A Face in the Crowd: Contemplating the Largest Gathering in Human History

The largest gathering of human beings in the history of the world is taking place right now. It’s surprising that it isn’t bigger news.

Every twelve years in India, a gathering called the Maha Kumbh Mela occurs. It is the great (“Maha”) version of the Kumbh Mela, which is celebrated in different forms at intervals of 6, 12, and 144 years. During a Kumbh Mela or “sacred pitcher festival,” all the holy men and women of India converge on one of four cities, based on the specific astrological significance of the time (it has something to do with Jupiter).

This year, a total of 400 million people are projected to pass through the city of Prayagraj and bathe in its ghats at the point where the sacred rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna, converge. That’s right: more people than the entire population of the United States are passing through the same place in a mere 45 days. Even by Indian standards, that’s quite large, encompassing roughly 28% of the entire population of the country.

A half-sized version of the Kumbh Mela occurs six years between Maha Kumbh Melas. At the last one in 2019, a mere 240 million people passed through. The event set the prior world record for the largest single day gathering in human history, with 50 million people all converging on the bathing ghats at Prayagraj on February 4^th of that year. This year, that record is expected to double to 100 million. To understand just how dense this is, observe the fact that Tokyo is the city with the world’s largest population, which is 14.18 million. And the denizens of Tokyo, while often snugly situated, are still a bit more spread out: the Kumbh Mela grounds are 15 square miles, while Tokyo as a whole includes 847 square miles.

The mind reels contemplating these numbers. After first reading about the Kumbh Mela in Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, I thought it might be interesting to attend one. (Even though Yogananda initially complains about the charlatanry on display there, he does end up meeting an allegedly thousand-year-old yogi). The opportunity to chat up a wide variety of yogis and wandering mendicants seemed like something not to be missed. That was before I found out about the sheer numbers involved, which led to a quick revision of my plans. I remember being elbow-to-elbow in a vast crowd in Midtown Manhattan during Christmastime and just barely restraining the impulse to freak out like the guy in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I would not do well at a Kumbh Mela. (Apparently, this means I’m a bigger wuss than Coldplay’s Chris Martin, one of the 150 million people to already attend the event.)

Furthermore, the current Kumbh Mela has already experienced tragedy: a stampede killed at least 30 people on January 28th. That’s not quite as bad as the 2015 Mina stampede, when over 2,000 pilgrims died during a stampede in Mecca. But still, when you’re dealing with crowds larger than entire nations, it seems impossible that something like this won’t occur. The term “logistical nightmare” would be a bit too mild. I have no idea how the Indian government is managing this event.

Yet, it is interesting to consider the sheer spectacle of such vast, anonymous crowds. Living in the hyper-technological West, it’s easy to feel like you live in Marshall McLuhan’s “global village.” On Twitter, I feel like I’m one degree of separation away from Elon Musk and J.D. Vance. I can influence policy. I can stop or at least pause AI. I can yell at celebrities online and they will actually read what I said. I can ruin their day. But the crowds at the Kumbh Mela puncture this delusional sense of one’s own significance and salience. Every one of the pilgrims bathing at Prayagraj has a consciousness, carrying a world like the one I carry. Compared to humanity in mass, I’m forced to wonder what I even am. Perhaps it inculcates humility appropriate to the spiritual nature of the festival.

If you look at the list of the largest gatherings in human history, the first sixteen are all religious in nature. In fact, they are all either Kumbh Melas or Arba’een pilgrimages, Shia Muslim pilgrimages to the shrine of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Husayn. Even at this late date, the sacred has the strongest appeal, the strongest grasp on body and soul. Nothing else can quite command the same hold on human attention, not even smartphones and internet fandoms. The crowds at Mecca and St. Peter’s will always outmatch the crowds at Comic Con.

The event challenges the pride of modernity. We’re a few centuries into the process of constructing society on an allegedly rational and scientific basis, yet, the Kumbh Mela seems completely antithetical to this mindset, in which your attention is generally scattered through a thousand different random areas of concern. Instead, it returns us to a traditional understanding of reality, demanding that the individual pilgrim focus on the sacred along with a vast nation-sized crowd of like-minded people. You can see this just as easily in the mass-direction of pilgrims’ attention towards the Kaaba during the Hajj. It is by turns incredibly attractive and incredibly repellent, since it promises to liberate you from your egotism and individuality, against which your egotism and individualism naturally rebel. (The problem with egotism is that it’s so cozy.)

The Kumbh Mela is itself like a parable: to reach the sacred, you have to strip yourself of your own name, your own identity, become just a face in the crowd, truly anonymous. That is the theory that the sadhus, or wandering holy men, gathered there are operating on. When someone renounces their possessions and becomes a sadhu, they become symbolically “dead” to the world, dispensing with the sacred thread that marked them as a “twice-born” member of the caste system. The symbolism of death and rebirth proves crucial to the process. I suppose that the crowds gathered there partake of this death and rebirth symbolism too (all too literally in the case of those who died during the stampede). To bathe in the Ganges is to be reborn, remade, rather like in a Christian baptism or in the ablutions performed before Islamic prayers.

Sitting here, typing on my computer, it is easy to feel that the waters of life, of ritual rebirth, are fairly distant. I suppose that’s the burden of living in the modern West, for which various material comforts attempt to compensate. But I’m grateful nevertheless for the conflicted emotions I feel contemplating the Kumbh Mela. I like to think that being disturbed is a step in the direction of wisdom.