In Search of the Ganga Aarti In Holy Varanasi

“Excuse me, is this the Ganga Aarti?” I asked the Indian man helping people find space on the cramped balcony of the nondescript white building.

“Yes, Ganga Aarti,” he said. We still weren’t convinced.

Outside, at every turn people had tried to sell us spots on their balconies to watch the Ganga Aarti at the famous Dashashwamedh Ghat.

“200 rupees!” they offered. “Water level too high, Ganga aarti on balcony, not here at ghat.”

Ghats are steps where people can access the river to bathe and pray. Every evening close to sunset, pandits (priests) conduct aarti, a Hindu prayer ritual at the main ghats. We had arrived at the very end of the monsoon season, and this year, rains had been particularly heavy, submerging the ghats and the entire riverfront with over one story of water. This meant each ghat was considerably smaller or even non-existent because they were mostly under water.

Not quite sure whom to believe (I’ve been lied to in other countries that this or that was closed in an attempt to divert me elsewhere), we had followed a tour group and muscled our way on to this nondescript balcony. But weren’t sure if this was a tourist show or the Ganga aarti.

“Excuse me,” I asked a tourist couple next to me. “Is this the Ganga aarti?” They smiled blankly in response, not understanding anything I was saying.

“Excuse me,” my sister asked someone else. “Is this the official Ganga aarti?” “It is wherever it is,” she tried to explain.

When we were exiting we saw another aarti happening on a different balcony. “Was that the Ganga aarti?” we wondered.

The next morning we went in search of a supposedly well-known morning Ganga aarti at Assis ghat, right where we were living. We stumbled out in the dark and watched as people bathed and performed their own individual rituals in the holy river.

One pandit did an abbreviated aarti at the edge of the water. Again we had that nagging feeling. We’d been told that Assis ghat was particularly well known for its morning aarti. Were we in the wrong place?

We went back to the hotel and asked the man working at the reception desk. “Excuse me, we wanted to know where the Ganga aarti at Assis Ghat is? We went to the place where they do it at night but someone told us it’s someplace different in the morning.”

He looked very confused. “Ganga aarti is everywhere,” he said.

And so it is.

It took me a few days to realize that we were so caught up in finding the one thing that we couldn’t see that there wasn’t just one thing to find. We were surrounded by aarti— small private aarti, larger ceremonies. It is everywhere.