Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 1765-1954

287 Pages·8.525 MB·English

by  Kama MacLean

Introduction
Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in
Allahabad, 1765-1954
Kama Maclean
Print publication date: 2008
Print ISBN-13: 9780195338942
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2008
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195338942.001.0001
Introduction
Kama Maclean (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195338942.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
Departing from the debates about the nature of communitas vis‐à‐vis Hindu
pilgrimage, the study begins by pointing out some of the conceptual shortfalls
that have plagued the study of pilgrimage. Aiming to bring a broader concept of
power to the study of pilgrimages, the Introduction reflects upon the potential of
a pan‐Hindu, mass pilgrimage in engendering the imagination of a “national”
community. After briefly describing the Kumbh Mela genre of festivals and
Allahabad's annual counterpart, the Magh Mela, the themes of the book are
identified, a conceptual framework is delineated, and an overview of each of the
chapters is given. The nature of available and accessible historical sources and
their attendant assumptions that have underpinned the colonial administration
and study of popular piety in India are set out and problematized
Keywords:   Kumbh Mela, Magh Mela, pilgrimage studies, Hindu pilgrimage, Communitas,
communication network, national imagination
This book grows out of fascination and frustration. My own fascination with the
Kumbh Mela, widely recognized as the largest religious gathering in the world,
has been tempered by a sense of frustration that there is so little known and
written about the history of the festival. My initial attempts to collect
information about the mela, which commands worldwide media attention when it
occurs every twelve years, produced two broad kinds of information. At one end
of the spectrum was information produced for the pilgrims themselves, which
was predominantly devotional in nature and unconcerned with the pilgrimage as
a material, historical phenomenon. At the other extreme were coffee‐table
picture books and magazine photoessays, none of which sought to explain much
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Introduction
about the mela; they were simply content to entertain the reader with
spectacular images of naked sadhus and wet sari‐clad Indians taking part in
“ancient” religious rituals. Although both genres conveyed a vague sense of the
mela's historicity, there was little attempt to situate it within history, to chart the
ways it had developed and changed over time.
Big pilgrimages have big implications for those who are in power or aspire to it.
As a mass pilgrimage, attended by pious people from all over the subcontinent
who then returned to their villages, the Kumbh Mela played an important role in
disseminating information. Such information was not necessarily simply
devotional in nature, nor indeed was the mela simply a religious gathering; it
was an intriguing blend of religiosity, trade, and social communication, sharing
(p.4) the recreational elements of a fair. The British recognized the potential
for melas to act as powerful conduits of disease as well as news, rumors,
sedition, and eventually nationalism, and they consistently sought to control the
pilgrimage.
Yet the colonial state and the colonized had different ideas about what the
Kumbh Mela represented; for the former, it was a potentially dangerous festival
that demanded tight regulation and control, whereas for the latter it was a
sacred sphere in which foreign interference was deemed intolerable. This
tension, and the manner in which it was negotiated by each side, are the primary
themes of this book. I ask why and examine how the colonial state tried to
control and manipulate the mela, and more important, what kind of mela evolved
from this process? These questions have important implications for recent
debates about the colonial “construction” of Hinduism (more often theorized
than demonstrated) and the role of Hindu identity, idioms, and imaginations in
the creation of the Indian nation.
This book emphasizes the very broad implications for power presented by a pan‐
Hindu pilgrimage. During the period under discussion, the Kumbh Mela drew
increasingly large crowds of pilgrims from all over India, and as such it defied
British attempts to redefine and manage Hinduism in terms of a privately
practiced, controllable religion.1 For pilgrims, the religious quest began when
they left their homes and ended only on their return; in between, they relied on
(among other things) the infrastructure and machinery of the colonial state.
Though the physical journey may have ended on their return, the
momentousness of a journey to the festival meant that it continued to live on in
their memories as it shaped social and religious lives and perspectives, and
perhaps even politics.
