For a festival that celebrates the ecstasy of timeless time, it's quite odd that nobody quite knows when the Kumbh really started at Prayag at the confluence of India's two mightiest rivers Ganga (Sanskrit, compassion) and Yamuna (Sans.,death) and a third, subterranean channel, Saraswati (Sans., clear pool of consciousnes) that becomes visible in a deep well, not far from where the rivers meet, at Sangam. Or, perhaps, it is because of this very reason, its very timelessness, that no one needs to know when it started.
For, the Kumbh, the pitcher, itself is time. Breaking that pitcher, the soul makes its great crossover from here to there, from earth to the great yonder. Beyond!
Public historians, and there are many, refer to an unreferenced year, sometime in the1850s when the Kumbh started acquiring the scale in which we celebrate it today, many times larger, grander... and commercial now. But that origin story is more of hearsay, as most mythologies are.
Nobody has ever cited an exact reference date for such a gathering on its banks from any 19th century public record.
The only reference from that era, perhaps, to a gathering of holy monks by the Ganga, is to be found in the little read, and much misunderstood jottings of an English fortune hunter John Lang's Wanderings in Hindoostan.
Lang, writes of a congregation of forest dwellers (van~nar) on the Ganga from all over India and Nepal, and refers to them as monkees (as monks in Victorian English were referred to in the plural, sing., monkee), endowing them with walking sticks, and tails, which is possibly why modern reprints of Lang's tale misspells the ascetics as 'monkeys'. Even then, John Lang was nowhere near Prayag, in middle India, but at Deoband, up north, on the Delhi-Meerut-Mussoorie highway, a frequent jaunt for British administrators and adventurers alike.
Eventually, in the decades that followed, Deoband became hostage to fundamentalist Islam, and was abandoned by the Hindus, after a madrasa came up there in the 1870s. Madrasa Dar ul Uloom would grow in influence, over time, to inspire violent Afghan and Pakistani suicide bombers, a century later. The spiritual significance of Deoband's cosmic religious bath has been lost forever to the Hindus.
Those finicky about dating the dateless, quote a one-line insert from 7th century CE Chinese traveller, Xuanzhang's wanderings in the 'western world' where the Buddhist pilgrim witnessed King Harsh lavishing alms among Brahmins and mendicants at Prayag. A still older journal of 5th century CE Chinese traveller Faxian makes no such mention about any local king or emperor and his river bank charity.
Valmiki's 5th century BCE Ramayan, has the earliest documented reference to Prayag. It talks of a river crossing where several ascetics pitched reed huts under the watch of Vedik luminary Bharadvaj (to whom, incidentally, my family traces is gotra, hence lineage). It is here at Prayag that Prince Ram forded the river, to enter the forest, en route to his 14-year exile in the South, charting the course of his epic journey into the unknown, and eventual return as the king of Ayodhya. There, a grand temple stands over a demolished mosque today. Yet, neither Valmiki nor Bharadvaj refer to the Kumbh, though the churning tale of the cosmic ocean out of which emerged the pitcher of ambrosia, that is kumbh, finds elaborate mention in Ram's story.
For me, however, at Prayag, home for five generations, and running, the Kumbh has always been around, just around the bend, only a walk away from home, beyond the great bund that separates the wide sandy riverbed expanse from the existential dilemmas of our digitally divided soceity.
I have been there, done that since the 1977 Kumbh, and still earlier, for annual dips at Magh, the festival month of 'bounty' in the eleventh month of the Indian zodiac. My father did the same for as long as he could remember, till he died at 74, and his father did that too between birth and death, and so did his father, great-great grandfather to Zara, our daugher, who is yet to take her first plunge at Sangam.
Pundits, diving still deeper into India's hazy past, insist, that it does not matter if the Kumbh cannot be dated. It was always there... here and now.
Celebrated since time immemorial, Kumbh will always come around, they say, measured by planetary conjunctions of the stars, the moon, and the Sun, in rotations of 12 months, 12 months x 12 (12 years), 12 months x 12x12 (144 years), and multiples of 12 thereof, each a milestone for completion (Sanskrit, purna) forever into eternity, in a cosmic play of this and that where every particle and god particle come alive, sipping the elxir of renewal, so that mankind may harvest the bounty of everything on offer, in cosmic and terrestrial time, in endless cycles, to clockwork precision, freed from the pulsating rhythm of our digital clocks that trap us in time.
Kumbh, in a sense, is also a fertility ritual of give and take, of sowing and reaping, on the bank of the Ganga, where farming emerged way back around 7000 BCE, as archaeological evidence suggests, north of the Vindhya. Here, the month of Magh heralds the advent of a bountiful crop every spring; and each Kumbh, after 12 Maghs, celebrates the topping of the storage jar, when all is given away, at completion of each cycle. This give and take goes on and on, till all is exhausted forever, in the great dissolution of the Universe, for everything to re-emerge all over again.
