THE UPCOMING MAHA KUMBHA MELA at Prayaga promises to be grander and more spectacular than its predecessor in 2019, which holds the record for being the largest ever congregation of Hindus in one place. If indications are anything to go by, the attendance to this year’s Maha Kumbha will easily beat that record.
We live in truly fortunate times to witness, experience and participate in the Maha Kumbha Mela of 2025. The Maha Kumbha is the crest of all Kumbhas — the Ardha Kumbha which occurs once every six years, the Purna Kumbha, once every twelve and the Maha Kumbha, once in 144 years — 12 multiplied by 12.
The history of the Prayaga Kumbha Mela — as also of its counterparts in Haridwar, Ujjayini and Nasik — is embroidered with piety, thrill, war, inspiration, joy and tragedy. There’s nothing remotely comparable to it when placed in the realms of space and time. One can only mention a few historical anecdotes by way of illustration.
More than half a century before 1857, it was the Sanyasis who inaugurated the first war of freedom from the tyranny of the East India Company. They hailed from all parts — the Yogi warrior-contingent from Rajputana and the fabled sadhu Akhadas of Prayaga who commanded primacy over the Kumbha Mela.
Then we have Mark Twain giving us a vivid and evocative account of the Kumbha Mela that he witnessed in 1894. It’s worth quoting in some detail.
Then we struck into the hot plain, and found the roads crowded with pilgrims of both sexes, for one of the great religious fairs of India was being held…at the junction of the sacred rivers, the Ganges and the Jumna. Three sacred rivers, I should have said, for there is a subterranean one. Nobody has seen it, but that doesn't signify. The fact that it is there is enough. These pilgrims had come from all over India; some of them had been months on the way, plodding patiently along in the heat and dust, worn, poor, hungry, but supported and sustained by an unwavering faith and belief; they were supremely happy and content, now; their full and sufficient reward was at hand; they were going to be cleansed from every vestige of sin…by these holy waters which make utterly pure whatsoever thing they touch…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 upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining. It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know… No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites. [Few among us] could exhibit the equivalent of this prodigious self-sacrifice, but the rest of us know that we should not be equal to anything approaching it. Still, we all talk self-sacrifice, and this makes me hope that we are large enough to honor it in the Hindoo.
Following the Equator
Swami Paramahamsa Yogananda in his celebrated Autobiography of a Yogi narrates how his Guru Sri Yukteshwar Giri met his Guru, Mahavatar Babaji in the same Prayaga Kumbha Mela of 1894.
In the 1906 Kumbha Mela, the Sanatan Dharam Sabha passed a resolution to found the fabled Banaras Hindu University under Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya’s leadership.
A FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENT in the Kumbha Mela is the fact that it is a Tirtha Yatra.
Tirtha Yatra is the timeless expression of Hindu piety on two moving feet. But increasing urbanisation and instant travel poses the danger of permanently losing the full profundity of the experience of undertaking a Yatra on foot. Indeed, a total outsider to Hindu culture like Mark Twain has quite accurately captured the essence of the Tirtha Yatra using his own cultural reference point.
Akin to the term Dharma, Tirtha also has an expansive range of connotations, which cannot be grasped in its entirety. It is derived from the root, Tru, from which we get the word, taraṇa, meaning ”crossing over.” In the philosophical sense, it also means transcending the worldly bonds to attain moksha.
But the most common meaning of Tirtha is water, which by definition is sacred in our tradition.
Other meanings include “descent into a river,” “a place of water,” “a holy place,” “a place of pilgrimage,” “a minister of a king,” “a remedy or cure,” “fire,” etc.
When used as a suffix, Tirtha denotes the name of a spiritual order. For instance, Tirtha is one of the honorifics affixed to the sanyasis of Adi Sankaracharya’s order. The current pontiff of Sringeri is titled Bharati Tirtha.
When used as a prefix, we get Tirtha-Rupa (one’s biological father or Guru), Tirtha-Yatra (pilgrimage), Tirthankara (a Jain monk), and Tirtha-Raja, a synonymn for Prayaga. Interestingly, the word Tirtha-Raji, a synonymn for Kashi, is used as a collective noun — an agglomeration of various Tirtha Kshetras located in the same city.
