Life is a Mela

Modern intellectuals are yet to appreciate the specialness of melas, a unique Indian cultural phenomenon

- Chandan Gowda

THE largest mela in the country for centuries, the Kumbh Mela, was a bigger phenomenon this year than ever before. Excitable television channels, smart tour operators, the thriving selfie culture, the non-stop celebrity endorsements, and big chunks of people with travel money for an event projected as a once-in-a-lifetime one, all joined in to make the holy dip in the Kumbh Mela a lifestyle issue and wrapped an easy piety around it.

The desire to wash off one’s sins at the once-in-144-year Maha Kumbh Mela—a disputed detail since other recent Kumbh Melas have also been claimed to be that—spread swiftly and widely. Lakhs of Hindus, who had no idea about what the Kumbh Mela meant or where it even took place, resolved to take part in it. Does all of this mean a strengthening of a generic Hindu identity in the country? Or, is the surge of Kumbh popularity a passing ephemerality, a depthless phenomenon, like so many hyped-up events in recent times?

The Kumbh Melas of Prayag, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nashik, which are held on the banks of rivers, exhibit remarkable features. They swell up with lakhs of people with the necessary facilities seeming to emerge spontaneously, without much prior planning on the part of any designated authorities. This magical quality indeed is a constitutive feature of a mela, as distinguished from a sammelana, which is an organised affair.