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Kumbh Mela
For the latest installment of Vittore Buzzi travel journals, we go to an enormouse festival held every twelve years in India, where time seems to stand still.
I do not like tourists who masquerade as photographers. Fake photojournalists with telephoto lenses… From far away, they try to photograph people as if they were on safari. India will never be an easy place: I’ve been there dozens of times, but every trip makes me feel like a newcomer to the subcontinent. And she always makes sure that my meticulously planned voyages never go quite as planned.
The Kumbh Mela (the pitcher festival) is the perfect time to find all of India gathered in one place: entire villages of Rajasthan, the Naga Sadhu come down from the mountains and come, every dozen years, to Haridwar on the river Ganges to celebrate and to purify themselves by the drops of Amrit that fell from his pitcher in flight from Garuda.
During the festival, the city bursts at the seams. For days trains unload hundreds of thousands of pilgrims at the station, and around the city myriad tents welcome ordinary people, who walk about with difficulty among the masses. The streets, closed to all but pedestrian traffic, become one-way routes that transport the faithful into a huge serpent that squeezes its attacks on the bridges of the Ganges. It is a colorful and varied humanity which advances in tandem to reach the main ghat “Har Ki Pauri.”
The most vulgar of the tourists rush to see the Naga Baba plunge into the waters of Mother Ganges, sprinkled with ashes and covered by only a hair from the field while spreading the smell of hashish that accompanies the asceticism and ecstasy. They look to capture a trace of Baba Amar Bharti, who in 1970 raised his hands to heaven never to lower them again, and they photograph them like trophies.
The Kumbh Mela is a special moment, however, where the rural India sets itself in motion. In nearly three months of celebrations, pilgrims pour in, leaving their lives to come be purified in the waters of the Ganges. They detach their lives from the everyday to devote themselves to something else. It is this which has always fascinated me, this ability to drop everything.
In a world like ours, marked by deadlines, deliveries, departures and arrivals, this ability to take back one’s own time and to resize it to fit the dimensions of one’s own life has been lost. Time, for us occidentals, is far outside our reaches and it devours us. Machines count time while we have allowed ourselves to dominated, regulated, our lives constricted by it.
So without even a vague care for time, I lose myself among the people. I linger in little groups, joke with the women. I immerse myself in the Ganges, sit down with an old man sipping tea. Around me Western cameras are busy snapping away, their operators dazed by the heat and taxed by the lack of meat (meat and alcohol are banned during Kumbh Mela). Once, I ask for directions, overwhelmed by the maze of alleys. I explain, smiling, to a slender, curious man that I am Italian. He takes my hand and leads me to his tent. “My wife, my two sons,” he indicates by a warm gesture of is hands, and then turns to me smiling and says, “our esteemed guest from Italy.” And in a flash I’m surrounded by women, children and adolescents, many of whom want to know if I know Sonia Gandhi… but that’s a story for another day!
Vittore Buzzi
