The Construction of the Kumbha Mela

Abstract

Hindu religious tradition is often portrayed as established and unchanging by its adherents as well as outside observers. Each of these groups can have good reasons to assert this, for Hindus, it reflects the conviction that their religious practices are rooted in antiquity, whereas for (polemical) outsiders it is evidence for the lack of any meaningful progress. Yet these assumptions ill explain the workings of any religious community – which not only constantly changes in response to its times, but also finds ways to clothe these changes in the garb of tradition. Both of these phenomena can be seen in the Kumbha Mela, a Hindu festival that is widely believed to be the world's largest religious gathering. The Kumbha Mela's tone and content have been profoundly altered in the recent past, spurred by changing social, economic, and political conditions. As the real‐life Kumbha Mela has been ‘constructed’ through this process of change, one sees the corresponding ‘construction’ of the sources (textual, mythical, and historical) to provide it with its roots, location, and raison d'être. These ‘constructed’ sources root the Kumbha Mela in the distant past, both to give it the authority of antiquity and to portray the festival as unchanging, but these new sources reflect these new forces. These forces have transformed the Kumbha Mela from a theater for ascetic military power into a government‐controlled mass religious festival, and this government control is now being challenged by Hindu nationalists. The constant feature throughout the festival's history has been the way it has served as a stage on which groups can enact and contest for authority.