Monday marked the beginning of the Maha Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival often described as the world’s largest religious gathering.
The Indian government expects 400 million people to participate this year, including many travelers from other countries, who will join Indian Hindus in taking a ritual bath in the Ganges River and other sacred waters.
“Maha Kumbh Mela” means “Great Festival of the Sacred Pitcher.” The pitcher in question, according to legend, contained an elixir that would make the drinker immortal.
Hindu gods and demons fought ferociously over this pitcher, ending a brief interlude of cooperation in which they wrapped a giant snake around a mountain and used it to churn the cosmic ocean until the elixir bubbled up. An avatar of Vishnu managed to hustle the mighty jar of elixir off to the heavens. Four drops of immortality elixir fell to Earth as the pitcher was carried away, landing at the sacred river sites where the Maha Kumbh Mela ritual is performed.
Snatching a giant pitcher away from an army of angry demons and carrying it all the way to Heaven while only spilling four drops is a most impressive feat, and the Maha Kumbh Mela festival celebrates the discipline and devotion that was required to accomplish it, among other virtues. Bathing in the sacred waters is believed to purify both body and soul, achieving a state of grace called moksha that echoes the immortality contained in the sacred pitcher.
Participants in the festival have developed many methods of ritually expressing this concept over the centuries, including processions that involve singing, dancing, and bearing ceremonial weapons.
The Maha Kumbh Mela is held every three years, when the planet Jupiter aligns with the Sun, Moon, and stars in a particular configuration. The precise configuration varies, and this year happens to be the most auspicious celestial alignment in a very long time – a configuration that only happens once every 144 years.
The location of the ceremony rotates between the four sacred sites, landing in the Uttar Pradesh city of Prayagraj this year. The event will last from January 13 – itself a very significant holiday known as Paush Purnima – until February 26. Local officials have built a temporary city to handle the gigantic crowds, including 150,000 tents, and Prayagraj will be patrolled by some 40,000 police officers.
The last few sacred baths drew immense crowds, but this year’s event could double the 200 million who came to the 2019 festival. The last Maha Kumbh Mela bath in Prayagraj, held in 2013, had 120 million participants. In comparison, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca draws two to three million worshipers.
This year’s Maha Kumbh Mela will include a number of social media celebrities and influencers hoping to raise the worldwide profile of the event. Some of them told One India on Wednesday they are the first members of their families to return to India for the festival in decades, or even centuries.
There is a major political element to the religious festival, as the Indian-nationalist ruling party, BJP, hopes to demonstrate its competence and influence by managing the gigantic event well. The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh is a hard-line Hindu monk, Yogi Adityanath, who changed the name of the city of Prayagraj in 2018 because its former name, “Allahabad,” was obviously not chosen by Hindus.
BJP is making strategic use of the event to reach out to India’s castes with a message of “social equality,” or “Samajik Samta.” Featured prominently in brochures and posters for Maha Kumbh Mela is BJP’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. One of the posters includes a photo of Modi bathing the feet of sanitation workers at the 2010 Kumbh Mela event.
Modi won a tough re-election fight to remain prime minister in June 2024, but BJP took a beating in parliamentary contests, in part because he lost support from the Dalits (the “untouchables” at the bottom of India’s traditional caste system) and the Nishads (who sit a bit higher up the caste ladder, often working as hunters and fishermen.) A successful, record-setting Maha Kumbh Mela festival with the right political messaging could go a long way toward helping BJP heal that rift.
