Chet Singh Ghat

Chet Singh Ghat is one of the most romantic and least crowded of all the ghats of Varanasi, a hidden, fortress-like landing that stands midway along the great crescent of stone steps that curves with the Ganga. While the crowded name-ghats of the south draw the pilgrim crowds, this northern stretch of the riverfront keeps a quieter, stranger character. Here the river wall is crowned not by temple spires alone but by the massive silhouette of the Chet Singh Fort, a great crenellated palace that gazes down over the water as if it still expected an enemy fleet to appear around the bend. The river here is wide and the old city falls away behind the ramparts, so that the fort seems to stand alone above the water, keeping its own counsel. Everything about the place whispers of defence and defiance.

This ghat is tied to one of the most dramatic chapters of Varanasi history, the collision between the last great Raja of Banaras and the British East India Company. In 1781 the fort above the landing was the scene of an arrest, a rebellion and an escape that left the Governor-General of India humiliated and made the Raja a folk hero across northern India. The stone of its walls still shows the pockmarks of the August cannonade, and old men in the lanes still tell the story of that day as though it happened last monsoon. Yet the visitor who arrives today finds no battlefield. Instead there is a placid stretch of river, a cluster of bobbing boats, a half-abandoned palace with peacocks on its terraces, and the feeling of having stepped through a gap in time into an older, prouder Varanasi.

To walk down the steep lane to the ghat, or to approach it by boat along the water, is to enter a different world from the tourist bazaar. Fishermen mend their nets on the platforms, boatmen nap in the shade of the fort walls, and the only music is the river lapping against the stones. From the water the landing looks almost Italianate, its weathered terraces stepping down to the current, and it is easy to understand why filmmakers and artists seek it out at every hour of the day. The ghat is a favourite of photographers and of travellers who have grown weary of crowds, drawn by its grand decay and by the memory of a king who dared to say no to an empire. It remains, in every sense, the rebel ghat of Kashi, a place to sit, to breathe, and to let the river do the talking.

In August 1781 Warren Hastings travelled to Banaras in person, determined to break Chet Singh. The Raja was summoned to his own fort on the fifteenth of August, where Hastings and the British Resident, Mr Markham, awaited him with a guard of sepoys. Chet Singh came, but when he refused to surrender his person and his treasure, Hastings ordered his arrest. At the same instant, in a pre-arranged signal, a distant gun was fired, and the Raja's followers — a fierce body of armed men who had been hiding in the palace and the lanes around the ghat — burst out from every door. The British sepoys found themselves surrounded and cut down where they stood, while Hastings himself barely escaped with his life through a window and down to the river.

In the confusion Chet Singh, who had been held in an inner room, made his legendary escape. With a handful of loyal men he slipped out by a secret stairway and a narrow passage that ran down through the fort's walls toward the river, emerging at the water's edge below the ghat. A boat was waiting, and as the shots and cries echoed above him the Raja pushed off into the Ganga and vanished downstream. He crossed to the far bank and fled overland toward the safety of Gwalior, where the Maratha prince Mahadji Scindia offered him refuge and gave him the dignity of an honoured guest in exile. The people of Banaras say that the very river that fed and blessed the city had risen to carry their king away.

The aftermath was savage. Hastings, who had escaped the fort through a window and fled by boat to a village downstream, returned with troops and put the city to ransom. Banaras was looted, hundreds were executed, and the Raja's brother was made the new ruler on humiliating terms. But the memory of the escape endured, and the fort above the ghat kept its name and its story. To this day boatmen point to the passage in the wall and tell of the king who slipped from the grip of the British in the space of a single monsoon evening, and visitors stand on the very steps where the secret door once opened to wonder at the speed and daring of that flight.

The architecture of Chet Singh Ghat is that of a defensive river palace, and every element of it speaks the language of power. The ramparts that crown the fort walls are not decoration but real battlements, designed for archers and musketeers to fire from behind stone teeth. Heavy round bastions bulge out at the corners, their curved faces built to deflect cannonballs, and loopholes pierce the lower walls so that defenders could rake the river approaches with fire. The ghat steps themselves are part of the defence: broad and slow near the water, they narrow and rise steeply toward the gate, forcing any attacker into a killing corridor. Standing at the landing and studying these details, one understands why the British found the fort so hard to storm.

Yet the fort is equally a work of beauty. The stone is local chunar sandstone, carved with the elaborate brackets and mouldings of eighteenth-century Indian palace craft, and where the plaster has fallen away the masonry shows the precision of the builders. Small shrines sit within the complex — modest temples to Shiva and other deities, with their own little towers — evidence that this was not a barracks but a king's home, complete with its private gods. Doorways are framed with carved lintels, the great gate is decorated with bold relief work, and even the ruined chambers retain the grace of their original proportion. The same hand that built the cannon platforms also built the altars, and both survive the centuries with equal dignity.

What makes the fort so striking is the way it combines both faces without contradiction. It was built at a moment when the Banaras Raj had to be both a court and a fortress, a place of ceremony and a refuge in war. Standing at the water's edge and looking up, the visitor sees a building that is at once a palace and a citadel, beautiful and forbidding. The broad platform at the top of the ghat, where the Raja kept his guard, is still the best place to study the whole composition — the stairways, the bastions, the gate — and to appreciate how completely the stone, the river and the history belong to one another. Every arch and angle of the building tells the same story, of a kingdom that was both a temple and a sword.

