‘It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is. No matter what the impulse is, the act born out of it is beyond imagination, marvellous to our kind of people, the cold whites,’ wrote Mark Twain after seeing the Kumbh.

     I have never known anyone who has witnessed a Kumbh Mela and not marvelled. In Allahabad in 1989, the first Kumbh I attended, a leading lawyer of that city told me it was something I would never be able to understand. He and millions of other pilgrims were camped out on the sandbanks where the brown waters of the Ganges merge with the blue waters of the Jumna River at what is known as the ‘sangam’, the meeting place. ‘We come here because we have faith in our rituals, not because we hope to gain faith,’ he said. ‘Without faith you cannot expect to understand the Mela.’

At the heart of the Kumbh are the Kalpvasis, those pilgrims who make no claim to spiritual wisdom and who live ordinary lives, but who find time to spend a month during the festival living austerely in tents on the banks of the river, eating just one meal a day – and that, for many, is uncooked. They bathe three times in the river each day and what remains of their time is spent meditating and listening to religious discourse. Kumbhs I have attended also brought the heads of the monasteries established by the eighth-century reformer Adi Shankara, who is among the most influential of the philosophers of Hinduism. Alas, I did not find his successors quite so profound. I heard one defend the practice of sati – the burning of the widow on the funeral pyre of her husband – and a Baba Bhutnath, a Lord of the Ghosts, taught that we can learn to transcend our earthly desires by indulging them. Ascetics practised spectacular feats of austerity. There was a sadhu – a holy man – who, it was said, had been standing on one leg for eight years. Another lay on a bed of thorns. Some though have no time for ritual and the head of the Kabirpanthis, followers of the fifteenth-century mystic poet Kabir, did not even bathe in the Ganges. ‘The tap is just as good,’ he told me.

The most spectacular and most trouble-some of the sects present at Kumbhs are the militant monastic orders, or Akharas. On days deemed auspicious for bathing by astronomers calculating from the positions of the planets, they emerge from their camps in colourful procession, scholars of the order, who would once have been mounted on elephants, now seated on elaborate gilded thrones carried on carts pulled by their devotees. Naked sadhus head the processions, shouting, dancing, beating drums, twirling maces and carrying tridents and swords. Pilgrims line the route bowing their heads in reverence. As they approach the river the sadhus break ranks and rush into the water shrieking with joy. But there is intense rivalry between the sects and clashes are not uncommon.

The most spectacular and most trouble-some of the sects present at Kumbhs are the militant monastic orders, or Akharas. On days deemed auspicious for bathing by astronomers calculating from the positions of the planets, they emerge from their camps in colourful procession, scholars of the order, who would once have been mounted on elephants, now seated on elaborate gilded thrones carried on carts pulled by their devotees. Naked sadhus head the processions, shouting, dancing, beating drums, twirling maces and carrying tridents and swords. Pilgrims line the route bowing their heads in reverence. As they approach the river the sadhus break ranks and rush into the water shrieking with joy. But there is intense rivalry between the sects and clashes are not uncommon.

Over the three most auspicious days of the 1989 Allahabad Kumbh Mela, twenty-seven million people took to the waters to bathe. They waited for hours in orderly queues to reach the banks of the Ganges. There was no pushing, no shoving, no sign of panic, just a patient waiting. I wrote after my first Kumbh, ‘There was no frenzy, just the calm certainty of faith; the knowledge that what had to be done had been done.’ RC Zaehner, a renowned scholar of the eastern religions, wrote that Hindus have ‘nothing but shocked incomprehension’ for the Semitic religions’ dogmatic certainties, and so Hindus bring their individual faiths to the banks of the Ganges to celebrate the Kumbh Mela. All one can say is that they believe in some way they will gain merit and be cleansed.

Pilgrims do not come only to bathe, for the Kumbh is a spectacular religious fair. Hinduism has been likened to a great banyan tree, setting down roots wherever its branches spread but no longer retaining a central trunk. It is not a religion of one book, it has no church or central authority, and its diversity has led many to say that it should not be thought of as a religion at all. Teachers and preachers of the many branches of Hinduism, inheritors of historic offices, monastic sects … all set out their stalls at the fair. Pilgrims wander from place to place and hear tell of the different roads that salvation has to offer.