A Pilgrimage Across Time

THE UPCOMING MAHA KUMBH at Prayagraj promises to be grander and more spectacular than its predecessor in 2019, which holds the record for being the largest ever congregation of Hindus in one place. If indications are anything to go by, the attendance at this year’s Maha Kumbh will easily beat that record.

We live in truly fortunate times to witness, experience and participate in the Maha Kumbh Mela of 2025. The Maha Kumbh is the crest of all Kumbhs— the Ardha Kumbh which occurs once every six years, the Purna Kumbh, once every 12 and the Maha Kumbh, once in 144 years—12 multiplied by 12.

The history of the Prayag Kumbh Mela—as also of its counterparts in Hardwar, Ujjain and Nasik—is embroidered with piety, thrill, war, inspira­tion, joy and tragedy. There is nothing remotely comparable to it when placed in the realms of space and time. One can only mention a few his­torical anecdotes by way of illustration.

More than half-a-century before 1857, it was the sanyasis who inaugurated the first war of freedom from the tyranny of the East India Company. They hailed from all parts—the yogi-warrior contingent from Rajputana and the fabled sadhu Akhadas of Prayag who commanded primacy over the Kumbh Mela.

Then we have Mark Twain giving us a vivid and evocative account of the Kumbh Mela that he witnessed in 1894. It is worth quoting in some detail.

“Then we struck into the hot plain, and found the roads crowded with pilgrims of both sexes, for one of the great religious fairs of India was be­ing held… at the junction of the sacred rivers, the Ganges and the Jumna. Three sacred rivers, I should have said, for there is a subterranean one. Nobody has seen it, but that doesn’t signify. The fact that it is there is enough. These pilgrims had come from all over India; some of them had been months on the way, plodding patiently along in the heat and dust, worn, poor, hungry, but supported and sustained by an unwaver­ing faith and belief; they were supremely happy and content, now; their full and sufficient reward was at hand; they were going to be cleansed from every vestige of sin… by these holy waters which make utterly pure whatsoever thing they touch… It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesita­tion or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining. It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know… No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites. [Few among us] could exhibit the equivalent of this prodigious self-sacrifice, but the rest of us know that we should not be equal to anything approaching it. Still, we all talk self-sacrifice, and this makes me hope that we are large enough to honor it in the Hindoo.” [Following the Equator, emphases added]

Swami Paramahansa Yogananda in his Autobiography of a Yogi narrates how his Guru Sri Yukteshwar Giri met his Guru, Mahavatar Babaji in the same Prayag Kumbh Mela of 1894.

In the 1906 Kumbh Mela, the Sanatan Dharam Sabha passed a resolution to found the fabled Banaras Hindu University under Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya’s leadership.

A fundamental element in the Kumbh Mela is the fact that it is a ‘Tirtha Yatra’. Tirtha Yatra is the timeless expres­sion of Hindu piety on two moving feet. But increas­ing urbanisation and instant travel pose the danger of permanently losing the full profundity of the ex­perience of undertaking a yatra on foot. Indeed, a total outsider to Hindu culture like Mark Twain has quite accurately captured the essence of the Tirtha Yatra using his own cultural reference point.

Akin to the term dharma, tirtha also has an expan­sive range of connotations, which cannot be grasped in its entirety. It is derived from the root, Tru, from which we get the word, tarana, meaning “crossing over”. In the philosophical sense, it also means tran­scending the worldly bonds to attain moksha.

But the most common meaning of tirtha is water, which by definition is sacred in our tradition. Other meanings include ‘descent into a river’, ‘a place of water’, ‘a holy place’, ‘a place of pilgrimage’, ‘a minis­ter of a king’, ‘a remedy or cure’, ‘fire’, etc. When used as a suffix, tirtha denotes the name of a spiritual order. For instance, tirtha is an honorific affixed to the sanyasis of Adi Sankaracharya’s order. The current pontiff of Sringeri is titled Bharati Tirtha.

When used as a prefix, we get Tirtha-Rupa (one’s biological fa­ther or Guru), Tirtha-Yatra (pilgrimage), Tirthankara (a Jain monk), and Tirtha-Raja, a synonym for Prayag. Interestingly, the word Tirtha-Raji, a synonym for Kashi, is used as a collective noun—an agglomeration of various Tirtha Kshetras located in the same city.

