Throngs of people attending the first “Shahi Snan” (grand bath) next to Godavari river at the ongoing, or Pitcher Festival in Nashik yesterday.
AFP/Nashik
Dreadlocked men and waves of people yesterday took a dip on the first main bathing day of India’s massive Kumbh Mela festival.
The “sadhus” (ascetics), with their faces painted, danced and chanted as they jumped into a ghat at a temple in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.
Tens of thousands celebrated the “Shahi Snan”, meaning “royal bath”, with Hindu sects following one another in shedding their orange robes before splashing joyously into the water at Nashik.
Their time to bathe lasted just seconds, however, as hundreds of police officers frantically blew their whistles to signal for them to hastily make way for the next wave of people.
The Kumbh Mela is held every third year and is rotated between four sites.
As a result, it takes place at Nashik every 12 years and although it isn’t on the same scale as the editions on the Ganges at Haridwar and the Saraswati at Allahabad, it still draws millions of people. The fourth site is Ujjain in central India.
Organisers had increased safety measures in a bid to avoid a repeat of a deadly stampede at the same venue 12 years ago and said the mass bathe had so far passed without major incident. “No, nothing like that, it all went well,” K Moghe, the district information officer for Nashik, told AFP.
Thirty-nine people were trampled to death when the festival was last held on the banks of the Godavari river in Nashik, around 160km from Mumbai, in 2003.
The crush was believed to have been triggered when a “sadhu” threw coins into a crowd of people who were growing increasingly impatient at having to wait for their turn to bathe.
When the coins were thrown they scrambled to gather them, resulting in dozens of people suffocating, according to reports at the time.
Nashik is unique out of the four venues in that it has two main bathing sites, the Godavari river in Nashik and nearby Trimbakeshwar temple ghat, stretching the emergency services across a wide area.
For this year’s edition, officials changed the routes to the ghats to avoid steep slopes while a massive police presence of around 20,000 officers ensured little overcrowding and first aid workers stood ready.
The first “sadhus” entered the water at Trimbakeshwar shortly before 4am with a continuous flow of people rejoicing in the ghat for several hours afterwards.
Between 8mn and 10mn people are expected to attend the two-month-long Hindu festival this year.
Its official opening was marked with a low-key flag raising ceremony in Nashik on July 14.
There are two main bathing dates left, on September 13 and September 18.
