India kicks off Hindu festival billed as world’s largest religious gathering: NPR

PRAYAGRAJ, India — Millions of Hindu devotees, mystics and holy men and women from across India gathered in the northern town of Prayagraj on Monday to launch the Maha Kumbh festival, billed as the world’s largest religious gathering in the world.

Over the next six weeks or so, Hindu pilgrims will gather at the confluence of three sacred rivers – the Ganges, the Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati – where they will participate in elaborate rituals, hoping to begin a journey to reach the goal ultimate of Hindu philosophy: liberation from the cycle of rebirths.

Here’s what you need to know about the festival:

A religious gathering at the confluence of three sacred rivers. Hindus revere rivers, especially the Ganges and the Yamuna. Devotees believe that bathing in their waters will cleanse them of their past sins and end their reincarnation process, especially on auspicious days. The most auspicious days occur in 12-year cycles during a festival called Maha Kumbh Mela, or the pitcher’s festival.

The festival is a series of ritual baths performed by Hindu sadhus, or holy men, and other pilgrims at the confluence of three sacred rivers that date back to at least medieval times. Hindus believe that the mythical Saraswati River once flowed from the Himalayas through Prayagraj, where it met the Ganges and Yamuna.

Bathing takes place every day, but on the most auspicious dates, naked and ash-covered monks rush to the sacred rivers at dawn. Many pilgrims stay for the duration of the festival, observing austerity, giving alms, and bathing at sunrise each day.

“We feel at peace here and achieve salvation from the cycles of life and death,” said Bhagwat Prasad Tiwari, a pilgrim.

The festival has its roots in a Hindu tradition according to which the god Vishnu snatched from demons a golden pitcher containing the nectar of immortality. Hindus believe that a few drops fell in the towns of Prayagraj, Nasik, Ujjain and Haridwar, the four places where the Kumbh festival has been held for centuries.

The Kumbh rotates between these four pilgrimage sites approximately every three years on a date prescribed by astrology. This year’s festival is the biggest and grandest of all. A smaller version of the festival, called Ardh Kumbh, or Half Kumbh, was organized in 2019, when 240 million visitors were recorded, of whom around 50 million took a ritual bath on the busiest day.

Maha Kumb is the largest gathering of its kind in the world. At least 400 million people – more than the population of the United States – are expected in Prayagraj over the next 45 days, according to authorities. That’s about 200 times the 2 million pilgrims who arrived last year in the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia for the annual Hajj pilgrimage.

The festival is a big test for Indian authorities to highlight the Hindu religion, tourism and crowd management.

A vast area of ​​land along the rivers has been transformed into a vast tent city equipped with more than 3,000 kitchens and 150,000 toilets. Divided into 25 sections and spanning 40 square kilometers (15 square miles), the tent city also has housing, roads, electricity and water, communications towers and 11 hospitals. Murals depicting stories from Hindu scriptures are painted on the walls of the city.

The Indian Railways has also introduced over 90 special trains which will make nearly 3,300 trips during the festival to ferry devotees, in addition to regular trains.

Around 50,000 security officers – a 50% increase from 2019 – are also stationed in the city to maintain public order and manage crowds. More than 2,500 cameras, some powered by AI, will send information about crowd movements and density to four central control rooms, where officials can quickly deploy staff to avoid stampedes.

The festival will strengthen Modi’s support base. Former Indian leaders have used the festival to strengthen relations with the country’s Hindus, who make up nearly 80% of India’s population of more than 1.4 billion. But under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the festival has become part of his advocacy for Hindu nationalism. For Modi and his party, Indian civilization is inseparable from Hinduism, even though critics say the party’s philosophy is rooted in Hindu supremacy.

The state of Uttar Pradesh, led by Adityanath – a powerful Hindu monk and a popular radical Hindu politician in Modi’s party – has allocated more than $765 million for this year’s event. He also used the festival to boost his and the prime minister’s image, with giant billboards and posters around the city showing them both, alongside slogans touting the government’s social policies.

The festival is expected to strengthen the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s track record of promoting Hindu cultural symbols to its support base. But the recent Kumbh rallies have also given rise to controversies.

Modi’s government changed the name of the Mughal-era city of Allahabad to Prayagraj as part of its nationwide Muslim-to-Hindu renaming effort ahead of the 2019 festival and national elections won by his party. In 2021, his government refused to cancel the Haridwar festival despite a surge in coronavirus cases, fearing a backlash from religious leaders in the Hindu-majority country.