The Kumbh Quest

LIKE THE JERSEY OF A FOOTBALL PLAYER in the last minutes of a hard-fought game, the winter sky outside my window is a patchwork of colours, a witness to some celestial frenzy and scuffle. The blue and white of the skies are juxtaposed with the brown and black of stately rain clouds. Where one colour bleeds into another is hard to say and there are seemingly no beginnings or ends to this palimpsest above. The meteorologists have declared that a storm is coming our way. But suspicion courses through me that what will eventually manifest might just be a minor squall out in the sea followed by a drizzle on land. Who can truly know of these things until they happen?

For now, the branches of a Callery Pear and the Elm that stand on opposite sides of the window that overlooks the street below are emptied of their leaves. Winter is here. For Kalidasa in Ritusamharam, winter was about sexual love, weary husbands, secret paramours, and women exhausted by making love all night long. But the Arctic winter, and its cruel henchmen the Arctic wind, is cold and brutal. No sign of life, far less the promise of love, sur­vives its onslaught. The trees outside withstand, as their ancestors have for millennia, proud even if denuded of their greens. They stand athwart as a sanctum for sparrows and robins, like some forgotten monument, forlorn in its solitude. Every so often, I see a pair of sparrows sit on those desolate branches, like some Upanishadic birds, one on a branch above the other, one active as its neck bobs back and forth and the other’s meditative pose marked by stillness. Together they form a kind of duality—action and quiet, life and withdrawal, motion and expectation.

All this is an all-too-human reading of nature’s play. A convenient misreading.

For the very idea of expectation, action, and meaning as humans intuit it is born out of our very particular understanding of time as a phenomenon through which we wade all our lives, like a worm caught in a plant sap eager to get to the other side. In our short-lived lives, we often assume that time is homeostatic—time ticks forward in the same manner for all—but a cursory glance into our past and across cultures reveals a diversity of understandings about time. From the cyclical but unimaginably vast expanses of time in Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu conceptions (anaadi, without beginnings, and ananta, without end) to conceptions where time is an ephemera (kshana), an unreality we seek to grasp. Where Buddhism sought to overcome the hegemony of time and en­able our consciousness to sublimate into nirvana, the diversities of Hindu thought have ranged far and wide on this matter of time. To the Vaiseshikas, time appeared as an independent entity unmoved by human presence (svatantra) which echoes Newtonian ideas of Absolute Time. But at the other ends, for the Vedantins, as they seek to demonstrate that consciousness is that entity which cannot be distilled fur­ther in any act of synthesis (philosophers call this ‘sublation’) across all three times (trikalabadhya), they arrive at the radical claim that time is an empirical construct. It does not fundamentally exist on its own. In this sense, these ideals of Buddhism and Vedanta which seek to overcome time’s hold on the human mind have remained a constant across Indic thought.

The challenge for a Hindu who thinks about these matters is that his experienc­es of these fundamental phenomena has radically changed over the past 300-odd years since various forms of modernity percolated into our lives. From the rise of clocks and watches and clock towers, which facilitated the rise of secular and ho­mogenous time, to the scattering of Indians across the globe where their experience of life and seasons are nothing like what one’s ancients wrote of. The question that emerges—silently at first, then as a rupture—is how must we privilege our past. Is the past even reliably the past? Burrowed deep inside these proximate questions is what in Indic thought, and more particularly Hindu thought, remains a constant as the world intrudes and its myriad ways seep into our lives.

At least since Cicero, the word religion has been used to describe an act of repetitive practice (“to go over again in thought”)—what Indic traditions would call saadhana—in order to acknowledge and sacralise one’s commitment to the gods. To the ancient Romans—much like the shikshavali in the Taittiriya Upanishad—pietas (the ‘justice rendered to parents’) was commensurate with the term religio (defined as ‘justice rendered to the gods’ or iustitia erga deos). By virtue of equivalences—from they who are near, our parents, we approach those who are distant, our ancestors, and they who are unseen, the gods—a chain of commitments was constructed. In this sense, by becoming ‘religious’ we provide justice to not just our gods but also to our parents and, by proxy, our ancestors. Hindu ideas of dharma, pitr, devas echo similar valences that speak to ancient cultures that saw religion as a way to offer a recognition to the unseen (our gods and our ancestors) and provide ways to allow them to enter our life, to enchant it, and offer them restitution from obscurity. But in order to be religious, to our ancients, what mattered was action and repetition across time—or more blandly, a commitment to ritual. Ritual, by now a word defiled by our excesses and rendered unacceptable by the unwisdom of the unthinking, is the means to be religious. Rit­ual is the means to collect oneself in order to find the resources to discover our abilities to provide attention. From attention is born the talent to see the world that has been rendered invis­ible. In a different context, but similar in its intent, the novelist Haruki Murakami writes: “I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mes­merize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

In our times, ritual has steadily been relinquished or has become a means for unthinking mimicry to demonstrate group solidarity.

