Article about the Kumbh mela

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1. The Kumbha Mela Of Allahabad: A Freak Fair?

Source: Hinduism Today, Francois Gautier, Correspondent

 

PONDICHERRY, INDIA, January 17, 2001: The Kumbha Mela, which is taking place

at the moment in Allahabad, demonstrates once again to what extent Western

journalism, when it is applied to India, harps on the anecdotal, the

superfluous, the derogatory, deforms everything and transforms what is

beautiful and noble into a show of freaks and fanatics. And wasn't that the

headline of the Independent of London " A freak fair " ? News agencies in

Europe and the US are only interested in the photos of Hollywood stars

(Madonna, Demi Moore, Richard Gere, Pierce Brosnan, etc.) who are going to

descend on the Kumbha Mela, even if they will be totally lost amongst the

millions of (real) devotees. Western newspapers and magazines do not know by

which end to take this gigantic mela and and are content to talk about

uninteresting angles: sadhus and mobile phones, luxury tents for foreigners

in search of spirituality, or the " Indian nationalists " trying to capitalize

on the mela. Isn't it strange that at the time of globalization and

standardization of the whole world, at a time when the civilization of

Coca-Cola and MTV reigns supreme from Rio de Janeiro to Manila, from Paris

to Shanghai, at a time when man's collective consciousness is universally

lowered to an idiotic level by American TV Soaps -- Bold and Beautiful, or

Friends -- nobody in the West finds it extraordinary that eighty million

souls converge by plane, by car, on horseback, on foot towards a place which

they consider sacred, to pray to That which is beyond us, to this immanent

Force towards which men have aspired to since millenniums? But not at all!

What does the Western press do? It publishes photos of naked sadhus, or

stretched out on beds of thorns; it harps on the ban of Cox & Bains

unethical marketing of the mela, or speaks of the VHP's fundamentalism.

Always these images which denigrate India, always this colonial superior

spirit which perpetuates itself in the negative vision which Western

journalists have of the Indian subcontinent.