Ask a Banarasi which ghat belongs to Tulsidas and you will get one answer, instantly: Tulsi Ghat. The poet-saint who gave Hindi its Ramayana lived, wrote and bathed here in the late 1500s – and four centuries later the ghat still feels like his front courtyard: literary, unhurried, and quietly devout.
This is the ghat for travellers who have done the big sights and want the Banaras that locals keep for themselves. Here is its story, what it feels like at sunrise, and how to visit.
My Experience: Mornings With the Regulars
Tulsi at 6 AM belongs to its regulars, and after a few visits they start nodding at you like neighbours. The same dozen swimmers cut the same lines across the current every day of the year – winter fog, summer glare, no difference. A retired professor does slow laps while reciting verses audibly enough to teach and quietly enough not to preach. By 7 the first wrestling pairs arrive at the earth pit above the steps, and the slap of oiled shoulders carries across the water the way temple bells do elsewhere.
What I love most is what is absent: no tout swarm, no loudspeaker wars, no selfie-stick gauntlet. Tea comes in kulhads from a stall that has had the same three benches since before I started coming, and the conversation is Banaras at its finest – half philosophy, half neighbourhood gossip, conducted entirely without hurry.
Walk fifty steps north or south and the spell shifts – toward the Shivala palaces one way, the Assi bustle the other. Tulsi sits between them like a held breath. Bring a book of the Ramcharitmanas if you can find one; reading two verses here, where they were lived, is worth more than a whole museum of commentary.
History: Tulsidas and the Poet’s Ghat
Goswami Tulsidas (c. 1532–1623), author of the Ramcharitmanas – the Hindi Ramayana that more Indians have heard than any other book – made this ghat his home in his Kashi years. Tradition holds that he lived, composed and bathed at Tulsi, and the ghat took his name the way neighbourhoods take the names of the saints who sanctify them. The small Tulsi Manas temple in the vicinity keeps his memory in daily worship, its walls inscribed with verses pilgrims stop to read aloud.
Close by lies Lolarka Kund, one of Kashi’s most storied sacred tanks, famed for its Lolarka Shashthi bathing day when childless couples come seeking blessing – a festival as old as the city’s memory, still thronged, still tearful, still joyful. The kund and the ghat together make this whole reach a geography of longing fulfilled: for children, for poetry, for God.
The stone steps and platforms in their present form belong to the 18th-century rebuilding of the riverfront, maintained since by trusts and the municipality. What no rebuilding created – and no flood has ever washed away – is the literary aura: this is the only ghat in Kashi named for a poet, and it behaves like one.
What to Do Here
Swim or sit at sunrise – even if you only dangle your feet, do it facing east. Visit Lolarka Kund in the lanes behind (ask any local; everyone knows it). Listen for verses – morning recitation drifts from half the doorways. And walk: south to Assi for breakfast, north to Shivala and beyond for the palaces – Tulsi is the perfect midpoint of a southern morning.
How to Visit
Best time: 5:45–8 AM, October to March. Evenings are gentle too, but mornings are Tulsi’s true self.
How to reach: On foot from Assi (10 minutes north along the steps) – the pleasantest approach in all Banaras; by boat, ask for a halt between Assi and Shivala.
Etiquette: This is a neighbourhood ghat first and a sight second. Swim clear of bathers, keep voices soft before 7, dress modestly, and buy your tea from the old stall – some economies deserve your patronage.
And when the sun is fully up and Tulsi has handed you back to the day, come north to Shivala Ghat – or come back in the evening, when our Ganga Aarti turns the poet’s river into a river of lamps.