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Kumbh Mela 2025 is a sacred Hindu festival, held every 12 years or so, each revolution of Brihaspati, and the largest known public Hindu pilgrimage. Kumbh is performed at 4 river pilgrimages: Prayagraj (Ganges-Yamuna-Sarasvati rivers converge), Haridwar (Ganges), Nashik(Godavari) and Ujjain(Shipra). This year, 2022, after seven centuries’ absence, the pilgrimage returned to Bansberia (Hooghly).
It is a day of water immersion ritual, but also of local trade and lots of fairs, classes, saintly orations, masses of monks, and shows. The apologists think they can wash in these rivers in order to pryacitta (prayer, repentance, reparation) for their wrongdoings, and it washes away their transgressions.
The festival is traditionally attributed to the 8th-century Hindu philosopher and saint Adi Shankara as part of his attempts to institute large Hindu assemblies for philosophical discourses and disputations and Hindu monasteries in the Indian subcontinent. But before the 19th century, no historical texts exist for these ‘ Prayagraj Kumbha Mela 2025’ type mass pilgrimages. We have a good deal of history in the manuscripts and inscriptions of a Hindu Magha Mela every year – followed by bigger ones every 6 or 12 years – at which pilgrims arrived in numbers, and where one of the rituals was a baptism in a river or holy tank. As Kama MacLean writes, the socio-political changes of the colonial era and a reaction against Orientalism saw the former Magha Mela repackaged and remobilised as the Kumbh Mela of the present, after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
The weeks during which the festival takes place repeat at each place about every 12 years or so according to the Hindu luni-solar calendar and the corresponding astrological positions of Jupiter, the sun and the moon. Prayagraj vs Haridwar festival difference is around 6 years, both has Maha (major) & Ardha (half) Kumbh Melas. Exactly which years – for the Maha Kumbh Melas at Ujjain and Nashik – have been disputed in the 20th century. Nashik and Ujjain festivals have been done either in one year or one year after each other i.e., 3 years after the Prayagraj Kumbh Mela. In many other parts of India, the same if smaller community bathing and pilgrimage events are known as the Magha Mela, Makar Mela or similar. In Tamil Nadu, for instance, Magha Mela with water-dip ceremony is a religious event from antiquity. This carnival, held at Mahamaham tank (below Kaveri river) once every 12 years in Kumbakonam, has millions of South Indian Hindus and has been referred to as the Tamil Kumbh Mela. Some other places where Magha-Mela/ Makar-Mela bathing pilgrimage and festivals have been renamed Kumbh Mela are Kurukshetra, Sonipat and Panauti (Nepal).
The Prayagraj Kumbh Melas have three dates in them on which the vast majority of pilgrims visit, and the festival lasts for one to three months around those dates. Every festival is a million-capacity affair, with the biggest in Prayag Kumbh Mela and the second largest in Haridwar. Indian officials said: “In 2019 more than 200 million Hindus participated in the Kumbh Mela including 50 million during the busiest day of the festival.’ It is one of the largest peaceful gatherings in the world, and the “world’s largest religious pilgrimage”. It is on the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.It is celebrated for many days, and day of Amavasya receives the most people on one day. The largest one-day crowd of the Kumbh Mela, the Kumbh Mela officials announced, was 30 million on 10 February 2013, and 50 millions on 4 February 2019.
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