At the age of 11, Sunil Kumar journeyed 125 miles south from his home of Gondo to Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, India, to plunge into the freezing water at the confluence of three sacred rivers. He saw it as a chance to wash his sins away.
The fog was thick that morning in 2013, and the water so cold that when he stepped in, “my legs felt like they were being cut off,” Kumar recalls. He and hundreds of millions of other Hindu pilgrims were gathered at the Sangam for Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest human gathering.
Kumar, desperate to end the chaos that plagued his family, attended the gathering with his father’s friend. As the oldest of six siblings, Kumar bore the weight of his household’s struggles—his alcoholic father, his mother whom his family believed was possessed by demons, constant fighting between his parents, and severe financial problems.
With the other pilgrims, Kumar performed arti and puja—a sequence of offerings and prayers made to a deity—and desperately sought divine intervention for his family’s problems. When he stepped into the water, “I anticipated supernatural peace to dawn upon me, but nothing of that sort happened,” he recalls.
This year, Kumar didn’t join the 500 million pilgrims making the trip to Prayagraj for Kumbh Mela, a 45-day festival that ends on February 26. His life took a dramatic turn eight years earlier, when an old friend invited him to church and he “found the peace I had searched for in the holy dip of Prayagraj.”
Today, he is a witness that no water can cleanse sin, only the shed blood of Christ.
This year’s version of the celebration, called the Maha Kumbh, only occurs once every 144 years due to a rare alignment of Jupiter, the sun, and the moon. Hindu believers consider this configuration a powerful amplifier of spiritual energies during ritual bathing and offers an opportunity for karmic cleansing and spiritual renewal.
According to Hindu mythology, Kumbh, meaning “sacred pitcher,” is based on a celestial struggle between demigods and demons over divine nectar that grants immortality. During the struggle, drops of this nectar fell at four sacred sites across India: Prayagraj, Ujjain, Nashik, and Haridwar. These sites now host the pilgrimage in rotation every 12 years.
Apart from taking a dip in the river, pilgrims join in elaborate prayer rituals and follow processions of ash-smeared sadhus, ascetics who have renounced worldly attachments. Devotional songs fill the air while attendees engage in spiritual discussions and watch religious theater performances on the 4,000-hectare festival grounds, equivalent to the size of 1,600 football fields.
Every act at Kumbh Mela carries deep spiritual significance, from the lighting of ritual fires to the floating of clay lamps (diyas). Helicopters shower rose petals on the devotees to welcome them.
Religious organizations operate free food distribution centers to feed the devotees daily, but most of the pilgrims—especially those who stay for more than a week—buy their own food and cook in parking lots.
To deal with the massive gathering, the local government spent 75 billion rupees ($865 million USD) to develop Prayagraj’s infrastructure and 15 billion ($173 million) to prepare the festival grounds. Yet during the pre-dawn hours of January 29, a massive crowd broke through barricades at the river, leading to a deadly stampede that claimed 30 lives and injured 60 others. The incident occurred during Mauni Amavasya, one of the bathing days when nearly 800 million devotees were expected to take the holy dip.
Another tragedy followed at the New Delhi Railway Station on February 17, where another stampede claimed 18 more lives—including five children—as pilgrims rushed to board Kumbh-bound trains. Fires also broke out in the temporary tent cities housing the pilgrims, and a gas cylinder explosion on January 19 ignited a blaze that consumed at least 40 thatched huts. No one was injured.
Still, Kumbh continues to draw enormous crowds. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath reported that, on February 14, more than 9.2 million devotees participated in the festival. The overall attendance, which passed 500 million, exceeded the combined population of the United States and Russia.
Kumar, now 23, expressed relief that none of his acquaintances attended this year’s Maha Kumbh. “People don’t respect their parents and care for their families but go to pilgrimages to wash their sins and come back and indulge in the same sins again,” he said.
For one Christian leader in India who converted from Hinduism and did not want to be named because of concern for his safety, Kumbh Mela is a festival that points to the world’s need for Christ.
“Taking a dip in the Kumbh acknowledges sin and the need for cleansing,” he explains. “This recognition of human brokenness and the need for divine intervention bridges our faiths.”
While Kumbh devotees seek purification from sin through ritual bathing, Christian faith points to Jesus Christ’s blood as the source of true cleansing from sin, he said. This contrast deepens when considering the Hindu concept of karma.
Traditional Hinduism teaches that people don’t have sin at birth, but their karma determines what they will become in their next life cycle. Performing good deeds alone can’t save a person, “only breaking free from these cycles [of birth and rebirth] altogether achieves that,” he said. “Yet at the Kumbh, we witness a different ideology: the belief that ritual bathing can wash away sins.”
He wishes that “Hindu brethren knew that Christ’s blood can wash away their sins and free them from all cycles they can think of,” he said. The Christian message of grace “fulfills the deepest longings expressed at the Kumbh—the desire for genuine cleansing from sin and true spiritual freedom.”
Kumar found this truth four years after his trip to Prayagraj when he walked with his friend into Believers Eastern Church, which gathered half a mile from his house. After giving his life to Christ, Kumar—who had been forced to leave school in second grade to provide for the family—returned to his studies with renewed purpose and graduated high school with good grades.
His family and community intensely opposed his conversion, yet through persistent prayer and living a life consistent with the gospel, he gradually earned their respect. Neighbors who once opposed him now seek his counsel and prayer.
His family, who had once driven him to seek cleansing in the Kumbh’s waters, also experienced healing. Kumar said that the demons left his mother as he prayed for her. His brother, four sisters, and parents have become Christians.
Kumar now ministers in the nearby villages, telling people about Jesus, the living water. As anti-Christian sentiment rises in India, he notes that carrying a Bible or Christian literature has become too dangerous. Instead, he says, “I carry the Word of God in my heart, which no one can snatch from me or confiscate.”
The post At the World’s Largest Gathering, a Search for Salvation appeared first on Christianity Today.