Gathering of the Faithful: LIFE at India’s Colossal Kumbh Mela,
1953 Few spectacles on Earth can compare to the great six-week
Hindu pilgrimage, the ancient Kumbh Mela, during which literally
tens of millions of people make their way to the river Ganges in
order to bathe and worship. The 2013 Kumbh Mela takes place at
Allahabad (Prayag) in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Sixty
years ago, in 1953, LIFE photographer James Burke chronicled an
earlier Kumbh Mela in a series of pictures that, for reasons
lost to time, were never published in the magazine. Here, in the
midst of the 2013 Kumbh Mela, LIFE.com posts a series of those
images — photos that capture something of the raw intensity and
almost overwhelmingly sacral nature of the celebration’s rites.
The great American writer Mark Twain, of all people, also
captured (or at least suggested) the unimaginable scale and the
depth of faith on display everywhere during the phenomenal
gathering: “It is wonderful,” Twain wrote in 1895, after
witnessing that year