Why Naga Sadhus Always Look Angry and Other Questions at the Kumbh

The Kumbh Mela is a major yaatra held four times over 12 years, with the Mela rotating every three years between four sites situated along holy rivers: the confluence of Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati at Prayagraj (Allahabad), the Ganga at Haridwar, the Godavari at Nashik and the Shipra at Ujjain. At every Mela, millions of Hindus congregate on auspicious dates for a Shahi Snan, or royal bath, seeking mukti (freedom from sins) and moksha (salvation).

The Mahakumbh Mela of 2013 and the Kumbh Mela of 2019 were both held in Prayagraj. Drawing an estimated 120 million and 220 million believers, respectively, each festival was cited in India and abroad as the largest human gathering in the world.

The following is an excerpt from Siddharth Kapila’s book Tripping Down The Ganga: A Son’s Exploration of Faith, published in 2024.

~

One day in January 2013. 9 am

‘Oh my god!’ Mummy rubbed her eyes as she opened the door. She smiled a big smile. ‘How did you find me?’

‘I have my ways.’ I smiled back. But I could see dark circles under her eyes. Probably having woken up at some unearthly hour she was catching up on her sleep. Behind her, spread on the floor I saw only a thin mattress and a fusty blanket. That’s it. That’s all there was.

Already I could feel anger growing in my veins. ‘Is this what you call VIP treatment? Please, let’s find a hotel.’

Mummy laughed. ‘Good luck with that.’ Yaatris were sleeping in tents, she said. They were camping out on the streets, staying in buses. There were dormitories along the river banks where people were renting beds by the hour. ‘That I’ve got this room really is VIP treatment!’

From my taxi, I’d seen a sea of grey tents stretching up to the Old Naini Bridge. And far, far beyond it. A temporary settlement reaching the horizon! A testament to human ingenuity and resilience! I had to concede.

~

Swami Shraddhanandji had invited my mother to attend the Mahakumbh Mela in Allahabad in 2013. It was the ideal place for the sadhus and trustees of Vairagi Teerath Gyanpeeth to meet.

Swami Atmanand and several other sadhus from Shivsagar Ashram were also going. ‘Sehdev, Prahlad, Saroj, everybody’s going,’ mummy said. And she was too. Because this was not just the Kumbh Mela, but the Mahakumbh Mela, and it came only once every 144 years.

I had to dissuade her. Not just because it was hard to shake off stories about people getting lost in the crowds but because there lay the very real risk of a stampede. There lay a certainty that my mother would drink the water in which millions had bathed and fall violently ill.

Mummy naturally began her side of the argument by retelling one of the most well-known Hindu legends, the Samudra Manthan, or the Churning of the Ocean of Creation between the asuras (demons) and the devtas (gods).

As I’ve mentioned, Dear Reader, first, the ocean expelled Halal Vish, the poison that Lord Shiva trapped in his throat. But finally, from the sea’s depths emerged the physician of the devtas, Dhanwantari, holding a pot of amrit, or the divine elixir of immortality. And as he appeared, the devtas grabbed the pot and ran, and the asuras began chasing after them. During this chase drops of amrit fell to the Earth at four sites, instilling each place with numinous properties: Haridwar, Prayagraj, Nashik and Ujjain.

The other, less mythical, origin story I’d see championed by many sadhus was that Shankaracharya began the Kumbh Mela to arrange regular meetings of ascetics for discourse and deliberation – a way to consolidate the Hindu sadhu base.

