Where the rivers meet - Kumbha Mela festival in India - The Pilgrim's Way

At the confluence of the Ganges and the Jamuna rivers, millions of Indian pilgrims gather for the Kumbha Mela festival

At the heart of any pilgrimage in India, there is a confluence of waters. From the trickle of underwater springs through the more steady course of rivers and seas to the vista of the ocean, pilgrimages derive their sanctity from their proximity to water, and more specifically to the mingling of waters. Tirtha - the site of a pilgrimage - literally means a "ford" or a "crossing place".

In the city of Allahabad in northern India, at the sangam or confluence of the rivers Ganga and Jamuna, subtly layered by the "invisible" waters of the mythical river Saraswati, the holy city of Prayag once stood. To bathe in these waters is said to be one of the most cherished privileges for any Hindu regardless of his or her caste, class or community. More than an opportunity to wash away sins or to earn merit, this immersion in the waters offers the richest possibilities of rejuvenation and self-realization.

Historically, Prayag has been associated with bathing rituals and ceremonies which over the centuries have evolved into the Magha Mela, a religious festival which is celebrated every year in the month of Magha between January and February.

Underlying this festival is a myth which refers to the beginnings of creation when the gods and the demons were collectively involved in churning the nectar of immortality from the ocean. A fight ensued between these two parties over a pitcher (kumbha) of nectar that emerged from the primordial waters, along with other treasures. As the demons chased one of the gods in possession of the kumbha, we are told that a few drops of nectar fell on four places in our world: Hardvar, Ujjain, Nasik and Prayag. These are the four tirthas in which a great festival known as the Kumbha Mela takes place once every three years in rotation over a twelve-year cycle. Twelve years, we are told, because it took twelve days for the gods to protect the kumbha in their cosmic flight, and twelve divine days are equivalent to twelve earthly years.

The mela or fair held at Prayag (or Tirtharaja as it is often called, literally king of the tirthas) is particularly dynamic. Here on the banks of the Ganga and the Jamuna where the waters have receded, millions of pilgrims congregate not only to bathe but to engage in trade, witness religious performances and dare-devil acts, and listen to sermons and the sales-pitch of vendors and mountebanks. This most concentrated of sacred spaces also accommodates a great celebration of everyday life, so much so that one is tempted to view the Kumbha Mela in Prayag as a transcendence of ordinariness rather than a summation of the extraordinary. Here we find "India" in all its multiple dimensions and heterogeneous identities, where the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor can share the same consecrated ground with an unselfconscious solidarity.

Sacred and profane

Before the first glimmers of dawn, the pilgrims arrive in droves, entire families and communities from the far corners of India with pots and pans, earthenware stoves, buckets and bedding, all piled one on top of the other, balanced in precarious equilibrium. As the pilgrims enter the camping grounds of the mela, they circumambulate labyrinths of dusty, triangular, canvas tents - thousands of makeshift edifices silhouetted in an omnipresence of dust. As these children of Ganga move purposefully towards the confluence of waters - they know where they are going with an almost intuitive knowledge - they become part of a vast sea of humanity seemingly without beginning or end.

From a distance, you see these eddies of people moving in circuitous lines (as always in India, you realize emphatically that lines are never straight but a continuous series of dots). As the eddies flow and separate and merge rather like tributaries in a river, you are almost afraid to enter their devious currents. But even before you have completed your thought, you find yourself wading into the depths where you become part of a surging humanity in which strangely - and inexplicably - you are free to be yourself.

Despite the rules and regulations enshrined by the shastras (religious texts) concerning the rules of pilgrimage - fasting, offering ceremonial rites or puja, maintaining celibacy and purity of mind and thoughts - there is always space in this sacred order for blessings and intimations received in solitude. No one was more painfully denied this condition than Mahatma Gandhi who, on his visit to the Kumbha Mela in Hardvar in 1915, was so besieged by seekers of darsan - the opportunity to see a holy person - that he found no time for his inner self. No wonder then that he complained almost like a foreigner about the oppressiveness of the mela, the "absentmindedness, hypocrisy and slovenliness" of the pilgrims, the venal sadhus (holy men), and the barbarity of such grotesque sights as a five-legged cow.

