Bundi Parakota Ghat

The town of Bundi lies in the Hadoti region of south-eastern Rajasthan, tucked into the hills of the Aravalli range, and for five centuries it was the capital of a proud Rajput state. Its fame rests on the fortress of Taragarh that crowns the hill above the town, on the jade-green palace of Garh that rises from its water tank, and on the Raniji ki Baori, a stepwell so ornamented with carved pillars and niches that it is counted among the finest in all India. Bundi was a court of painters and poets, and its miniature paintings, with their dreamy washes of indigo and gold, are treasured in museums around the world. To say that this small hill town gave its name to a landing on the Ganga in faraway Varanasi is to tell a story of how India's regions travelled with their people.

The roads between Rajasthan and the Gangetic plain have always carried pilgrims as well as goods. Marwari merchants from the west ran counting houses in the cities of the east, Rajput noblemen served emperors and nawabs across the Gangetic basin, and priests and traders from the Rajput states made their way to Kashi, the holiest city in the land, to bathe, to study and to die. It is part of the genius of Banaras that every region of India has left its trace on the riverfront, and the habit of naming a ghat after a faraway home is an old one: the city's stones carry the names of kings, queens, temples and towns from every corner of the subcontinent. The modest building behind Bundi Parakota, with its Rajasthani proportions, is the visible remnant of that migration — a small piece of Hadoti lodged in the heart of Kashi.

What remains of the old Bundi connection today is memory more than stone. The community that built the ghat has long since dispersed into the city, and the building behind the landing is no longer the busy seat of a merchant guild, yet the name has never been forgotten. Generations of boatmen, bathers and lane-dwellers have passed the name on, and today it is spoken without any sense of strangeness, as naturally as the names of the great ghats themselves. The town of Bundi, far away in the Aravalli hills, may know nothing of its name on the Ganga, but in Varanasi the two places are joined forever in a single word — a reminder that in this city of eternal memory, even a quiet landing keeps the story of a distant home alive.

Long before the sun clears the rooftops of the old city, the first bathers are already at Bundi Parakota. They come down the lanes with brass pots balanced on their heads, with bundles of wet clothes, with children half-awake and clinging to their mothers' hands — the same procession that has descended to the Ganga at this spot for centuries. The bathing itself is unhurried and untheatrical: the triple immersion, the cupped hands raising water toward the rising sun, the whispered mantras, the offering of marigold flowers and rice that floats away on the current. There is no priest chanting over the bathers here, no photographer's flash; the ritual belongs entirely to the bather and the river, and the ghat's quiet makes that privacy complete.

For the residents of the surrounding mohalla, this is not a spectacle but a necessity of the day, like drawing water or lighting the stove. Old men come for the health of the body and the peace of the mind, women bring brass pots to carry home holy water, and on the days of the new moon and the full moon the numbers swell as families arrive to bathe for the ancestors. The virtue of a minor ghat is precisely this: with no crowds and no ceremony, the bathing is the ancient rite in its purest form, performed not for display but for the soul. Many of the old residents say they have bathed here every morning of their lives, and that the river at this landing has never once failed to answer them.

Visitors who are willing to rise early will find the ghat at its best in the first hour of light. The water is still and golden, the smoke of the burning ghats drifts thin and far away, and the only sounds are the splash of immersion, the slap of wet cloths on stone, and the murmur of prayers. Some travellers join the bathing themselves, and they are received with the easy courtesy of the neighbourhood — a shared diya of ghee, a handful of flowers, a nod of welcome. It is one of those small experiences of Varanasi that no guidebook can quite convey: to stand in the cold Ganga at a nameless landing while the city wakes around you, and to feel that you have taken part in the oldest ritual of this river in the plainest, most honest way possible.

From the steps of Bundi Parakota, the Ganga presents herself in her middle course — wide, slow and silver-brown, with the far sandbanks of the other shore lying low on the horizon. Looking upstream, the eye travels along the chain of ghats that climbs toward the old city's heart; looking downstream, the river curves away past the rooftops and temple spires toward the southern reaches of the crescent. The view is the riverfront in its ordinary, unmagnificent truth: boats moving in slow lines, the opposite bank a pale strip of sand and green, and above everything the enormous sky that Kashi has always kept above its water. There is no panorama here that postcards sell, but there is what the postcards cannot sell — the river as she is lived with, hour by hour, from a landing that asks nothing of her but what she gives.

The river traffic is a spectacle in itself. Long wooden ferryboats cross from the ghats with passengers and bicycles; small canoes dart between the moorings with vegetables or laundry; a paddle steamer passes far out on the current, trailing its wake; and at dawn the rowers of the temple boats pull steadily toward the sun with their pilgrims, the oars flashing in the first light. In the monsoon the river rises until the lower steps vanish and the water laps at the landing's upper edge, and the same stretch that was a sandy margin in summer becomes a broad brown flood; in winter the morning mist lies over the water so thickly that the opposite shore disappears and the boats emerge out of the fog like ghosts, rowing by the sound of the temple bells alone.

At evening the view turns inward. The sun sets behind the old city, the water takes the colour of brass, and the lamps begin to appear — a diya on a boat's prow, a string of lights on a temple across the way, the cold flicker of the burning ghats far upstream. The river at Bundi Parakota never puts on a show, yet there is no hour when it does not reward a patient watcher: the flight of birds at dusk, the reflection of a full moon broken into coins of light, the silent passage of a night ferry with a single lantern. In the end, what the ghat gives the visitor is the river herself, in the form she takes when no one is performing for anyone — the Ganga as an everyday presence, immense, unhurried, and utterly at peace.

