What is the Kumbh Mela and how does it differ from the Maha Kumbh Mela? 

The Kumbh Mela is a huge pilgrimage. And what is a pilgrimage? It is a journey to a particular a conjunction of a deity, a place and a time. The Kumbh Mela is held every 12 years in Allahabad, which is now called Prayagraj. It also is part of a cycle of Melas that take place every four years, one in Haridwar in the Himalayan foothills, one in Ujjain in central India, and one in Nashik in West India. In four years, there will be one in Ujjain, and then in eight years in Nashik. In the next cycle, it will be in Haridwar. But the big one is in Prayagraj. What’s very special about this mela is that it is at the Sangam, the confluence, of the Yamuna and the Ganga rivers, both of which flow from the Himalayas, and a special underground river, almost a mystical River, that is called the Saraswati. A Sangam, the coming together of two rivers, is often a very important place for pilgrimage. The Maha Kumbh Mela is really no different, except the time is amplified this year. The time in which the Kumbh Mela took place is a much more special time that occurs only every 144 years.  

You have written extensively on Hindu pilgrimage and sacred geography. How does the Kumbh Mela embody the idea of “sacred space” in Hinduism, and what makes the Triveni Sangam such a powerful spiritual site?

Some people say that pilgrims make the pilgrimage place. It is by the footsteps and faith of millions of pilgrims that a place is sanctified. The pilgrimage place in India is referred to as a tirtha, a “crossing place,” It  is a place where crossing the river of this earthly life (samsara) to the far shore is somehow easier for mortals like ourselves, if we imagine immortality being the far shore of the river. A tirtha is one of the places that makes that an easier and more fulfilling crossing. But the truth is, there are tirthas all over India, places where people have beheld the divine, whether it be at the Sangam of rivers, or a manifestation of Shiva, or a manifestation of the god Vishnu. The Divine is present here, if only we have eyes to see it And the Divines present, not just in one place, but in many places. 

The most important tirthas are where rivers come together. It's essential to see thatthe rivers really are the great cathedrals of India. They are the places where, even if there is no temple, the Divine presence is felt. And the river Ganga is the big one. It is said to flow not only from the Himalayas, but also from the heavens above, falling down upon the hair of the god Shiva, who broke the fall with his hair so that it didn't shatter the earth with its power when it fell. And the river Yamuna also comes from the Himalayas, and each of them has many sangams. On their way to the Triveni, for example, the river Ganga itself has a couple of sangams where tributaries of the Ganga come together. And at each of those places, it's considered very sacred to be able to bathe in this coming together of sacred waters. Some of them farther up in the Himalayas are so swift that people have to hold onto chains anchored in the rock where the rivers come together in order to bathe. Lots of the great pilgrimage places of India are along the rivers and at the Triveni especially. It is important to understand that when pilgrims come for the Kumbh Mela, there is no temple that they visit. The temple really is the Triveni, the coming together of the rivers. And that is their destination. That is what they seek. And that is the fulfillment of their pilgrimage.

You have described the Kumbh Mela as an astonishing feat of urban planning. What are the key factors that enable such a large-scale city to be built in such a short time?

That is the question that we had in our minds when our team of researchers from Harvard went to the Kumbh Mela 12 years ago. It wasn't because this was somehow an exotic event or  because of the crowds, but because of our astonishment at the fact that they were able to create a city that would house at least 7 million people on any given night, and over the course of the whole time of the Kumbh Mela, it would house over 600 million people. Our question was, How do they do this? How do they build this temporary city on the sand banks of the two rivers – the Ganga and the Yamuna? They can only start building when those rivers have ceased to be in flood, and they are in flood most of the late summer and fall. They cannot start really until November or December. When does it become evident how much land there is on which to build this city? This   was an astonishing feat. We had people from the School of Engineering, the School of Architecture, people involved in urban planning and public health. How do they feed everybody? How is medical help provided?  How are the roads created? My colleague, Rahul Mehrotra, from the School of Design at Harvard is an urban planner and architect in India and in the United States. He had a team that looked at the ways in which they construct the city, which is basically constructed from readily available, easily transportable materials. They only use bamboo poles, rope, corrugated tin, nails and canvas, and these five elements enable them to very, very quickly construct buildings, tents, and halls for gathering and for entertainment. They construct the places where the various religious leaders have their encampments as well as the roads that carry the traffic. They build not just dirt roads, but steel plated roads and pontoon bridges. Moreover, the banks of the rivers have to be sandbagged so that people don’t slip into the river. There are also many public health facilities and clinics for people who were ill. The public health researchers were supplied with iPads so they could actually communicate with one another about the kinds of health issues they were encountering at various clinics. There are field hospitals using both homeopathic and Ayurvedic medicine and regular Western-type medicine. 

The whole Kumbha Mela is just an amazing feat. It is put together by essentially a temporary urban district, that is set up as a city within the city. It has a District Commissioner, a police force, and all of the elements that are part of the urban landscape in any city. However,  temporary District Commissioner is in charge only during the period of the Kumbh Mela. It's a really complicated process. They start building in December, and by mid-January, the pilgrimage begins. This is a kind of rapid construction that Indian craftsmen or builders are familiar with, and has countless uses for things like refugee camps around the world.  