If the pilgrimage does not induce an inner state of being, it can easily become chaos, a living inferno, or it can degenerate (as it so often does) into a mere spectacle, a theatrical extravaganza. As much as one is compelled to respond to the hyper-reality of the mela - the sheer dynamics of millions of people sharing a specific place and time - the raison d'etre of the pilgrimage is not to see (as in a spectacle) but to simply be. The topography and panorama of Prayag can be dissolved into an inner state of being. More elusively, it can be concentrated in the body and being of another pilgrim, who can be worshipped as a tirtha, as Prayag itself.

A recurring enigma in sacred geography is its transference of space, so that Prayag is also to be found in many other tirthas - the foothills of the Himalayas, Benares, a shrine on a street. In other words, the tirtha is capable of travelling, not unlike the mela which can filter into everyday life long after its auspicious time-frame has ceased. It is this fluidity that prevents the mela from being centralized, homogenized, bureaucratized, despite recent attempts by the state to regiment its space.

A celebration of life

What needs to be emphasized, however, is that the mela is not a carnival. Instead of reversing the existing social order (and thereby reinforcing the status quo), the mela enhances the existing order and then transcends it. What is being celebrated in the mela, therefore, is not anti-structure but the structure of life itself with all its hierarchies, disparities and distinctions, which are allowed to coexist on the same ground. Far from being an officially sanctioned deviation from the rules of everyday life, it is an expansion of life's possibilities.

Yet fear infiltrates one's very desire to enter the time-space of the mela at very bourgeois levels. One has to rebuke these fears of disease and theft, go beyond them, almost laugh at the rumours of stampedes and terrorist attacks that hang in the air. Melas are anti-bourgeois sites of experience. They are not for the timorous or faint-hearted. Even with all the amenities of "cultural tourism" which have made pilgrimages more comfortable, the mela challenges bourgeois notions of security.

Despite the need to protect the mammoth environment of the mela - in Prayag, the security provided by the police and the military is increasingly visible - there is something faintly ridiculous in attempting to "discipline" the tumultuous energies of the pilgrims. Their mingling of social, cultural and human identities functions on such a vast scale that it is not one community that is being celebrated, but a multitude of meetings with millions of people and one's self. So epic are the contours of the mela that they are almost impossible to frame; so private is the privilege of immersing one's self in the waters of Prayag that the moment defies representation. In the harmonious cacophony of this largest religious gathering in the world - the loudspeakers blare through the night announcing children lost who will almost invariably be found - there is silence.

One needs to remember the inner myth of Prayag in order to counter the recent attempts by fundamentalists and communalist parties to appropriate its sacred space in the name of Hindutva. The mela, one should keep in mind, has its own indigenous hierarchies and modes of socialization that are not likely to accept the strictures of a new administration advocating a centralized view of Hinduism. Somehow one is compelled to accept that the confluence of energies, symbolized by the intermingling of the Ganga, Jamuna and Saraswati, has the power to absorb any political ideology attempting to rule in the name of religion.

Centuries of faith cannot be removed overnight. Or more precisely, the sheer heterogeneity of faiths that have evolved over the years cannot be reduced to a uniform code of conduct and belief. Prayag teaches us more than tolerance or a passive faith in coexistence. From its multitudinous configurations and interactions, we can learn the vitality of living with difference.

RUSTOM BHARUCHA, an Indian writer, director and playwright, lives in Calcutta. He has written extensively on indigenous theatres and the politics of interculturalism. His most recent publications include Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (Routledge, London, 1993) and The Question of Faith (Orient Longman, 1993).

COPYRIGHT 1995 UNESCO
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