Maha Kumbh 2025: A timeless ‘sangam’ of faith, mythology and modernity

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Maha Kumbh 2025: A timeless ‘sangam’ of faith, mythology and modernity

Wednesday, 22 January 2025 | Dev Nath Pathak

Maha Kumbh 2025: A timeless ‘sangam’ of faith, mythology and modernity

the event reaffirms its status as an intangible cultural heritage, blending ancient mythology and lived religious practices to embody the unity in diversity of Indian spirituality

Mark Tully, the well-known former BBC correspondent depicted the 1989 Maha Kumbh at Parayag as an enigmatic and enchanting interplay of time and timelessness. Navigating the kaleidoscopic unfolding of saints from Akhadas, pilgrims called Kaplvasis, stakeholder communities such as Prayagwals and Ghatiya priests, Kewats and Khatiks, and overall householders and renouncers, Tully reported on the mythology and history aimed at a greater common goal, the spiritual uplift of the participating humanity. The religion of the Hindus at Maha Kumbh wrote Tully, is a ‘religion beyond the reality of history, a religion of the imagination which goes beyond reason’. 

The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur is engaged in reviewing the Prayag Maha Kumbh of 2025, enabling a fresh perspective on the interplay of time and timelessness surrounding the intangible heritage. At various levels, the intangible heritage seems to have found tangible manifestation. The enormity of Mahakumbh is not merely in the formidable statistics on the whopping number of participants or even the scale of the organisation. The numbers have increased over the decades and the organisation has entered an art of state level. In the past Mahakumbh was spotted by the Indian Space Research Organisation space satellite as one of the most jaw-dropping visuals.

The 2025 version has ensured that more elaborate facilities for the pilgrims and sadhus, diverse categories of accommodations on three sides of Sangam, and the latest technology for the upkeep of hygiene are in place. The administrators of the Kumbh district have seemingly left no stone unturned to ensure highly efficient, technologically supported services. Yet the most significant is the power of mythology, history and social embeddedness of the Hindu religion, the Sanatan dharma. No wonder UNESCO had to declare Kumbh as an intangible heritage of India in 2017. But the intangible and abstract have very tangible and concrete expressions in the Kumbh, the latest addition being an up-marketed Akshaya Vat, a mythical tree adjoining the precincts of the fort of emperor Akbar. Even though Maha Kumbh is conceived and communicated through abundant textual references, it is a manifestation of lived religious tradition and collective memory of India.

The ancient texts of the Rigveda, Yajurveda, Atharva Veda, Matsya Purana, Skanda Purana, Vishnu Purana, and the epics such as Valmiki’s Ramayana and Ved Vyas’s Mahabharata provide ample references to the religious congregation, premised on the origin myth of Hindu mythology. Gods in collaboration with demons conducted a churning of the ocean, the sagar-manthan. The boatmen tell us that the sagarmanthan shall continue in our minds. Of the fourteen priceless outcomes of the churning one was a Kumbh of Amrit, a pitcher filled with immortality nectar.

Many versions of the myth and tales inform that some drops of nectar fell in the confluence of rivers, Ganga, Jamuna and mythical Sarasvati. On certain celestial occasions, the nectar in the confluence becomes available for the pilgrims, who stay by the confluence and observe a daily life of austerity, piety, and spiritual practices, called Kalpwaas, aimed at transforming the body and mind.

Unlike the modern historians’ dispute about the origin of Mahakumbh, many travellers, chroniclers and intellectuals from ancient to modern times have found it mystical. The Chinese Buddhist scholar Hsüan Tsang attended a Kumbh in the 7th century CE in which the emperor of Kannauj Harshavardhan participated and gave away his wealth. In the 9th century CE, the Hindu reformer saint and scholar Adi Shankar transformed the Mahakumbh into a more pan-Hindu event. Much later Mughal emperor Akbar constructed ghats and fortifications by the Sangam contributing to the infrastructure of the Kumbh Mela, as described by Abu Fazal in Akbarnama. In modern India Mahatma Gandhi had more critical comprehension of the Mahakumbh.

He mentioned in his biography that self-realisation was not a hostage to the pilgrimage in the Kumbh, yet in 1915 he attended the Kumbh at Haridwar. Jawaharlal Nehru, however, fondly remembered in The Discovery of India, “What was the tremendous faith, I wondered, that had drawn our people for untold generations to this famous river of India”? A microcosm of India, Maha Kumbh represents unity in diversity and lived religion described in Dhananjay Chopra’s book published in 2024 by the National Book Trust of India. Perhaps that ensures an interplay of time and timelessness and thus a long future of the Maha Kumbh.

(The author is Associate Professor of Sociology at South Asian University and is a member of the Maha Kumbh review team of IIT Kanpur; views are personal)

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