In this essay I address the second of our three questions—Is the household self-contained?—by considering the Magh Mela: a month-long pilgrimage fair which occurs annually by the banks of the Ganga in the provincial North Indian city of Allahabad. The “Magh Mela”—literally: pilgrimage fair in the month of Māgh: a lunar month in the Hindu calendar which falls roughly between January and March each year)—takes place in a tent city which is set up annually by the banks of the river Ganga, which has been beautifully described, in the case of its younger, if larger, twelve-yearly avatar (the “Kumbh Mela”), as the “ephemeral megacity.” 

Even though pilgrims at the Magh Mela ostensibly leave their households behind—indeed every pilgrim with whom I spoke averred that the absence of their ordinary responsibilities was crucial to the experience of the pilgrimage—to engage in this seemingly highly individualized, ascetic experience, they nevertheless gradually find themselves part of an emergent community and occupying distinct social roles vis-á-vis each other. This piece will briefly explore this sense of community among these “householder-ascetics.” 

While the Mela has received much scholarly attention, the focus has so far been either on the millions of pilgrims who converge at the Mela, the spectacular processions of the various groups of ascetics, or on the infrastructural challenge of setting up and dismantling such a large encampment—said to be, every twelve years, the largest gathering of humans in history. However, an understudied and more central aspect of the fair is that in addition to tourists, day-bathers, and lifelong ascetics, it hosts equal numbers of householders who vow to live as ascetics for one month every year over twelve years. In other words, pilgrims aim to live as ascetics for a whole year but to do so one month at a time. During this time, they bathe only in the river, eat at most one meal a day, practice diverse, exacting regimes of prayer and fasting, and extensively distribute alms. 

At first glance, this pilgrimage experience might appear to be deeply individualistic. After all, even though the encampments in which pilgrims stay are largely inter-caste ensembles, the pilgrimage itself is mostly undertaken by older married couples and tradition emphasizes individual ritual practice. Perhaps more importantly, the strict dietary restrictions and regimes of commensality—one could only eat one meal a day, which one had cooked oneself—it might be seen as emphasizing the importance of the nuclear family unit (as with much else, here too the married couple was considered one unit, and so one was permitted to eat food prepared by one’s spouse). However, in this transient setting with pilgrims from all over the country focused on their own ritual practice, they nevertheless quickly embedded themselves into distinct social roles relative to one another. 

Let us just think through a handful of examples—from just one encampment out of the several thousand which comprised the Mela—to get a more concrete sense of these roles. 

Picture, for instance, the 97-year old “Dakiya” Sharma (literally “postman,” but also “one who runs”), on the verge of finishing his 47th straight year of pilgrimage—with two of his children, both retired, now pilgrims alongside him—who clearly plays the part of quiet patriarch for everybody: regardless of how old one was or when one  started one’s pilgrimage, he had already been there for decades when one arrived. Or consider “Shastri ji” (literally, “Mr. Scholar”), a retired university professor of Sanskrit grammar, who had just finished his twelfth pilgrimage, and whose persistent scholarly air led him to become the de facto resolver of all manner of quotidian ritual dilemmas. “Shastriji help! The panda was drinking tea, and offered me a cup, which I happily accepted. Did I err?,” or so asked Mr. Rathore—whom we shall meet shortly—one evening in 2023, though it could have been any other pilgrim, on any other day, with any other query (in this case, seeing as a pilgrim was supposed to eat only one meal a day, which one had oneself prepared, there were two points at issue here. First, does tea count as a meal? And second, does the panda—one’s preceptor and host for the entire duration of the pilgrimage—count as another person?). 

Or consider the 60-year-old Dr. Mishra who, having discovered over the years an ability to be persistent while remaining good humored, had readily taken on the role of unofficial spokesperson for all pilgrims when it came to nudging the panda over logistical matters (faulty water connections needing repair, bathroom doors needing latches, and so on). Or consider the many men and women who would readily leave their tents to participate in any family’s ongoing rituals, happily filling in any gaps in the proceedings with spontaneous bursts of collective singing. 

Further, while the pilgrimage itself might be said to operate outside of the sphere of ordinary life—indeed, several pilgrims attributed its restorative effect, despite the arduousness, precisely to the way it allowed them to break out of the rhythms of everyday life—the relationships between pilgrims, though seemingly transient, often weighed much more on the minds of pilgrims than one might initially expect. One can see this clearly at the beginning or end of the Mela when pilgrims part from each other warmly to return to their lives as householders in different parts of the country for another year, or the affection with which they reunite after a year’s gap. But one can also just as readily see the significance of these relationships absent such warmth—as in the case of Mr. Rathore below.