Our national institution of Tirtha Yatra is a peerless and irreplaceable illustration of order in chaos. It is an institution sans any headquarters or leader. The order is maintained by millions of ordinary people through their unsullied spiritual devotion, seeded, harnessed, nurtured and conserved almost since the dawn of Hindu civilisation. There is no state in Bharatavarsha which does not have multiple Tirtha Kshetras to which Hindus flock from all parts of the country.

In the fourth volume of his History of Dharmasastra, PV Kane devotes 104 pages giving a comprehensive list of Tirtha Kshetras located throughout undivided Bharatavarsha. Subject to correc­tion, this is the fullest list available in a single place, an invaluable ready-reckoner of sorts.

The corpus of primary literature exclusively dedicated to Tirtha Yatras is mind-boggling: Tirthaprakasha, Tirthendush­ekhara, Tirthayatra-Tattva, Tristhalisetu, Tirthachintamani, Tirthasara, etc. Every Purana has a mandatory section listing and extolling the glories of various Tirtha Kshetras. The Skanda Purana contains the most copious list. Independent works on Tirtha Yatras have been culled from this Puranic lore and remain popular to date—the Gaya-mahatmya, Kashi-mahatmya and Prayaga-mahatmya occupy the top slot. Likewise, primary texts, commentaries and digests of Dharmasastra, too, have precious details related to Tirtha Kshetras. Even in our technology-driven, consumptive era, there is a substantial chunk of Hindus who not only undertake Tirtha Yatras on foot regularly but also make generous endowments at different Tirtha Kshetras.

To understand the extraordinary primacy and invisible power of this priceless heirloom of Hindu culture, we must understand the fundamental impulses of the spiritual civilisation that sculpt­ed the Hindu psyche. In his collection of essays titled Sadhana, Rabindranath Tagore gives us a sublime clue:

“…the text of our everyday meditation is the Gayatri, a verse which is considered to be the epitome of all the Vedas. By its help… we learn to perceive the unity held together by the one Eternal Spirit, whose power creates the earth, the sky, and the stars, and at the same time irradiates our minds with the light of a consciousness that moves and exists in unbroken continuity with the outer world.

“…the sense of the superiority of man in the scale of creation has not been absent from her mind. But she has had her own idea as to that in which his superiority really consists. It is not in the power of pos­session but in the power of union. Therefore India chose her places of pilgrimage wherever there was in nature some special grandeur or beauty, so that her mind could come out of its world of narrow necessities and realise its place in the infinite. This was the reason why in India a whole people who once were meat-eaters gave up taking animal food to cultivate the sentiment of universal sympathy for life, an event unique in the history of mankind.” [Emphases added]

We notice precisely this philosophical sentiment of cosmic unity in Tirtha Yatras. It is also the root of why, in spite of territo­rial divisions as various kingdoms, Bharatavarsha’s geography has always been culturally united. Why, for example, would a 13th-century Hoysala king grant the entire revenue of a village to facilitate the Kashi Yatra of pilgrims travelling from South India? During his time, Kashi was under the control of Balban who had imposed the Jizya (pilgrim tax).

The Tirtha Yatra is the companion institution of Utsavas (festivals). Both acted as shock absorbers and preserved the integrity and continuity of Hindu civilisation, culture and society, which suffered incessant onslaughts from alien aggressors and rulers. It is precisely to break this integrity that almost all Muslim rulers imposed the Jizya and banned the public celebration of Hindu festivals.

But on a deeper plane, Hindu festivals are expressions of rever­ence for Rta (cosmic order) in the realm of time and Tirtha Yatras in the realm of space.

WE CAN TRACE the origin of Tirtha Kshetras (literally, sacred places situated on the banks of holy waters) to several verses in the Rig and other Vedas which regard water as sacred. There are hundreds of verses extolling the Apo-devis (Goddess of Water) in the entire Vedic corpus. In PV Kane’s words: “In the Rgveda, waters, rivers in general and certain named rivers are referred to with great reverence as holy and are deified… ‘may the divine waters protect me.’…waters are spoken of as purifying… hymns are addressed to waters as divinities. They are said to purify a man of all sins and lapses from the right path.”

