by Tahir Shah
Located a few miles away from Allahabad, most of the festival ground is more normally well underwater, beneath the sacred rivers. Organizers can never be quite sure how far the waters of the Ganges and the Yamuna are going to recede, and exactly which lands will be exposed.
Once the waters have retreated in late November, there’s a wait before the ground has drained and hardened. Last year the waters receded much later than usual, which meant that the vast tent city could only be constructed at the last moment.
The festival ground has to be seen to be believed. With a hundred million people traipsing through during the fifty-five-day Mela, it’s on a titanic scale. Covering almost five thousand acres, it’s divided and sub-divided into numerous sectors on a grid structure.
One of the great difficulties is that the site straddles the intersection of the mighty Ganges and the Yamuna. This leads to a complicated natural arrangement of sandbanks and uneven connection points. To link them all together, dozens of pontoon bridges are erected, each of them buoyed by a series of massive iron drums.
On the surface, the tent city resembles something out of a military campaign. In addition to the pontoons and the neat rows of khaki tents, the main thoroughfares are laid with iron sheets so that vehicles don’t get stuck in the mud. There’s electric street-lighting, too, which bathes the camp in an unnerving yellow glow through the hours of darkness. The lights are run by a series of mobile power stations, set up just for the Kumbh Mela.
But all this is just the tip of the logistical iceberg.
Dozens of police stations pepper the encampment, as do mobile field hospitals, fire stations and government offices. After all, in India, the wheels of bureaucracy die hard. And there are cafés, shrines, and trinket stalls by the thousand, as well as bandstands and rickety-looking fairground rides, and more than 35,000 portable loos.
Spend some time at the Maha Kumbh Mela and you quickly grasp that it’s not about mind-numbing statistics though. It’s about people, and about their utter belief in a system of devotion that forms an unwavering backbone to life from the cradle to the crematorium.
For those of us raised in the cynical nihilism of the West, it may be hard to understand how or why a family living in a village a thousand miles away from Allahabad would blow almost everything they have to bathe at this auspicious moment at the Sangam, the confluence. But, regarded through the eyes of the devout majority, it’s an affirmation of unshakeable belief. And central to that belief is the steadfast faith in a system that promises redemption in exchange for devotion.
If the figures are correct, and one in twelve of the entire Indian population passed through the Kumbh this year, then it reflects what this astonishing mass act of piety means to Hindus. They hastened to Allahabad from every corner of India – from each city, town, village and hamlet. They came from the tea plantations of Assam in the extreme north-east and from the desiccated deserts of Rajasthan, from the mountain stronghold of the Himalayas, and from the tranquil waterways of Kerala. They ventured, too, from the smog-filled urban sprawls of Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. And they came to be united all together but, more importantly, they came to be absolved of their sins.
I myself reached the Kumbh Mela at dusk on Valentine’s Day. Having taken a flight to Varanasi, and then driven through the lush countryside for several hours, I knew we were nearing because of a rumbling sound on the wind. We must have still been ten miles out of Allahabad, but I could feel the Kumbh in my bones.
Asking the driver to stop, I got down and listened.
What I heard was like one of those nature films where they stick a microphone into a colony of ants. A cross between frenzied movement, and what sounded like every conversation in the world overlaid on top of each other, it filled me with a primeval sense of fear and with curiosity as well.
We continued and, as we did so, we began to pass droves of people on foot. Most of them were laden with belongings piled on their heads. Processing forward through wind and light rain they marched with an extraordinary surety of movement. It was as if the Maha Kumbh Mela was somehow in their DNA, that to get there was programmed into them all – whatever the cost may have been.
When in India, foreigners have a way of asking questions for which there are no black-and-white answers. As soon as I arrived, I begged everyone I met to give me facts and figures, and to tell me when the Kumbh Mela began. No one seemed sure. One man told me, ‘It started ten million years ago.’ Another was less exact. He said: ‘It’s been going a long, long time, sir.’
