Varanasi, situated on the banks of the sacred River Ganges, is one of the holiest cities in India and a primary centre of pilgrimage in the subcontinent. The city stretches approximately seven kilometres along the river on its western bank. The riverfront is adorned with more than eighty ghats (landing areas with steps down the bank) from southernmost Assi ghat to Raj ghat in the north. Multitudes of pilgrims come to the ghats to bathe in the sacred river, which is said by Hindus to remove all sins past and present. The river is also worshiped as a mother goddess known as Ganga Ma.

The local population worship Ganga Ma during life cycle events. At these times, the everyday riverboat turns into a sacred deity; and the boatman becomes an essential ritual specialist assisting the locals in the conduct of life-cycle rituals. In this paper I examine a post-wedding river ritual wherein a seemingly mundane activity like boating is turned seamlessly into a sacral event. The first part of the paper describes this process. The second part reflects on it in the light of the Subaltern Studies approach and some recent interpretations offered by prominent anthropologists. Specifically, here I seek to re-examine the influential organising ideas of domination and hierarchy with attention to how the subaltern boatmen ingeniously subvert their assigned position as ‘the dominated’, thereby interrupting the traditional priestly order. It will be shown how the hard dichotomies of great/little tradition, subaltern/elite, dominant/dominated, contestation/co-operation, become more fluid when examined in the context of daily interactions at the grassroots level.

Further, I try to suggest a more dynamic view than the ones offered in these conventional approaches for understanding caste claims on lucrative ritual practices and the allocation of valued sacred space in Varanasi, by showing how the boatmen’s appropriation of Hindu textual tradition and symbols of domination enables them to construct for themselves a cohesive identity and place in the Hindu social hierarchy—one that reinforces their role as ritual specialists and furthers their social and economic interests. I ground this argument in a searching examination of indigenous categories and a careful analysis of the views of people who have engaged in post-wedding rituals, known as Ganga Pujaiya. Finally, I will consider the strategies which enable the traditional boatmen to maintain their monopoly over the ever-growing business of boating on the river.