Scindia Ghat

Scindia Ghat is one of the most striking sights on the entire riverfront of Varanasi, and the first ghat that many visitors photograph from a boat. It stands roughly at the centre of the great crescent of stone steps, its long terraces rising in gentle tiers from the water to a ridge of old palaces and temples. Its name is a reminder of a forgotten royal patronage, for this landing was built under the protection of the Scindia or Shinde family, the Maratha rulers of Gwalior, whose banner flew over Kashi in the early nineteenth century. Yet what makes the ghat unforgettable is not its size or its history alone. It is the extraordinary spectacle of a tall Shiva temple leaning sharply to one side, as if the earth itself had tilted beneath it, its shikhara half swallowed by the slow brown water of the Ganga.

The tilted temple gives the ghat an air of the fantastic, a picture that belongs on a painter canvas rather than in the middle of a bustling holy city. Pilgrims and travellers stand on the steps for long minutes simply staring at it, watching the current slide around the submerged masonry and trying to measure the impossible angle of the tower. Around it, the ghat continues its ordinary life — boatmen shout and bargain, sadhus sit cross-legged with their begging bowls, washerwomen beat clothes on flat stones, and cows pick their way between the sleeping pilgrims. The oddity of the leaning shrine sits perfectly within this everyday confusion, and after a little while it begins to feel less strange than the fact that nothing else in Kashi seems to be standing perfectly straight either.

For the visitor arriving for the first time, Scindia Ghat rewards patience. Come early, climb to the top of the terraces, and the ghat reveals itself as a complex little world — a working boatyard, a place of worship, a staging area for the cremation ghats to the south, and above all a vantage point from which the whole sweep of the Varanasi riverfront can be seen at a single glance. This guide follows the ghat through its history, its temples, its boats and its daily rhythms, and finishes with practical advice on how to reach it and what to look for when you are there.

Scindia Ghat was built in the middle decades of the nineteenth century under the patronage of the Scindia family, the Maratha dynasty that ruled the kingdom of Gwalior from their great fort city far to the south-west. The ghat creation is credited especially to Maharani Baiza Bai, the widow of Daulat Rao Scindia, one of the most formidable women of her age. After her husband death she travelled extensively across India, managing alliances and endowments with a political skill that impressed the British East India Company itself. When she passed through Kashi in the 1830s she found the riverfront in need of a grand new landing worthy of her family, and she devoted money and energy to building the ghat that bears the Scindia name.

The Maratha connection to Varanasi ran much deeper than one building project. For two generations, the Maratha confederacy had regarded Kashi as a second capital of their culture — a city of learning, pilgrimage and law where their queens came to bathe, their generals came to make offerings, and their bankers maintained palaces. The Peshwas of Pune patronised the ghats heavily, and the Maharaja of Gwalior kept his own riverside palace at Scindia Ghat, a long building of balconies and carved windows that still stands above the terraces today. For the Scindias, patronising Kashi was an act of piety, politics and prestige all at once: it announced that the rulers of Gwalior were protectors of the holiest city in India.

The riverfront of the ghat thus grew into a small Scindia quarter. The palace guarded the crest of the terraces, the new stone steps ran down to the water, and a chain of small temples and rest houses followed. Though the family power declined in the twentieth century, their imprint on this corner of Kashi never faded. The great floods and the slow rising of the Ganga tested the construction, and the famous temple at the water edge sank into the silt, but the palace above kept its dignity, and the ghat kept its name. Standing on the steps today, with the palace behind and the tilted tower below, one can still feel the presence of the proud Maratha house that decided, two centuries ago, to build its monument beside the holiest river in the world.

The architecture of Scindia Ghat combines the grandeur of Maratha palace-building with the everyday busyness of a working riverfront. The ghat begins at the water with broad stone steps, worn smooth by two centuries of bare feet, and climbs in three or four long terraces toward the crest. Above the steps rise the buildings that give the ghat its particular skyline: a row of painted facades in pink and ochre, some with wooden balconies, others crowned with small temple towers. The palace of the Maharaja of Gwalior dominates the ridge, its long frontage pierced by carved windows and overhanging balconies that seem to lean out over the terraces like spectators at a festival.

Water steps, arches and shrines interlock here in a tight composition. As the steps approach the water they widen into flat platforms where boats land and devotees sit, and at intervals the wall is broken by arched openings leading into cool passageways and small shrine rooms. At the crest, a chain of little temples runs along the ghat — shrines to Shiva, Ganesha and Hanuman, most of them modest, brightly painted, and crowded with the offerings of the neighbourhood. The whole arrangement is less a single monument than a miniature city, with lanes, courtyards and altars tucked into a space no wider than a few houses, yet every part of it is coherent, each level giving onto the next with a logic that centuries of use have made natural.

What strikes the careful eye is the mixture of ages. Here a Mughal-style cusped arch survives from an older building; there a nineteenth-century facade shows Victorian plasterwork beside a Maratha balcony; and at the water edge the tilted temple belongs to a different world altogether. The ghat has been patched, repaired and extended so many times that its architecture is a geological record of the Varanasi taste. Nothing is exactly symmetrical, nothing is entirely original, and yet the whole has a harmony that purpose-built riverfronts rarely achieve. For the visitor who walks slowly and looks closely, Scindia Ghat is a museum without walls, in which every balcony, bracket and step tells the story of a city that has always built, rebuilt and believed.

