A walk down the ghats

Seen from a boat, the crescent is one long stage. Walked on foot, it breaks into eighty-odd distinct places, each with a name, a legend, a temple, and a life of its own, no two alike. To know Kashi you have to walk them, and the walk has a direction. You go from south to north, from the head of the cosmic body toward its feet, upstream against nothing, because the river here is flowing north beside you. This is that walk, from the quiet southern end to the ancient northern edge, stopping at the ghats that matter most.

The southern steps

The walk begins at Assi Ghat, the southernmost of the great fords, where a small stream called the Asi trickles into the Ganga. The tradition gives the stream a fierce origin: here, it says, the goddess Durga flung down her sword, her asi, after slaying the demons Shumbha and Nishumbha, and where the blade fell the stream sprang up. At the confluence stands the linga of Asisangameshwar, and this is the head of the body of God and the starting point of the five-ford pilgrimage. In temper Assi is the youngest and most open stretch of the whole riverfront, the ghat of students and poets and long conversations, where in recent years a dawn programme of music and recitation called Subah-e-Banaras, “the morning of Banaras”, greets the rising sun with raga and lamp.

A little north lies Tulsi Ghat, and it carries one of the great names of the city, for here in the sixteenth century lived Goswami Tulsidas, the poet-saint who composed much of the Ramcharitmanas, the retelling of the Ramayana in the language of the people that became the most beloved devotional book of northern India. We will return to Tulsidas and his city of Rama in a later chapter, so mark the ghat and walk on, past the ancient sun-shrine of Lolark nearby where couples still come to pray for children, and past the spot where every autumn a boy dressed as Krishna leaps from an old tree into the river to dance on the head of the serpent Kaliya, in the beloved river-drama the city calls Nag Nathaiya.

Then Kedar Ghat, and a small miracle of sacred geography. Here stands Gauri-Kedareshwar, Shiva in the very form he wears at Kedarnath, the great shrine high in the Himalayas that most pilgrims can never reach. The tradition holds that the god brought his mountain form south to Kashi so that the poor and the old and the unfit could still have his darshan without the killing climb, and the precinct around the ghat, thick with South Indian devotees to this day, has the feel of a piece of the Himalayan south set down on the Ganges. Kedar governs the southernmost of the city’s three great zones, the Kedar Khanda, one prong of the trident, and its Gauri Kund is one of two places in Kashi that claim the title of the original Manikarnika, a reminder that in this city the holiest names are contested by more than one stone.

The heart of the crescent

Now the crescent turns grave, because the next ghat is a cremation ground. Harishchandra Ghat is the older of the city’s two burning places, and some call it Adi Manikarnika, the first Manikarnika. It carries the name of the king Harishchandra, an ancestor in the line of Rama, whose story is the tradition’s supreme parable of truth. To keep a vow he had made, Harishchandra gave up his kingdom, his wife, and his son, and sank so low that he took service at a cremation ground, collecting the fee for the wood, and there, in the pit of his testing, he was made to demand the burial fee even for his own dead child before the gods, satisfied at last with his unbreakable truthfulness, restored everything he had lost. To burn at Harishchandra Ghat is to be given to the fire on the ground where truth itself was proven past the edge of endurance. It is a working cremation ground still, and since the late 1980s an electric crematorium has stood beside the wood pyres, the modern and the ancient handling the dead side by side.

North of it opens the grandest ghat of all, Dashashwamedh, whose name we have already met: the ghat of the dasha-ashvamedha, the ten horse-sacrifices that Brahma is said to have performed here to welcome Shiva home in the days of Divodasa. The historian K. P. Jayaswal once proposed that the legend preserves a real event, ten great royal sacrifices staged by the Naga kings in the early centuries of the Common Era, and it is offered here as the scholarly guess it is. Whatever its origin, Dashashwamedh is the beating centre of the riverfront, the busiest and most crowded of the ghats by day, and at dusk the setting for the great Ganga aarti, the offering of lamps to the river we watched in the last chapter.

And then, a little further, the smoke thickens and never clears, because you have reached Manikarnika, the navel of the city and its supreme burning ground, where the pyres are said never to go cold. We stand here only for a moment, at the edge, because Manikarnika is not a stop on a walk. It is the heart of the whole treatise, and the next chapter is given entirely to it. Note the fires, and the stacks of wood rising in tiers up the ghat, and the families waiting, and walk on north, carrying the knowledge that you will come back.

The northern ghats

Past the burning ground the crescent grows older and quieter. Panchganga Ghat takes its name from a confluence the tradition counts as five rivers, though four of them are invisible now, sunk into legend, and only the Ganga remains to the eye. Above the ghat once rose the golden Vishnu temple of Bindu Madhav, one of the holiest Vaishnava shrines in the city, until it was destroyed under Aurangzeb in 1673 and the Alamgir mosque raised on the site, with a smaller temple rebuilt beside. This was the seat of the teacher Ramananda, and from his seat here ran the line of the great devotional reformers, Kabir and Ravidas among his spiritual heirs, whom we will follow when we come to the many faiths of the city. On the full moon of the month of Kartik the whole ghat fills with lamps.

A little north stands Scindia Ghat, built by the Maratha house of the Scindias around 1830, and famous for a building that should not be standing at all. The temple of Ratneshwar Mahadev leans out over the water at an impossible angle, half-submerged for much of the year, its spire tilted so far from true that photographs of it look doctored, the whole structure having settled and slumped into the soft riverbank under its own weight. The tradition holds this to be the ghat where Agni, the god of fire, was born, and it keeps a shrine to Vireshwar, the Lord of Heroes, to whom the childless have long come to pray for a son.

Then the palace-ghat of Man Mandir, with the great stone astronomical instruments of Raja Man Singh’s Jantar Mantar on its roof, the observatory we have already climbed to, watching the same sky the pilgrims below are worshipping.

And at last, at the far northern end where the little Varana river empties into the Ganga, the walk ends at Raj Ghat, and beside it the shrine of Adi Keshava, the “original Keshava”, one of the very few great temples of Vishnu in this most Shaiva of cities. The tradition holds that when Vishnu first came to Kashi, invited by Shiva, it was here that he set foot on its ground and washed his feet in the confluence, making this the Padodaka Tirtha, the ford of the water that touched the god’s feet. The image is fitting, for in the body of God laid along the river this northern point is the feet, and Vishnu’s first step falls exactly where the soles of the cosmic body rest. And it is fitting in another way too, because this northern plateau above the confluence is the oldest inhabited ground in all of Kashi, the place where the archaeologist’s spade found the early city three thousand years down. The walk that began at the head of God ends at his feet, on the oldest earth in the city, where a god once washed the dust of arrival from his own.

The crescent as a rosary

Turn and look back down the whole two-mile arc you have walked, and it reads now as what it is: a rosary of stories told in stone. The stream of Durga’s sword. The poet’s ghat and the boy who dances on the serpent. The Himalaya brought south for those who cannot climb. The king who kept his truth in the pit of a burning ground. Brahma’s ten sacrifices. The fires that never cool. The five sunken rivers and the destroyed golden temple. The leaning shrine that will not fall. The observatory reading the stars. And the oldest earth of all, where the feet of God came down. Each a bead, each a story, threaded on the one cord of the river.

We have now walked the length of the crescent and stood, twice, at the edge of the burning ground without entering it. That was deliberate. Manikarnika is the still centre of everything this city means, the place where creation and dissolution meet on a single step, and it needs the whole of a chapter to itself. It is time, at last, to walk down into it.