Beyond belief
The Kumbh Mela is like nothing else in the world. It is so big that the human eye cannot encompass it in one glance. It is so old that estimates vary by millennia. It is so populous that it could perhaps be held only in India, with about 40 crore persons expected to visit it this year over its 45-day span. It draws people to it for many kinds of motives. Many come out of religious faith to earn punya. But as many come perhaps just to look at the faithful congregation, or out of secular curiosity and even incredulity, or simply cultural tourism.
Altogether, the Kumbh is nothing if not spectacular. And such is its growing appeal one way or another that it gets bigger and bigger each time it comes around every 12 years. The first Kumbh I went to was in 1966 when I lived in Allahabad. I have gone to each Kumbh since then even after I moved to Delhi, and will go to this one, too, on the Basant Panchami day, if only to keep the personal record unbroken so long as I can.
The Spectacle
As one gets out of the city of Allahabad and approaches the Sangam, the confluence of three rivers, one traverses a fair distance with no buildings of any kind, and then one goes up a steep incline to reach and stand atop the bund (or baandh). It was built by Emperor Akbar in the 1580s, together with his fort located right on the holy confluence, and that was also when (according to his court chronicler Abul Fazal), he renamed the city of Prayag as Ilahabas/Ilahabad.
From this high vantage point, one sees to the right a Hanuman temple and the fort, and to the left the new gleaming Lal Bahadur Shastri Bridge. And right in front, stretching out for many square kilometres, there lies on the floodplains of the Ganga the vast temporary city of the Kumbh Mela, laid out in neat rectangular grids with broad straight roads. Beyond that, on the horizon, the Ganga is seen flowing on towards Banaras, just after the Yamuna has commingled with it and both the sacred rivers have become one.
It is a sight whose scale and grandeur can stir even a secular soul. For the believers, a huge high hoarding which stood for years right in front said it all: “Gange! Tava darshanaat muktih” (O Ganga, just by your darshan one attains salvation).
Myth and History
How old is the Kumbh Mela? No believer asks this question. The Western ‘Orientalist’ scholars alleged that Indians had no sense of history, by which they meant no precise chronology backed by verifiable documentation. That was true, for we had instead myth to believe in, which needs no documents but only faith.
So, in primeval times, when no humans existed but only the devas and the daityas (i.e., gods and demons), they decided to co-operatively churn the Milky Ocean, which yielded all kinds of fantastic bounty. Then, there came up a pot (in Sanskrit, kumbha) full of nectar. Seeking immortality and thus eternal invincibility, both the devas and the daityas made an unseemly grab for it, and Indra’s nimble son Jayanta ran away with the pot, with the daityas in hot pursuit. In the scramble, some drops of nectar fell at four places on earth: Prayag, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nashik. So, any believer who bathes at any of these places during the Kumbh festival will become ‘immortal’, by attaining mukti from the endless rounds of birth and death.
As for history, the Chinese pilgrim Hsuen Tsang (now spelt as Xuanzang) witnessed King Harsha give generous offerings to supplicants at Prayag. As Prayag never had rich temples, for the Ganga kept shifting its course and there are still hardly any ghats on it unlike in Banaras, no marauders came looting and demolishing here in the succeeding centuries. Some ‘historical’ accounts even claim that the Kumbh festival began as late as in the 1860s when, after the Mutiny, the British began to administer it and kept records in English which modern historians can read.
Another perspective on the antiquity of the Kumbh Mela is offered by a rare conjunction of myth and science. The Kumbh Mela comes around every 12 years because the planet Jupiter, which in the Indian languages is Brihaspati, completes its cycle of going around the zodiacal signs in 12 years by entering Aquarius, in the Indian languages known as Kumbha. This mythological-scientific collation lends to the word ‘Kumbha’ a double resonance.
The Naked Sadhus: Seekers & Forsakers
For many in the West as well as in India now, the defining image of the Kumbh Mela is its band of naked sadhus, the Naga Babas. Indeed, such is the intensity of our vulgar voyeuristic gaze at them that they have been turned into virtually the Poster Boys of the Kumbh.
This is not only a gross distortion, but an injustice. No one who looks at the Naga Babas pauses to ask who they are, where they have come from, or where they go and what they do in the intervening period from one Kumbh to the next. In fact, they are perhaps the most rigorous, disciplined and severe practitioners of asceticism in the whole festival, and that is the time-honoured reason why on the holiest bathing days, they get precedence among all the sadhus. They are accorded the sovereign privilege of the shahi snan, and are the first to bathe, at the crack of dawn.
All sadhus to be seen at the Kumbh, including the great majority who are clad in saffron or pure white, have renounced the world of domesticity. But the Naga Babas have renounced even the bare trappings of the world. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Lord Krishna describes the endless cycle of death and rebirth in a famous metaphor as the soul casting off one set of clothes and putting on another. As if taking this literally, the Naga Babas forsake clothes altogether while still living, and thus go one step further towards release from rebirth. There is a lot more to them than meets the eye.
The Mini-Kumbhs and the Sangam
The Kumbh comes round once in 12 years but the Sangam and Ganga-Yamuna are there forever as a place of holy pilgrimage. Every day of each year, pilgrims arrive from near and far (including South India) and take a boat to the Sangam, which is a platform of half-a-dozen takhts or wooden bed-size planks tied together to upright bamboo poles. The pilgrims ease themselves down from the platform into chest-deep water, take a deep dip or dubki of total immersion, and often a few more dubkis for the absent dear ones by proxy! The Ganga and the Yamuna can often be clearly seen as commingling, with the waters of the Yamuna greenish and of the Ganga off-white or light brown.
Besides, ever year in the month of Magh (January-February), which is the coldest part of the year and exactly when the big Kumbh is held, there springs up at the same spot a small township of tents and little huts, without any hullabaloo or razzmatazz. Believers, many of them devout old women, come and stay there for the whole month, doing ‘kalpavaas’, bathing every morning in the freezing river, eating simple self-cooked meals, attending pravachan or religious discourses during the day, and leading the austere life of a semi-ascetic to earn punya. This seems broadly comparable, in both intent and hardship, to observing the roza or daylong fasts during the month of Ramzan. Faith still runs deep and wide in our society, quietly, calmly and subterraneously, away from all political squabbles.
The Smouldering Twig
To return to the Naga Babas, the one possession they are allowed is a smouldering twig or a little branch of a tree. It is called dhooni, as in the common phrases dhooni ramaana or dhooni jamaanaa, which means to root oneself to a spot with a firm purpose. It is ash from such twigs that these ascetics smear over their body. While the twig slow-burns, it releases smoke and low heat. In winter, it will give the unclad ascetic no relief from the bitter cold, while in summer it can only add to the scorching heat of the sun.
The Jnanpith-award winning Hindi novelist Nirmal Verma once stayed at the Kumbh Mela for some days, wandering by day and night and talking to a whole range of persons. He felt that the Kumbh was “a flowing unwritten epic, a thread in which were strung together poverty and pride, joy and suffering”. He also said that from the smouldering twig arose a melody of the spirit in the winter mist — dhundh se uthti dhun. Perhaps even some of the non-believers like Verma who go to the Kumbh can hear a strain or two of that rare melody.
— The writer is a former Professor of English, Delhi University