A Spectacle to Behold: An aerial view of devotees taking a dip at the confluence of the Ganga, the Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati rivers on the final day of the Maha Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, on February 26, 2025 Photo: AP A Spectacle to Behold: An aerial view of devotees taking a dip at the confluence of the Ganga, the Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati rivers on the final day of the Maha Kumbh Mela in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, on February 26, 2025 Photo: AP

The largest mela in the country for centuries, the Kumbh Mela, was a bigger phenomenon this year than ever before. Excitable television channels, smart tour operators, the thriving selfie culture, the non-stop celebrity endorsements, and big chunks of people with travel money for an event projected as a once-in-a-lifetime one, all joined in to make the holy dip in the Kumbh Mela a lifestyle issue and wrapped an easy piety around it.

The desire to wash off one’s sins at the once-in-144-year Maha Kumbh Mela—a disputed detail since other recent Kumbh Melas have also been claimed to be that—spread swiftly and widely. Lakhs of Hindus, who had no idea about what the Kumbh Mela meant or where it even took place, resolved to take part in it. Does all of this mean a strengthening of a generic Hindu identity in the country? Or, is the surge of Kumbh popularity a passing ephemerality, a depthless phenomenon, like so many hyped-up events in recent times?

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The Kumbh Melas of Prayag, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nashik, which are held on the banks of rivers, exhibit remarkable features. They swell up with lakhs of people with the necessary facilities seeming to emerge spontaneously, without much prior planning on the part of any designated authorities. This magical quality indeed is a constitutive feature of a mela, as distinguished from a sammelana, which is an organised affair.

A mela is a unique Indian cultural phenomenon whose specialness is yet to be appreciated in modern intellectual discussions. Referring usually to fairs where large numbers of people gather and food, toys, clothes and a variety of other goods are traded, a mela is a colourful spectacle to behold and rejoice in. Not a random coming together of people, a mela happens in a designated place and time, which are known to people not as a result of formal announcements, but as much as in the nature of a detail in an ingrained cultural calendar.

A sense of fun, gaiety, blitheness and festivity is integral to the imagination and experience of a mela.

Maulana Azad’s description of a mela at a meeting of Congress leaders in Sevagram Ashram in mid-March, 1948, aptly conveys its specialness: “A mela is an open fair, a carnival. No one attending it needs to know the others. No one has responsibility of any kind. An open fair is a throw about of people and purposes.” A mela clearly holds out special freedoms.

The 1899 edition of the Monier-Williams’ A Sanskrit-English Dictionary defines a mela as an “association, assembly, company, society”. An essential feature of the coming together of people in a mela is that the participation in it is open to all. Social hierarchies and prejudices have no place in the imagination of a mela. Everyone is welcome to this event which celebrates life. When bigots ask that Muslim vendors be barred from temple and village fairs, they are choking the very idea of a mela. A mela simply ceases to be a mela if anyone is barred from it.

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Interactions in a mela are not rigidly bound by rules. Things happen, as it were, on their own. There is a freeness in how people interact without the assembly risking slipping into chaos or anarchy. And people can come and leave as they wish.

The 1894 Kannada-English Dictionary compiled by Ferdinand Kittel extends the range of meaning inhering in mela—“meeting”, “union”, “a large concourse of people collected at stated periods for religious or commercial purposes”, “a fair”, “a band of musicians”, “a set of dancing girls, musicians and singers and their performances”, and “mirth, merriment, jest, sport,betef.com joking fun”.

A sense of fun, gaiety, blitheness and festivity is integral to the imagination and experience of a mela. This is probably a reason why a mela can also refer to a group of performers, musicians and entertainers. While the mela as a fair or a large gathering brings up an abstract image of an assembly of people, a few melas in north India are directed at only women or set aside one of the mela days to women and children. In these instances, those who set up the mela facilities as well as the bulk of the traders are often male.

A mela can also mean the harmonious union of objects or people. For instance: “This literary work invokes shringara rasa to portray the mela of prakriti (nature) and prema (love).”

Post the cinema of the 50s, with women in focus and Nehruvian socialist hope in films, patriarchy reared its head reared more viciously from the 60s onwards. From the 70s on, the most popular films of the time reduced the female protagonists to supporting roles, which would aid the narrative of the ‘hero’. Invariably, the ‘villain’ became a ‘villain’ due to his lecherous gaze/action at the hero’s love interest/mother. The hero found his purpose in avenging the said attack, or ‘saving’ her from the said attack, and suddenly the role of the female protagonist moved from who she was and what she desired, to what she could be for the male lead. And how she could be pivotal to the plot of making the hero, a hero. The versions of the Ramayan and the Mahabharat that ran on TV, are exactly set in the same mould. Soorpanakha is punished for her desire with her nose (and breasts and ears) cut off, that essentially disfigures her face and attacks her for her agency, which had propelled her to act on her desire, or Sita, who had to go through a ‘justified’ agnipareeksha to prove her ‘virtuosity’, which loosely meant not having been made ‘impure’ by the touch of another man. Thus, reinforcing a man’s idea of ownership on a woman, his unchallenged authority towards her and her life, and her depiction of a servile woman in complete service and devotion of the ‘righteous’ male God. Draupadi was publicly humiliated as Krishna came to ‘save’ her. In all of these depictions, the woman is a dehumanised version of herself, with no agency and no gaze, and while things are done to her, that move the plots forward, she—her identity and her pain, is merely incidental to them.

Satshya Tharien, a former-journalist-turned-content-creator, discovered the reel of the man lying near a gravestone with the victim’s face on it, and couldn’t believe her eyes. “It’s so tasteless, ridiculous and dramatic that you don’t understand its purpose. It’s not about the issue but them trying to gain followers from a certain kind of content that will get more engagement.”  

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In colloquial usage, mela is often used to scoff at or deride a gathering that is crowded, or lapsed into a comical or confused affair. A lineage to the sense of a comic occasion is illustrated by the old Kannada words, meladaatha (a male buffoon) and meladaake (a female buffoon).

Over the decades, the word, mela, has become hitched to modest, limited-purpose occasions. Consider the following phrases: mango mela, loan mela, saree mela, job mela or science mela. In each of these instances, no one is under any illusion about the narrowness of the mela experience. A shopping sale organised by an online retailer a few years ago, The Great Indian Mela, projected a mela experience in digital space, among a virtual community of consumers. A sale confined to credit and debit card holders, its organisers could at best have been cynical in pitching it as a mela.

The conspicuous devotion of film stars, sports stars, business tycoons, politicians and lakhs of others among the selfie-class at the Kumbh Mela as well as the political gains that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) openly sought to make from the event engulfed the media space. Any of this did not matter perhaps for how the truly devout experienced the Kumbh Mela.

(Views expressed are personal)

Chandan Gowda is Ramakrishna Hegde chair professor of decentralisation and development at The Institute For Social And Economic Change, Bengaluru

This article is a part of Outlook's March 21cfgrupopg, 2025 issue 'The Pilgrim's Progress', which explores the unprecedented upsurge in religious tourism in India. It appeared in print as 'Life is a Mela'.