But my own reading on the Kumbh said differently. Yes, whilst it was beyond doubt that river bathing festivals in India had an ancient history, it was far from certain that the Kumbh had commensurately started at these four sacred sites. As per the Encyclopedia of Global Religion, ‘The earliest historical account of the Kumbha comes from Hiuen-Tsang, a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim who visited India in the seventh century… Although four locations are mentioned in the mythology of the Mela, early historical accounts of its occurrence refer only to Prayag and Haridwar.’ According to the Indologist Kama MacLean, Allahabad’s religious Mela prior to 1760 was an important yaatra, but it was not a Kumbh Mela. And according to an essay titled ‘The Kumbh Mela festival processions’ by James G. Lochtefeld: ‘The Kumbh Mela’s contemporary importance is belied by surprisingly scarce historical data, much of which points to a relatively recent formation – at least as a single festival celebrated in four places. Yet historical records clearly reveal large, well-established bathing festivals. Some were annual such as Haridwar’s Baisakhi Mela and Prayag’s Magh Mela. Others were determined by Jupiter’s twelve-year cycle – Hardwar’s Kumbha Mela and Nasik’s Sinhastha Mela whose differing charter myths clearly point to independent origins.’

Not that I expected such analyses to make the slightest difference. My mother went. And now I’d joined her.

…

Prayagraj. January 2019

A middle-aged man with a mop of matted hair and intense black eyes stood outside his tent, covered from head to toe in only ash. Behind him was another man, proudly austere, squatting by a fire, smoking hashish. Dense clouds rose from his lips, hung briefly in the air, then merged with the enveloping smog. But the image lingered: a naked man with a beehive for a beard, his mesh of untold mysteries.

Neither person wore his nudity as an affront. It was simply there like some avatar meant to reveal a lost primal state of incarnation. And once I adjusted my eyes, as I earlier did my feet to the dark-cold waters of the Ganga, the picture fit.

Here at the Prayagraj Kumbh Mela 2019, everything looked primal. While I lived in an India with one leg in the digital race, the limb here was steeped in our rivers of faith. On the mudflats surrounding the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati, it was not smartphones but tridents, rudraksh necklaces and uncovered phalluses that contended for conspicuity.

~

January 15, 2019. 9 am

It was Makarasankranti, the Mela’s first big bathing day, and the pop-up ‘Tent-city’ – a panoply of bright camps stretching out in all directions separated by pathways spilling with sadhus, pilgrims and sand – was throbbing. Built in under two months, the tumult would revert to a lull after Maha Shivratri on March 4, the Mela’s final day.

Vinaygiri, a youth leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, had told me earlier that this tent city was unlike any he had seen. For one, there was a laser show, and everything was digital. I told him that when I was here last for the Allahabad Mahakumbh in 2013, I’d read that the Mela was the subject of a case study at Harvard University. Scholars were interested in learning about the logistics behind the city’s swift popping up and winding down.

‘It was Allahabad then,’ Vinaygiri said. ‘Now it is Prayagraj. Before foreigners came to see our poverty. Now, they’ll see our greatness.’ He pointed to a row of plastic toilet stalls to one side. ‘All this wasn’t here when you came before. Was it?’

I didn’t mention that at my camp, wi-fi was available only on the booking site, and when I’d complained about this to the manager, he’d jovially but also self-righteously said that no Kumbh pilgrimage would be complete without incurring some hardship!

~

Having passed the camps of a Lakshmi Narsingh Khalsa from Brindavan and a Sadhguru Sai Ma from Varanasi, I stood among a crowd seeking blessings from Mathura resident Naga Baba Shyamanandgiri. His stand was one of many belonging to the Joona Akhara, the Old Order, which with over 400,000 sadhus as members was among the original thirteen orders of Hindu spiritual learning at the Kumbh.

On the bridge alongside, a procession of orange-clad sadhus plodded past me. The gurus sat on thrones on chariots and their disciples followed by foot. A helicopter whizzed by and down came a shower of rose petals trailed by a roar of Jai Shri Ram! Then came the parade of nude and semi-nude Naga Babas, all barefoot, and the incantations to Shiva rose to a fever pitch.

One baba had dreadlocks so long he clutched his coils in his hand like a bag.

An observing old woman joined her hands in prayer. A child’s jaw dropped open. A tourist brought out his fat-lensed camera. And the police pushed the onlookers back.

Above, a hoarding with the pictures of Chief Minister Adityanath and Prime Minister Modi read, ‘Padharo Sant aur Sajjan’. Welcome, saints and gentlemen.

