Metaphor for transformation
RANJIT HOSKOTE
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If we can think past sensational pictures, the Kumbh Mela could present us with vital clues to the management of the present.
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PHOTO: AP
"Every twelve years, Kumbhnagar, the most densely populated fairground on earth, a tentopolis near the city of God, is built on the sandy banks of the Ganga and Yamuna. For the first Maha Kumbh Mela of the 21st century, the Uttar Pradesh government divided the grey wasteland at the Sangam into 12 sectors. It laid out 450 kilometres of cables and 145 kilometres of water pipes; it paved 140 kilometres of roads, built 20,000 toilet boxes, erected 15 pontoon bridges and connected 5000 telephones. The organisation was impressive: 6000 garbage-men collected the waste; the roads, consolidated with sand sheets, were sprinkled every night; thousands of volunteers maintained daily order."
Ilija Trojanow: Along the Ganga (2005)
THE Maha Kumbh Mela, which takes place in Allahabad every twelve years — together with the associated sacred festivities of the six-yearly Ardha Kumbha and the annual Magha Mela — is a fertile source of visual cliché.
Very few observers have approached this mammoth phenomenon with the combination of wry admiration, sustained by respect and spiced with irony that the German novelist Ilija Trojanow brings to his account.
Rather, innumerable editors of photo-features and writers of travel essays have been kept in business by the images of naked Naga sadhus smeared in ashes, their battalions forming the most visible element of an army of ascetics. Think Kumbh and you think of pilgrims thronging in their honeycombed thousands, wading into the confluence of the Ganga, the Yamuna and the mythic, subterranean Saraswati, for the holy bath that can wash away lifetimes of sin.
The celebrants of the spiritual East's triumph over the materialist West will point, not quite accurately, to the Western tourists who join in the great commingling of the faithful, unsubscribing momentarily from post-capitalist comfort to experiment with the rigour and ceremonial of dharma. The Kumbh has been saturated with reportage and comment, subsumed under the limiting rubrics of tourism, heritage or millennial belief; it seems to have a life only in that peculiar zoo where the stereotypes of exotic India are bred in captivity.
Vital clues
If we can think past these sensational pictures, and beyond the outward circumstances of a religious occasion, it is possible that the Kumbh Mela could present us with vital clues to the management of the present. This grand event, when the modern Allahabad reaffirms its ancient identity as Prayag-raj, the pre-eminent site of holy sacrifice, embodies a process of transformation. This process offers us, if we approach it without benefit of readymade conceptual boxes but with the receptiveness of the symbolic imagination, powerful metaphors for the re-imagining of India.
For the Kumbh reminds us of the deeper mechanisms by which Indic culture has maintained its quintessential balance between turbulence and order, the secular and the sacred, the austere and the sensuous, the mundane and the sublime; a balance that has been destroyed both by the aggressive, symbol-denying secularism of the Left and the brutal politicised religiosity of the Right.
Key concepts
Perhaps we could approach the Kumbh phenomenon through an informal and even idosyncratic lexicon, dwelling on the three key concepts that inform it: those of the tirtha or crossing, the sangama or confluence, and the manthana or churning. The Kumbh Mela is, above all, an occasion when the relationship between the individual self and the larger social and cosmic totalities is reaffirmed. The ritual of lustration, the so-called holy dip, represents the return of the self to the waters of birth and regeneration.
The waters of Allahabad/Prayag are charged with two momentous symbolisms.
First, as the waters of a tirtha, they mark a threshold or bridge between worlds, between the secular realm of worldly goals and social relationships, and the sacred domain of self-overcoming and un-worlding. Neither motive annihilates the other: the world of normal experience is given shape, meaning and direction by the awareness of wider contexts that lie beyond words and strategies; the world of spiritual longing and ascetic discipline is thrown into high relief by the unpredictable, polychrome variousness of the temporal life.
Second, since Allahabad/Prayag is the sangama, the confluence of three rivers celebrated in hymn and sanctified by millennia of veneration, its waters represent fecundity: the weaving together of three separate impulses into a new wholeness that is greater than the sum of its constituents. While the crossing proposes a model by which we can hold our contradictory desires for belonging and elsewhereness together in a dialogue, the confluence suggests that it is through the combination of heterogeneous elements that we can replenish ourselves; that hybridity, rather than an imagined essential purity, is the trigger that activates growth.
And to these we may add a third symbolism: the Kumbh marks the manthana, the vast churning together of thousands upon thousands of people who lose, at least in theory and for the brief moment of this celebration, their sense of a separate caste and ethnic identity, and are gathered up in a pattern of ritual and observance that heightens their perception of being participants in a vaster drama than the theatre of private emotions and social conflicts.
This manthana, this churning, puts us in mind of the churning of the Ocean of Milk by the gods and the demons in Hindu myth: a process that threw up both nectar and poison, treasure and threat, and which seems to be an allegory for the ongoing adventure of human existence. The idea of the manthana returns us to one of the foundational myths of the Kumbh; for the kumbh or pot refers to the pot of nectar that was the prized goal of the mythic churning. The myth tells us that when one of the demons ran away with the pot of nectar, he was pursued by the gods: drops of the nectar fell as the fugitive hastened away with his booty, and wherever they fell, the event is commemorated.
The myth of the manthana, with its premium on tactical innovation and unity of purpose, on alternating phases of cooperation and competition, points us towards the necessary devices by which groups of individuals drawn to conflict can manage their differences, rate their priorities, pursue a healthy rivalry of positions in a game of advantage that remains forever open. The manthana, like the sangama, raises visions of a vast coming together of diverse factions — however transiently — around a cause that concerns each of them intimately and yet is larger than themselves. Not unlike the nation-state that is being continuously imagined forward, the Republic that is always a work in progress.
Ancient future
Perhaps the Kumbh Mela holds out to us an ancient future. Perhaps it provides us with operational myths for a society that has divided itself bitterly even as it pursues a notion of modernity. India's postcolonial modernity has been articulated largely through an electoral democracy set as a template over a society that was never redeemed from feudal structures of thought and the attitudes of destructive factionalism. That postcolonial modernity has been premised far too sharply on the edge, on antagonism and contradiction; its efforts to mitigate differences of privilege and entitlement have entrenched difference as a principle that precludes the greater common good. As against this, the symbolisms of the Kumbh Mela recall us to the uses of the blur, of synthesis, reconciliation and participation: modes of being that elude classification, encourage us to rise above our fragmented interests and commit ourselves to a more embracing and fruitful purpose.
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