Thus, it is not difficult to detect from this Vedic fountainhead the gradual evolution of the Tirtha Yatra as a pious national un­dertaking. By the late Dharmasastra Era (100-400 CE), the Tirtha Yatra had become one of the prescriptions to lead a dharmic life. The Vishnudharmasutra includes Tirtha Yatra as one of the four­teen elements in his definition of Dharma.

In its conception, origin, evolution and spread, the Tirtha Yatra is one of the original and inimitable gifts given by the Sanatana spiritual culture to world civilisation.

If Prayag is the Tirtha-Raja, the Kumbh Mela is the Mela-Raja, the undisputed monarch of all Tirtha Yatras. Like its counterparts, it is a yatra culminating in a grand utsava. The journey is enno­bling and the destination, elevating.

The word Mela variously means joining, union, a multitude, and an assembly. We clearly observe all of these in the Kumbh Mela.

But Mela also has two other, deeper connotations. The first: a combination of parts into a pleasing and orderly whole. This sense harks back to my earlier mention of how the Kumbha Mela is a living instance of order in chaos. The stunning scene of the Kumbh Mela as a single, grand visual indicates precisely this “pleasing and orderly whole”.

The second connotation is harmony. The closest analogy to explain this connotation is the Melakarta Raga system of Carnatic classical music. In this case, Mela is defined as the harmonious arrangement of svaras or notes of differing frequencies. It is also known as Svara-Maitri or friendship among svaras. When we extend this analogy slightly, melas like the Kumbh can be defined as Bhakti-Maitri or Adhyatma-Maitri. To invoke Kane once again:

“…though the Hindu community was broken up into numer­ous castes… pilgrimages tended to level up all men by bringing them together to the same holy rivers or shrines. The traditions associated with holy places, the discipline through which the pilgrims passed, association with holy and philosophic men and the whole at­mosphere… at the Tirthas made it easy for pilgrims to remain at a high spiritual level and inculcated in them a mood of reverence that lasted long after they returned from the pilgrimage. Pilgrimages supplied the much needed stimulus to draw ordinary men away from selfish pursuits and to make them think of the higher and the more enduring moral and spiritual values.” [Emphases added]

An honest study of institutions like the Kumbh Mela also disproves the wild colonial exaggerations and spurious Marxist theories, which define Hindu society as nothing but caste divi­sion and oppression. All Dharmasastra treatises unanimously and unambiguously declare that there is no Varna-Bheda— distinction based on social class—during a Tirtha Yatra.

The economic facet of the Kumbh Mela is visible to plain sight. Since untold antiquity, all such melas were self-sufficient and self-contained economic systems in their own right. The British, who had initially overlooked this aspect, quickly re­alised that this was a fecund cash cow. From 1860 onwards, they usurped the whole management and finances of the Kumbh Mela. In our own time, the total revenue generated during the 2019 Kumbha Mela was a colossal ₹1.2 lakh crore. The mas­sive spurt in attendance at the various Kumbh Melas during the last decade owes mainly to the heightened Hindu cultural consciousness. It is a combination of decades of hard, selfless work in reawakening the Hindu community to its own heritage.

A marked transformation in this reawakening was the long overdue renaming of Allahabad as Prayagraj, its venerated original name. In his Ain-i- Akbari, Abul Fazl candidly mentions the real intent of his master, Jalal-ud-din Akbar: “For a long time his [Akbar’s] desire was to found a great city in the town of Piyag… On 13th November 1583, he reached the wished spot and laid the foundations of the city and planned four forts… Ilahabad anciently called Prayag was distinguished by His Imperial Majesty by the former name.” [Emphasis added]

The ‘de-Allahabad-ification’ of Prayagraj should have occurred immediately after Independence but was halted for seven decades by the politics practised by its most famous inhabitant: Jawaharlal Nehru.