These Nagas were saints, but were they gentle? What spurred them to live as they did? How did they live? I wanted to know. I told myself I was an inquirer rather than a pilgrim. But when you’re in the thick of the world’s largest religious congregation, such distinctions matter little. Everybody who was here was here to find some meaning.

~

The baba spotted me. ‘Come, beta,’ he said, beckoning with a peacock feather. I was too old to be his son, but his bearing showed candour, so I asked, ‘Babaji, can you tell me about yourself?’

He answered swiftly, as though my query were routine and his life was as bare as his body. ‘What do I want? I want Jagat ka kalyan. Parmaatma ka chintan. Good for the world. To immerse myself in God. First, we toughen ourselves in the Himalayas. Any place where man – where you – cannot live. Then, after two years, five years, or ten, our guru orders us to return to the world, and we come here for our induction. At dawn, we sit on an empty stomach and have our dhooni. We chant Om Nama Shivay. We take 108 dips in the Ganga. We do our pind daan.’

Pind Daan is the ritual Hindus carry out when a family member dies, to return to the Universe what was fleetingly yours, the body. But sanyasis, ascetics, did this for themselves. From this moment, they were meant to renounce worldly life and commence a path free of attachment. But for the Digambar – or sky-clad – Nagas, nakedness was an additional mode to approach Truth – it necessitated a life of seclusion, away from carnal distractions. They said this state enabled them to penetrate the Maya that made up the material but illusory world of the senses.

Shyamanandgiri, however, unlike many of the other sadhus around – who it seemed to me were drawn to devoutness due to their dire circumstances – said he was spiritually inclined since childhood. He had a master’s degree no less, which he obtained after taking up sainthood. ‘Who says I should stop studying?’ he said. And when I inquired where he lived, he said serenely, ‘Brahmand mein.’ In the Universe. A response that might have elicited amusement coming from somebody else, from him – a man with no home and who led a peripatetic life, spending a night in a cave near the Ganga’s source or on the beach at Ganga Sagar where it merged with the sea – seemed sage.

To a man who had abandoned all desire and extracted equal joy from singing bhajans by a stream in the jungle or beside burning corpses in Varanasi, a sense of belonging scarcely seemed important. Or did it? For he did say that wherever he went, he never missed the Kumbh Mela.

~

In the beginning, however, the Nagas, literally mountain dwellers, were not benign wanderers. They had a clear purpose: to protect Sanatan Dharma, the Eternal Path, from outside threats.

Of the four monastic orders established by Adi Shankaracharya (the Hans, Paramhans, Dandi and Naga, and of which the thirteen Kumbh Akharas were living branches) in the eighth century, the Nagas were warriors entrusted with the faith’s tridents and spears. And we needed them because ‘if all sadhus busied themselves in sermons, who would protect our Dharma?’ Vidyasagar Saraswati, a Joona Akhara spokesperson, explained to me. So while most sadhus preserved our shaastras, sacred texts, the Nagas carried shastra, weapons. Ever ready to fight, ‘in one hand they held a mala, and in the other, they carried a bhala’, spear.

When they were confronted with adversaries, they would first cite divine reason. And if this failed, they could hit. But could these naked fakirs really fight? Who did they fight? Gaunt and drug-addled, with eyes that seemed more dazed than determined, many more held chillums than tridents in their hands. Even the sturdy ones had bellies and a look of blithe unconcern about them.

It was plain they had zero regard for their appearance. But did their skills in combat amount to anything more than a nod to the gods? Sureshpuri Baba, a saffron-robed sadhu from Ujjain, said they undeniably did. The fifty-two-year-old lean man with lucid coal eyes was an enthusiastic talker so I was happy he agreed to give me a camp tour.

~

We passed a Naga who had a bell hanging from his penis, which pilgrims rang one at a time to gain his blessings as others bowed in reverence. And one who rolled his foreskin around a metal rod like a wrapper, then proceeded to stretch the thing in various ways, all painful to watch. When he took the lot from between his legs to his back and twisted his wrists as if turning a lock, he smiled. I grimaced and Sureshpuri chuckled.

