The meaning of the Maha Kumbh Mela

I was barely 22 when I went to the Maha Kumbh Mela at the Allahabad sangam at the turn of the millenniumthis was the big one, once in 144 years.

- HINDOL SENGUPTA

It was the biggest cultural immersion possible from which I emerged thoroughly decolonised.

The gathering of countless sadhus, under countless tents, on a riverbank, with special auspicious bathing days where the dip in the holy waters of the trijunction of rivers would be led by warrior ascetics, the Naga sadhus, with dreadlocks, ashen bodies, carrying tridents, and naked.

I had gone to Allahabad (now Prayagraj) having read a bunch of writings on the Kumbh from reporters from various British and American newspapers. Barely out of college, I thought these clippings were the best researched pieces to read-up on the Kumbh. I remember one journalist writing that when he woke up in the morning in the train that was taking him to Allahabad, he thought outside people were shouting, "Tchaikovsky, Tchaikovsky, Tchaikovsky." What they were really saying of course, these vendor boys with their aluminum kettles and mud cups, was. "chaicoffee, chai-coffee, chai-coffee." I went to the Kumbh with this curious notion of telling "the world" (I was a junior reporter at an international news wire agency) about this "spectacle".

But the Kumbh destroyed any notions of being "an outsider". The most resonant feeling that I still remember so distinctly from the Kumbh is an overwhelming sense of déjà vu- -I had seen these visuals before. I knew this place-even though I had never attended a Kumbh in my life or even been to the city of Allahabad.

The Kumbh, seen through external eyes, was always about a sort of spectacle exotique-this idea had been drilled into many Indian minds too. But to experience the Kumbh is to live through a process which brings alive Gustav Mahler's words, "Tradition is not the worship of ashes, it is the preservation of fire." Something very old, something not from this lifetime alone, awakens within you, something primal, something ethereal.