The first known foreigner to have written his impressions was the 7th century Chinese monk Xuanzang. (Although some scholars have doubted whether he actually saw the Kumbh.)
The earliest known account in English was written by the celebrated American traveller and novelist, Mark Twain. He described his visit to the festival of 1894 in Following The Equator. Of it, he said: ‘It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint on such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining.’
I found myself wondering where Twain would have stayed on his visit more than a century ago. Fortunately for me, I was taken in at the lavish Laxmi Kutir Camp, in a prominent position above the main festival site. It was situated between a Hindu temple and a Muslim mosque – both of which strove to outdo the other in terms of noise and commotion through day and night.
The camp boasted tents with en-suite bathrooms, feather quilts, and hot water bottles. There were even chocolates on the pillows at night. Having settled in, I went over to the viewing terrace, and got my first real glimpse of the Kumbh.
Glowing canary yellow from all the thousands of improvised street-lamps, it was like nothing I had ever imagined. In the struggle to describe the spectacle it seems that only clichés are sufficient. It was like staring through a kaleidoscopic lens into the navel of the world, into a realm that defied both time and space. Humming, murmuring, and with whispers on the breeze, it was electrifying, empowering, and was more radiant in its sheer energy than anything I had ever seen.
After a couple of hours of trying to sleep in my prim tent, I got up. The vibrations from the plateau were calling me to come and join the fun. There was a sense of the Pied Piper about it, something so mesmerizing that I was quite unable to resist.
Clambering down steep steps cut into the rock, I climbed down to where tens of millions of ordinary Indians were camped. It was three AM but there were people everywhere. Some were washing or praying, many more were walking alone or with children in arms, all heading in the same direction – down to the Sangam.
Making my way through the unending landscape of tents, my eyes grew accustomed to the creamy yellow light. As for my ears, they were bombarded by the high-pitched chants from a thousand makeshift shrines. And, mounted on poles every hundred yards, were loudspeakers through which came continuous appeals of family members separated from their clans.
Following the hordes through mud, I stumbled forward in mist tinged with yellow light, over a series of pontoon bridges, down to the confluence. It was bizarre to think that for most of the year the land on which my feet were walking was the sacred riverbed. For the millions of pilgrims this was holy ground, the reason why a great many went barefoot.
The thing that sticks in your mind from the first moment you get there is the sense of goodwill. In the days I spent at the Kumbh Mela, I saw too many spontaneous acts of kindness to recall – a pilgrim pressing a folded bill into a blind beggar’s hand; a woman taking off her shoes and giving them to another who had lost hers in the mayhem; a little boy presenting his banana-leaf bowl of rice to a crippled old man on a cart.
Traversing a kind of beach, I finally got down to the actual waterline. Reinforced with sandbags, there was a flimsy wooden stockade screening the area off from a much larger expanse. On the other side of it there were literally millions of people surging into the water
. Stripping off their outer garments, they were mesmerized by the auspiciousness of the moment.
The Mela began on 14th January at the Makar Sankranti, when the sun entered Capricorn, the day on which it’s said that light returns after its long southward journey. A Winter Solstice, it signals the start of fifty-five days of providence. And, during this festival time there are a series of extra-specially auspicious days. Believing their prayers will be amplified, pilgrims make sure they bathe at the Sangam then.
The day after my arrival was the second most favourable of all, the reason why so many had got down to the water early – keen to beat the rush. With an ocean of people stretching as far as the eye could see, there was the constant fear of stampede. Kumbh Melas are notorious for masses of innocent people being trampled underfoot. All it takes is for one person to freak out and to run. There is in us all a primal fear of crowds, and it’s triggered at such moments.
Like everyone else, I was tanked up with pure adrenalin, ready for fight or flight, and for the stampede. But, unlike the pilgrims, my purpose was not to enter the freezing waters of the confluence, but to watch.
As I stood there on the less crowded side of the stockade, a policeman on horseback hurtled down the beach. Wielding a latti, a long wooden stave, he herded others and me into the narrowest pinprick of land between the water, the stockade, and the countless ordinary folk on the other side.
