by Mark Tully
3
THE KUMBH MELA
The Kumbh Mela is billed as the biggest religious festival in the world, but no one knows exactly how big it is. Perhaps the gods keep records of the devotees who wash away their sins in the rivers Ganges and Jamuna at Allahabad during the festival. As far as mortals are concerned, satellite photographs, computers and the other paraphernalia of modern technology might give a reasonably accurate estimate, but they have not so far been used for this purpose. So all one can say is that the official guesstimate was that about 10 million people bathed on the most sacred day of the 1977 Kumbh Mela. There was every reason to believe that even more would come in 1989. As the official description of the preparations for the Kumbh Mela said, ‘Due to increase in the population and also due to increasing interest towards religion it is expected that on the main bathing day about 15 million people will take bath near the Sangam.’ The Sangam is the point where the Jamuna and the Ganges meet. A third river, the Saraswati, is also said to have flowed into the Sangam, but there is no sign of it today, nor is there any record of when or how it disappeared.
The pandits said that 1989 would be the most important Kumbh Mela for 144 years, because of the particularly auspicious position of the stars and planets. I had read the pandits' predictions and the official report on the preparations for the Mela, so I was very surprised when I arrived in Allahabad a week before the big bathe to find administrators, journalists, religious leaders and the local clergy all worried that the millions might not turn out this time.
The history of the Kumbh Mela – like the history of all things Hindu – is not entirely clear and is therefore fiercely debated by historians and theologians. Indians are said to be recent converts to the study of history, so it is perhaps not surprising that the first known reference to the festival appears to have been made by a Chinese. The renowned seventh-century traveller Hiuen Tsiang found that half a million people had gathered at Prayag, the old name for Allahabad, to bathe in the rivers and to attend on the Emperor Harshvardhan who was taking part in the Kumbh Mela. The emperor distributed his wealth among his vassals. They paid for their gifts and returned them to him. He thus raised taxes from his vassals and everyone gained merit from the giving and receiving of gifts. A similar practice continues to this day. Brahmins keep calves tethered to their stalls for pilgrims to buy. The pilgrims then return them, and the calves are sold and resold many times. ‘Godan’ or the gift of a cow is one of the most meritorious acts for devout Hindus.
The word ‘kumbh’ means an urn, and ‘mela’ a fair. The festival celebrates one of the creation myths of Hinduism. Brahma, the creator, was floating on the primeval ocean in a trance. When he awoke, he started to create the universe. The gods and the demons decided to speed up the process by churning the ocean. They used a mountain as the churn and a giant snake as the rope to rotate it. As the ocean frothed, miraculous gifts appeared. The most valuable was an urn of a nectar which made anyone who drank it immortal. The demons grabbed the urn, but the son of Indra, who ruled the heavens, managed to spirit it away from them. Disguising himself as a rook, he flew over the earth, chased by the demons. Some say that during his flight to the abode of the gods he rested in four places, one of which was Prayag, or Allahabad. Others say that drops of nectar fell on those four places during the flight. The son of Indra took twelve days to fly to paradise, so, as one day in the life of the gods is the equivalent of a year in the life of mere mortals, Kumbh Melas are held in all four places once every twelve years. Allahabad is regarded as the king of the bathing-places, and the Allahabad Mela is the most important festival.
I was staying in Allahabad with one of my political gurus, Sant Bax Singh – a former member of parliament. After being elected the first undergraduate president of the Allahabad University Students Union, he went on to Oxford and then read for the bar at Lincoln's Inn. When he returned to India, he joined the multinational Lever Brothers, where he soon emerged as the most promising Indian executive. Sant Bax Singh's father was a raja, so ruling came more naturally to his son than managing. He rejected the prosperous life that Lever's offered him and came back to Allahabad to become the member of parliament for one of the nearby constituencies. Sant Bax Singh fell out with Indira Gandhi because he openly challenged her practice of nominating the officials of the Congress Parliamentary Party instead of allowing MPs to elect them. To spite him, she promoted the career of his younger brother, Vishwanath Pratap Singh. At the time of the Mela, Sant Bax's political career was in the doldrums while V. P. Singh, after quarrelling with Rajiv Gandhi, had emerged as the opposition candidate for the premiership. But Sant Bax Singh was not overshadowed by his younger brother and was still able to summon the leading citizens of Allahabad to meet me.
