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Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 1765-1954

Article · September 2008

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195338942.001.0001

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Introduction - Oxford Scholarship 8/09/2014 8:29 am

University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online

Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 1765-1954

Kama Maclean

Print publication date: 2008

Print ISBN-13: 9780195338942
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2008
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195338942.001.0001

Introduction
Kama Maclean (Contributor Webpage)

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195338942.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords

Departing from the debates about the nature of communitas vis-à-vis Hindu pilgrimage, the study begins by pointing out
some of the conceptual shortfalls that have plagued the study of pilgrimage. Aiming to bring a broader concept of power
to the study of pilgrimages, the Introduction reflects upon the potential of a pan-Hindu, mass pilgrimage in engendering
the imagination of a “national” community. After briefly describing the Kumbh Mela genre of festivals and Allahabad's
annual counterpart, the Magh Mela, the themes of the book are identified, a conceptual framework is delineated, and an
overview of each of the chapters is given. The nature of available and accessible historical sources and their attendant
assumptions that have underpinned the colonial administration and study of popular piety in India are set out and
problematized

Keywords: Kumbh Mela, Magh Mela, pilgrimage studies, Hindu pilgrimage, Communitas, communication network, national imagination

This book grows out of fascination and frustration. My own fascination with the Kumbh Mela, widely recognized as the
largest religious gathering in the world, has been tempered by a sense of frustration that there is so little known and
written about the history of the festival. My initial attempts to collect information about the mela, which commands
worldwide media attention when it occurs every twelve years, produced two broad kinds of information. At one end of the
spectrum was information produced for the pilgrims themselves, which was predominantly devotional in nature and

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unconcerned with the pilgrimage as a material, historical phenomenon. At the other extreme were coffee-table picture
books and magazine photoessays, none of which sought to explain much about the mela; they were simply content to
entertain the reader with spectacular images of naked sadhus and wet sari-clad Indians taking part in “ancient” religious
rituals. Although both genres conveyed a vague sense of the mela's historicity, there was little attempt to situate it within
history, to chart the ways it had developed and changed over time.

Big pilgrimages have big implications for those who are in power or aspire to it. As a mass pilgrimage, attended by pious
people from all over the subcontinent who then returned to their villages, the Kumbh Mela played an important role in
disseminating information. Such information was not necessarily simply devotional in nature, nor indeed was the mela
simply a religious gathering; it was an intriguing blend of religiosity, trade, and social communication, sharing (p.4) the
recreational elements of a fair. The British recognized the potential for melas to act as powerful conduits of disease as well
as news, rumors, sedition, and eventually nationalism, and they consistently sought to control the pilgrimage.

Yet the colonial state and the colonized had different ideas about what the Kumbh Mela represented; for the former, it
was a potentially dangerous festival that demanded tight regulation and control, whereas for the latter it was a sacred
sphere in which foreign interference was deemed intolerable. This tension, and the manner in which it was negotiated by
each side, are the primary themes of this book. I ask why and examine how the colonial state tried to control and
manipulate the mela, and more important, what kind of mela evolved from this process? These questions have important
implications for recent debates about the colonial “construction” of Hinduism (more often theorized than demonstrated)
and the role of Hindu identity, idioms, and imaginations in the creation of the Indian nation.

This book emphasizes the very broad implications for power presented by a pan-Hindu pilgrimage. During the period
under discussion, the Kumbh Mela drew increasingly large crowds of pilgrims from all over India, and as such it defied
British attempts to redefine and manage Hinduism in terms of a privately practiced, controllable religion. 1 For pilgrims,
the religious quest began when they left their homes and ended only on their return; in between, they relied on (among
other things) the infrastructure and machinery of the colonial state. Though the physical journey may have ended on their
return, the momentousness of a journey to the festival meant that it continued to live on in their memories as it shaped
social and religious lives and perspectives, and perhaps even politics.

Pilgrimage
Pilgrimage studies has, in the past twenty years, become something of a subdiscipline in its own right, yet it continues to
be dominated by anthropologists and religious studies specialists whose concerns tend to focus on the inner experiences
and social lives of pilgrims, an area that this book largely and unapologetically sidesteps. Without doubt, the most
discussed topic in pilgrimage studies—indeed, the theory that initiated the area of study—is Victor Turner's notion of
“communitas.” Simply defined, communitas refers to the spontaneous and joyful commonness of feeling, liable to strike
pilgrims at some stage during the pilgrimage process. 2 Studies that affirm communitas as a pilgrimage phenomenon tend
to emphasize the unity and egalitarian ethos (p.5) promoted by sacred journeys. This influential model of pilgrimage has
created bodies of scholarship that are numbed to the intricacies of power plays that revolve around religious travel. 3

For decades, scholars have hotly debated the validity of Turnerian theory for Hindu pilgrimage, and currently,
communitas stands largely discredited. 4 Scholars have argued that the tendency of Hindu pilgrims to travel in small,
self-selected cohesive groups based on region and caste precludes the kind of communitas that the Turners described in
Christian traditions. 5 Turner himself anticipated this, emphasizing that “the pilgrimage situation does not eliminate
structural divisions, it attenuates them, removes their sting.” 6 Most relevant for our purposes, Jack Llewellyn closely
examined the Haridwar Kumbh Mela for traces of communitas in 1998 and found a “festival of discord,” as that mela
disintegrated into a stand-off between a powerful organization of ascetics, the Juna akhara, and the mela administration
(under the direction of a Hindu nationalist-led government), in which the administration mobilized state paramilitary
forces against the holy men. 7 This was, to be sure, an incredible turn of events, and even though a level of dispute
between the mela administration and the akharas is to be expected, 8 the 1998 mela attained heights not seen since the

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late eighteenth century, when akharas battled each other for supremacy in Haridwar. Yet the fact that there is conflict at
one level of the mela does not necessarily cancel the possibility of unity at other levels, especially if we conceive of the
pilgrimage process as a broad one, spatially and conceptually. Conflict between akharas and the administration may be
disruptive, but it does not discount the possibility that there is enough commonality in a Kumbh crowd that might provide
the basis for a constituency for social and political orchestration. 9

