We set out for the Maha Kumbh Mela at around 3am. It’s a three-mile drive from the town of Allahabad; we’re hoping the roads will be clearer at this time, but within ten minutes we hit a traffic jam that stretches far into the distance. We turn around to take another route, but this too is blocked by thousands of vehicles, and we’re told we’ll be waiting in a queue for around eight hours. We retreat. The next day we try to catch a boat from a point further up the river, but pilgrims are thronging the banks and every boat is full. In the end, we walk for nearly four hours. Large hoardings line the route to the entrance, showing aerial views of the Sangam on which the faces of Narendra Modi and the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, have been superimposed, the former fractionally bigger than the latter. They exhort the crowds: ‘Punya phale, Kumbh chale’ – ‘Let virtue prosper, let’s go to Kumbh’.

This colossal event – the largest religious event in the world – ran for six weeks from 13 January. Devotees go to be cleansed of their sins by bathing at the Sangam, the confluence of three of India’s holy rivers: the Ganges, the Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati. Smaller Melas occur at four, six, and twelve-year intervals according to the astrological calendar, but this year’s ‘Maha’ or ‘great’ festival is said to coincide with a rare celestial alignment that occurs only ever 144 years. The scale of the event is unprecedented. The riverbank was transformed into a vast, 4,000-hectare city constructed from scratch, with pavilions, prayer halls, tents, roads, an electricity grid, running water and a sewage system. Organizers claim that over 620 million people – more than a third of India’s population – attended to take ‘snaan’ (a dip) at the Sangam.

Held in Uttar Pradesh, where Yogi Adityanath rules as a radically Islamophobic self-styled ‘monk’-turned-politician, the Kumbh Mela represents an opportunity to showcase the economic, infrastructural and organizational capacities of the Hindu-nationalist project, in the wake of a  setback to its electoral hegemony in 2024. That year, the BJP won a much narrower victory than anticipated in the general election, losing strongholds such as Ayodhya and coming away with 63 fewer seats than in 2019. For Modi and Yogi, both of whom have made highly publicized visits to the festival, it has been a chance to prove the success of this ‘double engine state’, where both central and state governments are led by the BJP. A total of 7,500 crore rupees (£75,000,000) was spent on the construction of new infrastructure for the Mela, said to include 14 new flyovers, six underpasses, over 200 widened roads, new corridors, expanded railway stations, and a modern airport terminal. Officials present this as a quasi-developmental programme in an area with acute levels of unemployment – promising 1.2 million new jobs and higher state income. These temporary jobs may facilitate the six-week festival, but they offer no long-term security.

The event has also exposed political cleavages within the BJP. In recent years, Yogi has attempted to position himself as the country’s next Prime Minister, yet his independence from the core institutions of the ‘Sangh Parivar’, an umbrella of Hindutva organizations which includes the BJP, has raised alarm among some party members. For Yogi’s allies, meanwhile, the party’s poor showing in Uttar Pradesh last year was due to Modi’s insistence on selecting the candidates. Critics of both noted the party’s failure to address the state’s unemployment crisis, and the mass eviction of residents to make way for the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. The Mela is the latest instance of this antagonism, with the centre bypassing the state to collaborate with the consultancy firm Ernst and Young to manage much of the occasion.

We walk among families with small children, groups of young men with skinny jeans and styled hair, some women in saris bought specially for the occasion, others looking bedraggled after overnight train journeys. Along the way, we come across tightropes being traversed by nine- or ten-year-old girls wearing kurta pyjamas, with balancing sticks in their hands and brass pots on their heads. A teenage boy in jeans and a t-shirt sits at one end, looking on disinterestedly with an offering tray in front of him. Motorbikes loaded with people and belongings weave in and out of the crowd, beeping their horns. Occasionally we are moved to one side to make way for VIP vehicles: cars adorned with lotus flags carrying BJP notaries, or SUVs with tinted windows ferrying Bollywood stars or higher-ranking politicians.

You don’t need to buy a ticket to attend the Mela, but pilgrims must pay for transport and lodging. The most elite visitors are flown in by helicopter and stay in luxury accommodation – ‘glamping’ sites at a cost of £800-£1,000 per night, replete with hot water, air conditioning, palm-lined boulevards and even a personal security guard. But most visitors are forced to navigate the sprawling crowds and logistical chaos. The makeshift city throws up a haze of dust which combines with smoke from the fires used to warm the ashrams; at night streetlamps illuminate the gritty air. The entrances to the ashrams are elaborate: a tiered saffron pyramid, looming images of the monkey god Hanuman and a vast papier-mâché fighter jet poised to defend the Mela from potential enemies. Sound systems compete for prominence: the devotional song from one ashram vying with that of its neighbour. I wonder about its resemblance to Burning Man.

