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Sleepy tourists follow singing pilgrims on the road to the Ganga. At this wee hour, a handful of pilgrims and vendors keep alive this road, which was a river of cycle rickshaws yesterday evening. The motley crowd takes a detour at one of the entrances to the Vishwanatha temple, the famed destination in Kashi aka Varanasi aka Banaras. Their bhajans will wake up the deity, Shiva. Then they will visit the nearby Sakshi Vinayak temple, where Ganesha keeps an attendance register for the devotees of his father.

Boundless faith, timeless city

Don Sebastian
2007-03-08 19:46:02

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harsh winter of northern India. Like rikshawallahs, most of the old oarsmen retire to a world of hunger and tuberculosis.

As Sampath rows downstream, the chilling black turns a pale gray. Traces of dawn appear beyond the eastern sandbank, where makeshift change rooms are built for the
occasional pilgrim. The vast river is drowned in mist, like the day when a sage mated with the oarswoman on a drifting boat, siring the legendary clan of Kauravas and Pandavas. The Ganga nurtured India's mythology and history. On its banks were the epics wrote. On its banks the mahajanapadas (city states) of the Iron Age flourished. Kashi was one among them.

Earthen lamps floating in the river are now dim. Sampath bows at the first sight of the red sun. So do the pilgrims at the ghats and in the river. A large group of Japanese tourists on a boat recite prayers with folded hands. They release fish to the Ganga. Sun, the first god, still presides over the Asian pantheon of deities. Pilgrims worship the sun and the mighty river with as much fear and reverence as Vishnu and Shiva, the gods of preservation and destruction respectively in the divine trinity of Hinduism.

Varanasi, 700 odd kilometers from New Delhi, is central to every pilgrim circuit. The ghats dotting the western bank of the Ganga are memorials of the patrons of faith. Every prince sought a space to build a ghat to immortalise his name. If you have money, build a ghat and be famous, Sampath tells me as he describes each of the ghats till the Malavya Bridge. In monsoon, the furious river conquers the ghats. We row past a leaning tower. Even now, the river is over 100 feet deep here, he tells me.

While some of the ghats resound with myths, most of the embankments bear the names of Maharajas of Jaipur, Udaipur, Gwalior, Indore and other princely states, who built it. Manikarnika, a burning ghat, is the last on a five-stop pilgrim itinerary that begins from Asi Ghat and covers Dasaswamedha, ...