Varanasi Ganga Aarti Circuit

About this pack

A 5-day mid-range trip to Varanasi, India, taking in Dashashwamedh Ghat aarti, Kashi Vishwanath Temple, Sarnath deer park and Assi Ghat sunrise.

Inside the Varanasi Ganga Aarti Circuit trip

Varanasi Ganga Aarti Circuit opens at Dashashwamedh Ghat, one of the principal ghats on the Ganges in Varanasi, close by the Kashi Vishwanath Temple. Hindu tradition offers two explanations for its name: one holds that Brahma created the ghat to welcome Shiva, the other that Brahma performed ten Ashwamedha, or horse sacrifices, here. Construction is traced to Raja Dushasan Shah of Dhaudharh in 1569, with the ghat rebuilt by the Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao in 1748 and again by Ahilyabai Holkar, the Maratha queen of Indore, in 1774 — the same patron behind much of the ghat's present-day form. Each evening at dusk, priests perform the Ganga Aarti here, carrying lit lamps in a rhythmic sequence set to devotional bhajans for roughly 45 minutes, drawing hundreds of onlookers to the ghat's steps.

A short walk away stands the Kashi Vishwanath Temple, dedicated to Shiva under the name Vishwanath, "Lord of the Universe," and counted among the twelve Jyotirlinga shrines held most sacred in Hinduism. The original Adi Vishveshwar Temple was destroyed during the Ghurid conquest of the city in 1194, then rebuilt under Mughal patronage by Raja Man Singh and Todar Mal during Akbar's reign, only to be demolished again in 1669 on the order of the emperor Aurangzeb, who built the Gyanvapi Mosque on the site; some historians attribute the demolition to the temple's association with local resistance to Mughal rule rather than religious motive alone. The present temple was built on an adjacent site in 1780 by the Maratha ruler Ahilyabai Holkar, and in 2021 a major redevelopment connected the temple directly to the Ganges via the newly built Kashi Vishwanath Dham Corridor.

The route continues to Sarnath, the deer park northeast of Varanasi where the Buddha delivered his first sermon after attaining enlightenment at Bodh Gaya, an event commemorated by the Lion Capital of Ashoka, raised on a column here around 250 BCE and now the State Emblem of India. One of the eight most important Buddhist pilgrimage sites and recently added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, Sarnath takes its name from the Sanskrit Saranganatha, "Lord of the Deer," after a legend in which the Buddha, in an earlier incarnation as a deer, offered his own life to spare a doe. The site flourished as a centre of Buddhist learning through the Gupta and Pala periods — the 7th-century Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang recorded a 61-metre vihara here housing some 1,500 monks — before its destruction in 1194 during the same campaign that swept through Varanasi.

The circuit closes at Assi Ghat, the southernmost of Varanasi's ghats, where the Assi stream meets the Ganges and where, according to tradition, the poet-saint Tulsidas departed for his final journey. Long favoured by long-term foreign students and researchers as much as pilgrims, the ghat hosts Subah-e-Banaras, a free two-hour programme of Vedic chanting, yoga and classical music held each morning before dawn since 2014, drawing residents and visitors alike to watch the sun rise over the river — a gentle, meditative close to a circuit that has already carried the traveller through centuries of ghats, temples and one of Buddhism's most sacred groves.

• Dashashwamedh Ghat — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Kashi Vishwanath Temple — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Sarnath — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Assi Ghat — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

What this trip is

Every dimension the Taro team tags this pack with — filter by any of these on the packs page.

More Asia packs