The steps to the river

Come down onto the steps.

For all the weight of gods and death this treatise has been carrying, the daily life of Kashi does not happen in the temples or at the burning ground. It happens on the water, at the edge, on the long flight of stone stairs that runs the whole length of the city, and at dawn it is one of the most beautiful sights on earth. To understand the ghats, you have to see them first not as a row of monuments but as a single continuous stage, the platform on which the entire drama of the city is played out, morning and night, in the open, at the river’s edge.

The crescent and the north-turning river

The ghats of Kashi are the ghats, the broad flights of stone steps that descend from the packed lanes of the city down into the Ganga. There are somewhere near eighty-four of them, the traditional sacred number, running in an almost unbroken arc along the western bank, so that the whole riverfront reads as one enormous curved staircase between the city and the water. From a boat at first light the effect is overwhelming: a two-mile crescent of stone and temple and palace, tier on tier, filling with people as the sun comes up.

And the river does something along that crescent that the tradition holds to be especially auspicious, something worth pausing on because it explains the whole orientation of the city. Across the northern plains the Ganga runs broadly eastward, toward the sea. But at Kashi she bends, and for the length of the city she turns and flows north. Uttaravahini, the tradition calls this stretch, “north-flowing”, and it reads the turn as a sign of grace: the river, at this one place, faces back toward her own Himalayan source, back toward the north where Shiva sits, as though pausing in her long journey to the sea to look homeward. The city was built along the inside of that northward bend, on the concave western bank, and the concavity matters. The west bank is the built bank, the holy bank, the crescent of stone. The eastern shore across the water is left bare, uninhabited, a wide blank of sand, and there is a reason for that emptiness that is strange enough to deserve its own chapter later in this treatise. For now, note only the shape: a city crowded onto one curved bank, facing a river that has turned to face its source, with the far shore left deliberately empty across the water.

The body of God along the water

The pilgrim who wants to honour the whole of the sacred waterfront does not bathe at any step that takes his fancy. There is an order, and the order is a map of the body of God.

Five of the ghats are the great fords, the Panchatirthi, the five crossings, and the tradition lays the body of the cosmic Lord along the river by naming them as his limbs. At the southern end, Asi, where a small stream meets the Ganga, is the head. Dashashwamedh, the grand central ghat, is the chest. Manikarnika, at the middle of the crescent, the great burning ground, is the navel, the point from which a world is spun out and into which it is drawn back. Panchganga, to the north, is the thighs. And Adi Keshava, far up at the meeting of the Varana and the Ganga, is the feet. To make the pilgrimage of the five fords, bathing at each in turn, ideally within a single day and in this order, is to worship the entire body of God by walking its length along the water, from the crown of the head at Asi to the soles of the feet in the north.

[FIGURE: kashi-panchatirthi — the five fords mapped to the cosmic body.]

This is the cosmogram of the third chapter brought down to the waterline. The abstract claim, that the city is a body and a diagram of the cosmos, becomes a thing you can do with your feet in the space of a morning. The five fords are stations of the inner body as much as steps into the river, and the pilgrim who walks them is tracing, on the outside, the same figure the meditator traces within. The Ganga aarti and the burning ground, the tradition says, are the same light. The five fords and the five centres of the subtle body are, in the same way, the same map.

The offering of light

If the river’s day begins with the bath, it ends with fire.

Every evening at Dashashwamedh, the central and grandest of the ghats, the city gives back to the river the light it received from her all day. This is the Ganga aarti, the offering of lamps to the water, and in its present form it is a magnificent piece of theatre: young priests in ranked rows on raised platforms, swinging great tiered brass lamps in slow, synchronised arcs above the river, wreathed in incense, while bells and conches and drums sound and thousands watch from the steps above and from a floating crowd of boats below. It is worth being honest that the grand, choreographed spectacle of the aarti in its current scale is a modern flourishing of an old and simpler rite, grown into a nightly performance for a city that now receives millions. But the thing it enacts is ancient and exact. The whole day at Kashi runs between two fires and one water: the sun that the bather greets at dawn as he rises from the river, and the lamps that the priests lift to the river at dusk, and, all day and all night in between, the pyres that never stop burning a little way upstream. The bath at first light and the offering of light at nightfall are the two ends of the city’s daily breath.

The stage of everything

And between those two ends, everything happens on the steps.

The ghats are where Kashi lives. The pilgrim bathes here, and the pandit teaches here under a palm umbrella, and the wrestler trains at the akhara at the top of the steps, and the boatman waits, and the widow prays, and the dead are carried down to the fire, and the children fly kites, and the buffalo wallow, and the sadhu sits in his ash, and the barber and the flower-seller and the pilgrim-priest all keep their patch of stone. It is the most concentrated stretch of human and sacred life anywhere in India, all of it pressed onto one long staircase between a crowded city and a moving river.

Even the sciences have their place on the steps. On the roof of the Man Mandir ghat, the palace-ghat that Raja Man Singh of Amber raised in the seventeenth century, stand the great stone instruments of a Jantar Mantar, an astronomical observatory, its huge sundials and sighting-arcs measuring the same heavens the pilgrims below are worshipping. A city that watches the stars and washes its soul on the same flight of steps is a city that has never drawn the line the modern world draws between the two.

The ghats, in the end, are the treatise’s whole argument in stone. They are a real place, honey-coloured and specific, and they are a diagram of the body of God. They are where the living come at dawn to be washed and where the dead come at dusk to be burned, the two faces of the city’s one promise laid side by side along a single riverbank. They are the outer stair, and they are the stations of an inner ascent. To walk them is to walk the city, and the self, and the body of the world, all at once.

But they are one thing seen from a distance and quite another walked closely, because each of those eighty-odd steps has its own name, its own legend, its own temple and its own life, and no two are alike. The crescent that reads as a single stage from a boat resolves, on foot, into a sequence of distinct and storied places, from the stream where a goddess flung her sword to the ghat where a poet wrote the most beloved book in north India to the fire that never goes cold. The next chapter walks them, one by one.