About 660 million people attended the Kumbh Mela in 2025, the largest gathering on Earth
The Kumbh Mela is a Hindu pilgrimage built around a ritual bath where great rivers meet. Its scale is almost impossible to picture: an estimated 660 million attended in 2025, up from 240 million in 2019. Yet the popular belief that it dates back to time immemorial is rejected by historians.
The festival rotates among four sites, Prayagraj, Haridwar, Nashik and Ujjain, and each hosts it roughly once every 12 years according to the positions of Jupiter, the Sun and the Moon in the Hindu lunisolar calendar. Prayag and Haridwar hold theirs six years apart, alternating major and half editions. A single mela runs from one to three months, with the new-moon day drawing the biggest crowds. Pilgrims immerse themselves in the water as atonement and cleansing, and the event also brings fairs, teaching, sermons and vast assemblies of monks. UNESCO lists it as intangible cultural heritage.
The name joins two Sanskrit words found as far back as the Rigveda. Kumbha means pitcher or pot, often one holding water or the nectar of immortality, and in astrology it also denotes Aquarius. Mela means a gathering or coming together. Put together, the phrase describes an assembly around the waters of immortality.
The founding story comes from the churning of the ocean of milk, when gods and demons battled over a pot of amrita. In a later extension, the pot spills at four spots, which become the four festival sites; accounts differ over who spilled it. Historians point out that no ancient or medieval text telling the churning legend connects it to any festival, and the spilling episode is missing from the earliest versions. Giorgio Bonazzoli, a scholar of the Puranas, calls these explanations anachronistic, a later attempt to give a popular pilgrimage deep roots.
The documented history is surprisingly recent. Before 1858, Kumbh referred only to every twelfth annual fair at Haridwar, which had seen violent clashes, including one in 1796. After the British suppressed the 1857 rebellion, the Pragwal priests of Allahabad proposed an organised pilgrimage at Prayag, and the first Kumbh there took place in 1870.
Source: Kumbh Mela
