India kicks off a massive Hindu festival touted as the world’s largest religious gathering

The northern Indian city of Prayagraj welcomed millions of Hindu devotees, mystics, and holy men and women on Monday, marking the grand opening of the Maha Kumbh Mela, a festival hailed as the world's largest religious gathering.

Over the next six weeks or so, Hindu pilgrims will congregate at the confluence of three sacred rivers—the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati. They will participate in elaborate rituals, hoping to embark on a journey toward the ultimate goal of Hindu philosophy: liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

Hindus revere rivers, particularly the Ganges and Yamuna. Devotees believe that bathing in these two rivers can cleanse them of their past sins and end their cycle of rebirth, especially on auspicious days. These most auspicious days occur in a 12-year cycle, during the Maha Kumbh Mela. The festival, a series of ritualistic baths performed by Hindu saints and other pilgrims at the confluence of the three sacred rivers, dates back at least to the Middle Ages.

Bathing rituals occur daily, but on the most auspicious days, naked, ash-smeared monks rush into the holy rivers at dawn. Many pilgrims will stay for the entire festival, observing abstinence, giving alms, and bathing daily at sunrise. “We feel peace here and get salvation from the cycle of life and death,” said Bhagwat Prasad Tiwari, a pilgrim.

The festival’s origins lie in a Hindu legend that says the god Vishnu snatched a golden pot of immortal nectar from demons. Hindus believe that drops of the nectar fell on the cities of Prayagraj, Nashik, Ujjain, and Haridwar—the four cities that have hosted the Kumbh Mela for centuries. The Kumbh Mela rotates among these pilgrimage sites roughly every three years, with the dates determined by astrology. This year’s festival is one of the largest and most grand. A smaller festival, called the Ardh Kumbh Mela, was organized in 2019, recording 240 million visitors, with about 50 million performing ritualistic bathing on the busiest day.

According to officials, at least 400 million people—more than the population of the United States—are expected to come to Prayagraj over the next 45 days. This is about 200 times the 2 million pilgrims who arrived in the Saudi Arabian holy cities of Mecca and Medina last year for the annual Hajj pilgrimage. The festival is a major test of the Indian authorities' ability to showcase Hinduism, tourism, and crowd management.

Vast swathes of land along the riverbank have been transformed into a sprawling tent city, equipped with more than 3,000 kitchens and 150,000 toilets. Divided into 25 sectors, the tent city, which covers 40 square kilometers (15 square miles), also has housing, roads, electricity and water, communication towers, and 11 hospitals. Murals depicting stories from Hindu scriptures have been painted on the city walls. Indian Railways has also launched more than 90 special trains, which, in addition to regular trains, will make nearly 3,300 trips during the festival to transport devotees.

Approximately 50,000 security personnel—a 50% increase from 2019—have also been deployed in the city to maintain law and order and manage crowds. More than 2,500 cameras, some powered by artificial intelligence, will send information on crowd movement and density to four central control rooms, where officials can quickly deploy personnel to avoid stampedes.

Past Indian leaders have used the festival to strengthen their ties with 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 integral to his promotion of Hindu nationalism. For Modi and his party, Indian civilization is inseparable from Hinduism, although critics say the party’s philosophy is rooted in Hindu supremacy.

The Uttar Pradesh government, led by Yogi Adityanath—a powerful Hindu monk and a popular hardline Hindu politician from 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 huge billboards and posters displayed throughout the city featuring the two men, along with slogans promoting their government’s welfare policies.

The festival is expected to boost the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s past record of promoting Hindu cultural symbols for its supporters. But recent Kumbh Mela gatherings have also been mired in controversy. The Modi government renamed the city from its Mughal-era name of Allahabad to Prayagraj ahead of the 2019 festival and the national elections his party won, part of its effort to change Muslim names to Hindu names across the country. In 2021, his government refused to cancel the festival in Haridwar despite a surge in coronavirus cases, fearing a backlash from religious leaders in the Hindu-majority country.