Chausatti Ghat

The temple of the sixty-four yoginis is the beating heart of Chausatti, and one of the last living witnesses in Kashi to one of the oldest cults of the subcontinent. The yoginis were goddesses of the tantric tradition — fierce, beautiful, and possessed of terrifying power — who appeared in circles of sixty-four, surrounding the Great Goddess at the centre of their mandala. They were worshipped not in ordinary temples but in open-air circular shrines, under the sky, where the goddesses themselves were believed to descend. Each yogini had her own name, her own face, her own animal vehicle and her own gift: some granted mastery of the elements, others the power of flight, others the art of healing, and all of them together formed the complete circle of the female divine. In the yogini cult, the Goddess was not a distant queen of heaven but an immediate presence, worshipped with secret mantras and offered blood and flesh in the old days, when the tradition was at the height of its power.

The yogini cult flourished between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, when temples to the sixty-four goddesses rose from Odisha to Madhya Pradesh, and Kashi was among the cities where the tradition ran deepest. The temple at Chausatti belongs to this family of shrines, and although its present form is simpler than the great circular temples of Hirapur or Bhedaghat, its sanctity is no less real to those who keep its faith. Here the yoginis are honoured as the guardians of the ghat and of the quarter around it, protectors who know every lane and every household, who watch over births and deaths, who can bless a barren womb and punish a broken vow. On certain nights of the year, the temple becomes the meeting point of the city's tantric tradition, and worshippers gather with offerings of flowers, vermilion, liquor and sweets — a survival, softened by the centuries, of the old rites that once made this spot famous across the whole of India.

For most modern worshippers the yoginis have merged into the great family of the Devi — they are understood as the many forms of the mother goddess, the sixty-four faces of one power that pervades the world. The fierce rites of the old days have given way to gentle ones; the offerings of blood have become offerings of red flowers and red cloth, the colour red still speaking of the goddess's ancient appetite for power. What has not changed is the sense of awe the yoginis inspire, and the belief that the circle of goddesses stands guard over Kashi as it has for a thousand years. To climb the steps of the temple and bow before the images, to see the vermilion on the threshold and the tiny lamps flickering in the dark sanctum, is to touch a living thread that runs from the tantric masters of the medieval age to the housewives of the modern mohalla, unbroken and still burning.

Kashi is the city of Shiva, but it is equally the city of the Goddess, and Chausatti is one of the places where that feminine face of the city shows itself most clearly. The old city is ringed with the shrines of the great goddesses: Annapurna, who feeds the world from her temple in the heart of the city; Vishalakshi, the wide-eyed one, whose shrine is counted among the fifty-one shakti pithas; Lalita, whose ghat lies nearby; and the yoginis of Chausatti, who stand in their circle above the northern steps. The goddess tradition of Kashi is as old as the city itself, and the Puranas record that Shiva could not bear to live in Kashi without the presence of the divine mother, so he placed her at the very centre of his city, and placed her fierce daughters in a ring around it.

The yoginis belong to the fiercest family of the goddess tradition. Unlike the gentle mother who feeds the world, they are the warriors and the healers, the goddesses who fight, who dance on the battlefield, who ride lions and tigers and stand upon corpses — images that are still carved on the walls of their temple, surviving from the centuries when the tantric rites were a dominant force in the religious life of India. In the old cosmology, the yoginis were believed to be the goddesses who consumed the offerings of the cremation ground, who walked among the ashes and the bones, who knew the secrets of both creation and destruction. To worship them was to embrace the whole of the divine feminine, the terrifying and the loving, the fierce and the fertile, the power that gives life and the power that takes it away.

This sacred feminine is woven into the daily life of the ghat in ways both visible and subtle. The women of the quarter run the households that open onto the ghat's lanes, and their devotion flows to the yogini temple in an unbroken stream of small offerings — a pinch of vermilion, a handful of flowers, a lamp lit at dusk. When a daughter is married, the family visits the temple; when a son is born, the temple receives the first offerings; when illness strikes, the yoginis are invoked with names that have been spoken on this spot for centuries. The goddess tradition of Kashi is not a museum piece here; it is a living faith, carried in the voices of the women who sing bhajans in the temple courtyard and in the quiet confidence with which the whole neighbourhood places itself under the protection of the mothers of Chausatti.

