CrossCurrents

Introduction

The black and white photograph is of a group of peasant women, wrapped in coarse woolen shawls against the January cold.¹ They look at the camera blankly—or is that with hostility at the camera’s intrusion? Deliberately drained of color, the image seems as though it could have been taken a century ago. One woman, the central figure, is wearing dark sunglasses, and has been no doubt chosen as a focal point because her middle‐class accessory stands out as the image’s only signpost to modernity. The photograph, “Kumbh Mela Women,” was taken at the Allahabad Kumbh Mela in 2001. It is copyrighted. It is “collectable,” and apparently, a wise addition to an investment portfolio.² It is also an example of how images of the traditional (often synonymous with “the religious”) have become desired, frame‐able objects, fine art mementos to our own modular, more complete modernity. It was images such as this (and this is a comparatively benign example) that raised a long‐standing issue for managers of the Kumbh Mela in 2001: did photographers have a right to enter the mela grounds and take photographs as they pleased? How did the presence of international media crews affect the festival, and the ways in which people perform their rituals? Many sensational photographs were reproduced around the world of the festival (usually featuring spectacularly naked holy men, or women bathing, struggling to conceal their bodies with their wet saris), prompting questions about who had the right to attend, photograph, and represent the event.

The Kumbh Mela

The Kumbh Mela is a series of festivals that rotate between the Indian holy cities of Haridwar, Ujjain, Nasik, and Allahabad (Prayag); the festival occurs in each of these cities on a cyclic basis, over a twelve‐year period. Of all of the Kumbh Melas, Allahabad’s is the biggest today, and as such is the focus of this article. Allahabad is known among Hindu faithful as Tirtharaj, the king of all pilgrimage places, where the Ganga, Yamuna, and the Saraswati rivers converge to form the triveni sangam (literally, the intertwining braid of three).³ Bathing in the confluence of these rivers is thought to cleanse one of all sins; as such, bathing is the core religious activity for pilgrims coming to Allahabad. Bathing at the triveni is an ancient practice that is believed to deliver various rewards, including freedom from all sins.⁴ The junction of the two rivers makes a stunning landscape, as noted by Tulsidas in the sixteenth century: “Beautiful is the meeting of the white and the dark (rivers of the Ganga and Yamuna). Tulsi’s heart leaps with joy at the sight of the waves.”⁵

While the triveni is considered auspicious all year round, it is more so on the occasions of a Kumbh or Ardh Kumbh, when amrit, or the nectar of immortality, is believed to be present in the waters. On these occasions, every twelve and six intervening years, respectively, large crowds are attracted to the sangam, of ordinary pilgrims as well as of bands (akharas) of holy men (sadhus). The Guinness Book of Records credits the Kumbh as being “the greatest recorded number of people assembled with a common purpose,” with an estimated twenty million pilgrims present in Allahabad on January 30, 2001.⁶ The influx of record‐breaking crowds naturally creates a lot of media interest, although the emphasis is rarely on the spectacular arrangements made by the mela authorities to manage the festival as safely as possible.

The 2001 Kumbh Mela was widely lauded in the Indian press as the “first Kumbh Mela of the Millenium.” This temporal theme—of the mela, as a traditional (and many believe, ancient), religious observance triumphantly surviving into the modern age—was one that was also celebrated in the international press, although there it took on very different connotations. In my own country of Australia, the Kumbh Mela occupied front‐page space as a human interest story, where color photographs were reproduced of pilgrims and holy men bathing. The public consuming this news...