Pilgrimage
Pilgrimage studies has, in the past twenty years, become something of a
subdiscipline in its own right, yet it continues to be dominated by
anthropologists and religious studies specialists whose concerns tend to focus on
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Introduction
the inner experiences and social lives of pilgrims, an area that this book largely
and unapologetically sidesteps. Without doubt, the most discussed topic in
pilgrimage studies—indeed, the theory that initiated the area of study—is Victor
Turner's notion of “communitas.” Simply defined, communitas refers to the
spontaneous and joyful commonness of feeling, liable to strike pilgrims at some
stage during the pilgrimage process.2 Studies that affirm communitas as a
pilgrimage phenomenon tend to emphasize the unity and egalitarian ethos (p.5)
promoted by sacred journeys. This influential model of pilgrimage has created
bodies of scholarship that are numbed to the intricacies of power plays that
revolve around religious travel.3
For decades, scholars have hotly debated the validity of Turnerian theory for
Hindu pilgrimage, and currently, communitas stands largely discredited.4
Scholars have argued that the tendency of Hindu pilgrims to travel in small, self‐
selected cohesive groups based on region and caste precludes the kind of
communitas that the Turners described in Christian traditions.5 Turner himself
anticipated this, emphasizing that “the pilgrimage situation does not eliminate
structural divisions, it attenuates them, removes their sting.”6 Most relevant for
our purposes, Jack Llewellyn closely examined the Haridwar Kumbh Mela for
traces of communitas in 1998 and found a “festival of discord,” as that mela
disintegrated into a stand‐off between a powerful organization of ascetics, the
Juna akhara, and the mela administration (under the direction of a Hindu
nationalist‐led government), in which the administration mobilized state
paramilitary forces against the holy men.7 This was, to be sure, an incredible
turn of events, and even though a level of dispute between the mela
administration and the akharas is to be expected,8 the 1998 mela attained
heights not seen since the late eighteenth century, when akharas battled each
other for supremacy in Haridwar. Yet the fact that there is conflict at one level of
the mela does not necessarily cancel the possibility of unity at other levels,
especially if we conceive of the pilgrimage process as a broad one, spatially and
conceptually. Conflict between akharas and the administration may be
disruptive, but it does not discount the possibility that there is enough
commonality in a Kumbh crowd that might provide the basis for a constituency
for social and political orchestration.9
Perhaps those who theorize about the prospects for unity at pilgrimage centers
are looking too literally. Communitas is, after all, a psychological sensation and
is difficult to discern, much less document. We may not see examples of “ludic
communitas” as Turner described it in the crowds of a pan‐Indian pilgrimage
like the Kumbh, but does that undermine the possibility that pilgrims might
conceptualize and imagine community somewhat differently after they have
experienced such a broad cross‐section of it? To phrase this differently: Why do
so many prominent politicians in contemporary India make a point of being seen
at the Kumbh Mela? Widely broadcast images of Sonia Gandhi in 2001 and
Mulayam Singh Yadav in 2007 (each preparing to face elections) immersing
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Introduction
themselves in the sangam with due propriety come to mind; each of these
politicians has a stake in encouraging an Indian (or Hindu) public to think of
them as being immersed in Indian (or Hindu) culture.10
(p.6) Several theories emphasize the potential for pilgrimage to act as a
national integrator, including this one, from a discourse at the Kumbh Mela
given by Sri 108 Swami Vishwadevananda Ji Maharaj Mahamandaleshwar, of
Sannyas Ashram, Gujarat:
The sangam of the three rivers is giving one message. From different
directions, three rivers are coming together here with great force. They
have their own respective backgrounds and uniqueness. Before they meet,
they had their own directions. And after the meeting, all the three merged
their identities into one. Even their flow was not disrupted. We must try to
merge ourselves as one.11
And again:
“Kumbha weaves our nation into one,” said Mahant Ganga Puri of the
Mahanirvani Akhara.12
And another, this time from an editorial:
The fair with its pilgrims and devotees drawn from the distant corners of
the country is a unique and significant contribution to the unity and
integrity of the country. The truth of unity behind diversity of costumes,
language, habits, race, religion, caste and creed that holds the people of
different parts of country together is very clearly manifested at this time.13
Whereas some might dismiss this as rhetoric, researchers agree that
pilgrimages have the capacity to integrate,14 and clearly exhortations such as
these resonate with Kumbh pilgrims and encourage them to imagine unity,
despite their apparent diversity.