And so, at some point in immeasurable time, the circle must collapse, so to speak, to a metaphysical point where all else cease to matter, before matter springs back to life once more.
That point of collapse has no magnitude, with no notion of space, and hence, no position. It is a mathematical point. This metaphysical point cannot adequately represent a state beyond it. It is infinitesimally subtle into which the manifest universe withdraws.
The sages visualised this point of collapse in the pixel, the dot or the bindu, that they sport on their forehead at the Kumbh. Here, an individual's consciousness completely identifies with the universal consciousness in the anarchy of the firmament in the cosmic haze of time.
And in that confusion, and the cacophony of worshippers, the aware and informed mind reconciles a multiverse where, every dip at every bath is only a portal to another universe.
The seers imagined that multiverse in a multitude of eons.
Markandeya, a Vedik cosmologist, calculated in the Vishnu Dharma, “A day of the supreme being, Brahman, as a kalpa, and the same as a night of his. So, 12 months (a year) of Brahma make 720 kalpas (theoretically, a year is 360 ‘moon nights’ in Brahma’s world). Brahma lives for 1200 such months in a lifespan of a 100 years. His 1200 months are a day of Purusa, the cosmic man, and the same is a night of his. The seers said that only those who can count the sand of the Ganga or drops of rain can know how many Brahman have already preceded Purusa.
And yet, in that one single drop of rain, and a single grain of sand, Indian seers measured both time and distance in the infinite expanse of the cosmic carpet, they called Brahma’s citrasana, on which they sat in prayer and adulation, at Sangam of that one invisible point of contact, we call God.
A millennium later, 20th century cosmologist Carl Sagan said in his epic Cosmos “A handful of sand contains about 10,000 grains, more than the number of stars we can see with the naked eye on a clear night. But the number of stars we can see is only the tiniest fraction of stars that are. What we see at night is the merest smattering of the nearest stars... the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.”
Kalpa, 11th century Khwarazmian polymath al Beruni said, "are the days of India, that measure cosmic effulgence and dissolution, the period at the start and end of which there is conjunction of the seven planets and their apsides and nodex (the navagrahas) in 0 degree of Aries..”
The kalpa, he said was the sum of days of life, that added up to 53.4 billion months, each year of 360 moon nights (the lunar calendar) or 51. 84 billion months, each year of 365 sun days (solar year). Modern science has estimated the age of the solar system at 53.4 bllion months (4.5 billion years) or thereabout.
Depending on what more he read, and digging deeper into still more confounding numbers, al Beruni read that the life of Brahman, at dissolution of the Universe counted for 72,000 kalpa, each kalpa of 54 billion months (4.5 billion years) of moon nights on earth; 155,520,000,000 kalpa added up to the life of Visnu who emerged from Rudra; 5,374,771,200,000,000,000 kalpa the life of Rudra who emerged from Isvara; 5,572,562,780,160,000,000,000,000,000 kalpa the life of Isvara who emerged from Sadasiva; 173,328,992,714,096,640,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kalpa the life of Sadasiva who emerged from Sakti, 173,328,992,714,096,640,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kalpa the life of Sakti who emerged in truti, 10,72,444,978,758,523,781,120,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kalpa made one truti.
Raving mad by now, Beruni said, “Whatever may be the nature of these calculations, apparently the day and the centennium are the elements out of which the whole from the beginning to the end has been constructed. Others however, build their system on the small particles of the day. We shall here give one system of this kind as invented by those who use the following metrologic system: 1 ghata (pot) is 16 kala, 1 kala is 30 kashtha, one kashtha is 30 nimesha, 1 nimesha is 2 lava, 1 lava is 2 truti"
Truti in Sanskrit is the first disengagement, therefore the first distortion of the first primordial being as Sakti the consort of, and the outpouring of Siva. The seers fixed a day in Siva's life at 37,264,147,126,589,458,187,550,720,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kalpa, each kalpa of 12×4.45 billion months, every 12 months of 360 moon nights, that Google throws up as 5.9697164e+67 moon nights on my laptop, that is to say, the number of nights adding up to 59.7 million followed by 66 zeroes.
This, our sages said, is measurable Time or kaal. This time is the cause for appearance and disappearance of all that is.
Later day ascetics defined the five stage separation from Brahma to Sakti, that is alsp Siva, in the cosmic reverberation of bum.bum.bum.bum.bum.lahiri 'Bum' is the sound of explosion, that in Sanskrit is called 'bisphot'. 'Lehar' in Sanskrit is both ripple and wave.
Western cosmologists refer to the Big Bang Theory of Cosmic creation.
