Ask a boatman which ghat the morning belongs to and, if he is feeling honest rather than commercial, he may not say Assi. He may say Munshi Ghat – the handsome, overlooked neighbour of Dashashwamedh, where the city’s most famous spectacle is visible but its noise is not.
Munshi is the ghat I recommend to photographers, to tired pilgrims on their third day, and to anyone who asked me, a little shyly, whether there is a place on this river to simply sit. There is. This is it.
My Experience: Dashashwamedh Without the Crowd
The geography explains everything. Munshi sits just north of Dashashwamedh, close enough that at dusk you can hear the conches and see the tiers of firelight reflected on the water – but the steps here hold dozens, not thousands. I have watched the entire grand aarti from Munshi’s lower steps with a family who had done Dashashwamedh the night before and preferred this: same river, same flames on the horizon, room to breathe, and a boatman who cut the engine so the chanting carried across the water.
Mornings are even better. The ghat wakes early and locally: bathers who clearly own their exact spots, a priest with a decades-old clientele, laundrymen beating rhythm into the stones further along, and above it all the facade of the old Munshi building – arched, ochre, quietly grand in the way of Maratha-era patronage that didn’t need to shout.
Afternoons, the steps empty into heat-haze and pigeons, and this is when I bring guests who want to understand the riverfront as architecture. Sit halfway up, look south: palace, temple spire, bathing platforms, laundry, life – the whole Banaras syllabus in one frame, with nobody selling you anything.
History: The Minister’s Ghat
Munshi Ghat was built in 1812 by Sridhara Narayana Munshi, a high minister and financier of the Maratha order – the class of administrators whose money, as much as any king’s, built the Kashi we see. The early 19th century was the golden age of riverfront construction: the Maratha sardars, diwans and munshis competed in piety along these steps, each endowing ghats, temples and rest-houses that carried their names into the daily geography of millions.
The building above the steps – part residence, part dharamshala in its working life – follows the riverfront formula perfected in that age: face the water, shade the courtyard, let the architecture do the preaching. Like its neighbours, its stone terraces rest on the continuum of the 18th-century rebuilding; like them, it has been repaired against flood and time ever since.
What to Do Here
Watch the Dashashwamedh aarti from the water off Munshi – ask your boatman; it is a known and loved arrangement. Bathe at dawn with the regulars. Sit through an afternoon with no agenda whatsoever – Munshi is the rare central ghat where idleness feels like participation.
How to Visit
Best time: Dawn for bathing life (5:30–8 AM, October to March); dusk from a moored boat for the borrowed aarti.
How to reach: Walk five minutes north along the steps from Dashashwamedh, or come by boat and ask to halt at Munshi.
Etiquette: Standard riverfront manners – modest dress, shoes off at shrines, quiet near bathers, ask before photographing people. This is a residential ghat; behave like a guest in a neighbourhood, because you are one.
And when the borrowed firelight fades, come home to the real thing: our daily Ganga Aarti at Shivala Ghat, where the flames are close, the hymns are yours to join, and nobody needs to borrow anything.