The recent stampede at the Maha Kumbh Mela site in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, is but a chapter in the denialism of tragic deaths in India. Nonetheless, it raises concerns.
The refusal to acknowledge systemic failures in the management of the Kumbh Mela can be made sense of in two different ways. First, in likening the Kumbh Mela to a city, which conceals occurrences of death in its confines, deflecting public attention or critical reflection. Second, in viewing such deaths as a reward for faith in a sacred space. Both these positions counteract the immediacy of demands for state accountability, something that can ensure that the recurrence of tragedies as such, is prevented.
Rupture and resilience in urban memory
Death prompts memorialisation unlike any other human experience. It places a responsibility on the living to remember. Although cities conceal deaths through spatial, cultural, and institutional practices that prioritise functioning of urban life over the visibility of mortality, mass tragedies resist this steady push towards normalcy. Instead, their occurrences rupture urban continuity, forcing societies to reckon with their causes, consequences, and meanings. Memorialising tragedies are a necessary response through which this unsettling of the normal is made sense of. Events as such, which necessitate remembrance then become part of a collective urban memory and lore.
Memorialisation however, is more than casual remembrance. It indicates a communal responsibility in making sense of mass tragedies. It generally unfolds in stages, from spontaneous and immediate responses, to tragedy, to official commemoration involving deliberations over how to remember the same.
Eventually, as events fade from immediacy, practices in commemoration and sacralisation of tragic memory allows for the resumption of normalcy, and the re-integration of spaces of tragedy into daily order. Memorialisation thus serves a purpose in societies that have faced tragedy. It pursues accountability for deaths and also resists buck-passing by concerned authorities in accepting responsibility for systemic lapses. Additionally, it also serves as a guidepost for the future.
By preserving the memory of mass tragedies, communities create a sense of history that informs future policy and disaster preparedness. It shifts perceptions of tragedies from inevitability to one of responsibility, urging us to learn from past failures and demand the implementation of measures that reduce vulnerability. Remembrance as such is reformative.
But lessons from past tragedies in sites such as Kumbh are seldom carried forth into the future.
Fleeting cities and forgotten tragedies
Despite its ephemerality, the Kumbh Mela site exhibits all the characteristics of a fully functional city.
Its temporary settlements are mapped out zonally, much like urban districts; and a vast administrative framework is also established, with infrastructure provisions, law and order, traffic management, and crowd control, operating on a scale similar to permanent urban centres. Provisions for disaster preparedness, such as temporary infrastructure and emergency response systems, are also crucial in managing the influx of pilgrims and mitigating risks to their lives and safety. However, the incidence of tragedy is located in the failure of such sites to avert the recurrence of incidents like stampedes, pointing to systemic failures in learning from past instances of mismanagement or unpreparedness.
The inability to halt the recurrence of tragedy is rooted in the Kumbh’s transitory nature, which in its very design resists the memorialisation of mishaps occurring at its sites.
The absence of an enduring landscape provides no physical anchors for housing memory borne out of tragic deaths. Unlike permanent cities, where grief is incorporated and commemorated in a fixed geography through physical memorials and oral traditions, Kumbh’s focus on renewal dissolves tragedy in its impermanence. The process of their erasure from public memory is also reinforced by the accumulation of Kumbh’s history within a cyclical temporality, spanning periods of three, six, 12 and 144 years; and that too across different locations. As such, tragedies like stampedes, fires, drownings become fleeting incidents in a space engineered to vanish.
In the absence of conditions that are conducive to the memorialisation of past tragedies, there emerges a persistent failure to reinforce the urgency of their prevention. Thus, systemic accountability to ensure that past mistakes are not repeated is obscured, as memory claims of tragedy upon which such demands can be exercised, disappear along with the sites of their occurrence.
Dying a ‘good death’
Kumbh’s sacrality also lends to the normalisation of deaths occurring there, as the coveted culmination of life in a sacred space. Ideas of ‘good deaths’ are culturally relative, and related to how communities create meaning around its occurrence. In many cultures, a good death means dying at home and in the presence of loved ones, while in some it necessitates being close to sacred locations.
Religious sites such as Kumbh, are characterised by ambiguity, transcendence, and proximity to the divine, making them ideal locations for experiencing not just spiritual rebirth but also an auspicious physical death. Unlike ordinary deaths, which are often marked by mourning, deaths in sites of religious significance are celebrated as spiritual triumph. Thus, pilgrimage to such sites resembles more than the traversal of physical space, but a symbolic enactment of the soul’s journey towards moksha.
Such ideas of a “good death” resist critical inquiry behind causes, especially when their circumstances are untimely or tragic. Thus, when mass tragedies like stampedes occur, the confluence of religious beliefs and cultural narratives operating in sacred spaces frame them as spiritually meaningful rather than preventable. The undertones of fatalism and spiritual justification effectively deflect necessary moments of critical, social reflection and conversations about accountability and preventability.
Ultimately, this spiritualisation of tragedy enables systemic negligence to persist, as both pilgrims and authorities sidestep critical conversations on safety, infrastructure, and accountability. The state’s silence reinforces the idea that order and safety measures are secondary to faith, allowing the chaotic and underregulated passage of lives through Kumbh and the potential for mass tragedies as a result of it, to persist. The lack of critical intervention implicitly legitimises the belief that pilgrimage is meant to be unpredictable, and also to test one’s faith through endurance and even risk of life.
The ritual of forgetting
The cyclical creation and dismantling of Kumbh Mela’s vast, impermanent settlement and its sacrality ensure that failures in crowd management and safety protocols are never scrutinised in the same way as they would be in a permanent city. Unlike permanent urban spaces where monuments and memories serve as enduring reminders of past tragedies, the transitory nature of Kumbh erases the referential spaces and associated remembrance necessary for sustained public discourse and demands for accountability. An absence that is further reinforced by the normalisation of mass tragedies within its sacred framework. Incidents as such, come to be absorbed into the transience of the Mela, framed through a clustered lens of spirituality and temporal urbanity, that normalises death in the Kumbh in two overlapping ways – as the culmination of life in a sacred space and as invisibilised occurrences in a context of ephemeral urbanity. This double bind of ephemerality and spirituality creates a ritual of forgetting. As the festival concludes and the physical structures vanish, so too does the immediate impetus for reform, leaving little room for long-term improvements in governance and logistical planning of the gathering. Without tangible, lasting spaces to bear witness to past failures, the tragedies of one Kumbh dissolve into the anticipation of the next, ensuring that each iteration of the festival begins afresh, unburdened by the memory of past tragedies.
Consequently, the recurrence of stampedes at Kumbh Mela have become ingrained in public consciousness as an accepted and often anticipated inevitability. Till mass tragedies in sites of pilgrimage like Kumbh are confronted through sustained public discourse, calls for state accountability, and a rejection of fatalistic justifications for preventable deaths, incidents like the recent stampede will continue to be pushed to the realm of the sacred rather than the systemic – allowing history to repeat itself with unsettling regularity.
Surya Sankar Sen teaches Politics and International Relations at RV University, Bengaluru. Juwairia Mehkri is an urban researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, policies, or positions of the institutions they are associated with.
