Ganga Mahotsav

For five nights each November, the stone ghats of Varanasi become a riverside auditorium for some of India's finest classical music and dance. Ganga Mahotsav, the Festival of the Ganga, is the cultural high point of the city's most luminous season, unfolding in the days that lead up to Dev Deepawali, the Diwali of the gods, when the ghats are lit with hundreds of thousands of earthen lamps and the river itself seems to glow.

Organised by the Uttar Pradesh Tourism Department, Ganga Mahotsav runs on the Hindu lunar calendar, beginning on Prabodhini Ekadashi, some eleven days after Diwali, and culminating on Kartik Purnima, which is Dev Deepawali itself. It is not a religious festival in the conventional sense but a cultural one, conceived to honour the heritage of the Gangetic plains and to showcase Varanasi, one of the world's oldest living cities, as a cradle of spiritual and artistic tradition. The festival grew from a modest regional tourism initiative in the 1980s into one of North India's most distinguished cultural events.

Across its five days, the festival presents India's most celebrated classical musicians and dancers on stages set against the river, at ghats such as Dashashwamedh, Rajendra Prasad and Assi, in a programme that spans Hindustani classical, devotional and folk performance and draws audiences that can number in the tens of thousands each evening. Around the concerts, the festival hosts craft fairs, including a parallel Gandhi Shilp Bazar bringing craftspeople from across many states, boat races on the Ganga, and traditional sports, while the daily Ganga Aarti is performed with more elaborate grandeur than at any other time of year. The whole builds to the finale on Dev Deepawali, when, by Hindu belief, the gods descend to bathe in the Ganga, and the ghats are transformed into a sea of light.