India’s great Hindu festival, the world’s largest religious gathering, begins in the north

• The Maha Kumbh Mela, or Hindu jug festival, begins Monday in the northern Indian city of Prayagraj.
• Authorities expect at least 400 million people to visit Prayagraj over the next 45 days.
• Under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the festival has become an integral part of the defense of Hindu nationalism. The festival is expected to boost the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s record in promoting Hindu cultural symbols to its support base. Critics say the party’s philosophy is rooted in Hindu supremacy.

Millions of Hindu devotees, mystics and holy men and women from across India flocked to the northern city of Prayagraj on Monday to begin the Maha Kumbh festival, which is touted as the The largest religious gathering in the world..

For the next six weeks, Hindu pilgrims will gather at the confluence of three sacred rivers (the Ganges, the Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati) where they will participate in elaborate rituals, hoping to begin a journey to achieve the philosophy’s ultimate goal. Hindu: liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

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Here’s what you should know about the festival:

A religious meeting at the confluence of three sacred rivers

Hindus revere rivers, and none more so than the Ganges and the Yamuna. The faithful believe that a bath in its waters will cleanse them of their past sins and end their reincarnation process, especially on auspicious days. The most auspicious days occur in 12-year cycles during a festival called Maha Kumbh Mela, or pitcher festival.

The festival is a series of ritual baths performed by Hindu sadhus, or holy men, and other pilgrims at the confluence of three sacred rivers that dates back to at least medieval times. Hindus believe that the mythical Saraswati River once flowed from the Himalayas through Prayagraj, emptying there into the Ganges and Yamuna.

They bathe every day, but on the most auspicious dates, monks naked and covered in ashes charge towards the sacred rivers at dawn. Many pilgrims stay throughout the festival, observing austerity, giving alms, and bathing at dawn every day.

“Here we feel calm and achieve salvation from the cycles of life and death,” said Bhagwat Prasad Tiwari, a pilgrim.

The party has its roots in a Hindu tradition which says that the god Vishnu snatched from the demons a golden jar containing the nectar of immortality. Hindus believe that a few drops fell in the cities of Prayagraj, Nasik, Ujjain and Haridwar, the four places where the Kumbh festival has been celebrated for centuries.

The Kumbh rotates between these four pilgrimage sites approximately every three years on a date prescribed by astrology. This year’s festival is the biggest and grandest of all. A smaller version of the festival, called Ardh Kumbh, or Half Kumbh, was organized in 2019 when 240 million visitors were recorded, of whom around 50 million took a ritual bath on the busiest day.

Maha Kumb is the largest gathering of its kind in the world

According to officials, at least 400 million people (more than the population of the United States) are expected to arrive in Prayagraj over the next 45 days. This is around 200 times the 2 million pilgrims who came to the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia for the annual Hajj pilgrimage last year.

The festival is a big test for Indian authorities to showcase Hindu religion, tourism and crowd management.

A vast piece of land along the banks of the rivers has been converted into a sprawling tent city equipped with more than 3,000 kitchens and 150,000 bathrooms. Divided into 25 sections and spanning 15 square miles, the tent city also features housing, roads, electricity and water, communication towers and 11 hospitals. Murals depicting stories from Hindu scriptures are painted on the city walls.

Indian Railways has also introduced over 90 special trains that will make nearly 3,300 trips during the festival to transport devotees, in addition to regular trains.

Around 50,000 security personnel (a 50% increase from 2019) are also stationed in the city to maintain law and order and control crowds. More than 2,500 cameras, some powered by AI, will send information on crowd movement and density to four central control rooms, where officials can quickly deploy personnel to prevent stampedes.

Festival will strengthen Modi’s support base

India’s former leaders have used the festival to strengthen their relationship with the country’s Hindus, who make up almost 80% of the population. The more than 1.4 billion inhabitants of India. But under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, the festival has become an integral part of his advocacy of Hindu nationalism. For Modi and his party, Indian civilization is inseparable from Hinduism, although critics say the party’s philosophy is rooted in Hindu supremacy.

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The state of Uttar Pradesh, led by Adityanath, a powerful Hindu monk and a popular hardline Hindu politician in Modi’s party, has allocated more than $765 million for this year’s event. He has also used the festival to boost his and the prime minister’s image, with billboards and giant posters across the city featuring the pair, along with slogans promoting his government welfare policies.

The festival is expected to boost the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s record in promoting Hindu cultural symbols to its support base. But the recent Kumbh meetings have also been mired in controversies.

Modi’s government changed the name of the Mughal-era city from Allahabad to Prayagraj as part of its Muslim-to-Hindu renaming effort across the country ahead of the 2019 festival and national elections won by his party. In 2021, his government refused to cancel the festival in Haridwar despite a rise in coronavirus cases, fearing a backlash from religious leaders in the Hindu-majority country.