Chet Singh Ghat has always been, first of all, a place of boats. In the eighteenth century the landing was a working port for the Banaras Raj, a place where grain boats and salt boats and travellers' barges tied up beneath the fort, unloading their cargoes up the steep stone stairs. Today the traffic is quieter but the tradition lives on: this is a favoured mooring for the boatmen of the northern ghats, who bring their wooden craft here to rest out of the current, their oars slung, their hulls rising and falling gently on the river's swell. Whole families of boatmen live within the shadow of the fort, and a child born on these steps learns to row before he learns to write.

Fishermen too make the ghat their own. Nets are strung between poles at the water's edge, drying in the sun, and in the early morning the catch is sorted on the stone platforms — glittering piles of small silver fish that will be carried into the lanes of the city and sold by the basket. The wide reach of river before the ghat is ideal for fishing, deep enough for big nets yet sheltered from the strongest current, and the men who work it know every eddy and sandbank between here and the far bend. Theirs is a life that would be recognisable to their ancestors of a thousand years ago, and in their patience and skill there is a continuity as old as Kashi itself.

For the traveller, the boats of Chet Singh are an invitation. From this quiet landing one can hire a boat for the classic northern cruise, drifting upriver past the ghats of Bhonsale, Ganga Mahal and Panchganga to the confluence at Raj Ghat, or simply push out into midstream to watch the fort from the water, where it looks its most imposing — a great stone ship riding at anchor above the river. Evening brings the boats home in a straggling line, silhouettes dipping their oars, and the landing fills with the low murmur of voices and the smell of cooking fires, the day's work done on the doorstep of an old king. It is the oldest commerce of the city, still going about its business beneath the rebel's walls.

Chet Singh Ghat has a reputation among photographers and painters that most ghats of Varanasi would envy: it is widely considered the finest sunset point on the entire riverfront. The reason is the fort. As the sun sinks behind the western horizon, the great mass of the palace is thrown into a perfect silhouette, every crenellation and bastion etched in black against a sky that runs through gold, rose, orange and violet by turns. The river catches the colour and mirrors it back, and the boats moored below the fort become dark cut-outs floating on fire. No camera, say the old boatmen, has ever truly captured the moment, which is why they never tire of watching it.

The daily ritual of the sunset draws a small, unhurried audience. Couples arrive on hired boats and sit facing the west in silence; photographers set up their tripods on the platforms; a few sadhus perform their evening worship on the water's edge, their lamps flickering in the growing dusk. There is a particular hush that settles on the ghat at this hour, as if the whole city has paused to watch the day end. The boatmen, who have seen this spectacle ten thousand times, still stop their rowing and turn their faces to the west like everyone else — a tradition of wonder that passes from father to son on these very steps. The last aarti of the day begins somewhere far off, its bells drifting down the water.

The sunset here is also the hour of stories. In the long twilight the boatmen tell the tale of the fort again — the arrest, the secret passage, the flight downriver — and the history becomes inseparable from the light. When the last colour drains from the sky and the fort turns black against the stars, the lamps of the far bank begin to glow along the Ramnagar shore, and the ghat settles into its night-time calm. It is the moment the traveller will remember above all others from Banaras, the image of the rebel king's home burning against the dying day, and the surest proof that the city's beauty is not in its monuments alone but in the marriage of stone, water and light.

Chet Singh Ghat is a lived-in place, not a stage set, and a visitor who treats it with courtesy will find the neighbourhood generous in return. The first rule is simply to be gentle with the space: the fort precincts are partly in private or institutional use, and while the lower ramparts and courtyards are generally open, it is both polite and safe to ask before wandering into the more residential parts of the complex. A smile, a folded hands greeting, and a few words of halting Hindi open doors that no fee could ever buy. The people who live here are proud of their ghat, and they respond to genuine interest with remarkable warmth.

Photography deserves particular care. On the ghat itself and on the open platforms, photographing the architecture, the river and the general scene is welcome and there is no need to feel shy. But the fort houses people who live there, and the neighbourhood includes private homes and, nearby, the roads used by funeral processions. Photographing residents without permission, or aiming a lens at a funeral cortege, is deeply intrusive in Banarasi culture and can cause real distress. The courteous approach is to ask first, accept a refusal with grace, and to put the camera down entirely when the mood of the moment asks for it. The finest photographs of the ghat are taken with permission and patience, not with surprise.

A few further courtesies complete the picture. As with all ghats, be alert to touts and self-appointed guides who may offer incense, blessings or inflated boat prices; a firm but friendly refusal is the best defence. Wear modest clothing, remove shoes before any small shrine, and never refuse a blessing offered by a sadhu — accept it and give a small offering if you wish. And finally, remember that this is a place of history and of people living their daily lives; treat the ruins as you would any temple, and the residents as you would your own neighbours. To arrive with respect is to leave with the deepest memory the ghat has to offer.