Assi Ghāṭ of Kāśī

Assi Ghāṭ of Kāśī

The southern ghat and the lake of a poem

Assi Ghāṭ is on the west bank of the Ganges at Varanasi, at the point where tradition places the meeting of the Assi river with the Ganga — which is what gives the ghat its name and what marks it as the southern limit of the older city of Kāśī. Like the other ghats it is a set of stone steps running into the water, and it is a working place of worship rather than a monument: bathers, sandhyā performers, lamp-offering families and the boats of the Ganga all use it through the day, and the evening Ganga ārtī here is among the best-attended on this stretch of the river.

The ghat's place in the literary imagination is a devotional one and should be described as such. The tradition holds that Tulsīdās composed — or first sang — the Rāmacaritamānaś at Assi Ghāṭ, and a small building and shrine on the ghat mark the spot, with the ghat named in Bengali and North Indian devotional practice as a place of first resort for those who cannot reach Ayodhya. That attribution is a tradition about a man and a place; no document places Tulsīdās at this ghat, and his dates and biography are themselves contested between the Rāmacaritamānaś tradition and modern scholarship. What can be said is that the shrine exists, is looked after, and functions as a memorial to the poem and its author — which is a vandana practice, not a claim about the poem's composition.

Assi Ghāṭ also sits in the middle of the living geography of the ghats: the great washing stretch of the river, the manikarnikā cremation grounds further upstream at Harīścandra Ghāṭ, and the Vishwanāth temple precinct across the water at Vishwanāth Ghāṭ. A Sanskrit college, the Śrī Kāśī Vidyāpiṭh, has long occupied buildings on the ghat and is one of the reasons this stretch has a residential and scholarly life rather than being purely a pilgrimage frontage. The ghat's physical form has been repeatedly altered by floods and by embankment works, and the current stone steps are not the original ones.

Sources and what is still unverified

• Rāmacaritamānaś — the object of the memorial, cited at work level.
• Kashi Vishwanath / Varanasi temple trust and the local ghat-priest (bhāgī) accounts — exist in Hindi and Sanskrit pamphlets; not held in this corpus.
• Varanasi District Gazetteer (Government of India gazetteer series) — for the ghat, the river, the college and the floods.
• Unverified: the Tulsidas-at-Assi tradition as a historical event, the date of the present steps, and every festival date in the frontmatter.