The first person to arrive was Ramjee Dwivedi – the former mayor of Allahabad, a prominent Congressman and a member of the committee advising the organizers of the Kumbh Mela. Ramjee was Mr Allahabad – he knew everyone and could fix anything, which is always very important in India. It was Ramjee who first expressed doubts about the official estimate of the number of people who would come to bathe on the big day. To my horror, he put the blame for this on the BBC, claiming that we had said that two lakhs (200,000) people would be killed in a stampede. I explained to Ramjee that this must be a rumour. It is a doubtful tribute to our credibility – particularly the credibility of our Hindi service – that Indians who want to strengthen rumours often say, ‘I heard it on the BBC.’ There have been several election candidates facing defeat who have tried to revive their supporters’ morale by telling meetings that the BBC has predicted they are going to win. Ramjee agreed it was quite possible that there had never been a broadcast forecasting that 200,000 people would be killed in a stampede and went on to say, ‘The rumour might well have been floated by the officials running the Mela. They have deliberately overestimated the number of people who will come so that more money is budgeted for the Mela. Now that they have eaten that money, they have to explain why so few people have turned up.’ Although he was a Congressman, Ramjee had no qualms about criticizing his own administration, because he happened to be out of favour at the time. The Congress Party is always in a state of civil war.
‘How do you know that there will not be many people?’ I asked.
‘We have already had two bathing-days and the figures were well below the estimate on which the budgets were based. Now you can go to the Mela yourself and you will see that there are not very many people there. I will take you and show you everything. I know everything that has happened.’
The next day I entered the sprawling fair with great trepidation. I had been in many situations where the BBC was unpopular, but never had we been accused of an offence against the gods, and that was surely the charge against us now. I hoped that perhaps Ramjee had been exaggerating and that the Mela was indeed filling up. There were now only six days left before the big bathe.
We came first to the temporary stables of the mounted police, then drove past the neat khaki tents of the police lines, on to a secular fair complete with Ferris wheels, a roundabout offering ‘Jambu Jet’ rides, a talking dog and a snake circus whose ringmaster boasted that he played with death. There was a great deal of noise and very little business. Next came government exhibitions, including one showing the achievements of the campaign that Rajiv Gandhi had launched to clean up the Ganges. Then we saw the high fences of corrugated iron hiding the tents of the commissioner of Allahabad and the deputy inspector general of police.
‘I will take you to see their tents later,’ said Ramjee scornfully. ‘Then you can compare them with the accommodation they have provided for the pilgrims. If you are living in a five-star hotel and you throw me into a slum, how will you hear my crying for help?’
Leaving the administration's headquarters, we drove to the top of a long embankment built to keep the Ganges and the Jamuna out of Allahabad during the monsoon floods. From here we could look down on the very heart of the Mela. It was a mag
nificent sight – mile after mile of tented pavilions flying the flags of different religious orders, the Ganges ahead and the great fort built by the Emperor Akbar standing on the banks of the Jamuna to the right. But the pilgrims were missing.
We drove to Akbar's Fort, where Ramjee had organized an official boat for us to see the Sangam itself. Boatmen who had rowed their shallow craft from as far as Varanasi, or Benares, eighty miles downstream, to make their fortune at the Mela were standing around waiting for customers. I asked one about business. He said, ‘People do not seem to be coming this year. I think they are not coming out of fear. Everyone's life is precious.’
‘What is this fear?’
‘I have heard that the BBC said many people will die at the Mela.’
