Swaminath Akhara (Tulsidas Akhara)

Tucked into the sandstone terraces of Tulsi Ghat, a short walk upriver from busier Assi Ghat, the Swaminath Akhara — universally called the Tulsidas Akhara — is one of the oldest continuously working wrestling grounds in India.

• Tradition holds that the arena was consecrated by Goswami Tulsidas himself in the mid-16th century, the same saint-poet who composed the Ramcharitmanas beside this ghat, and the mud pit here has been turned and blessed for close to 450 years without a single break in the lineage.
• It is not a museum or a ruin; it is a functioning gymnasium of the old school, where the day still begins before dawn with a lamp lit at the small ochre shrine of Hanuman (Bajrangbali) set behind the pit, and closes with the wrestlers' shout of "Jai Bajrangbali." What draws the curious traveller is the sheer authenticity of the ritual.
• Around five in the morning the pehlwans arrive, rake and level the soft red mitti — soil carried up from the Ganga and worked through with turmeric, mustard oil, curd and neem so that it soothes sprains and guards against infection — and begin their conditioning: hundreds of dands (Hindu push-ups) and baithaks (deep squats), swinging the heavy jori clubs and the stone gada mace, and finally grappling body to body in the earth.
• Guru and shishya train side by side, and the akhara doubles as a moral school as much as an athletic one, demanding celibacy, a simple vegetarian diet and daily devotion.
• In 2017–18 the akhara, managed by the Sankat Mochan temple trust under Mahant Prof.
• Vishwambhar Nath Mishra, made national news by opening its historic pit to women wrestlers for the first time in its long history, inspired by the film Dangal.
• The setting rewards a slow visit.
• From the akhara's edge the Ganga curves away toward the far bank, boats drift past, and each autumn Tulsi Ghat hosts the Nag Nathaiya leela — a Tulsidas-era enactment of Krishna subduing the serpent Kaliya — that fills the riverfront with lakhs of onlookers.
• A modest house on the ghat preserves relics associated with Tulsidas, tying the wrestling ground to Varanasi's deep devotional and literary memory.
• Visitors are welcomed warmly; the pehlwans are famously camera-friendly, though it is only courteous to greet the guru, ask before photographing anyone mid-bout, and keep your footwear off the sacred mitti.
• For the vegetarian traveller this is an easy and reassuring stop.
• The akhara's own culture is strictly vegetarian and teetotal — pehlwani diet runs to milk, ghee, almonds, chickpeas, seasonal fruit and rotis, with meat and alcohol regarded as unfit for the disciplined body — so nothing here conflicts with a plant-based ethic.
• Down at Assi Ghat and along Sonarpura, a cluster of long-trusted pure-vegetarian kitchens serves everything from crisp chaat to a proper thali.
• One caution worth remembering in Varanasi: several riverside "lassi" and "thandai" counters quietly serve bhang (a cannabis preparation); simply ask for plain lassi or a plain milk-based drink and stick to the pure-veg names listed below.