India is the land of festivals. The Maha Kumbh Mela, set to start in the Prayagraj city of Uttar Pradesh in the coming week, is the festival of festivals. Over 40 days, this massive festival of religion and spirituality attracts hundreds of millions of devotees from all across the world, including tens of thousands of non-Hindus.
Swami Vivekananda had described India as “Dharma-Praana Bharata” — “Bharat with dharma as the soul”. Everything, including the festivals, revolves around dharma. For ease of understanding, we tend to use the word religion for it. But where religion is defined as a set of “beliefs” in a given god or a book, dharma is a path of continuous exploration for self-discovery and purification of one’s soul.
The religion of Hindus, which is more a creed than a faith, insists on search and inquiry about noble and sacred truth rather than blind belief. In the Hindu creed, there are no believers in religion; there are only seekers of truth. Mahatma Gandhi encapsulated this aspect so beautifully by saying “If I were asked to define the Hindu creed, I should simply say: Search after truth through non-violent means. A man may not believe in God and still call himself a Hindu. Hinduism is a relentless pursuit after truth… Truth is God. Denial of God we have known. Denial of truth we have not known.”
All festivals in Hindu tradition are occasions for soul-searching and truth-seeking. The Kumbh Mela, a 12-yearly mega spectacle, is also one such occasion. Religions in the world were born mostly through prophets and sacred books. But the creed of Hindus was born through a “Bhadra Iccha” — “benign wish” of the sages for “Abhyudaya” — “welfare and wellbeing in this life and hereafter”. Hindu history tells that the sages of yore had come together, again and again, to contemplate and deliberate on the meaning and purpose of “existence”, and out of those deliberations emerged the “benign wish” for creating a worldview based on principles of universal good. That became the Dharma or creed of Hindus.
Kumbh Mela too began millennia ago as one such occasion when the saints and sages came together for weeks to deliberate on the dharma. Like in any other religion, myths abound in Hinduism too. The word “myth” sometimes evokes negative reactions in India, whereas in the sphere of religion globally, myths are the stories of yore, not viewed from the binary of truth and falsehood. Mythology is story and history too. One such mythological story explains the significance of Kumbh Mela in the context of the battle between Devas — gods — and Asuras — demons — for owning “Amrit” — the holy elixir. At the end of “Samudra Manthana” — churning of the oceans, jointly undertaken by the gods and demons, when the holy elixir emerged — a competition erupted between the two groups to capture it. To prevent the Amrit from falling into the hands of the demons, the divine bird Garuda lifted the pitcher and flew away. As the Asuras and Devas clashed with each other in pursuit of the Amrit, which lasted for 12 divine days equal to 12 human years, a few drops of Amrit fell at four places on earth: Prayagraj, Haridwar, Nashik, and Ujjain. The Kumbh Mela is held at these four places once in 12 years. Kumbh means the pitcher, a reference to the orb from which the elixir had dropped.
Although it began as an assembly of holy men, Kumbh Mela acquired the character of a massive human congregation over centuries due to the patronage of successive rulers across the country like the Nandas, Guptas, Cholas and Pallavas. Huen Tsang, the famous Chinese traveller, had recorded in his travelogue about attending the festival in the seventh century. Even some Mughal and British rulers too were said to have patronised the massive spiritual congregation over centuries. In 2017, UNESCO inscribed it in the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Western worldview looked at nature as an avenue of exploitation for human good, whereas in Hindu tradition, nature is considered divine and integral to the existence of the universe. The Atharva Veda, one of the four Vedas, dedicated one sukta or chapter to the praise of the earth, called “Prithvi Sukta”. Seeking to instil reverence about Mother Earth and nature, the Prithvi Sukta declared: “Mata Prithvi; Putroham Prithvyah” — meaning, “this earth is my mother, and I am her offspring”. All Hindu festivals, including Kumbh Mela, are designed to rekindle that sense of sacredness about nature in the human consciousness.
Mega festivals like Kumbh Mela are not just religious congregations meant for divine blessings for individuals. They are supposed to be the occasions for contemplation and inquiry into the challenges that humanity faces and finding answers to them. Over the last few centuries, the Hindu religious and social order has become lethargic and increasingly confined itself to revelling in rituals and the past. As a result, India’s contribution to the world’s contemporary wisdom became increasingly small.
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Today, when the world is faced with economic challenges, answers are sought from institutions like the World Economic Forum; and when it comes to challenges of climate, we turn to the COP series of conferences. The solutions that these Western-dominated institutions offer are not very different from what traditional Indian wisdom can offer. For example, the WEF is promoting the idea of “stakeholder capitalism” as an answer to present-day challenges. It is not much different from the concept of “dharmakarta” in ancient Indian thought. Similarly, India can offer better answers to humanity’s challenge of climate than the COP summits that focus more on setting limits on climate destruction and settling demands for climate financing.
The UP government deserves praise for hosting the “Kumbh Global Summit on Sustainability and Development” as part of the Mela this year to offer an Indic vision for climate mitigation. India should take the lead in offering guidance to the world in shaping the future on the basis of Eastern wisdom. Festivals like Kumbh can be a great occasion for that.
The writer, president, India Foundation, is with the BJP. Views are personal
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