Bundi Parakota belongs to the long chain of the southern riverfront, and its nearest landmark on the stretch is the ghat of Ahilyabai — the ghat of Rani Ahilyabai Holkar, the eighteenth-century queen of Indore, who did more for the riverfront of Varanasi than almost any other ruler. Widowed young, she governed her kingdom with extraordinary skill and devoted her wealth to sacred works; she rebuilt and restored ghats and temples across India, and in Kashi her name is remembered with reverence, for it was she who gave many of the ancient landings their present stone form. The stretch of riverfront that carries her name lies close to Bundi Parakota, and the two ghats are companions in the same quiet stretch of the crescent — one bearing the name of a queen, the other the name of a distant town, both of them resting points along the same unbroken walk.

Beyond Ahilyabai, the riverfront continues its unhurried course. The neighbouring landings are themselves minor ghats, most of them simple flights of steps with a temple or two behind them, each with its own small world of bathers and boatmen; further along, the chain quickens and broadens toward the great ghats of the south, where the crowds and the colour return. Walking this stretch in the early morning, when the mist lies on the water and the bells begin, is one of the finest promenades in Varanasi — the river on one hand, the old city on the other, and almost no one else about. The distance between the ghats is short, and the traveller who follows the steps from one landing to the next will see the riverfront in the gradual, varied way it was meant to be seen.

The position of Bundi Parakota makes it an excellent base for exploring this part of the riverfront. From the ghat, a boat can carry the visitor north to the great bathing ghats and the temples of the old city, or south along the crescent past Ahilyabai toward the quieter reaches; the lanes behind lead in a few minutes' walk to the main roads, where cycle-rickshaws and taxis wait. The old city's most famous sights — the Kashi Vishwanath temple, the bazaars, the great cremation ghats — all lie within a modest distance, and returning to the calm of Bundi Parakota at the end of the day is like coming home to a quieter room in a busy house. For the traveller who wants the old city and the river both, without the noise of either at its loudest, this ghat and its neighbours make a perfect centre.

The devotion of Bundi Parakota is the devotion of everyday life, and for that very reason it is among the most moving things on the riverfront. The small shrines of the quarter are the first signs: the roadside Shiva lingam washed and garlanded at dawn, the Hanuman of the wall niche with a fresh smear of vermilion, the tulsi plant on its raised platform before every house, watered each morning by the hand of a woman who does not think of it as worship but simply as what the day requires. The men who descend to the ghat with folded hands, the women who pour a little water toward the river before they fill their pots, the boatman who touches his boat before launching it — all of them perform their faith the way they breathe, without ceremony and without audience.

The river is the great temple of this faith, and the rites at the water's edge are the rites of the old religion in their plainest form. On the days of the moon's phases, families come to offer tarpan to their ancestors — sesame seeds and water trickled through the fingers, prayers for the departed murmured toward the sun. On the festivals of the year the quarter keeps its own calendar: the lamps of Kartik are floated on little leaf boats, the swings of the rain festivals go up in the lanes, and on the great days of the winter months the ghat fills quietly with families who have walked down to bathe before the temple visits of the afternoon. None of this is staged for visitors, and none of it notices them; it is the faith of the city going about its oldest work.

For the visitor, this unselfconscious piety is a rare gift, because it shows the religion of Varanasi as it is lived rather than performed. There is no ceremony here that exists for the sake of being watched; there is only the ancient habit of a people who have always brought their small joys and sorrows to the river. A woman praying for a son's return, a man thanking the Ganga for a harvest sold in the market, a child given a name at the water's edge — these are the transactions of this ghat, and they are as real as the stone of the steps. To be present at them, quietly and without intrusion, is to touch the reason Kashi has been holy for three thousand years: not its monuments and its miracles, but this unbroken conversation between the people and the river.

Reaching Bundi Parakota is easy from almost anywhere in the old city. A walk along the riverfront from the great ghats of the south takes barely half an hour, following the steps from one landing to the next past Ahilyabai Ghat; from the main road, a cycle-rickshaw or taxi will drop the visitor at the head of the lanes behind the ghat, from which the river is a few minutes' walk downhill. For those arriving by water, boatmen at any of the major ghats will row across or along the river to the landing for a modest fare, and this is the most pleasant approach of all, giving the ghat its proper first sighting from the Ganga itself. There is no entry fee and no gate; the riverfront is open to everyone at all hours.

The best time to visit is early morning, between first light and nine, when the bathing is at its height and the day is still cool; the evening, around sunset, is the second golden hour, when the boatmen return and the lamps come out. Between October and March the climate is mild and the light is beautiful; in April and May the heat is fierce but the ghat is almost empty, which some travellers find even more peaceful; and in the monsoon months the river rises and the lower steps vanish, an extraordinary sight in itself. Avoid the early morning of festival days only if crowds bother you, though even then the ghat remains calmer than the great ones. Whatever the season, a hat, water and modest clothing complete the visitor's kit.

A visit to the ghat combines naturally with the riverfront of the southern crescent. The famous ghats of the old city lie within a short walk or boat ride, the Kashi Vishwanath temple and the great bazaars of the old city are close behind, and the quieter reaches around Ahilyabai Ghat reward those who walk a little further. The lanes behind the ghat offer small tea stalls and sweet shops for a pause, and the boatmen can arrange sunrise trips that return along this stretch at the most beautiful hour of the day. Bundi Parakota asks nothing of the visitor but a little time; given that, it gives back the rarest thing in Varanasi — the sight of the holy city at rest, seen from a quiet corner of its oldest street, the riverfront itself.