In the modern era, some have argued that the Kumbh Mela has shifted from being a primarily spiritual event to one that is also deeply political and commercialized. Do you think this transformation affects the authenticity of the pilgrimage experience?

For most pilgrims, it doesn't affect the authenticity of their experience. Throughout history, pilgrims haven’t needed an invitation or a government promotion to go to the Kumbh Mela. They just know about it and go. It has, however, with the promotion by the Modi government taken on the aura of a symbol of national unity. That has some political resonances. Although this is a Hindu pilgrimage, there are lots of other people who go. There's a whole Muslim substructure of people who are involved in creating the infrastructure of the Mela. There are Sikhs who come. There are people from every walk of life, whether rich or poor, whether they can stay in fancy tents or whether they just camp out on the Mela grounds.

I'm not sure exactly how its political resonance affects the spirit of it. More than anything, when the Prime Minister or government officials attend, there is a f definite disruption of the traffic, because they're VIPs, and they get special treatment, like a special place to bathe, travel or land a helicopter. Prime Minister Modi has promoted this in various places and it has changed the landscape. For example, in the city of Banaras, Modi created a big corridor that went from the river up to the Vishwanath temple, knocking down countless houses and smaller temples on the way, but providing an easier way for VIP visitors to go from the Ganga to the temple without having the inconvenience of going through all the narrow lane. But in any case, I don't think this political involvement really changes the nature of the Mela. People go to bathe at the Triveni Sangam, have the darshan of some of the sadhus, or visit some of the entertainments. It is a Mela in the sense of being a festival as well as being a religious event. As for the commercialization of it, that's inevitable.

The Kumbh Mela has increasingly attracted foreign scholars, seekers, and tourists. How do you think this globalization has shaped how the festival is presented and understood both within and outside India?

There is a certain fascination with the Mela. During the weeks of the Mela, you would see articles about it in newspapers and even a few television spots. Some of this fascination has to do with the immense crowds, because it is the largest religious gathering on the face of the earth. It can be seen from space, and it's bigger than the Hajj in terms of its sheer size. Some people are fascinated with that. Others are fascinated with all the Sadhus,, the “holy men,” and their bathing and their encampments, which are usually special encampments closest to the rivers. There is something of the exotic that some Western tourists see and feel they would like to be part of, but they don't really want to be part of the huge crowds. This is not a pilgrimage for people who are claustrophobic. Outside groups have provided luxury tents for foreign and wealthy visitors. My particular tent had a zipper that opened to the outside, with an attached bath, and even a little heater. The effort to provide really comfortable living quarters for foreigners who have come to either witness or participate in the Kumbh Melas has made it a more attractive thing to visit, but even those visitors can't be protected from the throngs of people. You could go to the Triveni by boat, for example, and witness it from the safety of a boat.. That said, the number of foreign visitors is minuscule compared to the huge crowds of Indians from all over India, mainly from Central and North India. 

How has your study of the Kumbh Mela influenced your broader understanding of Hinduism and religious studies?

The Kumbh Mela is, in a sense, the capstone of some of my studies of India and Hinduism.

I began as a student in the city of Banaras, looking at the sacred geography of that city, something that is described in Sanskrit text called the Puranas. I tried to find the temples that they write about and the particular pilgrimage routes that circle the city. I spent some time doing that and wrote my first book, called Banaras: The City of Light.  That book is still very much in print today, though it was published probably thirty years ago.

What I realized as I was visiting those temples was that all of them were connected to other places in India. There was the very wonderful Vishwanath temple in Banaras. But there are also Vishwanath temples in the Himalayas and in South India. The city of Kashi was also duplicated, I found. There is also a Kashi of the South and a Kashi of Central India. The river Ganga was so important in Banaras, but I came to see that it was just one of a whole number of sacred rivers crisscrossing India. Banaras was seen to be a city of liberation. If you died there, you would find moksha. I later realized that Banaras was only one of seven cities of liberation. I became interested in the way in which pilgrimage places are not singular, but are duplicated. There are the 12 jyotirlingas, the manifestations of the god Shiva that are seen as eruptions of light in the middle of the world. There are jyotirlingas from the temple Kedarnath in the high Himalayas, down to the temple Rameshwaram in the south. Then I decided that I would like to visit these places and see what kind of pattern I could discern in all of Indian sacred geography. That took me a while. I learned a lot from traveling on the road in India and going to a number of the sacred places. I discovered that in these places, though they did have temples, and sometimes very grand temples, there was a real sense that they were also grounded in the hills, mountains, and rivers—the very geography of India. All of this work resulted in my book called India: A Sacred Geography. And through all of that time, I'd been to a number of important pilgrimages, but I had never been to the Kumbh Mela. So, this was a capstone for me, going to the greatest pilgrimage of them all. I was very happy to have gone, and to have gone in a way that was truly interdisciplinary. I was interested in the religious aspect of it, in the Sadhus and in the akaras and the religious teachings. That was the part that I was most fascinated by. It was a kind of a fulfillment. I am still very interested in pilgrimage, and I certainly will return to India for more of the same. But that really has been a focus of my life's work. This is a theme that is important in many religious traditions, in Christianity, in Judaism, in Islam, in Sikhism. We are basically travelers; we are journeying in this world, and that the religious life is itself a journey and a pilgrimage.