‘But did you hear any such broadcast or news yourself?’
‘No, I haven't heard that. But people here are speaking about the BBC saying there will be lakhs of deaths.’
I tried to explain that this was just a rumour, but I don't think the message went home. As far as the boatman was concerned, the damage had already been done, so what was the point of worrying whether the report was true or not?
From the jetty I could see the Sangam, where the blue waters of the Jamuna mixed with the muddy brown Ganges and then flowed away, sadly more brown than blue, towards Varanasi. We boarded our motor launch and set off towards the confluence. Looking along the river banks, Ramjee remarked, ‘People should be bathing here, but you see how few they are.’
I couldn't but agree. There weren't many pious Hindus standing praying or bobbing up and down as they ducked themselves in the Ganges no more than one would expect to see at an important place of pilgrimage on any day of the year. We climbed out of the boat on to a sandbank in the middle of the Sangam. There was a barricade of country boats anchored by bamboo poles which provided a floating bathing-ghat, but again there were very few customers. Ramjee pointed to the far bank of the Ganges. ‘There you see another big waste of public money,’ he said. ‘That is where they have built a helipad for the prime minister, but now he's not coming.’
‘Has he been put off by the BBC rumour too?’ I asked.
Ramjee was too serious a politician to take that as even a bad joke. ‘No,’ he replied earnestly. ‘When it was first announced that he was coming, I said wait until the results of the state-assembly elections in Tamil Nadu before making up your minds whether he will come. But the administration didn't listen. I knew that if he won that election he would be in political nasha – intoxication – and would be stupid enough to come. If he was defeated, he would not dare to show his face here. He lost that election very badly and you see his visit stands cancelled.’
‘Why would it have been stupid for him to come here?’
‘The sadhus [holy men] are very angry with him because he has been supporting the minorities, and they think his policies are anti-Hindu. They do not even think of him as a Hindu. They say his father was a Parsi and he has a foreign wife. They had prepared 6,000 balloons with black flags to release into the air during his meeting.’
The press had other explanations for the cancellation of the prime minister's visit. The local English daily, the Northern India Patrika, was owned by the family of a Congress Party MP, but that was not preventing it running stories every day against the Mela administration. It was leading the campaign to prove that the administrators had grossly inflated their estimates and were now trying to blame the low turnout on the BBC. The local press in India doesn't consider it's doing its job unless it is attacking the administration, but many of its allegations are ill-founded. Some of the less reputable papers – not, I hasten to add, the Patrika – blackmail officials and politicians. The Patrika said the Mela administration had put the fear of the godmen into Rajiv Gandhi because they were afraid that he would be met with a barrage of complaints about their arrangements for the Mela
The Jansatta, a national opposition paper, suggested that Rajiv Gandhi may have been reminded of an unfortunate precedent. His mother, Indira Gandhi, had addressed a meeting of the sadhus at the last Allahabad Kumbh Mela, twelve years previously. Later that year, she had been routed in a general election. The paper pointed out that Rajiv had to face the electorate before the end of the current year.
The man officially in charge of the entire Mela was the commissioner of Allahabad, Ravindra Gupta. I met him on the sandy banks of the Sangam. He was a middle-aged, balding, soft-spoken man, accompanied by two burly peons in blue overcoats, with the red sashes and brass badges which were their badges of office in the days of the raj. Immediately we were introduced, the commissioner smiled and said, ‘So you have come to see if 200,000 people really do get killed in a stampede.’
I once again denied that we had ever made any such suggestion and pointed out that no journalist would put his reputation at risk by making such a preposterous prophecy. The commissioner suggested that in that case the BBC should broadcast a denial of the rumour. A senior police officer wearing a solar topi laughed, ‘Don't deny it before the big bathe – that will make our lives much easier.’
The commissioner was not amused. ‘You have to take this seriously,’ he said. ‘It's not just a matter of the people coming or not. It's also a matter of the reputation of the BBC.’