Perhaps those who theorize about the prospects for unity at pilgrimage centers are looking too literally. Communitas is,
after all, a psychological sensation and is difficult to discern, much less document. We may not see examples of “ludic
communitas” as Turner described it in the crowds of a pan-Indian pilgrimage like the Kumbh, but does that undermine
the possibility that pilgrims might conceptualize and imagine community somewhat differently after they have
experienced such a broad cross-section of it? To phrase this differently: Why do so many prominent politicians in
contemporary India make a point of being seen at the Kumbh Mela? Widely broadcast images of Sonia Gandhi in 2001
and Mulayam Singh Yadav in 2007 (each preparing to face elections) immersing themselves in the sangam with due
propriety come to mind; each of these politicians has a stake in encouraging an Indian (or Hindu) public to think of them
as being immersed in Indian (or Hindu) culture. 10

(p.6) Several theories emphasize the potential for pilgrimage to act as a national integrator, including this one, from a
discourse at the Kumbh Mela given by Sri 108 Swami Vishwadevananda Ji Maharaj Mahamandaleshwar, of Sannyas
Ashram, Gujarat:

The sangam of the three rivers is giving one message. From different directions, three rivers are coming together
here with great force. They have their own respective backgrounds and uniqueness. Before they meet, they had
their own directions. And after the meeting, all the three merged their identities into one. Even their flow was not
disrupted. We must try to merge ourselves as one. 11

And again:

“Kumbha weaves our nation into one,” said Mahant Ganga Puri of the Mahanirvani Akhara. 12

And another, this time from an editorial:

The fair with its pilgrims and devotees drawn from the distant corners of the country is a unique and significant
contribution to the unity and integrity of the country. The truth of unity behind diversity of costumes, language,
habits, race, religion, caste and creed that holds the people of different parts of country together is very clearly
manifested at this time. 13

Whereas some might dismiss this as rhetoric, researchers agree that pilgrimages have the capacity to integrate, 14 and
clearly exhortations such as these resonate with Kumbh pilgrims and encourage them to imagine unity, despite their
apparent diversity.

While anthropologists and religious studies specialists hotly debated the validity of communitas, Benedict Anderson
extrapolated on Turner's ideas to craft one of the most enduring and compelling explanations of nationalism in his
Imagined Communities. 15 Anderson attributed great possibilities to pilgrimage, noting that “in a pre-print age, the
reality of the imagined religious community depended profoundly on countless, ceaseless travels.” 16 In a society where
access to literacy continues to be limited and where there is no common vernacular, the actions of pilgrims (“the
uncoerced flow of faithful seekers from all over” India, if I may rephrase Anderson) in coming to bathe in the sangam
serve to speak a common language of piety and ritual.

The fact that so many millions of people flock to the Kumbh suggests that there is something that unifies the religious
tradition of Hinduism, despite its rich diversity of practices, devotions, and deities. Veneration of water is one of (p.7)

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the common threads in Hindu traditions, and the Kumbh Mela is a celebration of the waters of the sangam, which deliver,
on Kumbh occasions, amrit, the nectar of immortality. The Kumbh is repetitively described as a “microcosm of India,” 17
which encourages pilgrims (and others) to imagine the nation before their eyes, as the panorama of peoples extend in
every direction (see Figure I.1 ), temporarily drawn together by a desire to bathe in the hallowed waters.

Here we might more productively return to (or overturn) the Turners' pilgrimage paradigm: They suggest that pilgrimage
is inherently subversive (“anti-structure”) because it entails a departure, perhaps even a rupture, with the normally
structured existence of the pilgrim before he or she has embarked on their sacred journey. In such a “liminoid,”
disconnected phase, they are open and vulnerable to a wide range of experiences and phenomena. However, the
structures of pilgrimage are increasingly controlled and/or informed by government, and this can create an arena where
government has an unparalleled opportunity to influence the congregated masses. Governments do not always make the
best of this, as we shall see in chapters 5 and 6 , but they undoubtedly have an advantage because they control most
modern infrastructure. The information network that operates through the pilgrimage system (pilgrims come to
Allahabad from all over India, and then return, talking as they go) is much harder to capture and control.

As a periodic happening that served to focus the attention of a Hindu public, the Kumbh Mela's scale and impact rendered
it a fruitful canvas for imagining an independent India. How such an imagined identity might function is less poetic.
Sandria Freitag's work has productively deployed the notion of communitas, linking it with identity formation, with
special reference to communalism (in South Asian parlance, the assumption that religious communities—particularly
Hindu and Muslim—constitute a major fracture in society). As this communal fault line became articulated in public
rituals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Freitag argues that collective action (ritual and/or violent)
“served to define community symbolically.” 18 This has profound connotations for melas like the Kumbh. The Kumbh is
thought of and repetitively referred to as an all-India, pan-Hindu festival, attracting Hindus from a range of sectarian
affiliations and caste groups. 19 As the festival exists today, it is so congested on the main bathing days that social barriers
are impossible to maintain. Though the emotional and social effects of communitas remain difficult to quantify, it is
certainly demonstrable that political and social organizations imagined a constituency of sorts—an audience that might be
mobilized—at melas from at least the late nineteenth century. The extent to which this had implications for Indian
nationalism is also one of the themes of this study. (p.8)

(p.9) Power
The assumption of distinct spheres of secular and sacred
activity has obfuscated a clear understanding of pilgrimages
as powerful material forces. Recent postcolonial analysis has
emphasized that the Christian-influenced intellectual
traditions through which we seek to come to terms with non-
Christian religions hamper our very attempts to do so. 20 If
the separation of “secular” and “religious,” or “sacred” and
“profane” in post-Enlightenment thought has continued to
inform and limit scholarship engaging with popular Christian
devotion, 21 it equally and even more inappropriately towers
over attempts to understand other traditions. 22 At the other
extreme, religion in general has been largely ignored in the Figure I.1. A view of the crowd, at the Ardh Kumbh Mela,
2007. Photo: PTI.
analyses of generations of Marxist historians of the
subcontinent, with the result that even social histories have
neglected religious phenomena except where it informs
communalism, 23 a trend that has only recently begun to turn.