The word Prayag can be expanded as prakrsto yago yatra, meaning “a place where excellent yagas are performed.” The earliest reference to Prayag is, again, found in the Rig Veda (X.75) which emphati­cally declares: “Those who take a bath at the place where the two rivers [Ganga and Yamuna] meet, rise up to heaven; those determined men who abandon their body there [literally, by drowning themselves] secure immortality or moksha.”

Set more than 10,000 years ago, this Vedic dec­laration is still the spiritual edifice that supports the crown of the Tirtha-Raja, Prayag. The Prayaga-mahatmya goes into raptures describing the glory of this sacred city. Prayag is also placed at the head of the famous Tristhali—the triad of Tirtha Kshetras, the other two being Kashi and Gaya.

Prayag derives its pre-eminence from the re­nowned Triveni Sangama, the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati (now extinct). Even today, the Triveni Sangama is the first destination of pilgrims who land in Prayag—Kumbh Mela or not. For un­countable centuries, the Triveni Sangama was the very spot where devout Hindus physically merged with the sacred river— by drowning themselves armed with the unshakeable belief that this pious act would free them from the cycle of birth and death.

Bharatavarsha’s historical annals contain quite a long list of people who gave up their mortal bodies at the Triveni Sangama. The story of the 10th-century Chandela king, Dhangadeva stands as an evocative example. After a splendid half-century reign, Dhanga spent his last days in Prayag. An inscription narrates that he became a sanyasi in that city and in the end, “as his renuncia­tion ripened, he entered the sacred waters at the Triveni-sangama and closing his eyes, fixing his thoughts on Rudra, Dhanga aban­doned his mortal body.”

HE ‘MODERN’ HINDU psyche—rootless and de­racinated—cannot comprehend, much less believe, that such people actually existed. To which once again, PV Kane supplies a brilliant insight.

“The psychological background behind [giving up one’s body] at Prayaga… is not difficult to realise. Centuries of philosophical thought had made a very deep impression on the minds of all people that the soul has to submit to a never-ending cycle of births and deaths. Ancient scrip­tures had offered a release in two ways, viz., by Tattvajnana [spiritual realisation] and by [giving up one’s body] at a tirtha. Death had no great terror for the pilgrim who submitted to various inconve­niences… ungrudgingly. If one is determined to put an end to samsara [worldly life] by taking one’s life, what nobler environ­ment… than at Prayaga, where two mighty rivers flowing from the sacred Himalaya unite and carry on unceasingly their work of fertilising the land and bringing prosperity and solace to millions of needy and anxious people?” [Emphasis added] Thus, the Kumbh Mela is in essence, a living, human miniature of Sanatana civilisation itself. The renewed impetus it has received during Yogi Adityanath’s chief ministership has fulfilled an imperative. Yet, it needs sub­stantial reform to adapt to a vastly altered India.

A hallmark of contemporary Hindu society is mindless pur­suit of money and a voluntary rush to embrace technology-in­duced dumbing-down. The challenge therefore is to preserve the spiritual core that built national institutions like the Tirtha Yatra of which the Kumbh Mela is a summit. If that core erodes any further, the Kumbh Mela will eventually resemble a rock concert.

There is no better way to conclude than quoting Kane again who foresaw this calamity when he wrote the following in 1953:

“Modern secular education and… stresses and trends leave hardly any room for moral and spiritual uplift. We are surrounded… by anxi­ety, misery, hardness of heart and crime. Therefore, the endeavour… must be to cherish all such institutions as tend to lift the mind out of narrowness and… concentrate it… on noble… aspirations and on detachment from the all-engrossing pursuit of money. Pilgrimage is one such institution. Those who have faith in pilgrimages as enabling a pilgrim to… collect merit and reach release from samsara should give pilgrimages a new orientation… it would be a calamity for the moral and spiritual greatness of India if pilgrimages to holy mountains and rivers came to be stopped altogether… in philosophical thought, in abid­ing literature, in works of art and in holy places… the destinies of the Indians of one part of Bharata are bound up with the destinies of all others. Frequent visits to distant places in Bharata, mixing up among our people… is absolutely necessary if we are to keep our freedom.” [Emphasis added].

HinduismMahakumbhMahamahopadhyaya PV KaneMark TwainPrayagrajSanatana civilisation