While anthropologists and religious studies specialists hotly debated the validity
of communitas, Benedict Anderson extrapolated on Turner's ideas to craft one of
the most enduring and compelling explanations of nationalism in his Imagined
Communities.15 Anderson attributed great possibilities to pilgrimage, noting that
“in a pre‐print age, the reality of the imagined religious community depended
profoundly on countless, ceaseless travels.”16 In a society where access to
literacy continues to be limited and where there is no common vernacular, the
actions of pilgrims (“the uncoerced flow of faithful seekers from all over” India,
if I may rephrase Anderson) in coming to bathe in the sangam serve to speak a
common language of piety and ritual.
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Introduction
The fact that so many millions of people flock to the Kumbh suggests that there
is something that unifies the religious tradition of Hinduism, despite its rich
diversity of practices, devotions, and deities. Veneration of water is one of (p.7)
the common threads in Hindu traditions, and the Kumbh Mela is a celebration
of the waters of the sangam, which deliver, on Kumbh occasions, amrit, the
nectar of immortality. The Kumbh is repetitively described as a “microcosm of
India,”17 which encourages pilgrims (and others) to imagine the nation before
their eyes, as the panorama of peoples extend in every direction (see Figure I.1),
temporarily drawn together by a desire to bathe in the hallowed waters.
Here we might more productively return to (or overturn) the Turners' pilgrimage
paradigm: They suggest that pilgrimage is inherently subversive (“anti‐
structure”) because it entails a departure, perhaps even a rupture, with the
normally structured existence of the pilgrim before he or she has embarked on
their sacred journey. In such a “liminoid,” disconnected phase, they are open
and vulnerable to a wide range of experiences and phenomena. However, the
structures of pilgrimage are increasingly controlled and/or informed by
government, and this can create an arena where government has an
unparalleled opportunity to influence the congregated masses. Governments do
not always make the best of this, as we shall see in chapters 5 and 6, but they
undoubtedly have an advantage because they control most modern
infrastructure. The information network that operates through the pilgrimage
system (pilgrims come to Allahabad from all over India, and then return, talking
as they go) is much harder to capture and control.
As a periodic happening that served to focus the attention of a Hindu public, the
Kumbh Mela's scale and impact rendered it a fruitful canvas for imagining an
independent India. How such an imagined identity might function is less poetic.
Sandria Freitag's work has productively deployed the notion of communitas,
linking it with identity formation, with special reference to communalism (in
South Asian parlance, the assumption that religious communities—particularly
Hindu and Muslim—constitute a major fracture in society). As this communal
fault line became articulated in public rituals in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Freitag argues that collective action (ritual and/or violent)
“served to define community symbolically.”18 This has profound connotations for
melas like the Kumbh. The Kumbh is thought of and repetitively referred to as an
all‐India, pan‐Hindu festival, attracting Hindus from a range of sectarian
affiliations and caste groups.19 As the festival exists today, it is so congested on
the main bathing days that social barriers are impossible to maintain. Though
the emotional and social effects of communitas remain difficult to quantify, it is
certainly demonstrable that political and social organizations imagined a
constituency of sorts—an audience that might be mobilized—at melas from at
least the late nineteenth century. The extent to which this had implications for
Indian nationalism is also one of the themes of this study. (p.8)
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Introduction
(p.9) Power
The assumption of distinct
spheres of secular and sacred
activity has obfuscated a clear
understanding of pilgrimages as
powerful material forces.
Recent postcolonial analysis has
emphasized that the Christian‐
influenced intellectual
traditions through which we
seek to come to terms with non‐
Christian religions hamper our Figure I.1.  A view of the crowd, at the
very attempts to do so.20 If the Ardh Kumbh Mela, 2007. Photo: PTI.
separation of “secular” and
“religious,” or “sacred” and
“profane” in post‐Enlightenment thought has continued to inform and limit
scholarship engaging with popular Christian devotion,21 it equally and even
more inappropriately towers over attempts to understand other traditions.22 At
the other extreme, religion in general has been largely ignored in the analyses of
generations of Marxist historians of the subcontinent, with the result that even
social histories have neglected religious phenomena except where it informs
communalism,23 a trend that has only recently begun to turn.