There has also been some resistance to linking pilgrimage and politics because it implies the debasement of the religious
observance; a number of people I spoke to while conducting my fieldwork vigorously denied that my subject had any valid

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premise at all. Others claim that political centers and pilgrimage centers must necessarily be different; because secular
powers view pilgrimage as an institution that may undermine political stability, they steer clear of them and, when
impossible, intervene. 24 The case of the Allahabad Kumbh Mela proves this theory in principle, insofar as the British
would have preferred to prevent pilgrimage to Allahabad, but further demonstrates that colonial authorities had limited
power to control piety. As has been shown in the case of Pakistan's management of Hajjis, “control of the pilgrimage does
not give control of the pilgrims, or their votes.” 25

Although many anthropologists have been interested in local or regional political intrigues between interested groups that
surround a pilgrimage shrine or town, 26 there are much broader implications for a pilgrimage known to be pan-Hindu
that attracts a range of sectarian adherents and is all-India in character. 27 Simon Coleman and John Eade, in Reframing
Pilgrimage, reflect that while the Turners note that pilgrimages have been known to feed into political uprisings, “it is not
made clear how the processual, set-apart character of the institution [of pilgrimage] can feed into structural change.” 28
Without a doubt, the Kumbh is an exceptional event, occurring only once every twelve years in Allahabad. However, one
thing that emerges in this study is the consistent attempts to close the set-apart character of pilgrimage and establish
(p.10) the Kumbh as representative of the Indian nation (examples of this come from both colonial and nationalist
quarters and are elaborated on in the first chapter). Surinder Bhardwaj's classic study of Hindu pilgrimage is dedicated to
the “countless pilgrims whose footprints have given meaning to India as a cultural entity”; for Bhardwaj, the movement of
pilgrims underpins a “pan-Indian Hindu holy space.” 29 The corollary to this is that if pilgrimage has played an important
role in forging a national imagination, then this has troubling implications for a theoretically secular society. A pilgrimage
to Haridwar or Banares today might include, for example, a visit to the Bharat Mata temple (which has at its central deity
a relief map of India and is closed to non-Hindus). 30 To what degree, the question must be asked, does Hindu pilgrimage
create and shape Hindu politics?

Anne Feldhaus has linked politics and pilgrimage in her recent study of the role of religious imagery and pilgrimage in
forming a “geographical imagination” of Maharashtra, although she seems to do so reluctantly. In her nuanced and
evocative examination of a series of regional pilgrimages, she posits that such imagined regions are not coterminous with
the political units. Yet she points to an exception—the Pandharpur pilgrimage, famously documented by Irawati Karve in
the late 1940s. 31 This pilgrimage—and indeed, Karve's writings—were important in strengthening the United
Maharashtra movement, which culminated in 1960 with the creation of the state. 32 Yet Feldhaus argues that is “the
exception which proves the rule” that “people can experience, imagine, conceptualize, and value a region in religious
terms without feeling the need to make it into a politically separate entity.” 33 Though I do not question this latter
statement, it seems premature to exclude the political possibilities that pilgrimages may offer, and a pilgrimage as
important as Pandharpur seems like a large exception to make. The potential of pilgrimages to act as conduits for political
information will be an important theme in the following pages.

Recent studies that directly address the relationship between power and pilgrimage in non-Western countries emphasize
the presence and influence, even when indirect, of the West and its discourses of modernity and progress. Sandra Greene
has explored the power of the colonizing West, which fundamentally altered the way the Anlo of Ghana perceive and
interact with their sacred landscapes. 34 A similar process applied to Shinto shrines, as Japan struggled to align itself with
European and American ideas of civilization and progress. These forces led to a “rearrangement of the landscape of the
gods” of Shinto by redefining their relationship with the state. 35 And in Vietnam, arguably postcolonial twice over and
moreover late socialist, a recent surge in pilgrimage in the south has been seen as partially a response to the withdrawal
(p.11) of state repression of religion (although Hanoi regards this more as a legacy of the “region's cultural degradation
under the French and Americans”). 36 Importantly, it is a testament to the potency of the forms of religiosity that are
constructed in response to such power that local elites and the state attempt to co-opt them. 37 I return to these
theoretical issues after a brief overview of the Allahabad mela and the key themes of the book.

Pilgrimage and Power in Allahabad

The Magh Mela celebrates an annual auspicious astrological constellation, lasting about a month (coinciding with

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January–February), during which bathers acquire spiritual benefits by bathing in the triveni or sangam, the confluence of
the Ganga, the Yamuna, and the invisible Saraswati rivers. Every twelve years, the mela is known as a Kumbh Mela and is
vastly attended; in the intervening six years, the mela is known as Ardh (half) Kumbh (readers unfamiliar with the mela
should turn to the appendix, where they will find a useful overview). Pilgrimage in Hindu traditions is not obligatory, but
it is meritorious and desirable. In the case of the Kumbh, a bath in the triveni promises superlative benefits, chiefly
immortality, but these are only on offer every twelve years; this relative rarity places certain compulsions on pilgrims to
take the opportunity of a holy bath when it arises, because it “may not be possible next time for a pilgrim, given the
uncertainty of human life.” 38

The period under discussion was one of great transition, in which the mela morphed from being dominated by elites to a
more popular form of pious expression. Indian noble and princely families habitually articulated their status though what
was an expensive journey to holy cities. Amid the political transitions of the eighteenth century, the British attempted to
insert themselves as powerful players in the pilgrimage, masquerading as gracious hosts, even as other social groups
began to embark on religious journeys to Allahabad, a central northern town that played a strategic role in East India
Company machinations from 1801 (and had been coveted by them earlier still).

The administrators of the East India Company and later the Raj were aware that interfering in religion was contentious—a
suspicion that for many was spectacularly confirmed by the 1857 rebellion. The scale of pilgrimage retinues periodically
traveling to places such as Allahabad was truly alarming. A princely party might include “175 sowars, great and small; 75
marksmen; 110 disciplined sepoys; 800 attendants; 40 Palankeens for males and females; 20 Wheeled carriages; 5
Elephants; 25 Camels and 100 Bangees,” as did Raja Bhakt Singh's Allahabad-bound company in 1813. 39 It is not
difficult to imagine (p.12) how the arrival of such small armies to take part in a festival held next to the Fort of Allahabad
might have been a cause for concern for the British, especially when “rogue” rulers were presumed to be using the pretext
of pilgrimage to enter and undermine British territories. There was little the British could do to dissuade such practices.
Indeed, they realized that facilitating pilgrimages to places within East India Company territory helped to keep India's
traditional rulers contented.

