Kumbh Mela

 

The Kumbh Mela is one of the greatest Hindu pilgrimages, held every four years, alternating between the four holy cities of Prayag (Allahabad) and Haridwar (both on the banks of the Ganges River, in north India), Ujjain (on banks of the Kshipra River, in central India) and Nashik (on the banks of the Godavari River, in western India).  Attended by millions the culmination of the pilgrimage involves a single-day of ritual bathing in the rivers of these cities.  Bathing in the waters of the rivers is a sacred act, bringing about spiritual cleansing and renewal.

 

Prayag ("place of sacrifice") is a holy city located in north India at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, and is considered to be the spot where Brahma offered his first sacrifice after creating the world.

 

An aerial view of Prayag and the Kumbh Mela (2001), in which over 70 million pilgrims gathered.

After visiting the Kumbh Mela of 1895,Mark Twain wrote:

"It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining. 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 of it is beyond imagination marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites."

 

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