The first bang, according to Indian seers was not a loud universe shattering explosion, but a pop sound, akin to the bursting of a cyst, that expanded in ripples, over impoundable time, to manifest as Bang.
Now sound, as we know, like light, travels in ripples and waves.
Bum bum bum bum bum lahri, then, is the five stage movement of sound and light in the Cosmic creation of the Universe impounded by the human ear of Indian mystics and savants here on earth.
Modern science explains this as baryon acoustic oscillations.
The five bum lahr to the intelligent, spritiual, and articulate mind in our everyday creative karmik life are wonder.will.wisdom.work.world. In Sanskrit, that translates to kautuhal, kriya, kama, krira and kamini, in which desire (kama) births the desirable (kamini) in measurable time.
Dumbfounded, al Beruni threw up his hands. To count those numbers was to go mad, he thundered, little realising that that path of madness led to the gateway to Wonder.
The Upanisads (dated to first millennium BCE, almost two millennia before Beruni) report a conversation between seers Yajnavalkya and Gargi, where the latter asks, “What is wonder woven of?”
Yajnavalkya replies, “To be there is to lose your mind (to countless possibilities).”
American mathematician Edward Kasner ventured into that possibility. He once asked his nine-year-old nephew to invent a name for an extremely large number — ten to the power one hundred (10^100), a one followed by a hundred zeroes. The boy called it googol. Here it is: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Sagan wrote, "You too can make up your own very large numbers and give them strange names. Try it. It has a certain charm. If a googol seems large, consider a googolplex. It is 10 to the power of a googol — that is a one followed by a googol zeroes. By comparison, the total number of atoms in your body is about 10^28, and the total number of elementary particles — protons and neutrons and electrons — in the observable Universe is about 10^80. If the Universe were packed solid with neutrons, say, so there was no empty space anywhere, there would still be only about 10^128 particles in it, quite a bit more than a googol, but trivially small compared to a googolplex. And yet these numbers, the googol and the googolplex, do not approach, they come nowhere near the idea of infinity. A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number one. We could try to write out a googolplex, but it is a forlorn ambition. A piece of paper large enough to have all the zeroes in a googolplex written out explicitly could not be stuffed into the known Universe. Happily, there is a simpler and very concise way of writing a googolplex: 10^10^100: and even infinity: (pronounced “infinity”)
When I exchanged notes with my daughter Zara, a sophmore at UPitt, she wrote back, " What al-Beruni probably missed out on is what modern astrophysicists define as time dilation, and how modern mathematicians calculate immense numbers by way of conversion of advanced algebraic variables."
Indian seers defined this state of consciousness as unmani, without mind. The state in which the paramount exists as a paradox of possibility, before oozing out as the nectar from the pitcher (kumbh) in the magnificent flow of consciousness to manifest as the paragon.
Yes, these mind-bending numbers do tell us a story. They paint a picture of the immensity of the cosmos, that we have travelled in this blog, so far, in the multiples of the 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, 11 and 12 counts…, each count a measure of distance that might take a voyager to traverse the different points of the Cosmos at the speed of light…
… to weave together a neverending epic of Star Wars that started with the path defining line: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...”
We get a hint of how far is far away from the water droplets that pour from the bottom of the pot or ghati suspended atop the shaft (linga) of Siva, one drop at a time, at every Siva temple across India even to this day.
In those drops too, the seers counted time, and distance, seven ghati adding up to a day. While one ghati makes for 16 kala, 1 kala for 30 kashtha or crucible (wooden spoon), one kastha makes for 30 nimesa, one nimesa 2 lava, each lava the tip of a sheep’s hair, one lava 2 truti.
While truti is a measure of distortion, the displacment happens even earlier, when the atom, cell (anu) splits, in all 6 atoms or 12 split-cell make 1 truti. That split, then, is the first separation of this from that, of man from God. This is the count of one from the other.
This is also how a single sperm detaches from the being, or a single cell microbe splits into two. It is believed that normal human semen contains 40 million to 300 million sperms per millimeter, of which 20 million sperms are considered adequate for pregnancy, of which, it takes just one sperm to fertilize a woman’s egg.
On the far side, on the cosmic scale, a 12-year cycle of the zodiac makes for a kumbh or pitcher, that emerged on the churning of the cosmic ocean, each kumbh an occasion to be celebrated by the celestials, seers, and householders on the banks of the Ganga at Prayag, once in every 12 years.
The seers have travelled far. Far, far away into the night sky, sitting at Sangam, at Prayag, contemplating this universe of which we all are sperm.
And so we celebrate Life.
And so we celebrate Kumbh.
© Shubhrangshu Roy
Kumbh, Prayag, 5 February, 2025
Adapted from the author's soon to be published work "pixel: Decoding Hinduism, The Metamorphosis of the Metaphysical into the Monolith"