Dawn on the Ghats of Varanasi: An Ordinary Morning
The famous photograph of Varanasi is taken at night — the priests at Dashashwamedh Ghat with their tiered brass lamps, the smoke, the crowd, the tourists on the boats. It is a genuine thing and it is worth seeing. But it is not the ghats. The ghats are a morning place, and on an ordinary weekday, well before that evening theatre, the river is doing something quieter and much older.
This is a plain account of what a morning here looks like. Not a festival day. Not a wedding season. Just a Tuesday.
Before five, the lanes are already moving
You come down to the water through the lanes, and the lanes wake before the river does. A milkman on a cycle. A man opening a tea stall by pouring the first kettle over the counter to clean it. Someone sweeping the stone. The famous Banarasi congestion — the cows, the scooters, the shop hoardings — has not yet started, so for one hour the old city belongs to the people who actually live in it.
Varanasi has eighty-four ghats, a line of stone steps running roughly six and a half kilometres along the western bank, from Assi Ghat in the south to Adi Keshava in the north. You do not walk all of them. You come down at one — most people come down near Dashashwamedh — and you turn and follow the river.
The boats push off first
The boatmen are the first workers of the day. By the time there is any grey in the sky at all, the long wooden rowing boats are already out, and the men are calling prices to the handful of early visitors in a tone that is bored rather than aggressive, because it is too early to bother.
If you sit on the steps and watch, you see the logic of the place. The river runs south to north here — one of the reasons the city is considered sacred, the Ganga briefly turning back toward its Himalayan source — so the whole eastern bank across the water is empty sandflat, deliberately left unbuilt. The sun, when it comes, comes up over that emptiness and hits the temples and the crumbling palaces on this side all at once. That is the thing the boatmen are selling: not a ride, but a seat facing the right direction at the right minute.
The bathers
While the boats drift, the steps fill. This is the part no photograph really captures, because it is not dramatic and it is not for you.
Men in wet dhotis. Women bathing carefully in their saris, which is a skill. Old people helped down the last slippery steps by a son or a grandson. Someone doing surya namaskar badly. A pandit sitting under a bamboo umbrella with his ledgers and his little brass pots, waiting for the families who will come to him. Widows in white. A group of young men who have clearly come straight from a night out and are treating the holiest river in the country as a place to sober up, which, to be fair, it also is.
Down at Assi Ghat, at the southern end, there is a more organised version of the morning — a programme called Subah-e-Banaras, "morning of Banaras," where students and visitors gather for sunrise yoga, classical music and prayers on the ghat. It is lovely and it is real, but it is a curated morning. The ghats I am describing are the uncurated ones in between, where nobody has arranged anything.
Manikarnika, which does not sleep
Walk north long enough and the mood changes. You smell it before you see it — woodsmoke, constant, particular. This is Manikarnika, the great cremation ghat, and it is the one place on the river that keeps no schedule at all. The fires here are said never to go out. On an ordinary morning there will be several burning, tended by the Dom families whose work this has been for generations, while stacked firewood is weighed on enormous scales above.
You do not photograph this. You do not linger and stare. You slow down, you are quiet, and you keep walking. But you also do not look away, because the entire logic of the city is standing right there in front of you: people come to Kashi to die, or to bring their dead, because to be cremated here is believed to release the soul. The bathers upstream and the fires downstream are not two different cities. They are the same idea, an hour apart on the same steps.
Up the lanes to the temple
Turn away from the river and climb back into the galis, and after a few minutes of the tightest lanes in India you reach the reason most pilgrims came: the Kashi Vishwanath temple.
Its history is a lesson in patience. The shrine that stands today was built in 1780 by Ahilyabai Holkar, the Maratha queen of Indore, on a site beside where an older temple had been demolished more than a century before. In 1835 Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Sikh empire gave roughly a tonne of gold to plate its spire and domes — which is why the tower catches the first sun the way it does. More recently the cramped approach was cleared into a wide corridor down to the river, opened at the end of 2021, so that for the first time in centuries you can see the temple and the Ganga in a single line of sight.
In the month of Shravan, which we are in now, the queue up to this temple is at its longest of the year. Every Monday of Shravan, Kashi Vishwanath — one of the twelve Jyotirlinga shrines of Shiva, and the one my own family named an incense stick after in our workshop back in Samastipur — draws lines that fold back through the lanes for hours. On an ordinary Tuesday it is calmer, but even now it starts early, and the smell of the queue is the smell I grew up with: crushed marigold, wet stone, camphor, and the particular sweetness of agarbatti burning in a dozen little shops selling coconut, cloth and flowers to people waiting their turn.
By nine, it is only a city again
That is the strange thing about the ghats. The sacred hour has a hard edge. By nine the light has gone flat and white, the day's heat has arrived, the tour groups are being marched down in matching caps, the boatmen have switched to their daytime prices, and Varanasi becomes what it also is — a loud, crowded, difficult north Indian city with terrible traffic and wonderful food.
But if you were down there at five, you saw the other thing. You saw a few thousand people do, without ceremony and without an audience, exactly what people have done on these same steps for longer than anyone can date — wash, pray, mourn, sell tea, push off a boat, and watch the sun come up over an empty far bank.
You do not need to believe any of it to be moved by it. You only have to be there before the crowd, and be quiet, and let the river get on with its morning.