There has also been some resistance to linking pilgrimage and politics because it
implies the debasement of the religious observance; a number of people I spoke
to while conducting my fieldwork vigorously denied that my subject had any
valid premise at all. Others claim that political centers and pilgrimage centers
must necessarily be different; because secular powers view pilgrimage as an
institution that may undermine political stability, they steer clear of them and,
when impossible, intervene.24 The case of the Allahabad Kumbh Mela proves this
theory in principle, insofar as the British would have preferred to prevent
pilgrimage to Allahabad, but further demonstrates that colonial authorities had
limited power to control piety. As has been shown in the case of Pakistan's
management of Hajjis, “control of the pilgrimage does not give control of the
pilgrims, or their votes.”25
Although many anthropologists have been interested in local or regional political
intrigues between interested groups that surround a pilgrimage shrine or
town,26 there are much broader implications for a pilgrimage known to be pan‐
Hindu that attracts a range of sectarian adherents and is all‐India in character.27
Simon Coleman and John Eade, in Reframing Pilgrimage, reflect that while the
Turners note that pilgrimages have been known to feed into political uprisings,
“it is not made clear how the processual, set‐apart character of the institution [of
pilgrimage] can feed into structural change.”28 Without a doubt, the Kumbh is an
exceptional event, occurring only once every twelve years in Allahabad.
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Introduction
However, one thing that emerges in this study is the consistent attempts to close
the set‐apart character of pilgrimage and establish (p.10) the Kumbh as
representative of the Indian nation (examples of this come from both colonial
and nationalist quarters and are elaborated on in the first chapter). Surinder
Bhardwaj's classic study of Hindu pilgrimage is dedicated to the “countless
pilgrims whose footprints have given meaning to India as a cultural entity”; for
Bhardwaj, the movement of pilgrims underpins a “pan‐Indian Hindu holy
space.”29 The corollary to this is that if pilgrimage has played an important role
in forging a national imagination, then this has troubling implications for a
theoretically secular society. A pilgrimage to Haridwar or Banares today might
include, for example, a visit to the Bharat Mata temple (which has at its central
deity a relief map of India and is closed to non‐Hindus).30 To what degree, the
question must be asked, does Hindu pilgrimage create and shape Hindu politics?
Anne Feldhaus has linked politics and pilgrimage in her recent study of the role
of religious imagery and pilgrimage in forming a “geographical imagination” of
Maharashtra, although she seems to do so reluctantly. In her nuanced and
evocative examination of a series of regional pilgrimages, she posits that such
imagined regions are not coterminous with the political units. Yet she points to
an exception—the Pandharpur pilgrimage, famously documented by Irawati
Karve in the late 1940s.31 This pilgrimage—and indeed, Karve's writings—were
important in strengthening the United Maharashtra movement, which
culminated in 1960 with the creation of the state.32 Yet Feldhaus argues that is
“the exception which proves the rule” that “people can experience, imagine,
conceptualize, and value a region in religious terms without feeling the need to
make it into a politically separate entity.”33 Though I do not question this latter
statement, it seems premature to exclude the political possibilities that
pilgrimages may offer, and a pilgrimage as important as Pandharpur seems like
a large exception to make. The potential of pilgrimages to act as conduits for
political information will be an important theme in the following pages.
Recent studies that directly address the relationship between power and
pilgrimage in non‐Western countries emphasize the presence and influence, even
when indirect, of the West and its discourses of modernity and progress. Sandra
Greene has explored the power of the colonizing West, which fundamentally
altered the way the Anlo of Ghana perceive and interact with their sacred
landscapes.34 A similar process applied to Shinto shrines, as Japan struggled to
align itself with European and American ideas of civilization and progress. These
forces led to a “rearrangement of the landscape of the gods” of Shinto by
redefining their relationship with the state.35 And in Vietnam, arguably
postcolonial twice over and moreover late socialist, a recent surge in pilgrimage
in the south has been seen as partially a response to the withdrawal (p.11) of
state repression of religion (although Hanoi regards this more as a legacy of the
“region's cultural degradation under the French and Americans”).36 Importantly,
it is a testament to the potency of the forms of religiosity that are constructed in
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Introduction
response to such power that local elites and the state attempt to co‐opt them.37 I
return to these theoretical issues after a brief overview of the Allahabad mela
and the key themes of the book.