But to the person who is sympathetic to the lure of tradition but reluctant to be co-opted by any movement that claims to speak for his or her inner journeys, a natural question that follows is: What does it mean to be a Hindu? This question garners greater salience if one’s life is not cosseted inside a set of regular rituals.

AS A PRELIMINARY TO answering this question, we may ask ourselves difficult political questions, even if one may disagree with the framing—why do they hate us, what can we do to protect ourselves, and so on. The answers to these seemingly intractable questions remain, often times, in the world of politics and history. But the question of what it means to be a Hindu in our contemporary present is more difficult since it is intimately tied to our idea of being an individual. Concurrently, at the heart of this difficulty lies the recognition that one is trying to discern an unmov­ing centre in an inconstant world. For our ancients, their world may have been tumultuous, but its outer edges were a constant, defined as it was by caste, obligations, geography, and roles. Rituals helped them bind themselves to an unmoving centre they called their Dharma. For us—with diminished attention spans, fragmented families, eroding social relations, and shape-shift­ing technologies that redefine our sense of Self—the world is neither a constant nor do most of us have commitments to rituals. How are we, then, to find an unmoving centre? By what process are we to use our individual religious commitments to ethicise our everyday lives? Thinking about these questions takes us into a labyrinth that reveals its shape in the form of questions which one must work to articu­late, understand, and answer only to realise that what awaits us farther on in this inward journey is another layer of questions.

Unlike other religious traditions where the articulation of spe­cific creedal beliefs facilitates a membership into a community of fellow believers, the Indic religions have little use for such expres­sions of brotherhood in so far as individual quests are concerned. A community of fellow initiates might be useful but the journey is still yours alone to make. Indic religions, particularly Hindu traditions, are the religion of an individual—from purusharthas to the ashrama system—one must struggle on one’s own. Other constructs like jati, varna and assorted types of dharma are scaf­foldings to aid what is ultimately a singular pursuit, a lone quest to arrive into a form of peace with the idea of moksha or nirvana. There is no collective rapture awaiting the believer or righteous end-days awaiting the believer. Even Yudhishthira in the Swarga­rohana Parva at the ends of the Mahabharata has little use for the heavens when he declares, that he seeks to leave the heavens and go where his brothers are (tatraham gantum icchami yatra te bhrataro mama). No obligations or commitment to the gods or promised rewards satisfy him—the promise of heaven has little meaning for him in this context. In fact, if the purpose of religion is to attain heaven, then Yudhishthira has no need for such a religion.

The telos of his life is not eternal pleasure in a munificent garden but the companionship of his loved ones. The denouement of the Mahabharata in this last parva of that epic inverts a common question of ‘what use is religion’ (heaven, say some traditions, a good life say others) into the question Indic traditions have always posed, sometimes directly and on others elliptically, ‘What am I living for?’

The answers to these questions are complex and variegated. The complexity may lead one to assume that Indic religious thought lays no premia on the singularity of beliefs. Nothing could be more wrong. Indic tradition lays an extraordinary importance on the idea of pramana (‘instruments of warranted inference’). For much of Hindu thought, the operat­ing principle has, by and large, been that if you can demonstrate the validity or rigor of your inferential reasoning, you are entitled to the specific belief struc­ture that emerges from that particular application of reason. It is this feature which lays premia on reason while al­lowing for the freedoms to practise what emerges from that application of reason that grants Hinduism its grammar of open-endedness. Unlike other traditions that rely on prophetic revelation as primary claims of truth, Hinduism has traditionally been more interested in techniques to legitimise beliefs. Even the existence of God is subject to this test as we see in this short verse by Udayancharya, the pre-medieval logician, who addressed Lord Jagannatha of Puri thus: “You’re so drunk on wealth and power/ that you ignore my presence/ Just wait: when the Buddhists come/ your whole existence/ depends on me.”

All this may be construed as another way of saying that while the Indic mind is ensconced within historical time, the Indic idea of being sees itself as standing outside of the ebb and struggle of history. Together, the Indic ideal of itself is a heterocosm in which the infinitude of time and the finitude of human experience coexist, like the sparrows on the branches outside my window, with one observing the other.

But these self-descriptors of human existence that Indic cul­tures have carried within themselves run afoul of the dominant strains of universalising reason and thought in our age of demo­cratic politics whose great god is history. A god, we are told by its high priests, that self-actualises itself by historicising every aspect of human and biological life. To be subsumed by history is tanta­mount to acknowledging the perishing of our body and society, irrespective of how context and conditions evolve. The human self however, over millennia of Hindu theological tradition, has been seen as that which persists—an undying flame which leaps from one golden fire to another. Summarising this Upanishadic claim about the nature of human reality, the Bhagavad Gita describes this indestructibility as “unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying and primeval”—ajo nityah sashvato ‘yam purano ’. And in case the message is too metaphysical, Krishna speaks to the violent demiurges and inevitable melancholies that throb inside Arjuna, the man on the fields of Kurukshetra, in a language that the warrior understands better: “[the self] is not killed, even if the body is killed”—na hanyate hanyamane sarire.

