What is the Godavari at Nashik?

The Godavari rises on Brahmagiri, the hill above Trimbakeshwar. People say she disappears into the hill and comes out again at Kushavarta, and the source of the Godavari tells the whole of that story. Kushavarta is the kund in the middle of Trimbak town. The Kumbh on this river is held at two places, Ramkund at Nashik and Kushavarta at Trimbakeshwar, and why the Kumbh is at two places has that arrangement. From Kushavarta the river comes down through the hills to Nashik, and from Nashik it runs east across the whole width of the country to the sea on the far side of India. Nashik is near its beginning, when it is still a river you can see across.

She has another name. The Godavari is the दक्षिण गंगा Dakshin Ganga, the Ganga of the south, and why the Kumbh comes to Nashik tells the story the name comes from.

This is what Nashik tells.

As the Godavari comes into the town it takes a turn to the south. That turn is the reason the rites are performed here. Water that flows south has a standing of its own for the rites for the dead, and the Godavari makes its turn right here, at Panchavati, with Ramkund on the bend. What that standing is, and how Nashik is set beside Gaya, is on Gaya and Nashik.

Seven small streams come down into the Godavari at Nashik, and every one of them has been given a holy name — Aruna, Varuna, Sarasvati, Shraddha, Medha, Savitri and Gayatri. Most of them you would walk past without noticing. They matter because of where they meet the river. The Aruna comes in at Ramkund, at the turn, and the place where it meets the Godavari is itself a bathing place. The old part of Panchavati is the stretch of bank between the Aruna at one end and the Varuna at the other, and the Kapaleshwar temple on the rise above Ramkund calls its own ground the place where the Aruna, the Varuna and the Saraswati all come into the Godavari.

A तीर्थ tirtha is a place of pilgrimage, and in the oldest sense a crossing place on a river. Along the bed of the Godavari at Nashik there is a row of them, and a row of pools called kunds, in the stretch of river between Govardhan to the west of the town and Tapovan to the south-east. Nashik counts twenty-four tirthas in that stretch, and ten of them lie inside the town itself, along the bank at Panchavati. Ramkund is a kund and a tirtha both. The tirthas on the Godavari has all of them and says which ones the rites are concerned with.

Go down to Ramkund and stand on the ghat. This is the easiest place to understand the river. The steps go down into the water on both banks. Behind you on the rise is the Kapaleshwar temple, beside you is the Ganga Godavari temple, whose door opens only at the Simhastha, and across the water, on its own rise, is Sunder Narayan’s. The river is wide here and, outside the rains, slow. In the monsoon it rises and runs brown and fast and the lower steps go under.

This is where the priest sits with a family and performs the rites for someone they have lost, at the water’s edge, and where the ash and bone of the dead are given to the river. If that is what you have come for, Ramkund says what happens there and what is asthi visarjan? says what the immersion is.

Upstream of the town the river is quieter, and downstream, a little way along the left bank, is Tapovan, where the Kapila comes in and where the story of the exile turns. Panchavati is the bank between.