ALLAHABAD, JANUARY 22: If there's any one group that truly comes into its own at the Kumbh Mela, it's the object of every photographer's camera lens: the ash-smeared Naga sadhus with their piercing eyes, matted hair and air of total disdain.The Kumbh Mela is one place where any sadhu who wishes to join the Naga order is ordained. It's also the place to see several of them at one go: walk into any of the Shaivaite Akharas - Juna, Mahanirvani or Niranjani - and the Naga sadhus can be spotted by a smoking pit of ash and coal, a cloud of chillum hanging around them. They are a draw not just among the foreigners; several pilgrims bow down in reverence and leave a coin or two or some notes. But probe the other sadhus about the Nagas and they hold back more than they reveal.The Naga order dates back to the 16-17 century, says D.P. Dubey, secretary of the Allahabad-based Society of Pilgrimage Studies. ``The then Shankaracharya thought it necessary to create a militant force that would protect the religion not just with its thoughts, also but through its actions,'' he says. This force had to be so strong-willed so as to shun all worldly ambitions and aspirations and to resist all temptation; and the expression of this commitment was found in the elemental rawness of nudity. ``A Naga sadhu is one who has no desire for clothing, for sexual desires, for money. He has to be ready to die any time for the cause of religion,'' says Dubey. ``The sky is his clothing, the ground his bed,'' adds Swami Rajeshwaranandgiriji of the Panch Dashnam Agni Akhara. ``And the ash on his body symbolises his readiness to destruct any time.''The order is as rigorous as are expectations, and not everybody is ordained a Naga. Recruits, as it were, are attached to a mahatma they have to serve for years before they're thought fit to be ordained in the Naga order. Most of them remain attached to the akharas, and their tasks include carrying water and other menial chores for their guru. Alongside this, they are trained in martial arts.It's only at the Kumbh Mela, that too only at Allahabad and Hardwar, where recruits are ordained as Nagas. At a ceremony that will take place on January 23, a day before the big bathing day on January 24, they will be tonsured, they will shed off their sacred threads, if any, since they are now above caste, a mantra is whispered into their ears by the the mahamandelashwars, the senior head priests in the Akhara hierarchy, and their life as Naga sadhus begins.After their ordaining, they continue to perform duties at the akhara, which they are now attached to for good: tilling fields, meditating, protecting the akharas. Several of them live with the akharas scattered all over, and the more rigorous among them, the Digamber sadhus, retreat to the Himalayas, only to emerge for events like the Kumbh.But like most things in the universe of the sadhus, things have changed for the Nagas. Their militant role is admitted to be redundant, and their swords and other weapons appear outdated in an age of AK-47s. In fact, many of them have slipped on their clothes once again. Only to shed them at every Kumbh Mela, where they truly come into their own.