Our national institution of Tirtha Yatra is a peerless and irreplacable illustration of order in chaos. It is an institution sans any headquarters or leader. The order is maintained by millions of ordinary people through their unsullied spiritual devotion, seeded, harnessed, nurtured and conserved almost since the dawn of the Hindu civilisation. There is no state in Bharatavarsha which does not have multiple Tirtha Kshetras to which Hindus flock from all parts of the country.
In the fourth volume of his majestic History of Dharmasastra, P.V. Kane devotes 104 pages giving a comprehensive list of Tirtha Kshetras located throughout undivided Bharatavarsha. Subject to correction, this is the fullest list available in a single place, an invaluable ready reckoner of sorts.
In fact, the corpus of primary literature exclusively dedicated to Tirtha Yatras is mind-boggling: Tirthaprakasha, Tirthendushekhara, Tirthayatra-Tattva, Tristhalisetu, Tirthachintamani, Tirthasara, etc. Every Purana has a mandatory section listing and extolling the glories of various Tirtha Kshetras. The Skanda Purana contains the most copious list. Independent works on Tirtha Yatras have been culled from this Puranic lore and remain popular till date — the Gayā-māhātmya, Kashi-māhātmya and Prayaga-māhātmya occupy the top slot. Likewise, primary texts, commentaries and digests of Dharmasastra too, have precious details related to Tirtha Kshetras.
Even in our technology-driven, consumptive era, there is a substantial chunk of Hindus who not only undertake Tirtha Yatras on foot regularly, but make generous endowments at different Tirtha Kshetras.
To understand the extraordinary primacy and invisible power of this priceless heirloom of Hindu culture, we must understand the fundamental impulses of the spiritual civilisation that sculpted the Hindu psyche. In his wonderful collection of essays titled Sadhana, Rabindranath Tagore gives us a sublime clue:
…the text of our everyday meditation is the Gayatri, a verse which is considered to be the epitome of all the Vedas. By its help…we learn to perceive the unity held together by the one Eternal Spirit, whose power creates the earth, the sky, and the stars, and at the same time irradiates our minds with the light of a consciousness that moves and exists in unbroken continuity with the outer world. “…the sense of the superiority of man in the scale of creation has not been absent from her mind. But she has had her own idea as to that in which his superiority really consists. It is not in the power of possession but in the power of union. Therefore India chose her places of pilgrimage wherever there was in nature some special grandeur or beauty, so that her mind could come out of its world of narrow necessities and realise its place in the infinite. This was the reason why in India a whole people who once were meat-eaters gave up taking animal food to cultivate the sentiment of universal sympathy for life, an event unique in the history of mankind.
Sadhana, Rabindranath Tagore
We notice precisely this philosophical sentiment of Cosmic Unity in Tirtha Yatras. It is also the root of why, in spite of territorial divisions as various kingdoms, Bharatavarsha’s geography has always been culturally united. Why for example, would a 13th century Hoysala king grant the entire revenue of a village to facilitate the Kashi Yatra of pilgrims travelling from South India? During his time, Kashi was under the control of Balban who had imposed the Jiyza (pilgrim tax).
The Tirtha Yatra is the companion-institution of Utsavas (festivals). Both acted as shock absorbers and preserved the integrity and continuity of the Hindu civilisation, culture and society, which suffered incessant onslaughts from alien aggressors and rulers. It is precisely to break this integrity that almost all Muslim rulers imposed the Jiyza and banned the public celebration of Hindu festivals.
But on a deeper plane, Hindu festivals are expressions of reverence for Rta (Cosmic Order) in the realm of Time and and Tirtha Yatras, in the realm of Space.
WE CAN TRACE the origin of Tirtha Kshetras (literally, sacred places situated on the banks of holy waters) to several verses in the Rg and other Vedas which regard water as sacred. In fact, there are hundreds of verses extolling the Āpō-dēvis (Goddess of Water) in the entire Vedic corpus. In P.V. Kane’s words,
In the Rgveda, waters, rivers in general and certain named rivers are referred to with great reverence as holy and are deified… ‘may the divine waters protect me.’…waters are spoken of as purifying…hymns are addressed to waters as divinities. They are said to purify a man of all sins and lapses from the right path.