An entire civilisational discourse and practice emerges out of this idea of continuity—not of the body but of an essence that transmutes to become another. This idea of a ‘great chain of being’ runs afoul of contemporary theologies that elevate the individual into a sacramental object higher than all else. Hindu traditions, in this sense, run in contrast to the modernity that surrounds us—where dualities, contradictions, and nebulous causations pose fundamental challenges to the widely accepted descriptions of reality. We see this most vividly during the Kumbh Mela where millions of men and women congregate, even as each carries within themselves an ishtadevata as well as an idea of what it means to be Hindu. They do this while still allowing another to retain his own set of ideas of what it means to be Hindu. This is a form of generosity that modern liberal­ism neither acknowledges nor has use for but unbeknownst dreams of as its own end state, its ‘end of history’. Far removed from the Kumbh Mela, at the other ends, a tradition like the Mi­mamsakas, who are ritualists but with no supervening need for an idea of God, poses fundamental category problems in con­temporary religious studies. What does it mean to be religious without an accompanying belief in God? Between the scepti­cisms of Buddhists and the beliefs of the Vedantins, the great Mimamsaka Kumarila Bhatta walked the proverbial razor’s edge. On one side was the abyss of atheism and on the other was the unvariegated infinitude of the Brahman of the Vedantin. For the Mimamsaka, the world operates independent of any supranatural intelligence. Instead, it flourishes in the manner of a self-driving engine, governed by a network of laws—laws of nature, laws of causal connection, laws of injunctions, laws of sacrifice-reward. Our Dharma, per this world view, is the sustenance of this world that manifests through those laws.

THE ARRIVAL OF colonialism and the hegemonic rule that imposed itself on every aspect of Hindu life—from education, social norms, language—emerged out of a post-Enlightenment Europe where the great tension, as Søren Kierkegaard described, was between “a Genius and an Apostle”. The Apostle embodied European society’s enthu­siasm for Christianity while the Genius saw the world as a repository of manifold inspirations. Relying on this schema, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk characterises the ‘medieval’ as those who ascribe to a “singleness of tradition” versus the ‘modern’ as those whose spiritual valences emerge out of “zeals other than [the] evangelical”. Modernity, or the very act of being modern, he argues, is born from a mindset that seeks non-singular inspirations to construct one’s inner world.

In this sense, contemporary Hinduism, despite being an ancient conglomerate of practices, is uniquely modern for its willingness to be periodically vitalised by a pluripotent source of spiritual ideals without a need for some supervening ho­mogenising ideal. No single truth, or its advocate, holds domin­ion over other claims. The contemporary Hindu, especially in the age of globalisation and the emergence of the nation-state has made peace with changing times and shifting mores by modulating the extent of his or her commitment to the practice of rituals. The cost of this shape-shifting is that the grounds upon which the Hindu self stands is steadily surrounded by the exigencies of politics and contrivances of everyday living. The contemporary Hindu, who has historically relied on practice to shore up his or her belief against the waves of time, lives in a historical moment today where inspirations are manifold and the sources of self-description swim in waters whose origins are unknowable.

This perhaps is the real challenge facing the contemporary Hindu. How to be modern while being a traditionalist—or, how to stubbornly refuse any efforts to reduce the present into bina­ries or dichotomies even as one lives up to one’s own commit­ments to the past and the present—without surrendering oneself to the fanaticism pregnant in the embryo of our modernity.

All the while as I write these words, I see the sparrows outside my windows eagerly move and still themselves. I am reminded of my father who, when I am late to return home in the evenings, goes over to the gates of our home, time and again, to see if I am on my way, as if the very act of his waiting will render the transcendence of his hopes into the immanence of my physical presence. In my teens, I thought his actions were foolish. A little older, I thought that it was the child’s arrival that imbued this all-too-familiar scene in many families with its meaning. But now, older still, I have come to realise that it is his waiting for me that lends the act of my arrival its mean­ing. Without someone at the door, without someone who records our motions, without our past to annotate our pres­ent—our here-and-now is no different than unfreedom and non-existence. Hope is the clay out of which we build a statue consecrated to the God of Time. But just like me, and perhaps most humans, the sparrow does not understand this fierce and awesome God who is both Time and Death, as Krishna reminded Arjuna (kalo’smi…).

Humans who describe themselves as Hindus can only play witness to, be a beneficiary, and ultimately a victim of this unknowable almighty who flows through us and we through it. But to the question of what it means to be a Hindu, each of us must think it anew, on our own, using our limited means. This makes Hinduism a religion full of quests, rituals, and mutinies. It is precisely this that makes Hinduism marked by a freedom to ask without the burden of sin or blasphemy, just as Arjuna did: Why am I here?

Bhagavat GItaHardwarHinduismMaha Kumbh 2025MahabharatmodernityPrayagrajtradition