‘This is his linga kriya,’ he said. ‘Some of them can lift weights with their lingams also. Want to see?’

‘No.’

He laughed. ‘You asked me to show you things, so I did. But don’t get the wrong idea. This is not what makes Nagas saints. These are tests of tapasya. The reality never stays hidden forever. It can only be like that for some time. There are fakes here also but they have no religion. They don’t belong to any akhara.’

Sureshpuri went quiet. ‘Have you seen the ocean?’ he said. ‘Does it keep anything toxic with it for long? It doesn’t. It throws it back out. Just like that, our akharas also throw the fakes out. These chillums also, like their sunglasses, came later. But it takes more. A lot more. You must look deeper.’

And so I looked. Inside one camp, I saw two men sparring with swords. Was it a mock joust? Then I saw one baba who drove his wooden staff through a stack of bricks placed over another’s head as spectators gasped in awe. And then another, a barrel-chested Naga in a loincloth, rotating a wooden staff in each hand like a pair of motors as he propelled his legs jauntily forward.

A baba Vashisht Giri, still in his twenties, had his arms and neck covered in rudraksh necklaces. The beads towered over his head rising like a crown pyramid capped by a crescent moon. He said he spent half the year meditating in caves near Kedarnath and his lot of necklaces weighed fifty-one kilos. Another, Lakkad Baba, also from Kedarnath, claimed he had been silent for twelve years. He communicated solely through handwritten notes. He left his job as a policeman to serve God, he wrote.

Apparently, some Nagas could stand on their heads for hours. They could put their bodies through intense heat and cold and went without food and water for days.

‘Can your commandos show this kind of hardiness?’ Sureshpuri searched my face. ‘Things change with time. But these things remain. What do you think this means?’

Like many religious folk, sadhus liked speaking in riddles. But still, what did he mean?

Sureshpuri said that the thirteen Kumbh Akharas were divided into fifty-two regiments called Madhi, and each one practised a different discipline. While one Naga clan trained in swords, the next turned to the gada, the mace, the weapon of Hanuman. While one invoked fire, another prayed to Surya, the sun. But the God who stirred every Naga was Shiva, the Lord of Destruction who was also the summation of cosmic energy. ‘It was Shiva who made the Naga sadhus one force.’

Was it a coincidence that our army regiments’ war cries echoed these age-old sadhu calls on the gods? I said aloud. “Bol Bajrang Bali Ki Jai!” and “Jo Bole So Nihal, Sat Sri Akal!” were the battle cries of the Rajput and Sikh regiments. Even the term akhara, which I associated with wrestling clubs behind Hanuman temples, appeared to have a connection with these shadowy seers.

Sureshpuri said such links were only to be expected and the reason was simple. ‘The Nagas were our army at a time when we had no nation, no force.’ The Nagas might seem an inscrutable bunch of shy, intimidating men today but everybody at the Mela knew who they were. ‘The Nagas were the ancestors to the Indian army.’

I must have appeared doubtful because he said, ‘Why, do you not find what you see familiar?’

As bewildering as the sights were, I had to admit that I’d just been on a walk down a hidden memory lane. I recognized the Nagas’ battle cries. Their chants were embedded in our prayers. Their metre was borrowed from our mantras. The Nagas’ clothes were nothing, but their invocations – they were reaching for something.

Perhaps this was one design of the Kumbh Mela? To breathe into me vague feelings of nostalgia. To enliven lost memories. To vivify them and give them God’s shape. To root me to the ground. To my identity. To my faith and country.

I gave Suresphuri a nod and he beamed.

Yes. At the Kumbh, folklore rather than historical facts held sway. And I had more questions.

~

I was starving. So I grabbed a leaf plate and joined a line at a camp where food was being served at a nominal price. I sat down to eat with a family from Punjab who had come to the Mela with their guru: Swami Madhavanand from Haridwar. The sadhu had a greying beard and a slight belly draped in rich silk pleats. It was his sixth Kumbh pilgrimage.

