People bathing at the river against a sunset backdrop.

People bathing at the junction of the Ganges, Yamuna and Sarasvati rivers for Kumbh Mela in Allahabad. (This featured image was added online in 2025, and did not appear in the original print publication.)Ninara / Flickr

“Slicing India”: New perspectives on India since 1947

If we had a clearer picture of how India changed after independence, we might have a better sense of where it is going today. But how to encompass half a century's history of hundreds of millions of people? Like a geologist analysing cross-sections of strata to understand how rock was formed and what may lie beneath, "Slicing India" examines the people, institutions, movements and diversions that were prominent in five specific years — the years of the Kumbh Mela when most of north India turns its attention for six weeks to Allahabad: 1954, 1966, 1977, 1989 and 2001. The last Kumbh Mela under British rule was in 1942, held at the same time that Singapore fell and as the Japanese were advancing through Burma. By 1954, India had been free for nearly seven years ...

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01 Jun 2002, 11:18 am

The Kumbh Mela of 1954, intended to be a celebration of the new India, became the greatest single day of death since the partition of 1947. On the main bathing day of 3 February, a crowd vastly greater than expected, estimated at between two and four million people, moved towards the confluence of the Ganga and Jamuna (the sangam) to bathe. When processions of holy men, demanding privileged right of way, became entangled with the crowds, frightened pilgrims ran, tripped, fell and tumbled down embankments made muddy with winter rain. Officially, 14 children, 49 men and 253 women were killed and thousands injured. Though the Prime Minister and other "VIPs" watched from the ramparts of Allahabad's famous Fort, the size of the crowd was so great that the stampede was not evident and they did not learn of it until late in the afternoon. This was a stark metaphor for the new India: the rulers standing on the walls of an ancient fortress able to see the people, yet unaware that the people were surging to their deaths.

In the aftermath, one of the accusations was that politicians and officials had sought a record-breaking Kumbh Mela crowd to demonstrate the vitality of the new India. The chairman of the inquiry denied the allegation. "Hundreds of thousands of people have been coming to Prayaga to bathe in the Sangam for thousands of years from all over India", he wrote. Their "irresistible inner urge and undying faith" meant that "no propaganda is needed to induce such people to come". And in this year, "the news … spread and reached every corner of the country" that "this year's Kumbh was of extraordinary significance", a particularly auspicious occasion, happening only once every 144 years".

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