“Friendly persons of rank,” however, were not the main focus of British consternation when it came to melas. Hindu holy
men—sadhus—who also gathered at the Allahabad mela in considerable numbers, were far more troubling. The East
India Company had noticed that itinerant bands of sadhus (akharas) were not simply religious figureheads but wealthy
traders, carrying valuables from one city to another as they moved along pilgrimage lines, and mercenaries, their warrior
skills acquired as a means of defending their precious commodities, such as gold, gems, and spices. Highly competitive
and belligerent, sadhu akharas took their elevated spiritual, economic, and military status seriously, engaging in deadly
inter-akhara warfare on an alarming scale at melas in Haridwar. These sadhu battles, in combination with the threat of
epidemic disease, public disorder, and sedition, began to inform the discourse of danger that became established in
writings about the mela by company men, Orientalists, administrators, and travelers, which underpinned the rationale for
tightly controlling the mela. An overview of such representational forms of power is the subject of chapter 1 .

As ordinary pilgrims also began to attend melas in large numbers in the mid-nineteenth century, the British began to fear
that their adoration of holy men might extend to emulating their seditious attitude toward the colonial state. The
brahmans that ministered to the pilgrims at the mela also had a history of rebellion against the British, and they, too,
were well positioned to influence pilgrims. Subversive activity aside, any outbreak of epidemic disease at the sangam soon
found its way into the Allahabad fort, infecting the troops there and undermining the security of the British, not just in
the town but in the region. Melas had to be managed in such a way as to minimize threats to British interests in
Allahabad. How the British did this is the focus of chapter 2 .

While it is popularly assumed that the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad is ancient, scholars have doubted this for some time,
and in the course of this research I could not fail to notice that, interpolations in Puranas and so on aside, there is no
mention in any text, Indian or European, of a Kumbh festival in Allahabad until the mid-nineteenth century. It was not

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until the immediate postrebellion period that the famous Kumbh festival, initially indigenous to Haridwar, was applied to
the Magh Mela, so that every twelve years it was (p.13) considered more auspicious, attracting larger crowds; this
argument is the focus of chapter 3 . Many will consider this the central finding of the book, and some no doubt will find it
controversial. My point is not to undermine the authenticity of the mela in any way. Clearly the Magh Mela is a practice of
very long standing, as referred to by Tulsidas in the Ramcharitmanas (invoked as the epigraph of this book). What is
significant is the extent to which the festival changed in character as interest groups gathered around it and responded to
the pressures of the modern state. A careful analysis of these changes reveal the extent to which colonized people
understood and made sophisticated use of the dynamics and constraints of colonialism. To my mind this is much more
interesting than what might otherwise appear to be the unveiling of yet another invented tradition. This point may seem
pedantic, but technically, the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad is not invented but adapted from its Haridwar namesake.

A number of factors underpinned the changes in the nature of pilgrimage to Allahabad in the mid-nineteenth century.
The gradual extension of Pax Britannica across northern India, the removal of the Pilgrim Tax (1838–1840), the
extension of the railways (1850s), and the strenuous efforts of Prayagwals, 40 the traditional river priests of Allahabad
who nurtured the festival and performed rituals for pilgrims, contributed to an increase in the number of wealthy
peasant-pilgrims, as the general decline in the fortunes of India's princes and rajas kept them away from Allahabad's
bathing ghats. 41 By the 1870s, the crowds were becoming considerably larger; by the 1900s they were quite unwieldy, as
attested by the difficulties in managing the crowds safely. As the British drew tighter controls around the mela to make it
safer and minimize risk, pilgrims responded by attending in even greater numbers. During this period, up until the
beginning of the twentieth century, the mela was redefined significantly as those interested in its defense found that the
best way to do this was to create something that the British would recognize as essentially religious (and not economic or
even social in nature). Once this was done, defenders could demand noninterference in matters of religion and reference
it with Queen Victoria's 1858 proclamation; this is the argument of chapter 4 .

The British perception of a need to contain the mela was complicated by the fact that Allahabad was an important part of
the pilgrimage network in the subcontinent, in which information was wont to spread, disease-like, from religious
centers. Pilgrims from all over India converged on Allahabad, took in the mela, and then dispersed again to their homes,
where they were welcomed and their stories and experiences eagerly heard by those who had stayed behind. As such, it
constituted a vital role in the “information order” that flowed throughout the subcontinent. 42 The British were well aware
of this (p.14) mechanism, and they knew they needed to influence it so that the messages carried back to the villages
positively represented British rule; if they did not, the discontent would be as broad as it would be profound.
Consequently, British administrators found themselves in a dilemma: They needed to manage the mela so that it was not
a threat to British interests, but also in such a way that caused satisfaction and, where possible, gratitude in the subject
peoples of India. By the 1900s, the same information order would be used, not unproblematically, by Indian nationalists
to spread the message of swaraj. Chapter 5 demonstrates that a massively important cultural event, with immense
potential to influence the minds of those who visit it, in all probability contributed to the spread of nationalism; but
because it was inscribed in the minds and on the tongues of the pilgrims, and not in an archive, it has evaded the attention
of historians.

The mela was not just a problem for the colonial state. For India's would-be rulers, the Kumbh presented a paradox. The
mela was emblematic of a unique, timeless India, which survived—indeed, thrived—under foreign rule. Its role in the
imagination of pilgrims, and as an information mechanism, made it an appealing opportunity to both Mahatma Gandhi
and Jawaharlal Nehru; both toyed with translating their different but commonly romantic interpretation of the mela into
a political exercise; both leaders would have portions of their ashes scattered at the sangam. But while the mela's
information mechanism provided an effective way of spreading the nationalist message, there was some reservation in
elite nationalist circles about the appropriateness of utilizing a Hindu institution to communicate ideas of an inclusive
nation, especially in the communal atmosphere of the 1920s. These reservations were set aside in 1954 at the first
independent Kumbh, with disastrous consequences for many hundreds of pilgrims who died, as detailed in chapter 6 .

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Although this mela of mass death would be attributed to the lack of modernity in the pilgrims themselves, one of my aims
is to question the assumption that modernity and mela are polar opposites. Modern infrastructure and technology have
been as adaptable to religiosity as to its presumed other, “(Western) rationality.”

