Foreigners gather at India’s religious mega festival

At the Kumbh Mela, the world’s biggest religious event, millions of Indian Hindus are not the only people bathing in the sacred waters to wash away their sins. Foreigners too are among the ascetics, saints, sadhus and spectators thronging the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna and mythical Saraswati rivers in northern India for what is billed as humanity’s biggest gathering. Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati grew up in a Jewish family in California but moved in 1996 to an ashram in Rishikesh -- the town made famous internationally when the Beatles visited in 1968 -- and changed her life and her name.

“I was on holiday with a backpack and when I got to Rishikesh, on the banks of the sacred Ganges, I had a very very deep, very very powerful spiritual awakening experience which made me realise where I need to be, where I need to spend my life,” she said. The 47-year-old is among the worshippers taking a dip at the Kumbh, which is expected to attract well over 100 million people over the next seven weeks.

“The reason we take a bath in the sacred waters is to achieve immortality... immortality of the soul,” she said. “It felt amazing, it always feels amazing... Normally only the body gets wet but here you actually feel like your inner self is getting wet, your heart, your soul is getting wet, your spirit... The depth of my being is being touched.” A record 22.5 million people plunged into the waters on the first day of the Kumbh last Tuesday, according to local officials. Westerners who have immersed themselves in Hindu spirituality include Baba Rampuri, who claims to be the first foreigner to be initiated into India’s largest and most ancient order of yogis, the Naga Sannyasis of Juna Akhara.

The surgeon’s son -- reportedly born William A. Gans -- grew up in Beverly Hills and moved to India in 1970, and like Saraswati is active on Facebook and Twitter. “I am not a great believer in modern technology, or the consumerist messages being sent out through the medium, but we have to make people aware that we exist,” he told the Indian Express.

Another is Sir James Mallinson, the dreadlocked fifth baronet of Walthamstow and British academic ordained as a mahant, or Hindu priest, in 2013. He also runs a paragliding firm in the Himalayas. Many of the foreigners at the Kumbh are simple tourists though, keen to see the ashsmeared, pipe-smoking Naga sadhus, naked except for beads and flower garlands.