I said I would like to ask him a question. ‘Many sadhus cite the Mughals and the British as outsiders whom the Nagas resisted. Is this correct?’

That the Nagas had organized themselves so during the Islamic rule of the subcontinent was an oft-told account of history here. One man even said that a band of Nagas resisted the very armies of Aurangzeb who went on to destroy the Kashi Vishwanath temple at Varanasi.

‘The Nagas were Dharma’s defenders,’ Swami Madhavanand said, ‘constantly safeguarding it from attacks from “Mlechchhas”.’ Barbarians. The word ‘mlechchha’ incidentally initially occurs in a Vedic text and is used for people who could not speak clearly. Given that Sanskrit was confined mainly to upper castes, ‘mlechchha’, scholars surmise, might have been used to connote people who fell outside the caste structure.

Swami Madhavanand scooped sabzi onto a section of roti and took a bite. ‘Islam and Christianity came later,’ he said. ‘But even when the Nagas were born many centuries before, Sanatan Dharma was close to disappearing. We were the minority, and the country had lost its mooring in the Shaastras. At that time, atheism was spreading fast everywhere.’

He chewed over this. ‘In those days, it was the raj of the Boudhwaale.’ The Buddhists. ‘People can say anything. But can you believe them all?’

While Swami Madhavanand neither confirmed nor denied what was implicit in my question – that the Nagas had resisted Islamic invaders – he reiterated what was common knowledge: that it was when a boy named Adi Shankaracharya came on the scene that things began to change in Hinduism’s favour. It was thanks to his efforts that Hinduism was revived.

‘Did the Naga Sadhus make the Buddhists leave India then?’

Though how and why Buddhism left the subcontinent is the subject of scholarly debate, with experts giving reasons from the reascendancy of the Brahmins to the mismanagement of monasteries and the arrival of Islam, I was in search of the principal currents of belief rather than historical fact.

‘The Buddhists were made to leave through knowledge, not by force,’ Swami Madhavanand said. And to buttress this point, he narrated the story of Kumarila Bhatta, a philosopher of medieval India who was a staunch believer in the Vedas.

The Buddhists had been unable to defeat Bhatta in debates, so they put to him a challenge: ‘If your Vedas are the Truth, you should survive a fall from a hill,’ they said. And Bhatta accepted their test, proclaiming, ‘If the Vedas are the Truth I will survive.’ Thus he was pushed down a hill and survived the fall, but lost an eye. When he questioned Gayatri, the fount of Vedic knowledge, about why this had happened, she said, ‘You must have had some doubt in the Vedas’ truthfulness; otherwise you wouldn’t have attached the word “If” before their Truth!’

Swami Madhavanand placed another rotiful to the side of his mouth. In the end, Sanatan Dharam prevailed, and the Naga Babas were instrumental in making this happen. Shankaracharya founded the mathas, monasteries, in four corners of the country – Govardhan Math in Odisha, Sringeri Sarada Math in Karnataka, Dwarka Math in Gujarat, and Jyotir Math in the Uttarkahand Himalayas. And as sadhus went about preaching Dharma between these far-flung corners, the Nagas protected them. Indeed, ‘they played so key a role in winning Hinduism back, that we honour them as mandaleshwars [leaders of sadhus] at the Mela until today. And the Nagas? They, too, go around chanting Shankaracharya’s name whom they consider an avatar of Shiva as they roam from place to place. Hai na?’

Swami Madhavanand gestured the sole woman in the group to fetch him water, and I realized that despite talking continually, he’d nearly finished his meal, whereas I hadn’t even begun mine. I had been just as caught up in his storytelling as the Punjabi yaatris were.

‘When the Kumbh Mela finishes, they will go back to their mountains and caves,’ he said.

~

I weaved through a patchwork of tents on an empty river bank later that evening. Most pilgrims had retreated to their camps and the bright blue lights alongside the mudflats gave the Ganga a silver sheen.

