There is a Shiva temple in Varanasi that stands at a permanent tilt, half-drowned, defying both gravity and restoration for two centuries – and most visitors float straight past it without learning its name. It stands at Scindia Ghat, and this guide is here to make sure you stop.
Built by the Maratha rulers of Gwalior, stalked by photographers at dawn, and home to Kashi’s famous leaning temple, Scindia is the riverfront’s great visual riddle. Here is its history, what it feels like at sunrise, and how to visit.
My Experience: The Temple That Leans Into the River
Ask your boatman to cut the engine off Scindia at 6 AM and just drift. The Ratneshwar Mahadev Temple rises out of the shallows at a frankly alarming angle – its spire leaning some nine degrees off vertical, its sanctum door spending half the year underwater. Every first-timer on my boat does the same thing: stands up, points, and asks if it is about to fall. It has been “about to fall,” the boatmen grin, since before your grandfather was born.
Photographers know this spot the way fishermen know currents. In October the sun rises almost directly behind the spire, and for ten minutes the leaning silhouette goes black against beaten-gold water as the ghats wake on either side. I have watched professionals from three continents wait two hours in the cold for those ten minutes. The temple never disappoints; the light sometimes does, and nobody minds, because waiting here – tea from a flask, river lapping the boat, the ghats waking on either side – is itself the experience.
The steps above are refreshingly ordinary: bathers, a small shrine or two doing steady business, laundrymen further along. Nobody crowds Scindia. The temple does all the talking, and it says plenty.
History: Gwalior on the Ganga
Scindia Ghat is the Kashi address of the Scindias of Gwalior, the great Maratha house of central India. When Maharaja Daulat Rao Scindia’s patronage raised this ghat in the early 19th century, it joined the long parade of Maratha building – Peshwas, Holkars, Bhonsales, Gaekwads – that gave the riverfront its present stone face. A Maratha ruler without a Kashi ghat was, in those days, barely a ruler at all.
The leaning temple is the ghat’s mystery and its fame. Why does Ratneshwar lean? Engineers point to the obvious suspects: enormous masonry mass on river silt, flood scouring at the foundation, two centuries of monsoon battering. Popular tellings offer their own explanations, argued over tea stalls with complete confidence on all sides. What everyone agrees on is the fact itself – a Shiva temple bowing toward the river it serves, half-submerged every monsoon when the sanctum disappears entirely, re-emerging each winter as if for roll call. There is no other sight quite like it on the Ganga.
What to Do Here
Photograph the lean at dawn from mid-river – October to December for the aligned sunrise. Circumambulate what you can of the temple platform in low-water months. Sit the steps with no agenda; Scindia is a thinking ghat, and the thinking improves with tea.
How to Visit
Best time: Sunrise, October to March. Monsoon (July–September) for the drama of the drowned sanctum – from a boat, never wading.
How to reach: By boat, between Manikarnika and Sankatha – every boatman knows “jhuka hua mandir”. On foot with a guide through the northern lanes.
Etiquette: No climbing on the temple structure – it is fragile as well as sacred. Standard riverfront manners otherwise: modest dress, quiet near bathers, ask before photographing people.
Then let the river carry you south to Shivala Ghat, where our evening Ganga Aarti stands as straight and steady as Scindia’s temple stands tilted – Kashi contains both, and loves both, exactly as they are.