I agreed, but pointed out that it would be very difficult for an organization which did not broadcast rumours to deny them.
Rumours and constant attacks by the press and by local politicians like Ramjee were not the only problems facing Ravindra Gupta and his team of administrators. Running the Kumbh Mela is a gigantic task. It involves constructing a city in the beds of the two rivers. No work can start until the monsoon floods have receded and the sands have dried out. The monsoon before this Mela had been particularly heavy and the site of the Mela had not dried out until October. The tented city had to be complete by January. As the commissioner told me, ‘Work had to proceed on a war footing.’ This was one war the Indian bureaucracy did win. Thirty-six thousand acres of land had to be flattened after the floods. Spurs and embankments had to be built to prevent the Ganges changing course and so altering the whole map of Kumbhnagar, as the tented city is called. After last year's monsoon, the Ganges had divided into two channels and irrigation engineers had tried to keep the channels separate so that there would be more space for bathing. The river defeated them, and so two months before the Mela the whole map of Kumbhnagar did indeed have to be changed. Then came another threat: the Ganges started eroding one of its banks, and could easily have flooded large areas of the Mela. An urgent message was sent up-river, and the flow through the dam at Narora was reduced.
Twenty-three tube-wells had to be sunk to provide drinking-water. They had to be deep enough to prevent the rivers seeping into them and polluting the subsoil water. One hundred and ten miles of water pipes and thirty-one miles of drainage had to be laid. The Public Works Department had to construct nine bridges on pontoons lashed to the banks of the Ganges. Forty mallahs or men of the fisherman caste watched each bridge day and night in case the moorings gave way. Every bridge had between seventy and eighty pontoons. The army was asked to construct a Bailey bridge across the Jamuna.
Twelve miles of steel plates had to be laid to provide motorable roads in Kumbhnagar, and another twelve miles or so of unmetalled roads had to be levelled. Thousands of acres of land had to be covered with tents to provide housing, offices and of course pavilions in which the religious leaders would give their discourses. There was also the threat of cholera. The medical officer who had the unenviable task of keeping the pilgrims healthy told me that he was providing 10,000 ‘seats’ a day in trench latrines. The seats had to be covered with lime, bleaching-powder, and anti-fly powder when they became unhygienic. This is apparently known as ‘ramming’ the trenches. Of course new trenches have to be dug to replace the rammed ones. The medical officer had also provided 4,000 flush lavatories and 700 commodes. I asked whether all the citizens of Kumbhnagar used the lavatories he had provided. He
replied, ‘Well, strictly speaking it's illegal to ease yourself anywhere else, but then any law to survive needs mass support, and that by the common man not by the superior people.’
In order to cope with those who didn't obey the law, the medical officer had laid on what he called ‘picking squads’ who had instructions to remove all the faeces by 6.30 a.m.
Kumbhnagar needed its own police force, more than 7,000 strong. The official note on the policing arrangements read, ‘Special emphasis will be given to motivate the policemen on duty to exhibit exemplary behaviour and courtesy towards the general public. In view to ensure this aspect policemen with clean records have been deputed for Kumbh Mela duty.’ Deputy inspector general of police Trinath Mishra had been chosen to command this exemplary force. A big, burly, pipe-smoking man who spoke excellent English, he appeared to be a highly anglicized member of the élite Indian Police Service – surely, I thought, not an appropriate officer to be in charge of an event as essentially Indian as the Kumbh Mela. I was to be proved wrong. When I got talking to D. I. G. Mishra I found that he had been a senior officer at the last Kumbh Mela. His predecessors had left inadequate notes about their arrangements and the problems they faced and so he set out to make a close study of the Mela and to record his findings meticulously. That had led to a book on the Kumbh Mela which was on sale this time.
D. I. G. Mishra helped me to find my way through the maze of religious organizations attending the Mela – more than 800.