A few minutes’ walk north of Assi, the riverfront rises to a ghat that belongs less to the gods than to a single human being — and one of the greatest who ever wrote in any Indian language. Tulsi Ghat, formerly Lolark Ghat, was renamed for Goswami Tulsidas, who lived here in the closing years of his life and died here in 1623, having given north India its most beloved book.
The house of the Manas
Climb the steps and you can still visit the small house where Tulsidas is said to have composed portions of the Ramcharitmanas — his retelling of the Ramayana, not in scholarly Sanskrit but in Awadhi, the language of the kitchen and the field. The pandits of his day were scandalised; the people were electrified. Within a generation the Manas had become what it remains: the scripture of the north Indian heart, sung in homes that own no other book. In the house, kept with moving simplicity, are his khadau (wooden sandals), his pillow, and a manuscript — relics not of a king but of a poet, which feels exactly right for Banaras.
Legend adds that Hanuman appeared to Tulsidas, and that the poet founded the nearby Sankat Mochan temple at the spot of the vision; the Tulsi Manas Mandir, whose marble walls carry the entire Manas, stands a short ride inland. This whole southern quarter is effectively Tulsidas’s parish.
Wrestlers and the drowned sun
Tulsi Ghat also guards two older treasures. The Swaminath Akhada — one of Banaras’s great traditional wrestling gymnasiums — has trained pehelwans here since Tulsidas’s own time; come early morning and you may see them exercising with stone weights and absolute, monk-like seriousness, mud-wrestling being its own kind of sadhana. And beside the ghat lies the Lolark Kund, “the trembling sun,” one of Kashi’s most ancient sacred pools, dropping deep between sheer stone walls. On Lolark Shashthi each Bhadrapad, thousands of couples seeking children descend to bathe in its green water — one of the city’s most intense and ancient living rituals.
Krishna comes to the Kadamb tree
The ghat’s most famous hour comes each Kartik (around November) with the Nag Nathaiya — the leela Tulsidas himself instituted four centuries ago. A boy playing Krishna leaps from a Kadamb branch into the Ganga to subdue the serpent Kaliya, rising triumphant on the snake’s hood while half of Banaras watches from steps and boats. It lasts minutes; people plan their year around it. We’ve written the full story in our Nag Nathaiya guide.
Quiet, scholarly, muscular and devoted all at once, Tulsi Ghat is Banaras in miniature — best visited with the morning crowd at Assi and a slow hour to spare.