Thus, it is not difficult to detect from this Vedic fountainhead the gradual evolution of the Tirtha Yatra as a pious national undertaking. In fact, by the late Dharmasastra Era (100 - 400 CE), the Tirtha Yatra had become one of the prescriptions to lead a Dharmic life. The Vishnudharmasutra includes Tirtha Yatra as one of the fourteen elements in his definition of Dharma (Chapter 2. 16-17).
In its conception, origin, evolution and spread, the Tirtha Yatra is one of the original and inimitable gifts given by the Sanatana spiritual culture to world civilisation.
If Prayaga is the Tirtha-Raja, the Kumbha Mela is the Mela-Raja, the undisputed monarch of all Tirtha Yatras. Like its counterparts, it is a Yatra culminating in a grand Utsava. The journey is ennobling and the destination, elevating.
THE WORD Mela variously means “joining,” “union,” “a multitude,” and “an assembly.” We clearly observe all of these in the Kumbha Mela.
But Mela also has two other, deeper connotations.
The first: a combination of parts into a pleasing and orderly whole.” This sense harks back to my earlier mention of how the Kumbha Mela is a living instance of order in chaos. The stunning scene of the Kumbha Mela as a single, grand visual indicates precisely this “pleasing and orderly whole.”
The second connotation is “harmony.” The closest analogy to explain this connotation is the Melakarta Raga system of Carnatic classical music. In this case, Mela is defined as the harmonious arrangement of Svaras or notes of differing frequencies. It is also known as Svara-Maitri or friendship among Svaras. When we extend this analogy slightly, Melas like the Kumbha Mela can be defined as Bhakti-Maitri or Adhyatma-Maitri. To invoke P.V. Kane once again,
…though the Hindu community was broken up into numerous castes…pilgrimages tended to level up all men by bringing them together to the same holy rivers or shrines. The traditions associated with holy places, the discipline through which the pilgrims passed, association with holy and philosophic men and the whole atmosphere…at the Tirthas made it easy for pilgrims to remain at a high spiritual level and inculcated in them a mood of reverence that lasted long after they returned from the pilgrimage. Pilgrimages supplied the much needed stimulus to draw ordinary men away from selfish pursuits and to make them think of the higher and the more enduring moral and spiritual values.
An honest study of institutions like the Kumbha Mela also disproves the wild colonial exaggerations and spurious Marxist theories, which define Hindu society as nothing but "caste" division and oppression. All Dharmasastra treatises unanimously and unambiguously declare that there is no Varna-Bheda — distinction based on social class — during a Tirtha-Yatra.
The economic facet of the Kumbha Mela is visible to plain sight. Since untold antiquity, all such Melas were self-sufficient and self-contained economic systems in their own right. The British, who had initially overlooked this aspect, quickly realised that this was a fecund cash cow. From 1860 onwards, they usurped the whole management and finances of the Kumbha Mela. In our own time, the total revenue generated during the 2019 Kumbha Mela was a colossal ₹ 1.2 lakh crores.
THE MASSIVE SPURT in attendance to the various Kumbha Melas during the last decade owes mainly to the heightened Hindu cultural consciousness. It is a combination of decades of hard, selfless work in reawakening the Hindu community to its own heritage.
A marked transformation in this reawkening was the long overdue renaming of Allahabad as Prayagraj, its venerated original name. In his Ain-i-Akbari, Abul Fazl candidly mentions the real intent of his master, Jalal-ud-din Akbar:
For a long time his [Akbar’s] desire was to found a great city in the town of Piyag…On 13th November 1583, he reached the wished spot and laid the foundations of the city and planned four forts… Ilahabad anciently called Prayag was distinguished by His Imperial Majesty by the former name.
The de-Allahabad-ification of Prayagraj should have occurred immediately after Independence but was halted for seven decades by the politics practiced by its most famous inhabitant: Jawaharlal Nehru.
