Kumbh Mela festival, India

Kumbha Mela is the largest religious gathering in the world, where saints and devotees gather to take a dip in the holy river Ganges. The month-long Hindu festival, which is celebrated every three years, rotates among four Indian cities : Allahabad, Haridwar, Ujjain, and Nashik. It is attended by millions of people on a single day. The major event of the festival is a ritual bath at the banks of the rivers in each town. Other activities include religious discussions, devotional singing, mass feeding of holy men and women and the poor, and religious assemblies where doctrines are debated and standardized.

Kumbh Mela is the most sacred of all the pilgrimages. Thousands of holy men and women (monks, saints and sadhus) attend, and the auspiciousness of the festival is in part attributable to this. After visiting the Kumbh Mela of 1895, Mark Twain wrote:

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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 which it is. No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination, marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites.

In 2001, I attended the Maha Kumbh at Allahabad, with a total participation of approximately 60 million people. The dates for this mela were special due to the planetary positions that repeat only once in 144 years. I hope to revisit the next Maha Kumbh Mela in 2012!