Scindia Ghat position directly beside Manikarnika gives it a quiet and unusual role in the city sacred geography: it serves as the viewing point, resting place and staging area for the great cremation ground. Visitors who are unwilling or uninvited to walk onto the burning platform itself often choose to sit on the Scindia steps and watch the smoke of Manikarnika from a respectful distance, their view softened by a hundred yards of water and air. Mourners, too, use the ghat: funeral parties gather here while arrangements are made, relatives rest on the flat terraces, and boats carrying mourners from the far bank put in at Scindia before the last rites begin.

The mood is calm rather than sorrowful, which is itself a lesson in how Kashi understands death. On the Scindia steps the two worlds intermingle without tension — a wedding party may be photographing the tilted temple while, a few hundred yards away, a funeral pyre is lit; pilgrims bathe while bearers carry their burden down the neighbouring lane. The ghat thus becomes a place where the visitor can approach the reality of Manikarnika at his own pace, watching the smoke rise and fall, listening to the chanted name of Ram drifting on the wind, without intruding on grief or violating the dignity of the rites. It is the closest many travellers will ever come to the burning ghat, and for most it is exactly the right distance.

There is a practical side to this role as well. The deep water off the Scindia steps provides reliable mooring for the heavy wooden boats used by the Dom community and funeral parties, and the ghat wide platforms serve as a staging ground where wood, ghee and other supplies for the pyres are unloaded and stored. The juxtaposition of the boatyard, the bathing platforms and the smoke of the pyres just beyond the spur is a complete picture of the economy of death and worship that sustains this corner of Kashi. For the traveller, standing on Scindia Ghat with the Manikarnika smoke rising against the sky is to be present at the very hinge of the city purpose — the place where the living and the dead share the same river.

Sunrise at Scindia Ghat is the hour that photographers dream of and wake early for. Before the sun clears the eastern bank at Ramnagar, the river is a sheet of soft grey touched with rose, and the leaning temple stands in silhouette, its broken line dark against the brightening sky. As the first rays strike the water, the surface turns to beaten gold, and the reflection of the tilted shikhara shimmers and dances across the ripples. Sadhus arrive on the steps in their saffron cloth, settle into their morning postures and begin their breathing and meditation, while the first ferries push off and the boatmen cries begin to carry across the water.

The bathers come as the light strengthens. Men and women in their washing clothes walk down the wet steps into the current, dip themselves with closed eyes, and pour brass lotas of water toward the rising sun with a silent prayer. Some dunk fully, then stand shivering and joyful, their heads shaved for a vow or damp with the river blessing. The whole ghat becomes a tableau of devotion and morning routine: a woman arranging marigolds for the shrine, a boy selling incense, a pilgrim prostrating on the platform, an old man inscribing his own little sandalwood mark on his forehead before the first temple. The sounds are the sounds of waking life — water splashing, bells ringing, pigeons clattering from the palace ledges.

For the photographer this is the most forgiving and most rewarding hour of the day. The low light softens the harsh geometry of the steps, hides the cracks in the old facades, and gives every subject — the tilted temple, the palace balconies, the boats drawn up on the sand — a golden edge that disappears by mid-morning. There is also a practical reward: the ghat is at its quietest, with only the earliest pilgrims about, so the famous views can be had without a crowd and without negotiation. Those who linger after sunrise are repaid again, because as the sun climbs, the pink and ochre buildings of the crest begin to glow like coals, and the leaning temple, now fully lit, seems to straighten itself in the morning light.

Scindia Ghat is a living place of worship, work and grief, and the visitor who moves through it with courtesy will be repaid with the warmth that Banaras reserves for respectful guests. The first rule is to dress modestly — shoulders and knees covered — especially when walking near the temples at the crest, and to remove footwear before entering any shrine. Photography is welcome, and the leaning temple is every traveller prize, but it is courteous to ask before photographing individual people, particularly sadhus, pilgrims at prayer and those who are visibly mourning. A simple gesture of the hand and a smile usually works where words fail.

Near the cremation side of the ghat, the rules tighten. It is proper to keep a respectful distance from funeral processions, to lower the voice, to put the camera away when mourners are passing, and never to photograph the dead or the pyres themselves without explicit permission, which is almost never given. Asking to be shown the burning ghat is acceptable in principle, but guides and boatmen will sometimes try to turn it into an elaborate and overpriced ritual, so it is wise to agree the price in advance and decline politely anything that feels like a performance. If you are moved to give, offerings to the shrines and small alms to the sadhus are traditional; giving money to the boatmen who attach themselves to tourists is entirely optional.

Safety matters as much as courtesy, because this is a working ghat with unrailed steps. The steps are uneven and often wet, and the water level changes dramatically between seasons, so shoes with a good grip are essential and a slow, careful pace near the water edge is wise. Avoid standing too close to the edge at dusk, when the light fails, and never swim in the deep channel, whose current is far stronger than it looks. Finally, remember that you are a guest in a neighbourhood of tremendous age and belief: silence near the temples, patience with the crowds, honesty in all transactions, and the ghat will treat you as kindly as it has treated pilgrims for two hundred years.