To Be Spirited Away

Instant moksha, spiritual safaris, seeking Shiva, touching the core of Indian spirituality - what foreigners come looking for in Mahakumbh 2025 in Prayagraj

- PARAMITA GHOSH

What happens when you are open to all kinds of foreign experiences amid circumstances that are exotic to say the least? Doris Hahnloser, from Zurich, a retired manager of a retail boutique, who has been visiting India since 1985, probably has some answer.

In the Mahakumbh, Prayagraj, for the first time, she tries to soak in all of it - the spectacle, the spirituality, the contradictions. "In India, I have seen the sane and the other side...," she says delicately. For her, a meeting with the sadhus - the high point of the event, along with the Shahi snan - falls in between the two stools.

She does not completely understand them but feels "moved" by their life of renunciation; she realises that to them too, her life may seem an aberration, or just plain different. But she has "felt, seen, and been heard".

From Hahnsloser and Atma Prem Giri Maharaj, a Russia-born seer who came under the spotlight this Kumbh as 'Muscular Baba', to the late Steve Jobs's widow Laurene Powell, whose stay at the Niranjini Akhara camp and becoming 'Kamala' has stirred an internet storm, the East-West encounter is a puzzle. It is so for both sides, and this has been visible at the Kumbh.

Religious tourism Orientalism has played no small part in this 'Eastward ho'. What is new is the scale of publicity this Kumbh is getting. Besides what happened serendipitously for many decades, for example, in the sixties, this encounter is now being packaged as religious tourism. And there are many takers.

Mahakumbh 2025 has gone viral. According to a local daily, "combo packages of ₹3,500" have been organised under the aegis of the UP state tourism department "to see Naga-Aghori sadhus".

Powell is also an example of a new seeker from the West, who has come to the Kumbh for a new Eastern experience, a spiritual safari before returning to actual lives.