Impressions and Unnecessity: 'Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Megacity'

 From the desk of Vitasta Raina

Time: Spirituality and humbugging.

Notes: I was recently handed a copy of the Harvard hardcover 'Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephermeral Megacity", and asked to review the book. I wrote this as I read. 

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Do you remember Woodstock in 1969? How about the 2003 Phish concert that drew crowds of fan to 'Limestone' that made it the largest city in Maine for the weekend. The first chapter describes the Kumbh Mela and the 'mystical' attraction of people to the mela.

The truth is that given the spiritual nature of the Hindu religion, the absurdly large number of people who congregate there and perhaps the long 55 day period for which it is held, the festival holds a certain fascination. But as far as rummaging through history to figure out 'why' people are attracted to the mela, is in my opinion, as simple as the reason why a 'Phan' is attracted to a Phish concert, or why a Deadhead congregates at a grateful dead concert.

In India, there is no distinction between mythology, folklore and religious figures. We have no Aesop's fables. Our folklore is also pious to us. So concerts like the Kumbh become what they are- Larger than Life. Instead of being described as 'phans' people are described as 'ascetics'.

Chapter 1  dwells deep into the history, origins, traditions and myths of the Kumbh to understand why people flock to rock-shows. How I wish they had juxtaposed images of the Kumbh Mela with images of Woodstock/any Phish/Grateful Dead concert. [They didn't by the way, they did not.]

Phish Concert (Left) Kumbh Mela (Right). Images from the Internet

The first part of the second chapter describes the logistic constraints of a pop-up megacity where the rivers constantly shift and everything is 'elastic'. The build-up is exactly the same as the first 20 seconds of Beethoven's symphony no 5.

It then divides into subheads as Governance, Metrics, Grid etc. that give clear observable construction details of the Kumbh City. We understand the 'Sense of Elastic Accommodation', an essence of an undefined organic city that can stretch 30 times its size, an organism that never existed before. People brought pieces to the city, swelled it, and then left taking different (or same) pieces with themselves[1]. The section skims over the city's unique ability to maintain individuality and preserve multiple social identities within it through participatory initial planning, and as the terms 'Incremental', 'Elastic', 'Spontaneous' begin to seep in, the clockwork precision of the 'Deployment Process' starts, and we begin steering towards the city's  dismantlable infrastructure. A Lego-Cityesque image begins to form in the reader's mind, though no direct references to Lego-City are made.

One thing that stands out is the fact that unlike other cities built over-time and in different pieces, the Kumbh is built all-at-once. The section details the warlike military strategies adopted in setting out the electricity poles, bridges, etc. It also explains the management structures. It observes that while parts of the infrastructure (such as roads and hospitals) are non-ephemeral (fixed) others come and go.

It, in a way, details the processes and exhaustive measures that go into assembling the temporary city. One observation it makes regarding the division of the city into Sectors, which as per the book is a derivative of post-chandigarh did not settle well with me. Though it is perhaps my own experience, but the arrangement of the tents, and the division into various 'mohalla' like individual camps is reminiscent of refugee camps- seen in images of the partition, and at Jammu. Again, I would have been fascinated if such a juxtaposing has been undertaken.

KP Refugee Camp Tents in Jammu (Left), Kumbh Mela (Right). Image Sources: Internet.

Temporality, villages moving with roped beds, cattle in tow, are not out-of-the-ordinary in India. We are the land of Summer Capitals and Winter Capitals. While the book dived deep into the religious history of India, it did not in my opinion look at the history of Indian Settlements to draw correlations. Though it may not, perhaps, have been important.

The last part of the chapter titled 'Envoi' goes though a lot critical thinking to remind us of the cliché : Change is the Only Constant. It then tells us that urbanism should be 'adjustable' over time, dismantlable almost, to cope with the changing requirements of time. The Section has left me with two questions:

a) Regarding the Sewage disposal. As the book makes observations and does not offer solutions, we are left with an image of a temporary city without fixed infrastructure where open defection is de facto standard. How do you plan for "temporary" human waste disposal[2], or what do learn from it?

b) The end essay has brought in a strange idea in my head regarding 'Heritage' in a city. We normally study continuity in cities, but in an 'adjustable' urbanism as proposed, when the time comes to change, things can be dismantled and reused. Since we are moving from 'permanent' to 'ephemeral', what happens to heritage. Consequently, if the process of 'dismantling' occurs over long periods of time, how is the idea of 'temporality' or 'ephemerality' any different from 'continuity'[3] ? 

Moving forward, the book explains the section-wise purpose and strategy employed while studying the various administrative tools and materials flows in the city. It is clear that the idea of a city that forms on an island, which appears for a few months before disappearing beneath the waters, has an added appeal to the study. While the people studying it focus on the cultural parameters of the Indian Subcontinent for doing so, the image in my mind is that of the mythical Atlantis that sank to the bottom of the ocean, though correlations with Atlantis are incorrect because it never reappeared.

The chapters note that the fluid nature of the floodplain is the focus of the study, and the Grid (which again references Chandigarh) that adapts to the changing river bed, explaining how the grid allows for the laying of both infrastructural and governance tools.

The Health and Safety chapters bring the ritual bath area-the Sangam to the fore. The chapter is broken in sections such as Public health priorites, disaster preparedness etc. While doing so, the authors make the Kumbh Mela sound almost like Ground Zero for Future Pandemics and site the example of the 1817 Cholera for their concerns. The Kumbh becomes 'The Zone' from Tarkovsky's Stalker, complete with raging elephants that cause stampedes. 

