House of Sissendi

Long before Varanasi had a name that fit on a map, it had a name that fit a feeling. Hindu tradition holds that the city was first known not as a city at all, but as a forest — Anandavana, the Forest of Bliss. It is the name from which House of Sissendi's new collection of enamel platters takes both its title and its imagery.

Why the city by the Ganga is called Kashi

Most visitors today know the city as Varanasi, a name drawn from two rivers, the Varuna and the Asi, between which the old town sits. But for nearly three thousand years before that, and still in scripture, ritual, and daily speech, the city has gone by an older name: Kashi.

The word comes from the Sanskrit root kash — to shine, to radiate, to glow. Kashi means, quite literally, the City of Light. The Kashi Khand of the Skanda Purana renders this as a theological claim rather than a poetic flourish: kāśate brahma atra iti kāśī — because Brahman, the ultimate reality, shines here, it is called Kashi. The name appears as early as the Rigveda, composed somewhere between 1500 and 1200 BCE, making it one of the oldest recorded city names in human history.

The two names — Kashi and Varanasi — are often used as if interchangeable, but they point at different things. Varanasi is a geographic descriptor, the land between two rivers, while Kashi is the spiritual and cultural name, the one scripture treats as carrying the city's true identity. One names a location. The other names what the location is believed to be.

Anandvan: the city before the city

Older still than either name is Anandvan — also written Anandavana — the Forest of Bliss. Long before Kashi grew into a dense city, ancient texts describe it as flourishing as a forest: a paradise of groves, streams, flowers, birds and temples, where sages taught, yogis practiced, and even natural enemies were said to live in peace. Lore holds that Kashi was literally the first city, built by the first king, on ground within the Anandavana that was carpeted with sacred kusha grass.

The name is not incidental. Ananda, or bliss, is one of the three defining qualities of Brahman in Vedantic thought — sat-chit-ananda, being-consciousness-bliss — so to call Kashi the Forest of Bliss is to say the ground itself is made of that same essence. Tradition places this original forest on the plateau at Raj Ghat, the spot where the city is said to have first taken root. Centuries of saints and seekers are remembered as having found their way to it: it is described as the forest where Tulsidas met Hanuman, where Kabir met his guru, and where the great shehnai player Bismillah Khan made his home.

It is a landscape, in other words, before it was ever a metropolis — deer moving through tree-lined groves, peacocks unfolding their feathers near water, lotus blooms holding still on quiet ponds. It is this landscape, rather than the temples and ghats that came after, that House of Sissendi has set out to hold in lacquer and wood.

 

 

 

The collection

Each piece in the Anandvan collection is hand-finished in acacia wood, framed with a brass border, and topped with a high-gloss enamel surface that holds the artwork the way still water holds a reflection. The motifs are drawn directly from the imagery of the old forest: peacocks with trailing, jewel-toned plumage; golden deer caught mid-stride on a hillside; lotus ponds rendered in layered pinks and reds; cypress-like trees standing sentinel beside flowering groves; and clouds, scrolled and gilded, drifting above it all.

The collection spans both square and circular trays, paired in several designs with a small matching bowl — practical objects built for a console table, a dining setting, or a tray of morning tea, but carrying within them a visual language thousands of years old.

Four ground colours anchor the range — a soft sand, a deep aubergine, an earthy chestnut brown, and a warm olive-on-cream — each shifting the same scene into a different mood, much as the Ganga itself is said to look different at every hour between dawn and dusk.

A name worth carrying

To name a collection after Anandvan is to reach past the city's busier, more modern identity and toward something quieter: a forest that is said to have stood before recorded history, on a stretch of riverbank tradition still calls the most luminous place on earth. House of Sissendi's platters do not attempt to depict Varanasi as it stands today. They are an attempt, instead, to set a small piece of its oldest story — the deer, the peacock, the lotus, the light — onto a table.