Sankat Mochan Sangeet Samaroh is the temple's own offering of music: six nights kept with Hanuman Jayanti, the stage set on the verandah before the sanctum so that Hanuman is the first listener, and artists of classical music and dance coming from every part of the country. No one is charged to enter and no performer takes a fee; what began a century ago as a gathering of the city's musicians is now among the north's great music assemblies.

Sankat mochan is Hanuman's own name before it is any temple's — the one who loosens trouble. The shrine that carries it stands south of the old city beside the Assi stream, on the road from the Durga temple at Durgakund down towards Banaras Hindu University. Varanasi's district administration and the city's Kashi portal both give its founding to Goswami Tulsidas in the early sixteenth century: the poet who gave the north its Ramcharitmanas and, by long tradition, the Hanuman Chalisa. Tradition holds that Tulsidas saw Hanuman at this very spot; the Ministry of Tourism carries the telling further — at the poet's asking Hanuman shaped an image of himself from clay, and the temple rose around it.

The mahants who keep the shrine have for two generations been engineers as well. Veer Bhadra Mishra was mahant here and a professor at the Banaras Hindu University institute that is now IIT (BHU); from the temple's seat at Tulsi Ghat he began the Swatcha Ganga campaign that still tests the river's water. His successor, Vishwambhar Nath Mishra, is mahant and professor of electronics engineering at the same institute. The foundation puts its founder's thought plainly: science and technology are one bank of the river, religion, tradition and faith the other, and both banks need to be firm.

From the road an ochre gateway opens under the trees, the temple's name lettered on the wall beside it, and past that arch the city's noise stops. There is no gali here and no press of shopfronts: a walled compound of old trees, a covered walk leading in, a courtyard with the shrine at its centre. The building is low and plain against the carved stone of Kashi's older shrines — whitewash and ochre, a modest spire, verandahs where devotees settle in for a path of the Chalisa.

The sanctum is small and the darshan close: Hanuman in vermilion and marigold, facing across the court towards Rama, the Ram Darbar and smaller shrines completing the circuit. Phones and cameras are left at the gate, as the temple asks: the sanctum is to be looked at, not photographed.