The Human Tributary

As you journey to the Kumbh Mela, the Hindu festival which attracts the most impressive crush of humanity – indeed, the global event which gathers more humans together than any other – the mystery and hysteria around the experience increases. Some tell you to expect 30 million people gathered in the space of the UNC campus on just one day. Some excitedly explain that this Kumbh is really the most important of the last twelve or 62 or 700 years, and give varying cosmological reasons why. Bhim Yogi, the hefty, limping but infinitely wise caretaker of the ashram where we stayed that weekend, continually reminded me and my friends that we would lose each other, so to make sure that our cell phones were on at all times (I wonder what people did 700 years ago?).

It took hours just to spot the place along the Ganges where devotees venture to bathe (security persons and barricades, as in many places in India, were ubiquitous, and with good reason, for stampedes aren’t unheard of). The line to bathe at this spot is as wide as a road, thick with bearded sadhus (renunciants) who come organized in their hierarchy of sects, some from thousands of kilometers away. The line, though it moves constantly, appears endless as it curves for miles out of the river, through the city of Haridwar and beyond. For that day, it is as though humanity has created an extra tributary in the great network that becomes the Ganga, one that flows from all over South Asia. In the moments of seeing that mass, I was overwhelmed. Not by the number of people or the fear that I would easily lose my cohort. But by a sense of comfort, to find so many people who still live according to non-materialist rhythms, who still inhabit a world where the Ganga – rather than the market – determines their movements and migrations, who challenge the opinion, held widely among educated Americans of my generation, that “religion is one of the world’s greatest problems.”

The festival was filled with spectacles. The phenomenal line. The entire city of tents that goes up for kilometers around Haridwar to host the pilgrims. The image of the train heading out of the city that evening was extraordinary, for not a crevice between people existed, and limbs extended out of every corner of every window and door. But none of these spectacles was surprising, for one is told over and over to expect them. And indeed, the human scale of India can only shock one so many times. The most unpredictable moment of the trip to Haridwar came in finding a quiet part of the Ganga, somehow magically removed from the miles-long line and the tent city and the millions of people. The public health warnings about the Ganges instantly faded away. To neglect that chance to bathe in its waters would have been reckless. So I didn't neglect it; I immersed myself in the river for which millions make arduous pilgrimages. For a moment I felt like one of the droplets of water that comprised the human tributary that day, and the river seemed to wash away more than simple sweat and grime.