Most of the riverfront tells stories of gods and moksha. Chet Singh Ghat tells one of gunpowder. The small fort that rises from these steps — round bastions, battlements, gates built for keeping people out rather than welcoming them in — was the stage for the most dramatic political episode in the ghats’ history: the week in 1781 when Banaras rose against the East India Company and very nearly won.
Raja against Governor-General
Raja Chet Singh ruled Banaras under the Company’s uneasy overlordship. Warren Hastings, the Governor-General, squeezed by war debts, kept demanding extraordinary payments and troops; the Raja kept demurring. In August 1781 Hastings arrived in person with a small escort, placed the Raja under arrest in this riverside palace — and discovered he had badly misjudged the city. The Raja’s troops and the people of Banaras fell upon the arresting companies, who had marched in, almost unbelievably, without ammunition. They were cut down; the Raja escaped down the fort wall to a boat on the Ganga (tradition says by a rope of turbans, which is too good a detail to question); and Hastings himself had to flee Banaras in disguise with a tiny guard — the most powerful man in India, hiding from the city of Shiva. A local wit immortalised it in a couplet still quoted: “Ghode pe haudā, hāthi pe jīn — jaldi bhāgā Warren Hastings.” (Howdah on the horse, saddle on the elephant — Warren Hastings fled in a hurry.)
The Company, of course, returned with cannon; Chet Singh lost his throne and died in exile, and the fort passed eventually to the Banaras royal family. But the week of defiance entered the city’s bloodstream, an early tremor of 1857 and of everything after.
The quiet fort today
The fort and ghat were restored in recent years, and the stretch is now one of the most peaceful on the southern riverfront — wide steps, massive walls glowing rust-and-cream in the afternoon, hardly a tout in sight. Within the precinct stand old Shiva shrines, and the ramparts have begun hosting evening light-and-sound and classical music events; there are few better stages than a battlefield with a river view. Sub-ghats (Niranjani, Nirvani) shelter akhadas of ascetic orders, keeping the soldier-sadhu tradition oddly appropriate company here.
Chet Singh slots perfectly into a southern walk: start with Assi’s morning bustle, drift north past Tulsi Ghat’s wrestlers, pause on these quiet battlements, and continue to Harishchandra. Four ghats, four entirely different Banarases — poet, pilgrim, rebel and the fire that outlasts them all.