A Kumbh for all reasons — when a dip in the water becomes a leap of faith

They all have their own reasons. Some have come for “salvation,” for them the dip is their leap of faith. Some because they wanted to check out a place they have heard about. For many, just getting here has been an achievement, a sort of a personal milestone they fixed on the road their lives have taken. Yet, there are others who are here as accidental tourists.

Ask Devkaran Yadav who has come here with his wife from Rajgad, Madhya Pradesh. He fills his white plastic can with gangajal. “I heard it is good to bathe here,” he simply says. For him the Kumbh mystique is no more and no less than the swirling water that makes the Sangam.

For Trilochan Shastri, who has brought along five other family members from Guwahati, it’s a “sacred place to attain salvation.” Ask him what he means and he says: “We feel we meet God somewhere here.” It wasn’t God but the river that brought 62-year-old Krishna Mitra all the way from Calcutta where she works at the plush Bellevue Nursing Home.

She says she had been to the Kumbh Mela at Hardwar before and has always wanted to make the journey to Allahabad. “She (the river Ganga) brought me here,” smiles the 62-year-old.

There’s also another attraction, of meeting the assortment of “holy men,” who have apparently renounced everything, the modern-day tramps of spirituality. Ratan Singh Rajput, an agricultural labourer from Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, has been spending the last two nights he’s been here with seven others at the railway station. “We heard from our ancestors about the Kumbh and I’ve always wanted to come here. Where else do you meet so many sadhus and holy men at one place?”

There are pilgrims from Jammu and from Nepal, from Madhya Pradesh, south India, the US, Europe. The mela ground is a Tower of Babel of dialects and costumes, all of which tends to dissolve, for one fleeting moment, in the waters of the river.

Divyasuri Saha travelled from her village in Nepal to the border by rickshaw, took a bus across the border, then a train to Lucknow. There’s a 40-strong group from Jammu, and an all-woman band from Bidar district, Karnataka. “We’re staying in the open, and it gets so cold and so uncomfortable,” says Ambabai, who washes utensils for a living and earns Rs 150 a month. She’s spent Rs 5,000 to be here. “But it’s my first time here and I feel good about it.”

There’s even a postman from Belgium: Alain Salme says he’s interested in Hindu philosophy and came here to try to understand of the religion. “My colleagues told me I was crazy to spend so much to be here. But back home, people do not understand it when I talk about the Ganga.”

Accidental tourists Sonia Kohon and Daniel Kasztelan, who read about the Kumbh Mela three days ago when they were travelling in Jaipur, gleefully jumped into the Ganga for their dip. “This is India. I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Kasztelan, from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Because it fits the perfect stereotype: the land of teeming masses and an unshakable faith in fate.

But Christian Iverson, an American who heads an independent film company, takes the position of a defender of the faith. “We don’t want this to be projected as a freak show. It’s the responsibilty of Western journalists to help the West understand sadhus and Hinduism better,” says Iverson, who’s working on an Enlightening Film Project whose prime character is a “spiritual super-hero who’s Superman and Saibaba combined.” The Kumbh Mela certainly doesn’t disappoint.