India opens Hindu festival billed as world’s largest religious gathering: NPR

A devotee garlands a senior Hindu saint walking in procession in Prayagraj, India, Sunday, Jan. 12, 2025, a day before the 45-day Maha Kumbh festival.

Ashwini Bhatia/AP

Hide caption

Toggle label

Ashwini Bhatia/AP

PRAYAGRAJ, India – Millions of Hindu devotees, mystics and holy men and women from across India flocked to the northern city of Prayagraj on Monday to kick off the Maha Kumbh festival, considered the largest religious gathering in the world.

Over 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 take part in elaborate rituals in the hope of beginning a journey to the ultimate Hindu destination Philosophy to achieve: liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

This is what you should know about the festival:

A religious gathering at the confluence of three holy rivers. Hindus worship rivers, and none more so than the Ganges and the Yamuna. Believers believe that bathing in their water will cleanse them of their past sins and complete their reincarnation process, especially on auspicious days. The most auspicious of these days occur in cycles of 12 years during a festival called the Maha Kumbh Mela or Pitcher Festival.

The festival consists of a series of ritual baths by Hindu sadhus, or holy men, and other pilgrims at the confluence of three sacred rivers that date back at least to the Middle Ages. Hindus believe that the mythical river Saraswati once flowed from the Himalayas through Prayagraj, where it met the Ganges and the Yamuna.

Bathing takes place every day, but on the most auspicious days, naked, ash-smeared monks rush to the holy rivers at dawn. Many pilgrims stay throughout the festival, observing austerity, giving alms and bathing at sunrise every day.

“We feel peaceful here and attain salvation from the cycle of life and death,” said Bhagwat Prasad Tiwari, a pilgrim.

The festival has its roots in a Hindu tradition that says the god Vishnu snatched a golden jar containing the nectar of immortality from demons. 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 held for centuries.

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

Maha Kumb is the world’s largest gathering of its kind. According to official figures, at least 400 million people – more than the population of the United States – are expected to attend Prayagraj in the next 45 days. That’s about 200 times the 2 million pilgrims who arrived in Saudi Arabia’s Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina last year for the annual hajj pilgrimage.

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

A huge site along the riverbanks has been converted into a sprawling tent city with more than 3,000 kitchens and 150,000 toilets. The tent city is divided into 25 sections and covers 40 square kilometers (15 square miles). It also has housing, roads, electricity and water, communications towers and 11 hospitals. Murals depicting stories from Hindu scriptures are painted on the city walls.

Indian Railways has also introduced more than 90 special trains, which will make nearly 3,300 trips to ferry devotees during the festival, apart from the regular trains.

About 50,000 security forces – a 50% increase from 2019 – are also deployed in the city to maintain law and order and control crowds. More than 2,500 cameras, some equipped with AI, will send information about crowd movement and density to four central control rooms, where officials can quickly deploy staff to avoid stampedes.

The festival will strengthen Modi’s support base. India’s past leaders have used the festival to strengthen their ties with the country’s Hindus, who make up nearly 80% of India’s more than 1.4 billion people. But under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the festival has become an integral part of his advocacy for Hindu nationalism. For Modi and his party, Indian civilization is inextricably linked to Hinduism, although critics say the party’s philosophy is rooted in Hindu supremacy.

The state of Uttar Pradesh, headed by Adityanath – a powerful Hindu monk and popular hardline Hindu politician in Modi’s party – has committed more than $765 million to this year’s event. The festival was also used to boost the image of him and the Prime Minister, with huge billboards and posters around the city depicting both, along with slogans touting their state welfare policies.

The festival is expected to strengthen the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s previous track record of promoting Hindu cultural symbols to its support base. But recent Kumbh gatherings have also been mired in controversy.

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