Banaras Hindu University Campus

Spread across roughly 1,300 acres on the southern edge of Varanasi, the Banaras Hindu University campus is a world apart from the city's roaring ghats — a vast, orderly, tree-shaded expanse where broad radial avenues fan out from a semicircular plan, meeting at right angles beneath old peepal and gulmohar canopies.

• Founded in 1916 through the lifelong campaign of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya — the reformer, lawyer and nationalist reverently called Mahamana — BHU was conceived not merely as a university but as a temple of learning that would fuse ancient Indian knowledge with modern science.
• More than a century on, that vision survives in the honey-coloured colonial-modern buildings, the domed institutes, the sprawling Sayaji Rao Gaekwad Central Library, the botanical gardens and the quiet lawns where students sketch, cycle and read.
• For the traveller, the campus is a rare Varanasi experience: calm, spacious, green and utterly walkable.
• The undisputed centrepiece is the New Vishwanath Temple, popularly the Birla Temple, rising in gleaming white marble at the heart of the campus.
• Its foundation was laid in 1931 by the industrialist Birla family and the structure took some three decades to complete, opening in 1966.
• Modelled on the original Kashi Vishwanath and built in the Nagara style, its shikhara climbs to about 77 metres (252 feet) — reputedly one of the tallest temple towers in the country, taller than the Qutub Minar — and the complex enfolds several subsidiary shrines to Lakshmi-Narayan, Durga, Ganesha, Surya and Saraswati.
• Open to people of all faiths and backgrounds, it is a serene, unhurried place of worship quite unlike the crush of the old-city temples.
• A short stroll away, the celebrated Bharat Kala Bhavan museum holds one of India's finest collections of miniature paintings, sculpture and Banarasi textiles.
• Vegetarian travellers could not ask for an easier day.
• Varanasi is one of India's most emphatically vegetarian cities, and the Lanka gate market flanking the campus — along with the nearby Assi Ghat neighbourhood — is packed with pure-vegetarian, alcohol-free kitchens.
• You can walk out of the temple straight into a plate of hot kachori-sabzi, a crisp South Indian dosa, a rustic Bihari baati-chokha thali or a bowl of seasonal malaiyo, with no meat, fish or egg to navigate anywhere.
• Student cafes and juice stalls around the gates keep prices low and portions generous, and satvik thali halls make lunch effortless.
• Because this is a living, working university rather than a ticketed monument, the mood is scholarly and gently paced.
• Enter respectfully, keep to the roads and open lawns, avoid disturbing classes or hostels, and let the sheer scale of the greenery slow you down.
• Combined with the temple, the museum and a sunset walk to Assi Ghat, BHU rounds out a cerebral, restful half-day in the southern reaches of Kashi.