The word Prayaga can be expanded as prakṛṣṭo yāgo yatra, meaning “a place where excellent Yagas are performed.” The earliest reference to Prayaga is, again, found in the Rgveda (X.75) which emphatically declares thus:
Those who take a bath at the place where the two rivers [Ganga and Yamuna] meet together, rise up to heaven; those determined men who abandon their body there [literally, by drowning themselves] secure immortality or moksha.
Set more than ten thousand years ago, this Vedic declaration is still the spiritual edifice that supports the crown of the Tirtha-Raja, Prayaga. The Prayaga-māhātmya goes into raptures describing the glory of this sacred city. Prayaga is also placed at the head of the famous Tristhali — the triad of Tirtha Kshetras, the other two being Kashi and Gaya.
Prayaga derives its preeminence from the renowned Triveni Sangama, the confluence of Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati (now extinct). Even today, the Triveni Sangama is the first destination of pilgrims who land in Prayaga — Kumbha Mela or no. For uncountable centuries, Triveni Sangama was the very spot where devout Hindus physically merged with the sacred river — by drowning themselves armed with the unshakeable belief that this pious act would free them from the cycle of birth and death.
Bharatavarsha’s historical annals contain quite a long list of people who gave up their mortal bodies in the Triveni Sangama. The story of the 10th Century Chandela king, Dhangadeva stands as an evocative example. After a splendid half-century reign, Dhanga spent his last days in Prayaga. An inscription narrates that he became a Sanyasi in that city and in the end, “as his renunciation ripened, he entered the sacred waters at the Trivēṇi-saṅgama and closing his eyes, fixing his thoughts on Rudra, Dhanga abandoned his mortal body.”
THE "MODERN" HINDU PSYCHE — rootless and deracinated — cannot comprehend, much less believe, that such people actually existed. To which once again, P.V. Kane supplies a brilliant insight.
The psychological background behind [giving up one’s body] at Prayaga…is not difficult to realise. Centuries of philosophical thought had made a very deep impression on the minds of all people that the soul has to submit to a never-ending cycle of births and deaths. Ancient scriptures had offered a release in two ways, viz., by Tattvajnana [spiritual realisation] and by [giving up one’s body] at a tirtha. Death had no great terror for the pilgrim who submitted to various inconveniences…ungrudgingly. If one is determined to put an end to samsara [worldly life] by taking one’s life, what nobler environment…than at Prayaga, where two mighty rivers flowing from the sacred Himalaya unite and carry on unceasingly their work of fertilising the land and bringing prosperity and solace to millions of needy and anxious people?”
Thus, the Kumbha Mela is in essence, a living, human miniature of the Sanatana civilisation itself. The renewed impetus it has received during Yogi Adityanath’s chief ministership has fulfilled an urgent imperative. Yet, it needs substantial reform to adapt to a vastly altered India.
A hallmark of the contemporary Hindu society is a mindless pursuit of money and a voluntary rush to embrace technology-induced dumbing-down. The challenge therefore is to preserve the spiritual core that built national institutions like the Tirtha Yatra of which the Kumbha Mela is a summit. If that core erodes any further, the Kumbha Mela will eventually resemble a rock concert.
And finally, there is no better way to conclude this essay than quoting P.V. Kane who foresaw this calamity when he wrote the following in 1953:
Modern secular education and…stresses and trends leave hardly any room for moral and spiritual uplift. We are surrounded… by anxiety, misery, hardness of heart and crime. Therefore, the endeavour… must be to cherish all such institutions as tend to lift the mind out of narrowness and…concentrate it…on noble…aspirations and on detachment from the all-engrossing pursuit of money. Pilgrimage is one such institution. Those who have faith in pilgrimages as enabling a pilgrim to…collect merit and reach release from samsara should give pilgrimages a new orientation…it would be a calamity for the moral and spiritual greatness of India if pilgrimages to holy mountains and rivers came to be stopped altogether…in philosophical thought, in abiding literature, in works of art and in holy places…the destinies of the Indians of one part of Bharata are bound up with the destinies of all others. Frequent visits to distant places in Bharata, mixing up among our people…is absolutely necessary if we are to keep our freedom.
|| Om Tat Sat ||
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