Dev Deepawali: The night the river becomes a lamp

Dev Deepawali falls fifteen days after Diwali, on the Kartik Purnima the full moon of the month of Kartik. On that one night, every ghat in Varanasi is lit with rows of clay diyas. Not a symbolic handful. Not a decorative border along the temple entrances. Rows upon rows, along every step of every ghat, from Assi in the south to Raj Ghat in the north, tended by the families who live above them and by volunteers who come from as far as Lucknow to help. From a boat on the river it looks less like a festival and more like an event of natural physics as though the sky, tired of holding its stars up, has folded down onto the water for one night to rest.

The story most locals tell is the one about the gods. When Shiva killed the demon Tripurasura on this day, the story goes, the gods descended to Kashi in celebration and lit lamps along the Ganga to honour him. Dev Deepawali means, quite literally, the Deepawali of the gods. It is the festival the gods came down to celebrate the reason, at least in mythology, that lamps and Varanasi have been inseparable ever since. There are other stories too a Shivaji connection, a much older Buddhist one from Sarnath but the Tripurasura story is the one you will hear from the priests on the ghats, and it is the one that best fits the mood of the evening.

Practically, it is the busiest night of the year in the city. Train tickets to Varanasi sell out four to six weeks in advance, and even the flights fill up faster than usual. Hotels raise their rates sometimes doubling them, sometimes worse and the good ones stop taking bookings altogether about a month out. The ghats themselves, which are ordinarily busy in a manageable way, become genuinely crowded on Dev Deepawali night in a way they otherwise never are. If you are coming, plan early. If you are coming without a plan, plan to be flexible about which ghat you end up on.

The single most important piece of advice we give guests: book a boat, not a seat. A seat on the steps at Dashashwamedh is a fine thing on any ordinary evening. On Dev Deepawali it becomes a shoulder-to-shoulder scrum with poor sightlines and a real risk of being separated from the people you came with. A boat, by contrast, gives you the whole city as a moving strip of light. You can drift from ghat to ghat at your own pace, tie up briefly at a quieter spot to watch a smaller aarti, and see the whole thing from the angle it was really designed to be seen from the water, which is what the diyas are meant to be reflecting in the first place.

We start booking boats for guests in mid-September, and we recommend our neighbours do the same. Prices roughly triple compared with an ordinary night, and by late October there are very few rowboats left at any price. Motorboats and larger tourist launches are usually still available, but a rowboat is what you want you can hear the aarti bells over a rowboat's silence, and you can ask the rower to hold position when something catches your eye. On a launch, you go where the launch goes.

There are actually four aartis on Dev Deepawali night, not one. The main one at Dashashwamedh is the largest twenty-one priests instead of the usual seven, with correspondingly more elaborate choreography but the ones at Assi, at Rajendra Prasad Ghat (right next to Dashashwamedh, and often mistaken for it), and at Panchganga are worth the extra effort. Panchganga in particular is where the Akash-Deep tradition lives bamboo poles rigged with lanterns that have been lit here every evening in Kartik for centuries, and that on Dev Deepawali reach their fullest expression. If you can time your boat to pass Panchganga around eight-thirty, you will see it.

The lighting of the lamps happens in two waves. The first, more organised wave begins around dusk five-forty-five in November when volunteers walk down the ghats setting oil-soaked cotton wicks into the clay diyas and lighting them from long tapers. This takes about forty minutes. The second, more chaotic and beautiful wave is the residents' own families coming down to their local ghat with brass thalis of diyas and small marigold garlands, lighting them for departed relatives and releasing tiny leaf-boats onto the water. This continues well into the night.

Dress warmly. November nights on the river are colder than anyone expects often eight or nine degrees Celsius after ten p.m., and there is always a light wind on the water. A shawl over a light sweater is roughly the right idea for women; a jacket that you can shed and hold if the evening warms up is the right idea for men. Wear closed shoes with grip the steps are damp with river spray and often, by the end of the night, slippery with wax from spilled diyas. Do not wear anything you would be sad to see stained; oil splatters, incense smoke, and the odd stray flower petal are all in the ambient environment.

Eat before you leave the house. You will not want to break the evening for dinner. The restaurants on the main lanes back away from the ghats become impossibly crowded on Dev Deepawali night, and even our regular chai stalls are three-deep at eight p.m. Our kitchens serve an early thali dinner from five to six for guests on those nights a simple thing, dal and rice and two vegetables and a piece of hot roti and you will thank yourself for eating it. Carry a small bottle of water and a couple of biscuits in a bag if you want a snack later.

A few things not to do. Do not release plastic-based floating candles onto the river; they end up in the fishing nets downstream and are one of the environmental prices Varanasi is starting to pay for the festival's popularity. Buy the traditional pattal-leaf boats with a cotton wick from the vendors on the steps; they biodegrade in a few days. Do not photograph the cremation ghats from the boat, festival or no festival the rule stands. Do not launch fireworks from a boat, however much fun it looks; the ghats have a fire brigade on standby every year for a reason.

For photographers: this is a low-light, long-lens night. A 35 to 85mm range lens, a fast aperture, and a very steady hand or a small monopod will serve you better than a full tripod, which is unwieldy on a moving boat and unwelcome on the crowded steps. Set your ISO high and accept the grain it will actually look like the night felt, which is what you want. Shoot the crowds as much as the lamps; the faces lit by the diyas are the real subject.

For families with children: the ghats are safe on Dev Deepawali night but they are loud, crowded, and slow to move through. If you have children under seven, we recommend the boat option strongly it gives them something to look at from a fixed and comfortable seat, and you do not have to hold hands the whole time. If you have children between seven and twelve, a shorter shore visit followed by a boat ride is usually the best combination. Older children handle the crowds fine; they usually love it.

For older guests, or anyone with mobility considerations: some of the ghat steps are steep and uneven, and there are almost no railings. Our hosts can arrange assisted access at Dashashwamedh, Assi, and Rajendra Prasad a young man who will walk with you down the steps and back up, and stay nearby throughout the aarti. Arrange this in advance; on the night itself it is difficult to organise anything at short notice.

The morning after Dev Deepawali is one of the strangest and most peaceful mornings in the city's calendar. The ghats are covered in a fine ash of burned-down diyas, the river carries the remains of thousands of tiny boats, and the crowds are entirely gone. If you can arrange to stay one more night after the festival and most of our guests who have done it have said it was the best decision of their trip you get a sunrise walk down empty ghats that still smell faintly of oil and marigold, with only the sweepers and the sadhus and the buffaloes for company. That morning, in a way, is the festival too.

Book early. Come warmly dressed. Eat before you leave. Take a boat. Leave a day on either side. That is the whole guide. The rest of it the story about Shiva and Tripurasura, the eight-hundred-year unbroken lineage of the priests, the exact number of diyas by ghat and by year is available in half a dozen good books and in a much greater number of bad ones. What is not in any book is what a million small flames actually look like from the water, at eight-thirty on a cold November night, when the aarti bells are ringing four ghats down and someone in the boat next to yours is very quietly crying.