The daily life of Chausatti is the daily life of the river — work, worship and weather, all on the same stones. The boatmen are the ghat's first citizens: they arrive before dawn, untie their long wooden boats from the iron rings set in the steps, and set out into the grey water, ferrying pilgrims to the far bank, carrying loads of firewood and bricks, or simply fishing the slow current. In the middle of the day they sit on the lower steps, mending their nets, chewing paan, and arguing with a fine theatrical fury about the price of a crossing, while their sons dive from the moored boats with the perfect disregard for danger that only river children possess. The water itself is their office, their market and their temple, and they know every shift of its current the way a farmer knows his fields.

Around the bathers and boatmen moves the whole economy of a riverside quarter. Washermen beat the white cloth of the city on the stones, spreading it over the railings to dry; women scrub brass pots with sand at the water's edge; hawkers bring up baskets of vegetables and fish in the mornings, and by noon the upper steps are a small market of their own. Sadhus sit in the shade of the temple porch, reading and receiving offerings; children play cricket on the flat stones above the water; cows and goats wander down the lanes to drink. The tea stalls behind the ghat do a steady trade from first light, their little stoves glowing in the morning mist, and the smell of strong milk tea mixes with the smell of incense from the temple and smoke from the cremation ghats upstream — the whole life of Banaras compressed into a few hundred yards of stone.

What strikes the visitor most about Chausatti is how little its daily life has changed. The photographs taken here a century ago show the same steps, the same boats, the same laundry drying on the same railings, the same barefoot women carrying the same brass pots. The ghat has been rebuilt and repaired many times, but the pattern of life upon it is older than any of the stones, a rhythm that belongs to the river rather than to any age. The people of the quarter seem to know this too: they live their lives without self-consciousness, as if the visitor were not there, and that very indifference is a gift. To sit on the steps of Chausatti for an hour is to watch the oldest city on earth simply being itself — no performance, no welcome, no farewell, just the endless, tranquil traffic of human life on the banks of the Ganga.

Behind Chausatti rises the dense, secretive warren of the northern mohallas, some of the oldest neighbourhoods of the old city. The lanes here are narrow and uneven, paved with stone and lined with houses two and three centuries old, their facades covered in worn plaster, carved balconies and doorways that open onto sudden courtyards. Life in these lanes runs on a schedule of its own: the morning milk arrives by cart before the sun, the bread comes hot from the ovens of the small bakeries, and the women of the quarter move between their houses and the ghat with the confidence of people who have known every step of the way since childhood. Every lane has its shrine — a small Hanuman under a tree, a stone snake worshipped with milk, a tiny yogini image blackened with age — and every evening the lanes fill with the sound of bells and bhajans.

The mohalla around Chausatti is a working quarter, not a museum. Weavers, metalworkers, tailors and sweet-makers ply their trades in rooms that open directly onto the lanes; the brass pots that shine on the ghat in the morning are scoured and sold in these very alleys. The neighbourhood has its own rhythm of festivals and sorrows, its own elders who sit on the stone platforms outside the temples settling quarrels and arranging marriages, its own cycle of births, deaths and weddings that has turned here for centuries. This is the real Banaras — not the Banaras of the tourist map, but the city of families who have lived on these same streets for ten generations, who still draw their water from the same river, worship at the same shrines and bury their dead on the same ground where their ancestors were consigned to the Ganga.

Wandering these lanes, the visitor begins to understand how completely the ghat and the quarter belong to each other. The steps of Chausatti are not a monument approached from outside; they are the front courtyard of the neighbourhood, the place where the lane's life spills out onto the river. The temple of the yoginis is not a tourist site but the household deity of the whole mohalla, visited daily, swept daily, dressed and decorated by the women who consider it their own. In the afternoon the lanes cool under the high walls, the shops close for a while, and the quarter rests; in the evening it wakes again, the lights come on in the doorways, and the sounds of cooking and conversation drift down toward the water. For those who stay a night or two in the lodgings above the ghat, this living neighbourhood becomes the truest memory of Kashi — a city that is not a stage but a home.

