Kedāreśvara of Kedārghāṭ, Kāśī

Kedāreśvara of Kedārghāṭ, Kāśī

A small Kedarnath in the middle of Varanasi

Kedārghāṭ is one of the ghats of Varanasi, on Dashāśwamedh Ghaṭ side of the river frontage, and on it stands a small shrine of Kedāreśvara — Śiva as Lord of Kedar. Its importance is not architectural but relational. Kedarnāth in Rudraprayag district of Uttarakhand is one of the twelve Jyotirlingas and one of the Cār Dhāms; a Kashi temple of Kedar makes that Himalayan power available to people who could not, or would not, make the journey, and the Varanasi shrine is best understood as a transfer-point of a cult rather than as an independent Jyotirlinga. The jyotirlinga status in the Śaiva lists belongs to the Himalayan shrine; the Kedāreśvara of Kedārghāṭ does not displace it, and an entry that gave this temple a Jyotirlinga claim would be wrong.

The leelā attaching to it is the part that is genuinely interesting and the part that is least documented here. Local tradition in Kashi connects the Kedarnāth lingam with Kashi, and there is a well-known leelā in which a lingam is carried from one place to another for the benefit of devotees who cannot travel — the same logic that produces the Kashi images of Kedarnāth, Haridwar and Badrīnāth in the Kashi shrine. The corpus frontmatter asserts a "Kāśī-Kedarnāth link" without a source; the link is real as a devotional practice but the specific story attaching to this ghat has not been traced to any text or published temple account, and no such story is asserted here.

Kedārghāṭ is also, like the neighbouring ghats, a working place: it is used for morning snān and sandhyā, and the annual Ganga Dūj festival and the The Ganga Duj is associated with the ghats of Varanasi generally, and its performance at this ghat in particular has not been documented in the sources consulted. The ghat's own physical history — its steps, its manḍap, and the embankment works on this stretch of the river — is a matter for the district gazetteer.

Sources and what is still unverified

• Kāśī literature and the Khaṇḍa Purāṇa — work level; no chapter cited.
• Kashi Vishwanath Trust and local bhāgī accounts of the ghats — exist in Hindi and Sanskrit; not held here.
• Varanasi District Gazetteer (Government of India gazetteer series).
• Unverified: the frontmatter's Kashi-Kedarnath narrative, the jyotirlinga implication of the file's framing, and every festival date listed.