Pilgrimage and Power in Allahabad
The Magh Mela celebrates an annual auspicious astrological constellation,
lasting about a month (coinciding with January–February), during which bathers
acquire spiritual benefits by bathing in the triveni or sangam, the confluence of
the Ganga, the Yamuna, and the invisible Saraswati rivers. Every twelve years,
the mela is known as a Kumbh Mela and is vastly attended; in the intervening six
years, the mela is known as Ardh (half) Kumbh (readers unfamiliar with the mela
should turn to the appendix, where they will find a useful overview). Pilgrimage
in Hindu traditions is not obligatory, but it is meritorious and desirable. In the
case of the Kumbh, a bath in the triveni promises superlative benefits, chiefly
immortality, but these are only on offer every twelve years; this relative rarity
places certain compulsions on pilgrims to take the opportunity of a holy bath
when it arises, because it “may not be possible next time for a pilgrim, given the
uncertainty of human life.”38
The period under discussion was one of great transition, in which the mela
morphed from being dominated by elites to a more popular form of pious
expression. Indian noble and princely families habitually articulated their status
though what was an expensive journey to holy cities. Amid the political
transitions of the eighteenth century, the British attempted to insert themselves
as powerful players in the pilgrimage, masquerading as gracious hosts, even as
other social groups began to embark on religious journeys to Allahabad, a
central northern town that played a strategic role in East India Company
machinations from 1801 (and had been coveted by them earlier still).
The administrators of the East India Company and later the Raj were aware that
interfering in religion was contentious—a suspicion that for many was
spectacularly confirmed by the 1857 rebellion. The scale of pilgrimage retinues
periodically traveling to places such as Allahabad was truly alarming. A princely
party might include “175 sowars, great and small; 75 marksmen; 110 disciplined
sepoys; 800 attendants; 40 Palankeens for males and females; 20 Wheeled
carriages; 5 Elephants; 25 Camels and 100 Bangees,” as did Raja Bhakt Singh's
Allahabad‐bound company in 1813.39 It is not difficult to imagine (p.12) how
the arrival of such small armies to take part in a festival held next to the Fort of
Allahabad might have been a cause for concern for the British, especially when
“rogue” rulers were presumed to be using the pretext of pilgrimage to enter and
undermine British territories. There was little the British could do to dissuade
such practices. Indeed, they realized that facilitating pilgrimages to places
within East India Company territory helped to keep India's traditional rulers
contented.
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Introduction
“Friendly persons of rank,” however, were not the main focus of British
consternation when it came to melas. Hindu holy men—sadhus—who also
gathered at the Allahabad mela in considerable numbers, were far more
troubling. The East India Company had noticed that itinerant bands of sadhus
(akharas) were not simply religious figureheads but wealthy traders, carrying
valuables from one city to another as they moved along pilgrimage lines, and
mercenaries, their warrior skills acquired as a means of defending their precious
commodities, such as gold, gems, and spices. Highly competitive and belligerent,
sadhu akharas took their elevated spiritual, economic, and military status
seriously, engaging in deadly inter‐akhara warfare on an alarming scale at melas
in Haridwar. These sadhu battles, in combination with the threat of epidemic
disease, public disorder, and sedition, began to inform the discourse of danger
that became established in writings about the mela by company men,
Orientalists, administrators, and travelers, which underpinned the rationale for
tightly controlling the mela. An overview of such representational forms of
power is the subject of chapter 1.
