Although I never studied or lived in Allahabad, I always felt a strangely close relationship with it. When I was young, the Allahabad University was considered to be the best by the well to do and well-educated residents of my town Najibabad as many of them had received their education there. Had fate not intervened and pushed me towards the Jawaharlal Nehru University, I would have done my post graduation from the Allahabad University. However, this diversion did not really matter because most of my friends happen to be from Allahabad and they have accepted me as an honorary Allahabadi.
Therefore, last year when I came to know that a new book had come out on Allahabad, I promptly ordered it online. Neelum Saran Gaur, who taught English literature for many years at the University, has written a book titled Three Rivers and a Tree: The Story of Allahabad University. In 2007 renowned poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who also retired from the English Department, had edited a book called The Last Bungalow: writings on Allahabad. While Gaur’s book is a monograph based on her own experiences, observations and research, Mehrotra’s book contains writings that span over millennia and includes those of Hiuen Tsang, Jawaharlal Nehru, Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Ved Mehta, Pankaj Mishra, Gyanranjan, Saeed Jaffrey, Kama Maclean and Palash Krishna Mehrotra. While both the books have a wealth of information about Allahabad, I was especially fascinated by their association with Triveni, the confluence of Ganga, Yamuna and the invisible Saraswati, and the Kumbh Mela, considered to be the biggest religious fair in the world. The title of Gaur’s book has an obvious pointer to Triveni.
It may come as a shock to most people to know that Triveni is a myth whose history is not very old. I came to know about it from an unpublished article of Lakshmidhar Malaviya that he was kind enough to share with me. Malaviya, who has been living in Japan for more than four decades during which he taught Hindi at universities in Tokyo and Osaka, is a grandson of Mahamana Madan Mohan Malaviya. As he hails from Allahabad, he intimately knows the city and its history. An erudite scholar, he informs us that the word Triveni was used for the first time in 1873 to convey the confluence of Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati in the six-volume Sanskrit work Abhidhan Vachaspatya of Taranath Tarkvachaspati, who was associated with Government Sanskrit College, Calcutta (now Kolkata). Otherwise, according to its etymology, it meant triple-braided. Whether it is Valmiki or Kalidasa, no Sanskrit poet has used the word Triveni to denote the confluence of rivers at Prayag (Allahabad). Whenever they referred to it, it was always as a confluence of two rivers Ganga and Yamuna.
It was the Prayagwal Pandas who created the myth about Triveni and the Kumbh mela at Prayag in the latter part of the 19th century – after 1860 to be exact. As Malaviya comments sarcastically, these Pandas “dug a 500-miles-long tunnel to take Saraswati to Prayag”. The Last Bungalow includes a wonderful and well-researched article by Kama Maclean. She opines that the name “Kumbh Mela was applied to Allahabad’s existing Magh Mela in the 1860s by Prayagwals – river pandas of Prayag – working upon and within the limits imposed by the colonial state and its discourses. This process was inadvertently aided by the British, and the resulting mela was affirmed by sadhus and pilgrims.” This view is supported by Malaviya who points out that the word Triveni denoting a confluence of three rivers occurs only in the dictionaries compiled by Indian and British scholars during 1870-1900 and all of them were associated with educational institutions set up the colonial state.
Using Hiuen Tsang’s testimony, Maclean makes a revelation that the Magh Mela was in fact a religious fair that was started by Emperor Harsha in the seventh century and it was originally Buddhist in its character. All later historical records speak of an annual Magh Mela at Allahabad but not of a Kumbh Mela that took place after 12 years. Even the Yadgar-i-Bahaduri, composed in circa 1833, does not talk of any Kumbh Mela. When Bharatendu Harishchandra wrote on the significance of Magh snan (bathing in the Ganga in the month of Magh), he did not even mention the Kumbh Mela.
According to Maclean, the first mention of a Kumbh Mela occurs in a report submitted by the magistrate of Allahabad in 1868. In astrology, the concept of a Kumbh Yoga is a disputed one and if its calculations arrive at a date different from that of the traditional Magh Mela, the traditional Magh Mela takes precedence. It is not possible to offer a full explanation of the Kumbh phenomenon here. Suffice it to say that the Prayagwal pandas created it to meet the challenge of the colonial rulers who had imposed new taxes on the Magh Mela. Malaviya informs that they built a temple called “Patalpuri” outside the Allahabad Fort and declared that the underground Saraswati came up to the temple to meet Ganga and Yamuna. They also announced that the banyan tree that was standing there was the real Akshayvat (the immortal tree). Little wonder that the ideological progeny of these pandas are preparing to release water into the newly found “Saraswati” in Haryana.
(The writer is a senior literary critic)