The Power of the Kumbh

I have sketched out the material features of the Kumbh that make it politically significant, and now I introduce a
somewhat different form of power. The Kumbh is inherently powerful because of its sheer scale, which has been formally
attested to by the Guinness Book of World Records, no less. 43 Despite my (p.15) reluctance to document the religious
experiences of pilgrims, it is pertinent here to ask: Why do people find the Kumbh Mela so compelling? Why do so many
people attend? Bathing at the confluence on the occasion of the Kumbh offers supplicants immortality; that in itself
makes it worth the austerities involved in a long journey to Allahabad. Immortality is not only accessed though the
process of snan (bathing), it can also be witnessed through gaining an audience (darshan) of the sadhus who attend the
Kumbh and Ardh Kumbh festivals in large numbers (it is estimated that approximately 180,000 sadhus attended the
2001 Kumbh Mela). In fact, holy men may be seen as representatives of the immortality that the pilgrims seek, for they
are seen as conquerors of death (religion, William Pinch suggests, is best understood as “a way through death, to cheat its
temporal finality and to thereby conquer it,” and this is what yogis aspire to and demonstrate so well). 44

This can be understood and witnessed at a number of levels. In the process of initiation, sadhus are declared dead; they
are socially dead to their kin, and throughout their yogic practices, they continue to articulate this deadness. Smearing
their bodies with sacred ash (vibhuti) is a reminder that the body is mere ash. Displays of indifference to pain—lying on
thorns, wearing spiked shoes, enduring extremes of heat and cold, performing incredible feats of penile strength, or
otherwise deforming the body (all of which can be seen at the Kumbh)—proclaim their transcendence from bodily
sensations. Sadhus are, as a result of these life-denying austerities, inherently powerful beings, capable of bestowing
blessings on the pilgrims who seek their darshan. Such holy men are all at once mesmerizing and intimidating,
enchanting and awesome; their inherent shakti (power) connoted in the term (often derisively used in the English media)
“Godmen.”

The sadhus' apparently fearless disdain for life, along with visible remnants of their formerly militant identity, present a
challenge for modern society and governments. Sadhus represent an alternate form of power, and indeed, they serve as a
reminder of what might have been. William Pinch notes that in the eighteenth century, militant ascetics might have
triumphed over the East India Company had the powerful gosian warlord “Anupgiri, since 1792 the de facto ruler of the
suddenly very valuable real estate of Bundelkhand,!…!not turned his entrepreneurial eyes in 1803 toward Wellesley and
the Company and away from his considerable Maratha connections gathering to the south as west!…!Indian history—
indeed world history—would look very different.” 45 That the bathing ceremonies of the sadhu akharas continues to be
called ‘shahi snans’ (royal bathing) is further indicative of the powerful institutions that the holy men once were aligned
with. It is also important to bear in mind that militant sadhu akharas are popularly thought to have to been (p.16)
created specifically to protect Hinduism from “Muslim attacks,” 46 and to have also consistently opposed the British, a
conception helped considerably by Bankimchandra's construction of sadhus as “proto-modern Indian patriots.” 47 Their
consistent, seemingly unchanging presence and rhetorical opposition to prevailing regimes position them as powerful
political beings.

The power of sadhus to influence politics (and pilgrims, construed as being representative of India's “masses”) nudged the
imaginations of nationalists and, indeed, continues to count in independent India, as VIP politician visits to
Shankaracharyas and the Kumbh attest. The holy men, pledged to upholding the righteousness of Hindu society,
represent an alternative to modern forms of power and governance (in particular, secularism's bid to separate religiosity
from governance), which in the closing decades of the twentieth century became a powerful idea in Hindu nationalist
politics. The spiritual power of sadhus makes the mela a potent vehicle that others seek to exploit: The Kumbh captures
the attention and the imagination of masses of Hindus, and those seeking to capture them have sought to inject
themselves into the mela.

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The Power of the Pilgrims

What of the pilgrims themselves? Obviously, there is power in a crowd, and the promise of unwieldy crowds made the
British vigilant in their attempts to control the Kumbh. However, it is clear that the concept of “the pilgrims” becomes a
powerful trope in political rhetoric. The mela tends to be thought of as an event that mainly attracts peasants, rural “folk,”
and “ordinary” villagers, including lower caste Hindus, 48 their religiosity marking them apart from the modern,
cosmopolitan subject. There are two points to be made here. First, if this book takes an overly governmental or elitist
interpretation of power, it is because it is limited by the lack of sources from the pilgrims and mela-goers themselves.
European representations form the bulk of the available historical documentation on the mela; this is overwhelmingly the
case until the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Even then, Indian articulations of the mela came from educated
circles—from the “Hindoo gentlemen” whom the British consulted on mela matters; the editors of Indian newspapers; or
the local notables who rose in the mela's defense.

These powerbrokers were usually careful to separate themselves from the decidedly subaltern pilgrim, often claiming to
be motivated by a desire to articulate what they could not: the necessity that the mela be controlled by those who
understood the needs of pilgrims (as opposed to the governmentality that sought to run the mela according to principles
of security, safety, and economic (p.17) viability). This relates to my second point: The Kumbh Mela, despite many
assertions to the contrary, was not simply the preserve of peasants and others that we might label subaltern. Where
historians have traditionally attributed a global growing trend toward secularization following the European
Enlightenment, C. A. Bayly has shown that this was largely a trend confined to intellectual elites. Religious activities were
likely to serve as status rituals for middling classes of the nineteenth century; as a result, religiosity, far from declining,
was becoming more vital. For the adherents of many religions, “piety and respectability went together.” 49 It is interesting
to note, for example, that in north India religious publishing—of texts such as Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas, pilgrimage
guides, mahatmyas, prayer books, and so on—accounts for a significant portion of the fledgling book industry in the late
nineteenth century. 50 That mela-specific publications were produced and sold on the site from the late nineteenth
century is in itself evidence of a learned pilgrim demographic.

Yet so many sources written by Indians at the mela actually disparage the religious experience before them and explain
away their presence in other terms—frequently, as a reluctant chaperone for female relatives. 51 The term pilgrim, in both
British and nationalist writing, emerges as a word loaded with meaning; it connotes an innocent, even ignorant subject
(never quite a citizen, even in the independent nation), the Other to the enlightened missionary, magistrate, or minister.
The British perceived the pilgrim as the quintessential Indian peasant, superstitious and impressionable but simple and
honest, a view that many Indian nationalists affirmed. 52 It is no surprise that so many people, when asked to define their
purpose at places of pilgrimage, prefer to describe themselves as tourists. 53 The movements of pilgrims are reflected in
British records, newspapers, and other prose, but their own voices and experiences seldom come to the fore. 54

Perhaps the silence of post–nineteenth-century pilgrimage (princely pilgrims were never so quiet) can also be explained
in the fact that it is largely a personal experience, even allowing for the fact that the personal may be more broadly
construed in the South Asian context. 55 Not only were many pilgrims illiterate, 56 but even lettered pilgrims appear to
have been less likely to record their journeys, 57 unlike the colonial travelers and Western tourists who have apparently
been compelled to do so. 58 Perhaps those who were able to record their journeys preferred not to leave any public
evidence of their subscription to a ritual that had been pronounced as backward and superstitious by colonial discourse.
This defensiveness can be seen in the authors of the tract Kumbha: India's Ageless Festival ( 1955 ), who in response to
Western representations of the mela retorted: (p.18)

