Every boat that leaves Dashashwamedh for the northern ghats passes it within two minutes: a grand, honey-coloured palace rising straight out of the river, its arched windows staring at the sunrise. That is Darbhanga Ghat – the Maithil kings’ address on the Ganga, and one of the most photographed buildings in Banaras.
It is also a ghat with a wound. Part of the old palace gave way and slipped into the river in recent years, and the broken edge is still visible – which makes Darbhanga the best place on the riverfront to understand an uncomfortable truth: Kashi’s palaces are not museum pieces. They are old buildings in a living, flooding river, and keeping them standing is a fight.
My Experience: The Palace From the Water
Darbhanga is best seen, first, without stopping. Take the dawn boat north from Dashashwamedh and watch the palace grow: three storeys of arched verandas, carved brackets, a roofline of domed pavilions, all in the pale sandstone that glows apricot for about twenty minutes after sunrise. Boatmen slow down here without being asked. Everybody photographs this building; the good boatmen know the exact angle where the reflection completes it.
Then look at the southern end, where the wall steps back in a scar of fresh brick and exposed masonry. That is where a portion of the palace collapsed into the Ganga – an event that made national headlines and broke a lot of Banarasi hearts. The affected section has been barricaded, engineers have inspected it, and the debate about restoration continues in the way all Kashi debates continue: passionately, publicly, and slowly.
On the steps themselves, life is calmer than the story suggests. Morning bathers, a couple of priests with regular patrons, children jumping from the lower steps in summer while their mothers shout precisely calibrated warnings. The ghat works. The palace watches. That is Darbhanga’s whole character: grandeur with its feet in daily life.
History: The Darbhanga Royals on the Ganga
The palace and ghat belong to the erstwhile royal family of Darbhanga – the Maithil Brahmin dynasty that ruled a wealthy zamindari in present-day Bihar and poured its fortune into temples, Sanskrit learning and charity across North India. Like the kings of Benares, Jaipur, Indore and Nepal, the Darbhanga maharajas kept a Kashi address because no Indian ruler’s prestige was complete without one: a palace on the river, a temple served daily, priests retained year-round.
The present palace building is chiefly an early-20th-century construction in the grand Indo-Saracenic taste of its age – arches, colonnades and pavilions composed for river viewing, because on this riverfront the real facade always faces the water. Below it, the stone steps and platforms belong to the same continuum as the rest of the riverfront: established in the great 18th-century rebuilding under Maratha patronage and maintained, repaired and rebuilt ever since against flood, age and use.
That maintenance is the ghat’s modern story. The Ganga undercuts; monsoon currents chew at foundations; a building this size, this old, standing in a river, needs constant care. The collapse was a warning the whole riverfront heard. When you visit, you are looking at both Kashi’s beauty and its bills – and both deserve your attention.
What to Do Here
Photograph it at dawn from a boat slightly mid-river – the classic shot. Bathe or sit on the steps in the morning hour; the ghat is far calmer than Dashashwamedh next door. Walk it south to Dashashwamedh for the crowds or north to Munshi and Ahilyabai for the quiet – Darbhanga sits exactly on the hinge between Kashi’s festival and Kashi’s contemplation.
How to Visit
Best time: Sunrise, October to March. The palace face catches first light head-on.
How to reach: Two minutes by boat north of Dashashwamedh; on foot, descend from the Godowlia–Dashashwamedh lanes and walk north along the steps.
Etiquette: Keep clear of the barricaded damaged section – it is genuinely unsafe. Otherwise standard riverfront manners: modest dress, shoes off at shrines, quiet near bathers.
End the morning the way our guests do: drift back south as the river wakes fully, and return in the evening to Shivala Ghat, where our daily Ganga Aarti proves that Kashi’s real monument was never stone – it is flame, song and the people who gather for both.