ABSTRACT
The Kumbh Mela is the largest religious gathering on earth, with estimates of mass participation in the holy fair reaching as high as 120 million people in 2013. Under the current Indian government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a member of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Kumbh Mela has become an entity of the Hindu nationalist imagination. This chapter demonstrates how the Kumbh Mela functions as a hyperobject, which unfolds expansively across time and space and is deployed for political gain. Focusing on the lenses of sound, scale, and nation, this chapter addresses the intersections and interventions of this expansive, yet ephemeral, megacity. The Kumbh Mela projects not only the capacity of the current administration to manage masses of people and subsequent infrastructure needs, but also encompasses a thinly veiled threat of violence against its ideological opponents as it celebrates its principal pilgrims: militant Hindu warrior ascetics idealized as the defenders of the faith. An expansive imaginary of governmental production and pilgrim management, the sheer magnitude of the mela has become a testament to the gravitas and consequences of the nation imagined as Hindu.