The sturdy rationalist of to-day finds it only too easy to prick the bubble of the ancients' reputed wisdom with the
facile prod of ridicule.!…!Yes, it is easy enough to raise a laugh by the casting of cheap flings at faith and easier still
to “debunk” the holiness of “medieval saints meditating on their heads” or “quixotic ascetics concentrating on their
navels.” 59

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Readers will recognize in this comment the underlying assumption that religion is (or ought to be) sui generis—unique,
private, inexplicable. Russell McCutcheon's critique alerts us to the establishment of the discourse of sui generis as a
political strategy—in this case, an attempt to quarantine Indian asceticism from study (“debunking”). 60 It is the
successful deployment of sui generis as a discourse that enabled the mela to be revolutionized from an eclectic regional
market and bathing fair to a more chaste “Hindu religious observance” in the late nineteenth century.

It is unfortunate that many of the booklets (such as the one just quoted) and pilgrimage manuals that might provide a
glimpse of pilgrim experiences of the mela have been shunned by librarians and archivists. 61 Recent melas have
witnessed the publication, sale, and dissemination of a number of small paperback treatises on the mela in a number of
regional languages; this has been the case for some time, but these gems of information are rarely reserved for posterity.
62 In the relative absence of Indian representations of the mela, the constructions of Europeans take on a hegemonic

position, at least in the limited realm of texts and archives. At the same time, it needs to be kept in mind that millions of
pilgrims have their own ways of apprehending the mela that we are not privy to; hence my reluctance to elaborate on their
religious experiences. 63 Access to such sources (particularly from the nineteenth century) might have provided a
different picture of the Kumbh than can be provided here.

The preeminence of Hindu politics in India in the past twenty years has threatened to conflate the saffron worn by some
ascetics at the mela with the saffron wave, a trend that would consign the Kumbh to the hands of Hindu nationalists. This
topic warrants a book of its own. However, I venture to suggest that the contemporary Kumbh is such a large event that it
is difficult for any political party (even a governing one) to truly harness it; this was certainly the case for colonial
Kumbhs.

When I was researching this book in India and told people that I was researching the history of the Kumbh Mela in
Allahabad, they often responded (p.19) by telling me the story of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, the most popular
version of which is this:

Thousands of years ago, perhaps in the Vedic Period, gods and demons made a temporary agreement to work
together in obtaining Amrita (the nectar of immortality) from the milky ocean, and to share this equally. However,
when the Kumbh (pot) containing the Amrita appeared, the demons ran away with the pot and were chased by the
gods. For twelve days and twelve nights!…!the gods and demons fought for the possession of this pot of Amrita. It is
said that during the battle, drops of Amrita fell in four places: Prayag (modern Allahabad), Haridwar, Ujjain and
Nasik. Thus, Kumbh mela is observed at these four locations where the nectar fell. 64

This reading of history clearly challenges conventional approaches to historiography, where the actions and agency of
gods, goddesses, and demons have been averred. 65 The story's hegemonic position in popular understandings of the
mela's historicity has been compounded by a relative lack of countervailing information, sources, and evidence about the
history of the mela. 66 This represents an exciting challenge, and yet I am mindful of concerns that to take the Kumbh
Mela (which belongs, in the minds of the pious, to “the time of the Gods”) and situate it in historical time, locating within
it the actors and forces that have shaped it over the centuries, might remove some of its mystical attraction. Doubting that
it will do so, in the present work, while exploring the power relations and dynamics that shape the modern festival, I also
provide a history of the Allahabad Kumbh. (p.20)

Notes:
(1.) See Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East” (London/New York:
Routledge, 1999 ).

(2.) Victor Turner, Process, Performance and Pilgrimage (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1979 ); Victor Turner and
Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 ).

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(3.) See the gender-sensitive analysis of Darlene M. Juschka, “Whose Turn Is It to Cook? Communitas and Pilgrimage
Questioned,” Mosaic 36, no. 4 (December 2003 ), pp. 189–204.

(4.) See Alan Morinis, Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition: A Case Study of West Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1984 ), pp. 255–60, wherein Morinis points out that Turner “excluded data that did not fit his theory.” For a recent review
of communitas in a Hindu context, see Ishita Banerjee Dube, Divine Affairs: Religion, Pilgrimage, and the State in
Colonial and Postcolonial India (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2001 ), pp. 11–15. For a more general
critique, see John Eade and Michael Sallnow (eds.), Contesting the Sacred: the Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage
(London: Routledge, 1991); Jill Dubisch, In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995 ), ch. 3.

(5.) Peter van der Veer, “Structure and Anti-Structure in Hindu Pilgrimage to Ayodhya,” in Kenneth Ballhatchet and
David Taylor (eds.), Changing South Asia: Religion and Society (London: SOAS, Asian Research Service, 1984 ), p. 65.

(6.) Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1974 ), p. 207.

(7.) J. E. Llewellyn, Festival of Discord: The 1998 Kumbh Mela in Hardwar, 1999 , unpublished ms., pp. 1–15.

(8.) See, for example, the memoirs of the 2001 Mela Officer Jiwesh Nandan, Maha Kumbh: A Spiritual Journey (New
Delhi: Rupa, 2002 ), to get a sense of the delicate negotiations that were carried out with the sadhu akharas in the process
of allotting their camps and organizing bathing processions.

(9.) The political affiliations of the akharas are neither predictable, unitary, nor stable. The best account of the political
lives of sadhu akharas (with emphasis on the Junas) is found in Taran Ramrakha, “Dwaj-dhari: Flag Bearers (of
Righteousness): Indian Asceticism and Hindu Nationalism in Contemporary India,” Ph.D. diss., University of Sydney,
2001.

(10.) Italian-born Sonia Gandhi sought to confirm her Indianness, and as UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav's
political base is thought to constitute OBCs and Muslims, his snan might be construed as reaching out to a broader Hindu
audience. Indeed, Mulayam Singh's image loomed large over the Ardh Kumbh Mela, featured prominently on billboards
throughout (welcoming pilgrims to the festival) and in Hindi booklets distributed freely throughout the mela grounds.
Ram Naresh Tripathi, Ardh Kumbh Parv 2007 (Lucknow: Suchna evam Jansamparvak Vibhag, 2007 ). See also Vijay
Pratap Singh, “From ‘maulana’ to ‘mahant’: Mulayam Dons a New Hat,” Times of India, January 21, 2007.