The great festival of Chausatti is Navratri, the nine nights of the Goddess, when the yogini temple comes into its own. For nine nights the shrine glows with lamps and fills with worshippers, and the goddesses are honoured in all their forms — the fierce and the gentle, the warrior and the mother. The women of the quarter keep the ancient fast, the small girls of the neighbourhood are dressed and honoured as the goddess herself, and the temple courtyard resounds with bhajans and the ringing of bells late into the night. On the final night, the great Vijaya Dashami, the whole mohalla gathers at the ghat for the immersion of the images of Durga, and the river below the yogini temple carries the lights and the flowers of the departing goddess toward the sea. Navratri at Chausatti is the feminine faith of the city made visible, a festival in which the very name of the ghat becomes a celebration.

The yogini temple has its own special days through the year. On the nights of the new moon and the full moon, the tantric tradition of the ghat stirs again: the inner sanctum is opened, special offerings are made, and the older worshippers perform rites that have been handed down in their families for generations. Chausath Yogini Puja, the special worship of the sixty-four goddesses, is held with particular care at these times, when the yoginis are believed to be at their most powerful. In the old days these rites drew adepts from across India; today they are a family tradition of the quarter, kept alive by a handful of families who still know the old mantras and the old ways. On these nights the ghat is quiet and the temple is lit, and the visitor who happens to be present may witness something rare: a living survival of the tantric practice that once made this spot famous.

The other festivals of the year pass over the ghat in their eternal procession. At Kartik Purnima the whole northern riverfront glows with lamps, and Chausatti's share of the holy dip draws bathers from the surrounding mohallas, their voices rising in the morning air. Holi brings its own chaos of colour to the lanes behind the ghat; Diwali lights every doorway; the full moon of Magh brings the winter bathing festival, when the faithful sleep on the riverbank to begin their ablutions before dawn. Through all of them, the yogini temple stands above the steps, its goddesses presiding over the turn of the year with the same impassive power they have held for a thousand years. For the visitor, the simplest way to share in this life is to come at festival time and join the crowd on the ghat — not as a spectator but as a guest, welcomed by a city that has been welcoming pilgrims for more than two thousand years.

Chausatti is easy to reach and rewarding to visit, though it rewards those who come at the right hour. The ghat lies on the northern riverfront, about a kilometre and a half north of Dashashwamedh along the ghat road; the simplest approach is to take a cycle rickshaw or auto to Raj Ghat and walk the last few minutes south along the riverfront, or to walk the whole way from the centre if the morning is cool. By boat it is a pleasant run from the main ghats, and the boatmen of Dashashwamedh will take you there with a stop at the bridge on the way. The ghat is not on the main tourist circuit, and that is its charm: the walk itself, past the old ghats and temples of the northern quarter, is part of the experience.

The best time to visit is the early morning, between six and ten, when the bathing is at its height and the light is at its most beautiful; the afternoon sun is fierce, and the ghat, though never crowded, is at its quietest. October to March is the ideal season, with cool air and clear skies; the summer months are hot, and the monsoon brings the river high up the steps and the lanes muddy. Allow an hour for the ghat itself, and two or three if you plan to walk the northern chain — Raj Ghat, Lal Ghat, Panchganga — and return by boat. There is no entrance fee, no ticket, no timings to respect; the ghat is open and alive from before dawn until the last lamp is lit at night, and it asks nothing of the visitor but respect.

Chausatti is best combined with the other ghats of the north, and the day can be arranged as a single unhurried circuit. Start at sunrise at Raj Ghat beneath the Malviya Bridge, watch the city wake on the river, then walk south to Chausatti for the morning bath scene and the yogini temple. From there continue through Lal Ghat to Panchganga, where the five rivers are believed to meet, and end the morning with a boat ride back along the riverfront to the centre of the city. For those who wish to stay nearby, simple guesthouses and lodges are scattered through the lanes above the ghat, and the railway station is a short ride away. Whatever the route, the ghat asks one thing only of its visitors — that they come as pilgrims in spirit, with time on their hands and stillness in their hearts, and the old goddesses of the northern steps will do the rest.