The one thing that is mentioned in this chapter is that the present data of disease prevalence (Common colds) is strikingly similar to the London Olympics. I find the thought of comparing the Kumbh to the Olympics very stimulating, and something I did not think of before. The section also covers the stampede at the Allahabad Railway Station and suggests flow analysis and ethnographic analysis for understanding crowd behaviour. In the end they conclude that everything somehow works despite the great risks in everything. [Ram Bharosey!]

The chapter leads to the Maximum load vignette which makes us very aware of the 'Sheer Numbers of Stuff- Beds, toilets, days, and the maximum load on most auspicious bathing days. The Author states how open space reduces drastically on these busy days, which reminds me of Rush Hour Traffic anywhere in the world, but particularly on Andheri Railway Station, when just one hour after the 'rush hour', there is a dramatic transformation. 

Kumbh Mela People (left), Mumbai Local People (right). Funnily, the river can become the train, the cacophony is, well, constant. Image sources: The Great Interweb

Towards the end, the book expects us to learn are 'reversibility' and 'openness'.

In reversibility the authors talk about both material (building materials and systems) and immaterial (governance structures). In a way, the authors are discovering Bright Green Environmentalism and its application in Architecture and Urban Design. Particularly in light of the Viridian Design Principles: "Avoid the Timeless, Embrace Decay" and "Planned Evanescence[4]"

Of course their taxonomy and nomenclature is different (bringing in words like reversibility etc), but the idea in principle seems to be the same. One more time, the distinction between continuity and abruption (It's vanished!) are not particularly clear to me. Though I appreciate the modular architectural design they explain, or things that can be changed into other things.

In urban planning, with the introduction on crowd-sourced mapping, the concept of 'reversibility' becomes more apparent. But before we come to that, we should briefly discuss 'openness'. The authors urge us to look at 'porous' membranes for cities rather than 'boundaries' or limits. From Allahabad to No Man's Land to Jhunsi, where does one end, and the other begin, the idea of 'open' boundaries. In my postgraduate thesis, I had proposed a Zone of Transition between the city and the rural extremities, an area where 'Legalized Squatting' would be permitted, a sort of site and services (Kumbhesque model), an amphibious creature between the city and the village.

So let’s talk about openness and 'reversibility' in cities. Now, a borderless or a city without limits is not possible. Not because of the 'borders' per say, but when we look at cities as thermodynamic living organisms, and apply the basic growth equation, we will find that the metabolism will force it to stop growing. In terms of just interactive borders, the idea of elasticity and expansion, that too with maximum entropy will stop functioning. On the other hand, we can examine what is happening within the Kumbh itself: The Akharas! There are Akhara that have their own flags, their own customs, their own traditions etc. It seems to be a mini-country within a vast seeming similar city or 'open city.' One can argue that the Eurozone functions like an 'open' city, but it is not then in definition a city.

So, here's my theory of what a 'smart city' is and why perhaps calling the kumbh a city is a misnomer.

A smart city is a 'perceivable' space-time that is run through crowd-sourced real time feedback. Think of it as an organism made of several smaller organisms that pool their minds together to run the basic live functions of the city- A hive mind' if you will. There are similarities between city systems and life systems. In Neural systems, the idea of an OSM like software, that is updated and relays real-time information for quick responses, is in fact the idea of a smart city[5]. An organism is smart if it is "self-aware" and the self-awareness is brought about in a transparency between the interactions of the organism with other organisms, and its natural or environmental setting.

The clearer the neural pathways, the smarter the city organism. Which brings us to the point about the Kumbh itself. Is the Kumbh really a City, or is it in fact just a Celebration, albeit a celebration on a very large scale. Mela is a Carnival after all, but the mythical stature of the Ganga makes it more than the sum of its parts I suppose.

In the end the authors urge us to embrace change and build in a temporality into design, and that what we learn from the Kumbh is how to handle to ephemeral nature of built environment. The book has left we with questions regarding what we call our Cities and how self-organization models of governance are perhaps the future of Indian urbanism. It also asks us in a subtle way to pay heed to the existing coping systems of people. For instance, and my biggest grievance with the idea of open-defecation was eventually mitigated when I realized that it probably made sense. People went there every 12 years and fertilized the ground. All in all, the book has left me feeling 'incomplete' since the idea of 'city' is not made clear, neither the ecological implications of a reversibility process. Is it sustainable in the long run? The book does not cover water load or the ecological footprint of diesel run generators. But perhaps incompleteness is in essence ephemerality.

It does not also, simply look at the 'mela' as a 'fair' and by equating it with nagari, I think it loses its mirthful appeal.

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Footnotes:

[1] This reminds me today of the Great Art of Living Circus on the Yamuna Banks of last year, complete with pontoon bridges, golden elephants and bearded men holy men.

[2] The book mentions the well (soak pit, I hope), the cleaners (night-soil sweepers) spraying disinfectant, others burning waste, but the whole thing is highly unsustainable.

[3] As mentioned in the book, when cities are analyzed overlarge spans of time, ephemerality is the only constant. Though perhaps the temporality that the authors suggest within the city is only for the habitation/ residential areas, and indeed a planned squatting model (site and services) is a good option for our cities where housing for all is a distant dream.

[4] "Planned Obsolescence" means that a product will be driven off the market, within a known time-frame, by some purported improvement. The Viridian principle of "Planned Evanescence" extends this practice by demanding that the product and all its physical traces should gracefully disintegrate and vanish entirely.

[5] By adopting an OSM system, cities can "Transform" and "change" things like Land Utilization based on Need. Road networks can adapt, traffic can be rerouted, the idea of a 'temporary public space' can be conceptualized. The fact is the more we move towards 'being smart', the more we need to involve the citizens in the daily functioning of systems. We perhaps also need to define our own urban design language- what do we consider public and semi-public space, what are our land-use models, how the make-shift works in

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