As ordinary pilgrims also began to attend melas in large numbers in the mid‐
nineteenth century, the British began to fear that their adoration of holy men
might extend to emulating their seditious attitude toward the colonial state. The
brahmans that ministered to the pilgrims at the mela also had a history of
rebellion against the British, and they, too, were well positioned to influence
pilgrims. Subversive activity aside, any outbreak of epidemic disease at the
sangam soon found its way into the Allahabad fort, infecting the troops there
and undermining the security of the British, not just in the town but in the
region. Melas had to be managed in such a way as to minimize threats to British
interests in Allahabad. How the British did this is the focus of chapter 2.
While it is popularly assumed that the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad is ancient,
scholars have doubted this for some time, and in the course of this research I
could not fail to notice that, interpolations in Puranas and so on aside, there is
no mention in any text, Indian or European, of a Kumbh festival in Allahabad
until the mid‐nineteenth century. It was not until the immediate postrebellion
period that the famous Kumbh festival, initially indigenous to Haridwar, was
applied to the Magh Mela, so that every twelve years it was (p.13) considered
more auspicious, attracting larger crowds; this argument is the focus of chapter
3. Many will consider this the central finding of the book, and some no doubt will
find it controversial. My point is not to undermine the authenticity of the mela in
any way. Clearly the Magh Mela is a practice of very long standing, as referred
to by Tulsidas in the Ramcharitmanas (invoked as the epigraph of this book).
What is significant is the extent to which the festival changed in character as
interest groups gathered around it and responded to the pressures of the
modern state. A careful analysis of these changes reveal the extent to which
colonized people understood and made sophisticated use of the dynamics and
constraints of colonialism. To my mind this is much more interesting than what
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Introduction
might otherwise appear to be the unveiling of yet another invented tradition.
This point may seem pedantic, but technically, the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad is
not invented but adapted from its Haridwar namesake.
A number of factors underpinned the changes in the nature of pilgrimage to
Allahabad in the mid‐nineteenth century. The gradual extension of Pax
Britannica across northern India, the removal of the Pilgrim Tax (1838–1840),
the extension of the railways (1850s), and the strenuous efforts of Prayagwals,40
the traditional river priests of Allahabad who nurtured the festival and
performed rituals for pilgrims, contributed to an increase in the number of
wealthy peasant‐pilgrims, as the general decline in the fortunes of India's
princes and rajas kept them away from Allahabad's bathing ghats.41 By the
1870s, the crowds were becoming considerably larger; by the 1900s they were
quite unwieldy, as attested by the difficulties in managing the crowds safely. As
the British drew tighter controls around the mela to make it safer and minimize
risk, pilgrims responded by attending in even greater numbers. During this
period, up until the beginning of the twentieth century, the mela was redefined
significantly as those interested in its defense found that the best way to do this
was to create something that the British would recognize as essentially religious
(and not economic or even social in nature). Once this was done, defenders
could demand noninterference in matters of religion and reference it with Queen
Victoria's 1858 proclamation; this is the argument of chapter 4.
The British perception of a need to contain the mela was complicated by the fact
that Allahabad was an important part of the pilgrimage network in the
subcontinent, in which information was wont to spread, disease‐like, from
religious centers. Pilgrims from all over India converged on Allahabad, took in
the mela, and then dispersed again to their homes, where they were welcomed
and their stories and experiences eagerly heard by those who had stayed behind.
As such, it constituted a vital role in the “information order” that flowed
throughout the subcontinent.42 The British were well aware of this (p.14)
mechanism, and they knew they needed to influence it so that the messages
carried back to the villages positively represented British rule; if they did not,
the discontent would be as broad as it would be profound. Consequently, British
administrators found themselves in a dilemma: They needed to manage the mela
so that it was not a threat to British interests, but also in such a way that caused
satisfaction and, where possible, gratitude in the subject peoples of India. By the
1900s, the same information order would be used, not unproblematically, by
Indian nationalists to spread the message of swaraj. Chapter 5 demonstrates that
a massively important cultural event, with immense potential to influence the
minds of those who visit it, in all probability contributed to the spread of
nationalism; but because it was inscribed in the minds and on the tongues of the
pilgrims, and not in an archive, it has evaded the attention of historians.
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