Varanasi Ghats Guide: Which 10 Ghats Matter for Pilgrims

The Southern Ghats: Where the City Breathes

1. Assi Ghat

The southernmost of the major ghats, at the confluence where the small Assi river once met the Ganges. Tradition holds that the poet-saint Tulsidas died here in 1623, and pilgrims performing the Panchatirthi Yatra — the circuit of five crossing-places — begin at Assi. It is also, frankly, where modern Varanasi relaxes: students from Banaras Hindu University, morning yoga classes, chai stalls. The Subah-e-Banaras ceremony at dawn is a recent invention (it began in 2014), but the sunrise itself is not, and Assi is the easiest place to board a boat without the crush of Dashashwamedh.

2. Tulsi Ghat

A few hundred metres north, and named for Tulsidas, who lived here in the late 16th century while composing the Ramcharitmanas — the Hindi retelling of the Ramayana that most North Indian Hindus know better than the Sanskrit original. His house still stands above the ghat, and his wooden sandals and a manuscript are kept there. The Ramlila performance tradition he founded, still staged in Varanasi every autumn, is inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Tulsi Ghat is quiet most of the year. I sat here for an hour one January morning and shared it with two bathers and a dog.

3. Harishchandra Ghat

The smaller of the two cremation ghats, named for King Harishchandra, who in legend gave up his kingdom, his family, and finally his own dignity rather than tell a lie, and ended his trial working as a cremation-ground attendant on this spot. Some families consider it the older and more meritorious of the two burning ghats. It is less visited than Manikarnika and, in my experience, a more composed place to sit with the reality of what happens here. An electric crematorium was added in the 1980s; the wood pyres continue alongside it.

Skip this one — and Manikarnika below — if you know that open-air cremation will distress you. There is no shame in that, and the mourners owe you nothing. The ghats are not a test.

The Central Stretch: The Ritual Heart

4. Kedar Ghat

You cannot miss it: the Kedareshwar temple above the steps is painted in broad red-and-white vertical stripes, the marking of South Indian Shaiva tradition. The lingam inside is held to be a natural outcrop, self-manifested rather than installed, and the ghat draws a strong Bengali and Tamil pilgrim community. Kedar Ghat at 6 am is one of the best places on the river to watch ritual bathing done unselfconsciously, by people for whom it is simply Tuesday.

5. Munshi Ghat

Built in 1912 by Sridhara Narayana Munshi, a finance minister of the Nagpur estate, and later extended by the Darbhanga royal family — the massive Greco-Indian palace looming above it is now a hotel. Munshi has no major shrine and no famous ritual, which is exactly why I include it: it is a calm, uncrowded place to board a boat, take a breath between the intensity of Kedar and Dashashwamedh, or photograph the architecture of the riverfront without fifty other cameras in frame.

6. Dashashwamedh Ghat

The main ghat. The name means "ten-horse sacrifice," from the myth that Brahma performed the ashvamedha rite here ten times over. Whatever its origins, it is now the ceremonial centre of the riverfront, and every evening at sunset seven priests perform the Ganga Aarti — a synchronised offering of fire, incense, and conch blasts to the river as goddess. The ceremony in its current staged form is over a century old and happens daily, in every season, regardless of weather or crowd. I watched the aarti from a boat 50 metres out and it was the right call: from the water you see the whole line of flame-bearing priests at once, mirrored in the river, rather than the back of someone's head. I have written a full account in my Ganga Aarti guide, including where to sit if you prefer the steps.

7. Man Mandir Ghat

Just north of Dashashwamedh, built around 1600 by Raja Man Singh of Amber (Jaipur), whose sandstone palace still fronts the river with some of the finest carved balconies in the city. A century and a quarter later, Sawai Jai Singh II added a Jantar Mantar on the roof — a masonry observatory of the same family as the famous ones in Jaipur and Delhi, with instruments for tracking the sun and stars. It is open to visitors for a small fee and almost always empty. The juxtaposition is very Banarasi: precise 18th-century astronomy stacked directly above the oldest continuous religious theatre on earth.

The Northern Ghats: Death and the Long Memory

8. Manikarnika Ghat

The great cremation ground, the mahashmashana. Hindu tradition holds that the fires here have not gone out in living memory — the sacred flame kept by the Dom community is said to be thousands of years old, and cremation on this spot is attested in texts going back well over a millennium, with the site's ritual use likely far older. To die in Kashi and be cremated at Manikarnika is, for many Hindus, to attain moksha: release from the cycle of rebirth. Some 80 to 100 cremations take place daily. The atmosphere is not mournful in the way outsiders expect; it is brisk, matter-of-fact, wood-smoke and logistics. Watch from a respectful distance, keep your camera down — photography of the pyres is genuinely forbidden — and refuse anyone offering a "special viewing area" in exchange for a donation toward firewood. That request is a script, and the money does not buy wood.

9. Scindia Ghat

Immediately adjoining Manikarnika, and my favourite illustration of the riverfront's instability. When the ghat was rebuilt around 1830 by the Scindia rulers of Gwalior, its masonry proved so heavy that the whole structure began sliding into the river, and a Shiva temple at the water's edge now stands permanently tilted, half-submerged, like a ship going down at anchor. Above the ghat lies Siddha Kshetra, a warren of lanes dense with shrines, where Agni, god of fire, is said to have been born. After the smoke of Manikarnika, Scindia is oddly serene.

10. Panchganga Ghat

The northern anchor of the pilgrim circuit, where five rivers — the Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati, Kirana, and Dhutapapa — are believed to converge, the latter four invisibly. This was where the 16th-century weaver-poet Kabir is said to have tricked the Brahmin teacher Ramananda into initiating him, by lying on the steps in the pre-dawn dark. Rising directly above the ghat is the Alamgir Mosque, built in the 17th century under Aurangzeb on the foundations of the great Bindu Madhava temple. Hindus still worship at a small replacement shrine beside it; Muslims still pray in the mosque above. Five hundred years of contested, shared, stubborn coexistence, stacked vertically on one staircase. Nowhere else on the river compresses the city's history so tightly. During Kartik (October–November), pilgrims hang akash-deep — sky lamps in baskets on tall bamboo poles — to light the way for ancestors.