Had any battle between the Nagas and the Buddhists or the Mughals ever been recorded? If any had, I hadn’t heard of it. On the other hand, I had heard rumours of internecine battles between sadhu akharas.

I was to later read an article by historian David N. Lorenzen, entitled ‘Warrior Ascetics in Indian History’, in which he speaks of a prolonged sanyasi-fakir rebellion in Bengal against the British that occurred in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Lorenzen writes, ‘[T]he precise historical beginnings of warrior ascetics in India are not clearly known… Most if not all the known groups of warrior ascetics were…founded only after the Muslim conquest and evidently were not the result of a gradual evolution of previously existing institutions.’ However, he clarifies, ‘This does not mean to say that violent confrontations involving ascetics were not known before this time. Religious conflict, one of the basic preconditions necessary for the rise of warrior ascetics, was present in India at least as early as the sixth century BC. Most often this conflict took the form of sect competition, usually capped by theological debates and miracle contests between rival schools or sects… On the part of the Hindus, we hear as early as in Panini of ascetics who carry an iron lance. Nonetheless, there is nowhere any clear indication that early sect competition ever led to the formation of anything resembling military orders.’

Later he writes, ‘The earliest well-documented armed clash involving warrior ascetics in India occurred in the presence of the emperor Akbar near Thaneswar in about AD 1567. The skirmish was not between Hindus and Muslims, however, but between two different Hindu orders.’ And: ‘The evidence regarding the founding of the six akharas or “regiments” of Dasnami nagas, so-called from their habit of going about “naked” (nagi), is uncertain and conflicting. This lack of historical data tends to support our belief that the Dasnami naga akharas were created to defend local interests such as the lands and treasure of temples and monasteries since such defence would be unlikely to attract the interest of Muslim historians in the same way as did the Sikh and Satnami rebellions. The earliest source on the founding of akharas is a Hindi manuscript of probably the nineteenth century which was loaned to [Jadunath] Sarkar by the Nirvani Akhara. This document, as summarized by Sarkar, purports to give the spiritual genealogies of the heads of the six akharas and to describe some of the more important battles in which they took part… Two of the more interesting events mentioned in the manuscript are a battle between the Nirvani and some bairagis, i.e. Vaishnav ascetics at Hardwar…in about 1254 AD and another battle between the same akhara and a sultan, possibly Aurangzeb, in 1664. Unfortunately, none of these dates and traditions can be corroborated from other sources.’ (Emphasis mine throughout)

~

A mother and son were walking back from the river bank after a bath. Was it their second one of the day? How many pilgrims would return on Mauni Amavasya? It was the next big bathing day, marking the start of the Hindu month of Magh. My neighbour at my camp, a retired professor from Ranchi, had said the crowds were expected to be the heaviest then. Followed only by Basant Panchami, the last big bathing day that marked the onset of spring.

‘Careful, bhai,’ I heard a man’s voice and looked down.

I’d nearly walked into a cluster of babas. There were four men hunched around a fire, chatting and smoking. One was robed in black and the other three wore the more ubiquitous orange. I took out my phone and switched on the recorder. Acquainted with the sadhus’ direct-but-dense style, I felt less inhibited this time. ‘Can I talk to you?’ I said. The man in black asked me to buy him tea first, which I did.

 ‘Why do so many Nagas look so angry?’ I then asked him. This aspect of the sadhus’ deportment had impressed me deeply.

It can be difficult to visually reconcile the Hinduism of nonviolence, vegetarianism and accommodating pandits – my faith – with images of bloodshot eyes and waving tridents. I appreciated that these images played out in real life, of course. But in my mind, these things happened far away: in the sky where good fought evil and won, or in distant places on the ground where Hindu–Muslim riots occurred.

The baba turned toward the Ganga. The river had turned a reflective white, and wisps of white gulls raced over it to their homes. He tilted his head to a side, in the way I’d come to learn babas typically do, took a long pull on his chillum and exhaled a plume of smoke into the cool air.