(11.) Hinduism Today, May/June 2001, p. 34. Thanks to Prashanth Shanmugan for this article.

(12.) “Kumbh Mela,” Hinduism Today, September 1998, p. 34.

(13.) Chetna Shukla, “Kumbh as Renewal of the Indian Spirit,” Speaking Tree, Times of India, February 3, 2001.

(14.) Research that pilgrimage functions to create social and/or national integration includes but is not limited to
Bernard S. Cohn and McKim Marriott, “Networks and Centers in the Integration of Indian Civilization,” Journal of Social
Research 1 ( 1958 ), pp. 1–7; Surinder Mohan Bhardwaj, “Religion and Circulation: Hindu Pilgrimage,” in R. Mansell
Prothero and Murray Chapman (eds.), Circulation in Third World Countries (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985 ),
pp. 241–67.

(15.) In his acknowledgments, Anderson owns that his thinking on nationalism has been “deeply affected” by the work of
Victor Turner. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism
(London/New York: Verso, 2006 [1983]).

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(16.) Ibid., p. 54.

(17.) Louis Rousselet, India and its Native Princes: Travels in Central India (Delhi: B R Publishing, 1882 ), p. 557; “On
Pilgrimage,” Editorial, Pioneer, January 13, 1930, p. 8; and for nationalist accounts of the same: Editorial, Leader,
January 11, 1954, p. 4; “This Kumbh's a Confluence of Two Worlds,” Indian Express, January 11, 2001.

(18.) Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in
North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989 ), p. 280.

(19.) A few qualifications are in order. First, there are indications that pilgrims are predominantly (but not exclusively)
northern. See Anita Caplan, “Pilgrims and Priests as Links between a Sacred Centre and the Hindu Culture Region:
Prayag's Magh Mela,” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1982 , figure 4.1 , “Home States of Prayag's Pilgrims from
Pilgrim-Stream Sample Survey”; and a comparable table of data gleaned from Prayagwals, in Letter from C. C. Banerjee,
Traffic Canvasser, East India Rail, to Traffic Manager, EIR; dated August 28, 1917, National Archives of India (NAI),
Railway Department Proceedings, Traffic 1918, “Re measures for stopping of the Kumbh Mela held at Allahabad in 1918.”
Second, regarding caste: Bhardwaj theorizes that pan-Indian pilgrimage tends to be an upper-caste institution, yet
Dubey notes that as religious activity at the sangam is largely outdoors, there are no caste distinctions made, and it is thus
an inclusive festival. Surinder Mohan Bhardwaj, “Religion and Circulation: Hindu Pilgrimage,” in R. Mansell Prothero
and Murray Chapman (eds.), Circulation in Third World Countries (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); D. P.
Dubey, “Significance of Ritual Bath at Prayaga,” Purana 33, no. 1 (January 1991). Finally, while the festival is thought of
as Hindu, there are in fact a range of religious participants, which point to the very amorphousness of Hinduism. The
Udasis and Nirmala akharas, who have long been associated with the Kumbh, are Sikh. The Dalai Lama was a prominent
guest at the Kumbh in 2001. As will become later apparent in the book, religious practices at the sangam have historically
been marked by syncretism.

(20.) King, Orientalism and Religion; Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge and
Ideology, trans. William Sayers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003 ).

(21.) Suzanne K. Kaufman, Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 2005), p. 8.

(22.) King, Orientalism and Religion; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Histories and Post-Enlightenment Rationalism,”
in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002 ), p. 28.

(23.) C. A. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World: 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004 ), p. 329; Chakrabarty, “Subaltern
Histories,” p. 23.

(24.) William La Fleur, “Points of Departure: Comments on Religious Pilgrimage in Sri Lanka and Japan,” Journal of
Asian Studies 38, no. 2 ( 1979 ), pp. 271–81.

(25.) Robert R. Bianchi, Guests of God: Pilgrimage and Politics in the Islamic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004 ), p. 81.

(26.) Examples of this genre are to be found in the work Alan Morinis on Bengali pilgrimage, Ishita Banerjee Dube's
study of Jagannath, and Peter van der Veer on the pilgrimage town of Ayodhya.

(27.) By “all India,” I mean that pilgrims from all over India attend the Kumbh Mela. This claim is attested to by the
Prayagwals' records and regional specialties. Caplan, “Pilgrims and Priests as Links,” p. 121. However, it is evident that
the majority of pilgrims at the Allahabad Kumbh are from the Hindi-speaking belt—all announcements and signage, for
example, are in Hindi. Surinder Bhardwaj, in his attempt to classify pilgrimage places, typified the Ardh Kumbh in

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Haridwar and the Kumbh in Ujjain as “supra-regional” in nature. Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India (Berkeley:
University of California, 1973 ), pp. 127–29.

(28.) Simon Coleman and John Eade, “Introduction: Reframing Pilgrimage,” in Simon Coleman and John Eade (eds.),
Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion (London: Routledge, 2004 ), p. 3.

(29.) Bhardwaj, Hindu Places of Pilgrimage, p. 173.

(30.) James D. McNamara, “Hindu Pilgrimage as a Force of Indian Spatial Cohesion and Temporal Continuity,” in D. P.
Dubey (ed.), Pilgrimage Studies: Sacred Places, Sacred Traditions (Allahabad: Society of Pilgrimage Studies, 1995 ), p.
40. See also Lise McKean, Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1996 ).

(31.) Irawati Karve's article, “On the Road: A Maharashtrian Pilgrimage,” was originally published in Marathi in 1949
before being translated and published in the Journal of Asian Studies (22 [1962], pp. 13–69), and again in Eleanor Zelliot
and Maxine Bernstein (eds.), The Experience of Hinduism: Essays on Religion in Maharashtra (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1988 ).

(32.) Feldhaus contends that both the pilgrimage and Karve's article were influential in promoting “a way of thinking
about Maharashtra, and it helped them to articulate their demand for the founding of the state.” Anne Feldhaus,
Connected Places: Region, Pilgrimage, and Geographical Imagination in India (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003 ),
p. 218.

(33.) Ibid., p. 221.

(34.) Sandra S. Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002).

