India Kicks Off Hindu Maha Kumbh Mela 2025 Festival

Millions of Hindu devotees, mystics, and holy men and women from across India descended on the northern city of Prayagraj on Monday to kick off the Maha Kumbh Mela 2025 festival, which is billed as the world’s biggest religious gathering.

Over the next six weeks, Hindu pilgrims will gather at the confluence of three sacred rivers — the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati — to participate in elaborate rituals, hoping to embark on a journey to achieve Hindu philosophy’s ultimate goal: release from the cycle of rebirth during the Maha Kumbh Mela 2025.

Hindus revere rivers, particularly the Ganges and Yamuna. The faithful believe that taking a dip in their waters will cleanse them of their past sins and end their reincarnation cycle, especially on auspicious days. The most auspicious of these days occur every 12 years during the Maha Kumbh Mela, also known as the Pitcher Festival.

The festival, which dates back to mediaeval times, consists of ritual baths performed by Hindu sadhus, or holy men, and other pilgrims at the confluence of three sacred rivers. Hindus believe that the mythical Saraswati river flowed from the Himalayas to Prayagraj, where it met the Ganges and the Yamuna.

Maha Kumbh Mela Bathing

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

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

The festival is based on a Hindu legend in which the god Vishnu captured a golden pitcher containing the nectar of immortality from demons. Hindus believe that a few drops fell in the cities of Prayagraj, Nasik, Ujjain, and Haridwar, which have hosted the Kumbh festival for centuries.

The Kumbh rotates between these four pilgrimage sites every three years, on an astrologically determined date. This year’s festival is the largest and most spectacular of all. In 2019, 240 million people attended a smaller version of the festival known as Ardh Kumbh, or Half Kumbh, with approximately 50 million taking a ritual bath on the busiest day.
Maha Kumb is the world’s largest such gathering.

According to officials, at least 400 million people—more than the population of the United States—will visit Prayagraj over the next 45 days. That is roughly 200 times the 2 million pilgrims who arrived in the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia, for the annual Hajj pilgrimage last year.

The festival serves as a major test for Indian authorities in terms of promoting Hinduism, tourism, and crowd management.

The festival to increase Modi’s base

A vast area along the riverbanks has been converted into a sprawling tent city complete with over 3,000 kitchens and 150,000 restrooms.

The tent city, which spans 40 square kilometres (15 square miles), includes housing, roads, electricity and water, communication towers, and 11 hospitals. Murals depicting stories from Hindu scriptures have been painted on the city walls.

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

The city also has approximately 50,000 security personnel stationed there, a 50% increase from 2019. More than 2,500 cameras, some of which are AI-powered, will send crowd movement and density data to four central control rooms, allowing officials to quickly deploy personnel to avoid stampedes.

The festival will increase Modi’s support base.

Previous Indian leaders have used the festival to strengthen ties with the country’s Hindus, who account for nearly 80% of India’s population of over 1.4 billion.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi

However, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the festival has become an integral part of the government’s Hindu nationalist agenda. Modi and his party see Indian civilisation as inextricably linked to Hinduism, despite criticism that the party’s philosophy is based on Hindu supremacy.

Adityanath, a powerful Hindu monk and a popular hard-line Hindu politician in Modi’s party, has allocated more than $765 million for this year’s event. It has also used the festival to boost his and the prime minister’s image, with giant billboards and posters of them both throughout the city, as well as slogans promoting their government’s welfare policies.

The festival is expected to strengthen the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s track record of promoting Hindu cultural symbols among its supporters. However, recent Kumbh gatherings have also sparked controversy.

Modi’s government changed the city’s Mughal-era name from Allahabad to Prayagraj as part of a nationwide effort to convert Muslim to Hindu names ahead of the 2019 festival and the national election, which his party won. Despite an increase in coronavirus cases, his government refused to cancel the Haridwar festival in 2021, fearing repercussions from Hindu-majority religious leaders.

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