Along with the larger akhadas run by monastics orders, the ashrams provide most of the accommodation, food and spiritual guidance for the event. The Mela thus combines large-scale neoliberal subcontracting with humble sewa, or service, provided by volunteers. Ashrams and akhadas vary in size, wealth and importance, but they usually represent a particular religious tendency – Vaishnavite, Shaivite, or followers of the Maa-Devi – and have ties to different regions, communities or castes. We stay in an ashram hosted by Brahmacharyas, or renunciates, from a caste of historically powerful Uttar Pradesh landlords. We sit before the guru, Brahmacharya-ji, as he explains how the renunciates sustained their project by establishing ties with the family of a powerful local Rajah in Allahabad. He tells us with pride that only renunciates from the landlord Thakur caste could be accepted into their fold.

The Mela’s residential area is divided into sectors. One night we trek from Sector 19, where we are staying, to Sector 16, on a walk that takes thirty minutes through streets of glowing smog. We reach the newest akhada, formed by India’s ‘third-gender’ community, including trans people or those who fall under the nonconforming category of ‘Hijra’, who were only allowed to attend the Mela after a Supreme Court Ruling in 2016. The Kinnar Akhada gained prominence in 2019 for its full-throated support for the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. On three sides of the largely empty compound are pictures of its leading guru, Laxmi Narayan Tripathi. There is a small stall selling merchandise for the Mela and a selfie booth which allows pilgrims to pose next to a picture of a life size Hijra cutout. We attend a puja worship ritual held in the akhada, amongst the hundred or so devotees there are a handful of Hijra women.

On a different scale altogether is the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), or Hare Krishna, Ashram. Its entrance features the logo of the Adani group alongside the Hindu pantheon. Inside the entrance hall we are met by fifteen-foot mechanical Krishnas; visitors stop to pose for photos. Known for its distribution of free food and Hare Krishna chants, ISKCON was formed by Bhaktivedanta Swami in New York in the late 1960s. If Hare Krishna devotees have tended to be thought of as ageing Western hippies seeking an enigmatic Eastern ‘spirituality’, the regionally diverse, middle-class devotees at their ashram in the Kumbh suggest the rising domestic influence of this transnational Hindu offshoot.

References to Rama, the mythical hero of the Ramayana, are ubiquitous. After devotees emerge from the Sangam, their foreheads are daubed with paint and a devotional sign for a small fee. Historically, this would have often been the trident of Lord Shiva, but today it is usually the name ‘Ram’. Similarly, when pilgrims take snaan in the holy waters, they now chant ‘Jai Shri Ram’ rather than the traditional chant to Shiva. These allusions, which signals the growing important of Ram in Hindu culture, are intimately tied to Ram Janmabhoomi, the movement to construct the temple to Ram in Ayodhya on the site of the Babri Masjid mosque – a centrepiece of the BJP’s communal programme.

The Ramayana has long played a role within popular religious devotional practice, known as bhakti. Bhakti chants celebrated not just the masculinity of Rama, but also its unity with Sita’s feminine qualities – through the chant ‘Jai Siya-Ram’. Yet this has now been transmuted into the mantra ‘Jai Shri Ram’: a celebration of both the masculine qualities of Rama and the Ayodhya temple. This shift suggests the blunting of dissenting impulses within Hinduism, even as Hindutva increasingly incorporates marginalised castes or trans people.

Despite the enormous investment and the supposed technological sophistication of the event, the Mela has been beset by disaster. First, fires broke out in residential sections. Then on 29 January, on an important day of worship known as Mauni Amavasya, pilgrims were caught in a stampede. Official figures claim that thirty died and sixty were injured, but those present claim that the number of fatalities was much higher. Those killed were largely poor pilgrims from Bihar without accommodation, who were sleeping uncovered near the water’s edge in order to bathe at the appropriate times. An investigation was launched into the causes of the disaster after troubling questions were raised. Why were so many bridges reserved for VIP attendees, hemming pilgrims into the narrow tip where the rivers converge? Why did the thousands of police present fail to stop the rushing of the crowd? Some even alleged conspiracy, with rumours fuelling the factional struggles within the BJP.

The Maha Kumbh Mela is increasingly pitched as the sine qua non of being a Hindu: a microcosm of the ‘Hindu Rashtra’ – Hindu nation – that the BJP wants to create. The vast number of visitors allow politicians like Yogi and Modi to propagate this narrative. But the massive sums spent on running and marketing the event may not translate into votes in the ballot box. The class character of the Hindutva project is clear from the treatment of these foot soldiers who attend the Mela – forced to walk long distances, encouraged to bathe in the filthy river, vulnerable to the crush of the crowd. This, it seems, is what the promised land of Hindu nationalism looks like.

Read On: Radhika Desai, ‘Peak Hindutva?’, NLR 147.