All of a sudden I made out the muffled cries of what sounded like an army roaring into battle. Turning quickly, squinting through the yellowed light, I saw a sight of true terror, like something from Hollywood’s wildest fantasy.
Hundreds of naked men were making a beeline for the spot on which I was standing. Their bodies caked in ash, their hair matted in long twisted dreadlocks, some were waving swords, others tridents, or shields. More still were chanting or howling, faces contorted with macabre expressions, feet running in a crazed blur of movement.
Wave upon wave of them charged into the chill water, immersing themselves, before retreating hastily onto the beach. These nagas, holy men, are the revered mainstay of a tradition dedicated to prayer, solitude, and to relinquishing the trappings of conventional life. Their brotherhood, the Order of the Juna Akhara, meaning ‘Ancient Circle’, is a secretive monastic order of sadhus, yogis and ascetics.
Such is their reputation for spiritual leadership, they are given VIP pride of place at the Kumbh Mela. When not bathing down at the waterline, they spend their days smoking pipes stuffed with hashish in a special area reserved just for them.
Dedicated to receiving Moksha, liberation from continual reincarnation, sadhus (which simply means ‘good men’), criss-cross the Subcontinent most usually on foot, living lives of stark austerity. They are sworn to celibacy and shun material chattels, and spend a great deal of time crouched beside a smouldering sacred fire known as a dhuni. Rubbing the ash onto their naked skin, they pass the hours smoking, meditating, and receiving the veneration of ordinary people.
In the lanes of this VIP-area, I came across all manner of avatars and holy men. A few were practising acts of penance, their bodies contorted in strange positions, or their arms having been raised up in the air for decades.
It was there that I found Baba Rampuri.
Bespectacled, with sapphire eyes and with a great bush of teaselled greying beard, he was seated on a low dais. Uncharacteristically clean for a sadhu, with hair that fell in curls to his shoulders, his clothing was spotless too, a loose saffron shirt and pyjama-style trousers.
Baba Rampuri said he had been coming to Kumbh Melas since 1971, the year in which he moved to India from the United States. A throwback to the age of tie-dye and navel-contemplation, he oozed peace, love, and goodwill to all men.
We spent the afternoon together, and in that time Baba Rampuri lifted the veil into the world of the ordained sadhu. A mystical fraternity with roots in India’s ancient past, it’s a society that sits awkwardly with the feverish consumerism that clouds any experience of modern urban India.
Leaning back on his dais, Baba Rampuri looked as though he’d seen it all before – a writer crouching before him eager for a useable sound bite. Then he told me that he had read some of the books I’d written and I punched the air in my mind. His hands churning around him, he said:
‘No writer or photographer who’s ever come to the Kumbh Mela has ever had a financial or artistic success. None of them. Not a single one.’
I asked why.
Rampuri grinned, albeit a sarcastic grin, one that made me shift my crossed legs uneasily.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘you all tell it like it is, blinkered by the overwhelming seductive imagery. But you never tell the story behind the story. Here at the Kumbh there are a couple of worlds present at the same time. There’s the one that’s on the surface that intoxicates you, and the other that you hold in your heart.’
Rampuri Baba wagged a finger hard in my direction. ‘It’s not about me,’ he said, ‘but about the order of which I’m a small part. This institution has the ability to pass learning down through the time. I’ve devoted my life to the Ancient Circle of the Juna Akhara. And in that time I’ve seen that most foreigners miss the point. You all go on about how a pilgrimage like this is about nurturing the self. Well, it’s not about the self but the group experience!’
During our conversations, Baba Rampuri would take the chilam, the clay pipe, from a fellow American guru, wrap a handkerchief over the end to filter it, and draw hard. His sapphire eyes clouding over, he railed against the foreigners who came to the Kumbh Mela and missed it all because they were too busy peering through camera lenses, and as a result failed to see what was going on.
All of a sudden the American sadhu waved a finger in my direction.
