Karnataka State Ghat

Karnataka State Ghat is one of the calmest and most characterful of Varanasi's southern ghats, tucked into the Bangali Tola–Sonarpura riverfront just north of Hanuman Ghat.

• For centuries this slope of stone was simply part of Hanuman Ghat, but in 1915 the estate of the Maharaja of Mysore purchased the land and rebuilt it as a proper masonry ghat, giving it the name it still carries — Karnataka, the modern successor to the old Mysore state.
• A narrow stone-slab lane divides it from Hanuman Ghat, and to this day a pilgrims' rest house (dharamshala) maintained by the Karnataka endowment offers shelter chiefly to travellers from the south, so that a Kannada- or Tamil-speaking pilgrim arriving in Kashi has always had a familiar doorway on the Ganga.
• This is one of the loveliest expressions of Varanasi's pan-Indian pull: a corner of the far south, quietly transplanted onto the northern riverbank.
• The ghat sits within the venerable Hanuman Ghat neighbourhood, a mohalla long dominated by South Indian families and dotted with eighteenth-century Shiva shrines, a Sringeri Shankaracharya connection and the Dravidian-style Kamakoteshwar temple managed by the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham.
• On Karnataka Ghat itself, the Juna order of ascetics keeps a monastery and akhara, and in a weathered stone niche (madhi) at the water's edge sit worn images of Sati and of Ruru Bhairava — one of the eight Bhairavas believed to guard the inner sacred territory of Kashi.
• There is no ticketing, no spectacle and no crowd; this is a working, lived-in ghat where the drama is small and continuous — a dhobi beating laundry, a sadhu at dawn meditation, a boat pushing off into the mist.
• Vegetarian travellers are wonderfully well placed here, because the whole Sonarpura–Bangali Tola quarter is thoroughly vegetarian in temperament.
• A short walk up the lane brings you to Ksheer Sagar on Sonarpura Road, a beloved pure-vegetarian sweet house famous for rasmalai, kheer and Banarasi mithai, while the Godowlia market a little further north holds Kashi Chat Bhandar and Keshari Restaurant, both strictly vegetarian.
• A gentle, important caution: several riverside lassi and thandai stalls in Varanasi serve bhang (cannabis) thandai — always ask explicitly for plain lassi or plain thandai, and children and unsuspecting visitors should never be handed the 'special' version.
• Come at sunrise, when a shared or private rowboat drifts past this stretch and the low sun gilds the ghat steps; the neighbouring Harishchandra Ghat to the south is a working cremation ghat, so keep a respectful silence and never photograph funeral pyres or mourners as you pass.