(35.) Sarah Thal, Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: The Politics of a Pilgrimage Site in Japan, 1573–1912
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 ).

(36.) Philip Taylor, Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 2004 ), p. 284–90.

(37.) Ibid, p. 294.

(38.) Bhardwaj, “Religion and Circulation,” p. 247.

(39.) Letter from Agent of Bundelkhand, to Secretary to Government, in Secret and Political Department, Fort William,
dated December 11, 1812, “Measures adopted in consequence of numerous persons of rank for exemption from the tax on
Pilgrims,” OIOC, Board's Collections, F/4/421, no. 10371.

(40.) Also known as Pragwals; I use Prayagwal here because it more closely resembles the word as it is spoken in Hindi,
and also to make a distinction between the British usage and spelling, which to my mind has come to bear the weight of
colonial discourses about them.

(41.) C. A. Bayly, “From Ritual to Ceremony: Death Ritual and Society in Hindu North India since 1600,” in Joachim
Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa Publications, 1981 ), pp.
154–86.

(42.) C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780–1870

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(London: Cambridge University Press, 1996 ).

(43.) The famous book awarded the Allahabad Kumbh Mela with the category of “the largest-ever gathering of human
beings, assembled for a single purpose,” after it counted a crowd of a 15 million on the largest bathing day, Mauni
Amavasya, in 1989.

(44.) William R. Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (London: Cambridge University Press, 2006 ), p. 15.

(45.) Ibid., p. 256.

(46.) Jono Lineen, “Kumbh Mela,” Hinduism Today, September 1998, p. 34; Pinch, Warrior Ascetics, p. 7.

(47.) Pinch, Warrior Ascetics, p. 9.

(48.) Statements to this effect are numerous, but specific examples can be found in Letter from A. Macmillan, Joint
Magistrate, to Magistrate of Allahabad, dated March 21, 1885, no. 15/LF-2, Magh Mela Report, 1885, Proceedings of the
Government of North-Western Provinces and Oudh, Miscellaneous (General) Department, Oriental and India Office
Collections, British Library (OIOC), P/2450, file 372; “The Magh Mela: Origin and Meaning,” Leader, February 1, 1911, p.
5.

(49.) Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, p. 325.

(50.) Francesca Orsini, “Pandits, Printers and Others: Publishing in Nineteenth-Century Benaras,” in Abhijit Gupta and
Swapan Chakravorty (eds.), Print Areas: Book History in India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), p. 115.

(51.) See chapter 6 .

(52.) Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993 ), pp. 158–59.

(53.) Bhardwaj, “Religion and Circulation,” p. 247.

(54.) There are few exceptions. Bholanath Chunder is one, a Bengali who wrote his travels for the pleasure of the readers
of the Englishman. His travels were later published as a two-volume book, and though it included accounts of his
experiences of pilgrimage places, it cannot truly be said that he adopted the subjectivity of a pilgrim. Indeed, his writing
was such that the readership of the newspaper suspected he was a European who had adopted the persona of a Bengali as
a literary device. Bholanath Chunder, Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India (London: N.
Trubner, 1869 ).

(55.) See, for example, anthropological accounts of pilgrimage by Irawati Karve, “On the Road,” and Ann Grodzins Gold,
Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 ), which reveal the
personal nature of these sacred journeys.

(56.) Christian missionaries at the mela in the 1840s complained that they had difficulty in finding literate pilgrims to
whom to give their books. Their policy had been to give the Bible to anyone who would accept it, but after pages of the
Good Book were found used as sweet wrappings in the local bazaars (which may not indicate illiteracy as much as putting
the book to practical use) or torn up and lying in the dust, they were forced to become more discerning. Letter from J.
Owen, dated Allahabad, March 18, 1845, American Presbyterian Mission, Presbyterian Church in the USA (Pennsylvania),
Board of Foreign Missions Correspondence and Reports, India Letters, Allahabad Mission, Microfilm Reel 5.

(57.) For an exception to this, see the accounts of the “bhadralok pilgrims” described by Kumkum Chatterjee, who
articulated their journeys in the positivist genre of travel writing, carefully separating the historical and the mythical in

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stories collected in their travels. “Discovering India: Travel, History and Identity in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-
century India,' in Daud Ali (ed.), Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1999), pp. 192–227.

(58.) The term Western is used advisedly because today tourists from parts of the globe formerly conceived of as
Eastern, such as Japan and Israel, visit the mela and apprehend it in Orientalist terms. Interestingly, there is a stronger
record of travel writing from Hajis, which Barbara Metcalf notes appears to have arisen from the 1870s. Barbara D.
Metcalf, “The Pilgrimage Remembered: South Asian Accounts of the Hajj,” in Dale F. Eickelman and James Poscatori
(eds.), Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious Imagination (London: Routledge, 1990 ).

(59.) Dilip Kumar Roy and Indira Devi, Kumbha: India's Ageless Festival (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1955 ), p.
40. I am grateful to Peter Reeves for lending me this rare book.

(60.) Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of
Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997 ).

(61.) For example, there is only one known copy of Kumbhaparva Mahatmya, an important text that sets out
comprehensively the intricacies of the observance of the Kumbh Mela, in a small library in Banares. D. P. Dubey kindly
made a copy of it for me.

(62.) For example, in 1954 the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting produced a book for pilgrims called Prayag
Darshan, but I have not been able to find any copies of it.

(63.) Ahistorical (see Nandy) ways of understanding the mela's past—for example, in oral histories and “myths”—are
further explored in chapters 2 and 3 . Ashis Nandy, “History's Forgotten Doubles,” in Philip Pomper, Richard H. Elphick,
and Richard T. Vann (eds.), World History: Ideologies, Structures and Identities (New York: Blackwell, 1998 ).

(64.) Vivek Singh (ed.), Allahabad Guide: Kumbh Mela Triveni Sangam (Allahabad: City Info Indya, nd [ 2006 ]), p. 6.

(65.) Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Time of History and Times of Gods,” in Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (eds.), The Politics of
Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997 ); Ashis Nandy, “A Report on the Present
State of Health of the Gods and Goddesses in South Asia,” Postcolonial Studies 4, no. 2 ( 2001 ); Sanjay Seth, “Reason or
Reasoning? Clio or Siva?,” Social Text 78, vol. 22, no. 1 (Spring 2004 ).

(66.) It was only in 2001 that D. P. Dubey published the first substantial monograph on the Kumbh, Prayaga: Site of
Kumbh Mela (New Delhi: Aryan Books International, 2001 ).

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