Since then, I have returned to the Kumbh as it completes its quadrennial cycle across the four sacred sites. There are few spectacles that rival it—humanity gathered at an epic scale, bound by faith, and the singular act of immersion into the holy waters of the sacred rivers. In my early years, I was seduced by the enormity, its religiosity, and the charged rituals of devotion. I tried to photograph the grandeur, the crowds, and the visual excess of belief made visible at an overwhelming scale. I had seen everything there was to see, I did make photographs that worked—Images that bore the familiar markers of the Kumbh. The photographs were assured, even striking, but they felt insufficient. It took multiple visits and lot of time to recognise this gap.

When I returned to the Kumbh in 2019, now at Prayagraj, something shifted. This time, I walked away from the Sangam, the sacred confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna, toward the mela grounds, into the vast, makeshift city that rises briefly and then disappears on the riverbed—I began to notice people. Individuals who, until then, had been absorbed into the scale of the gathering.

Away from the epicentre of the Kumbh, the crowds loosened, and the faces emerged. It was here, at the edge of the spectacle, that my attention settled. The Kumbh no longer revealed itself to me as a singular, overwhelming event, but as a collection of lives—each shaped by belief, routine, endurance, and fatigue. In the periphery, where the noise softened, people could be seen one at a time in their ordinariness.

As I spent time on the mela grounds, the Kumbh felt far less ceremonial. I found myself drifting into people’s lives—watching how they slept, worked, waited, and lived. What surfaced were patterns of order and imbalance, social hierarchies that were stark and unavoidable. The vanity of the mela slowly receded, replaced by encounters that were deeply unsettling. Standing there, I began to question what kind of conviction sustains such journeys. What draws people across distances, carrying little except belief? It was impossible not to reckon with the depth of faith that brings people to the Kumbh.