Enthralled by an early morning boat ride on the Ganges

by Julian Worker, New Westminster, B.C.

As the fiery ball of the sun began to rise over the eastern bank of the Ganges on our left-hand side, the lighted candles on banana leaves, offered in prayer to the gods, started to float past our boat. The oars lapped gently in the water as the high, stepped bank on our right-hand side gradually became a hive of industry.

Women’s saris, individually vivid as they were picked out by the sun’s earliest rays, were being readied for washing; men stood almost naked lathering themselves with soap; goats lay watching events unfold; religious rituals commenced; ablutions began; prayers were being said, and people immersed themselves and each other in the holy river as smoke drifted across from a nearby cremation. The day had begun on the ghats at Varanasi.

Seeking out an oarsman

A dawn boat ride on the Ganges is the highlight of any trip to Varanasi, also known as Banaras or Benares. Situated in India’s state of Uttar Pradesh, Varanasi is a sacred center of Jainism, Sikhism and Buddhism. However, for over 2,000 years it has been the religious capital of Hinduism, more revered and sacred than all the other places of pilgrimage put together.

Varanasi is known to devout Hindus as Kashi — the Luminous or the City of Light — one of the oldest cities in the world.

Half an hour earlier, I had arrived at Dasasvamedha Ghat to find an oarsman for my boat ride. From the throng of potential rowers I decided to try Sandeep, whose salesman’s patter — “I am a strong boy who will get you where you want to go” — made me laugh.

The cost of the boat ride was the equivalent of $3 for two hours.

Diversity on the river

Heading upstream, we first passed the Munshi Ghat, where the city’s Muslim population, roughly one-third of the total, comes to bathe even though the river has no religious significance for them.

Dhobi wallahs, or professional washermen, then began to appear, standing in the water up to their knees in a long line, washing clothes and then slamming them repeatedly on large flat stones with such great force that I heard the sound echoing across the water almost before seeing the washermen themselves.

Large areas of the bank were covered with their laundry, drying already in the warm glow of early morning. There is religious merit in having your clothes washed here.

Just as we approached Harischandra Ghat, the most sacred smashan, or cremation area, I noticed two white bundles float past us.

“What were those?” I asked San-deep.

“They are children, sir; we do not burn children.”

I also found out that people who have died of a high fever — in the past it used to be smallpox — are not cremated but are instead thrown into the river, in deference to Sitala, the goddess of smallpox.

Daily chores

We stopped a moment to watch a group of women washing their saris in the water and rinsing them with the utmost care. One woman was cleaning her son, scrubbing him roughly, washing his hair and rinsing it with water from the Ganges poured out of a kettle.

Next door was a ghat for men, where a fully clothed man was standing with a beaker in his hand at waist height, letting some water fall from it gently whilst reciting a prayer. Next to him, a large, bearded man with a potbelly and holding a bowl over his head poured the water from it silently yet quite majestically over himself.

Sandeep turned the boat around and we moved downstream past our starting point to Man Mandir Ghat, where the Maharajah of Jaipur converted a palace into an astronomical observatory in 1710. Cricket matches were noisily being played on a flat stretch of the bank by the Dom Raja’s house.

The Doms are the “Untouchables” of Varanasi who perform the parts of the cremation service that all other Hindus would find ritually polluting.

People were enjoying themselves, swimming around the boat and smiling as I photographed them. Others were diving into the water from the stepped bank, where some Western tourists were sitting silently with their eyes closed facing the sun.

A sacred place

Shouts of “No photos” greeted our arrival at the principal burning ghat of the city, Jalasayin. From my vantage point in the boat I could see the bodies waiting to be cremated, wrapped in the most colorful sheets.

Relatives fussed around the grieving family members as the funeral pyre was being built a few meters away and children played on the huge pile of wood at the back of the ghat. Each log is weighed on giant scales to calculate the price of the cremation.

As a mark of respect, you should not take pictures of the burning ghats, even with a long lens. People have been handed over to the local police for ignoring the warnings.

The elderly come to Varanasi to seek refuge or to live out their final days, finding shelter in the temples and being assisted by alms from visiting pilgrims. Hindus believe that_anyone who dies in Varanasi attains instant moksha, or enlightenment.

As a result, cremation is big business. Outcasts, known as Chandal, carry bodies swathed in cloth on bamboo stretchers through the alleyways of the old city to the sacred Ganges.

A colorful journey’s end

Along the riverbank at the Panch-ganga Ghat, young boys were flying multicolored kites. Serious competitors try to bring down other flyers’ kites by coating their twine with a mixture of flour paste and crushed light bulbs to make it razor sharp.

Unbelievably, my two hours were almost over, so Sandeep rowed me back to the Dasavamedha Ghat — and the most photogenic vista of color I have ever witnessed came to an end. It was so awe inspiring that I got up even earlier the following day to view the ghats at sunrise once again.