‘What is Shiv without the matra?’ he said. His lips were cracked. His eyes were yellow.

‘What?’

‘See this.’ With his chillum, the baba wrote Shiv in Hindi in the sand. Then he wiped out the ‘i’ matra – here, vowel – clean so that what remained was ‘shav’: dead body.

‘Do you understand me?’ His eyebrows converged into a snake.

~

When I returned to my camp, the Ranchi professor was furious. ‘Let me tell you what happened here,’ he said. ‘These people are criminals. I paid for my tent in advance, but now they want me to share it with somebody. Just now, this nice lady from New Zealand left after fighting with the manager. They took full payment from her on the internet, but when she came here he said they are booked out. She told him straight, “You say you treat your guests like gods. But this” – he opened his arms to the smoggy sky – “this is the reality.”’

The man stared sadly at his shoes. ‘These people really make us look bad.’

~

I slept briefly under a warm (but unwashed) blanket that night, but at 1 am I was up. My train to Delhi was at 3 am, but given that most roads in the city had been closed off, I was relieved I could get to the station in time.

I stood on the platform with my thoughts swimming inside, my earphones in.

Shiva without anger equals death. Did he mean the death of belief? Or the end of culture? Death of Self or Identity? What kind of death? The only answers that made sense at this moment posed further questions. What was faith without teeth? I thought. What was the phallus without blood? Nothing. What was attachment without jealousy? Maybe this was what the sadhus meant by Shiv-Shakti. That God was a confection of all emotions and all energies. God was a summation of all dimensions, all scopes, all realities… I realized I was beginning to sound like a sadhu myself and laughed aloud.

Somebody tapped me on my shoulder. I turned around. ‘Are you waiting for the Rajdhani?’ a man said. He looked roughly my age. He spoke like the sadhus. Pious and whole, like a sugar cube. He’d come with his guru, he said. He belonged to the Mahanirvani Akhara. What about me? I said I was on a material gathering trip, that I’d spoken with many saints, and he let a moment of silence pass between us.

‘Whatever work you have in life, it won’t get done until you find your guru,’ he said. ‘Believe me.’ And the way he said this, at once sincere and searing, made me want to turn my face away. The train tracks stretched on interminably into the night.

‘I know from experience,’ he said. ‘I bathed in the Ganga at 4 am yesterday, with the Naga sadhus.’ I could tell he was very proud of this feat. As though he had experienced a state of bliss for which only a select few had been chosen.

I was there too, I didn’t interrupt him.

~

I boarded the train, climbed silently into my berth and lay down but my eyes stayed open. Around this time yesterday, the Nagas from the Mahanirvani Akhara were the first to run into the Ganga. After forty minutes, it was the next akhara’s turn, the Atal Akhara. While some Nagas posed for photographs like models, their sunglasses turning a kaleidoscope of lights, others bared their teeth as if they wanted to be left alone. Others still retained an air of refined insouciance, as if they’d descended to this world of mortals only because they had to. Only so they could immerse their bodies in the Ganga. For their souls already belonged elsewhere.

I could feel the rumble of the train’s engine growing faint now.

That other train I saw yesterday. The human one made up of charging Naga babas with its horn blaring Har Har Mahadev! When it leapt headlong into the Ganga: was it a mere spectacle to admire as one would a special effect in a movie, or was something deeper at play? Had something inscrutable come down from the churning of the ocean between gods and demons and settled in Prayag along with the droplets of immortality, so that even now serpentine dreadlocks splashed about alongside river-bathing software engineers?

The mortals and the immortals, drawing on different heads of the many-headed snake of Truth, took a dip at the Sangam yesterday. When the sadhus came out of the water, the yaatris rushed in. There were people from everywhere. From Nepal and Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Bengal, Mumbai and Azampur. From Germany and Russia and Brazil, too. The foreigners mostly stood outside and the locals rushed in. The rich and the poor, everybody submerged their heads.

I was one with them. I went into the water. I took it all in. But I could go no farther in than ankle deep.

Siddharth Kapila is a lawyer turned writer.