Maha Kumbh Mela: What to know about the Indian festival
PRAYAGRAJ, India — Millions of Hindu devotees, mystics and holy men and women from across India flocked to the northern city of Prayagraj on Monday to kick off the Kumbh Mela, billed as the world's largest religious gathering. .
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 take part in elaborate rituals that hope to Begin a journey to achieve the ultimate goal of Hindu philosophy: freedom from the cycle of rebirth.
Here is information about the festival:
Religious gathering at the confluence of three sacred rivers
Hindus worship rivers, especially the Ganges and Yamuna. Believers believe that soaking in the water can wash away their past sins and conclude their reincarnation process, especially on auspicious days. The most auspicious of these days occurs in a 12-year cycle during a festival called Maha Kumbh Mela or the Festival of the Pitcher.
The festival, a series of bathing rituals performed by Hindu saints and other pilgrims at the confluence of three sacred rivers, dates back to at least the Middle Ages. Hindus believe that the mythical Saraswati river once flowed from the Himalayas through Prayagraj, where it joined the Ganges and Yamuna rivers.
Bathing takes place every day, but on the most auspicious days, monks, naked and covered in ashes, rush to the sacred river at dawn. Many pilgrims stay throughout the festival, observing austerities, giving alms and bathing at sunrise every day.
“We feel peace here and get salvation from the cycle of birth and death,” said pilgrim Bhagwat Prasad Tiwari.
The festival has its origins in Hindu tradition, where Lord Vishnu is said to have wrested a golden pot containing the nectar of immortality from the hands of a demon. Hindus believe that a few raindrops fall in the cities of Prayagraj, Nasik, Ujjain and Haridwar – four places where big festivals have been held. Kumbh Mela for centuries.
The Kumbh Mela rotates between these four pilgrimage sites approximately every three years on astrologically determined dates. This year’s festival is the biggest and biggest of them all. A smaller version of the festival, called Ardh Kumbh (or Half Kumbh), was held in 2019, with 240 million visitors, about 50 million of whom performed the ritual bath on the busiest day.
Maha Kumbh is the largest such gathering in the world
According to officials, at least 400 million people – more than the population of the United States – are expected to gather in Prayagraj in the next 45 days. That's about 200 times the 2 million pilgrims who arrived last year in Saudi Arabia's Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina for the annual hajj.
The festival is a major test for Indian authorities on Hindu religion, tourism and crowd management.
A large swath of land along the river has been transformed into a sprawling tent city, equipped with more than 3,000 kitchens and 150,000 bathrooms. The tent city is divided into 25 parts and covers an area of more than 40 square kilometers (15 square miles). It also has housing, roads, water and electricity, communication towers and 11 hospitals. The city walls are painted with murals depicting stories from Hindu scriptures.
In addition to ordinary trains, the Indian Railways has also launched more than 90 special trains, and nearly 3,300 trains will be run during the festival to transport devotees.
The city also has about 50,000 security personnel stationed in the city, a 50% increase from 2019, to maintain law and order and crowd management. More than 2,500 cameras, some powered by artificial intelligence, will send crowd movement and density information to four central control rooms, where officials can quickly deploy personnel to avoid stampedes.
The festival will strengthen Modi's support base
India's past leaders have used the holiday to strengthen ties with the country's Hindus, who make up nearly 80 percent of India's more than 1.4 billion people. But under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the festival has become an integral part of his advocacy of Hindu nationalism. For Modi and his party, Indian civilization is inseparable from Hinduism, although critics say the party's philosophy is rooted in Hindu supremacy.
Uttar Pradesh, led by Adityanath, a powerful Hindu monk and a popular hardline Hindu politician in Modi's party, has earmarked more than $765 million for this year's campaign . It has also used the holiday to boost his and the prime minister's image, with giant billboards and posters displaying the pair across the city alongside slogans promoting their government's welfare policies.
The festival is expected to boost the ruling Hindu nationalist party Bharatiya Janata Party's past record of promoting Hindu cultural symbols to its base of support. But recent Kumbh gatherings have also sparked controversy.
The Modi government changed the city's Mughal-era name from Allahabad to Prayagraj as part of its nationwide campaign ahead of the 2019 festival and Modi's party won national elections. part of an effort to change Muslim names to Hindu names. In 2021, his government refused to cancel the festival in Haridwar despite a surge in coronavirus cases, fearing a backlash from religious leaders in the majority-Hindu country.