‘We have to go and feed people now,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘Ordinary people.’
‘How many ordinary people?’
Baba Rampuri pushed his rimless glasses up higher on his nose.
‘About five thousand,’ he said.
When I asked how he could afford it, the guru seemed a little despondent.
‘Every member of the Juna Akhara leaves the Mela penniless,’ he told me. ‘We always do. It costs us way more than a hundred thousand dollars. Such a great social responsibility goes along with it – in which feeding the masses is just one of the responsibilities.’
Before I took my leave of Baba Rampuri, he told me to check out his website and to follow him on Facebook. I did a double take.
‘You’re in cyberspace?’
Reaching for the chilam, the American grinned one last time.
‘Of course I am,’ he said.
Leaving Rampuri to feed a small fraction of the entire pilgrim population, I strolled through the makeshift lanes of the Juna Akhara. Taking in the dozens of holy men, some naked and others not, I felt as though I had reached the innermost layer of onion skin. This seemed to be the spiritual core of an entire religious system, in a land with many hundreds of millions of followers.
I got talking to a Gujarati couple from Ahmedabad who had been prostrating themselves before an elderly sadhu, who had supposedly taken a vow of silence back in 1962. The husband, Rajiv, told me that he worked ten hours a day in a call centre, and that he had brought his entire family to the Kumbh Mela to help balance the malevolent forces in the universe.
I asked what the naked naga would be able to do for them.
Rajiv touched a hand to his heart.
‘He has given us his love and his blessing,’ he said.
‘But why do you feel you need it?’ I asked cynically.
Rajiv’s wife, Mahdvi, broke in.
‘Because, it’s the counterbalance for the world that we all live in.’
‘And how is it – your world?’
Mahdvi shook her head glumly.
‘It’s a place of deadlines, stress, pollution, and without enough space – a place where you’re suspicious of strangers and where you forget to
see the beauty.’
‘Which beauty?’
Rajiv held out his hands.
‘The beauty that’s all around us,’ he said.
Back up at the deluxe Laxmi Kutir camp, I took a hot shower, scoffed down a four-course dinner, and felt rather ashamed at myself for feeling the need to regroup in the lap of luxury. At the next table I met an Englishman called Ronnie who had come to the Kumbh to look for an old school pal. A big blustering bear of a man with broken veins speckled over his cheeks, he told me that he had been at Eton with Sir James Mallinson.
‘He’s down there somewhere,’ said Ronnie distantly. ‘Although I haven’t a clue where to start looking. He’s gone native, you see.’
I asked Ronnie what he meant.
‘Well, after Oxford, Jim became a sadhu, and he was given the name Jadish Das. He’s devoted his life to purifying himself.’
I asked Ronnie what his friend was like.
A little overcome with excitement, he exclaimed:
‘Jim’s a terrific chap – a real chum!’
For all its colour and curious traditions, the brotherhood of the Juna Akhara impressed me for the way it had remained on the rails. It may have been a beacon for eccentric Englishmen and for Californian ex-hippies, but there was something honourable about it. Most of all, I found myself appreciating what it hadn’t become – a big-business Disneyland of the Soul.
The same couldn’t be said for the dozens of godmen and godwomen who had set up temporary ashrams all over the Kumbh Mela. As the days passed, I couldn’t help but become preoccupied by the sleek well-oiled machinery of their high-flying guru businesses.
One afternoon I was making the long walk across the pontoons to the Sangam, when it began pouring with rain. Seeking shelter, I slipped into a giant canvas marquee in which a darshan, a meeting with a holy person, was taking place. Against the rhythmic drone of a tanpura, a woman dressed in a red turban was dispensing blessings to one and all.
Strangely, most of the followers were white Anglo-Saxon foreigners. Dressed identically in costumes of unblemished white, some had shaven heads, except for a Hare Krishna-style pigtail dangling from the back of the scalp. But they were not Hare Krishnas. They were instead zealous devotees of the Mauritius-born godwoman, Her Holiness Sai Maa.