Mahakumbh: Order Within the Divine Surge
Mahakumbh
Order Within the Divine Surge
Coffee Table Book: Mahakumbh — Order Within the Divine Surge
Published for Uttar Pradesh Police
There are times when you stand before an enormous river and wonder how you are ever going to enter it, leave alone cross it.
Mahakumbh 2025 felt like that to me.
Except that this river was made of people. In fact, it wasn’t even a river, but a never-ending sea… a huge ocean of emotions.
Faith. Humanity.
An extraordinary scale.
An assignment.
An ocean of possibility.
The 2025 gathering was widely described as a once-in-144-years spiritual occasion. By the time Mahakumbh ended, the official figure used in our book was more than 66 crore pilgrim visits over a period of just a few weeks. More than 50,000 personnel were part of the policing effort, apart from the numerous specialist, emergency and paramilitary agencies involved.
Uttar Pradesh Police approached us to create a visual record of Mahakumbh and the immense effort involved in securing it.
The assignment would eventually involve photography, films and a coffee table book bringing together two seemingly different worlds: the spiritual and human experience of Mahakumbh, and the enormous security apparatus working behind it.
It was an exciting proposal. I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to take it on.
I had photographed Mahakumbh in 2013. When the akhadas arrived for the snan, the sudden rush and chaos made me drop my camera. I lost it in the crowd; a few foreign photographers around me lost their equipment too. That experience was one reason I wasn't entirely comfortable about returning to crowds of that scale.
And then there was the freezing January cold. After living in Mumbai for most of the last 25 years, that wasn't particularly inviting either.
Rupali, however, was excited by the visual possibilities. She wanted to create a strong photographic body of work and direct a short film that could capture the faith, scale and extraordinary human energy of Mahakumbh.
We spoke about it at length. It was Rupali who began breaking what appeared to be an impossible assignment into something we could actually execute.
January was already packed with our NSG, Mumbai Police and other professional commitments. Instead of attempting one continuous Mahakumbh shoot, we divided the documentation into phases.
Even before Rupali reached Mahakumbh, we had sent an advance camera team to capture its moods and moments. She had given them clear instructions on what she wanted covered and how. Rupali would take the first substantial phase, photographing people, sadhus, akharas and rituals while working closely with camera and high-end cinematic drone teams. I would follow later, concentrating considerably more on security, technology, action and the multiple forces deployed across Mahakumbh.
Rupali was there on the chaotic night of Mauni Amavasya and spent the night in a boat, in the freezing cold. I remember being concerned for her as the crowds continued to grow. People kept arriving in extraordinary numbers even after the major snans.
When Rupali returned from that first phase, she brought back much more than photographs and footage. She had met many akhada heads and spiritual leaders, and the experience had been as spiritual as it was creative.
Looking through her work, I felt proud of her. She was already known for fashion and action photography, but here I saw another side of her, both as a photographer and a filmmaker. This was a different scale of work. The photographs were beautiful and soulful.
We had made a commitment, and eventually I went with the intention of shooting for four or five days. Once I had settled there, I began to understand how much more the event deserved. Four or five days became more than two weeks. Mahakumbh deserved more photography, more films and more time than we had initially imagined.
A river
made of people.
Nothing really prepares you for the physical scale of Mahakumbh.
Akhadas, camps, bathing areas and security sectors were spread across an enormous temporary city. Something that appeared a kilometre away could take hours to reach. Vehicles help only until vehicles can move.
Thereafter, everybody walks.
Eight or ten kilometres in a working day became perfectly normal for our teams.
There were times when I simply stopped photographing. I would stand and watch, soaking in the moment. When I could detach myself from the movement around me and look at the faces, I saw people who had walked for miles and miles, yet did not seem tired. Something kept them moving towards the river, towards that holy dip.
I saw sons pushing elderly parents in wheelchairs for miles because there was no other way of getting them to the holy waters. I remember watching a man carrying his old mother on his shoulders through that enormous crowd. Yet neither of them looked tired.
I don't think everything I saw can be explained. Some moments can only be experienced, not fully captured in words or photographs.
What makes someone travel hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres, walk for hours through an unimaginable crowd and endure every discomfort for a few moments in the waters of the Sangam?
One police inspector told me about his 84-year-old mother insisting that she too wanted to come for the holy dip. He tried explaining the crowd, the walking and the risks at her age.
Her response stayed with me.
If something happened to her there, she asked him, what better place could there be for her to leave this world?
You don't have to explain faith after that. Perhaps you cannot.
The Challenge of
Photographing Mahakumbh
For photographers and filmmakers, Mahakumbh is visually extraordinary. It can also be a nightmare.
The akhara you want may be miles away. A procession isn't going to wait because you haven't found your angle. The sadhu whose face fascinates you has absolutely no obligation to be photographed.
He hasn't come down from the mountains for your camera.
You want the photograph.
That's your problem, not his.
Then there are crowds that can knock you off balance, cameras and equipment close to water, constantly changing access, VVIP movements, drone restrictions and security protocols that will not change merely because you have a photograph in your head.
Even with the necessary permissions, a drone in the air could suddenly be affected when security jammers were activated during VIP movement. These were practical realities we had to work around while trying to capture Mahakumbh.
There were occasions when we were moving with senior police officials and another policeman standing at a barricade simply wouldn't allow us to cross.
As a photographer it could be maddening. Sometimes the difference between where you were standing and a potentially great photograph was five feet.
But it was impressive too. At Mahakumbh, rules had to remain rules.
The policeman holding that line had been assigned a responsibility.
Nobody crossed.
The same reality confronted us while documenting the security apparatus. UP Police, CRPF, SDRF, NDRF, Railway Police, Jal Police, Fire and Emergency Services, specialist teams and other forces were all working within the larger system. More than 13,000 UP Home Guards alone were deployed across sectors supporting policing, traffic, crowd management and emergency response.
It was an enormous collective effort by Uttar Pradesh Police and the security, rescue and emergency agencies working alongside it.
On paper, coordination appeared straightforward.
On the ground, everybody was working.
People weren't sitting around waiting for a photography team. Days could disappear trying to find the right unit at the right location during a window in which it could actually be documented.
Eventually, I stopped waiting.
Over the years I had worked directly with many of these forces and their headquarters. I began making calls myself, explaining what we were documenting and why their contribution needed to become part of the visual record.
That helped us locate personnel, understand what they were actually doing and find operational windows in which they could be photographed without interfering with their responsibilities.
It was equally important that we did not manufacture action merely because it would make an exciting photograph.
Preparedness drills happen before an event. Once millions of pilgrims occupy Mahakumbh, the people trained for those situations are no longer demonstrating their work. They are doing it.
What we were creating was also an archive. It needed to remain truthful and as close to reality as possible.
Across an event of this scale, no single team could possibly be everywhere. Uttar Pradesh Police also made available additional photographs from its documentation resources for moments our teams had missed. Those became part of the larger material from which the final book was constructed.
Keep people
moving.
One of the things that fascinated me most was how technology had begun changing crowd management. At the heart of the system was the Integrated Command and Control Centre—the ICCC.
Thousands of surveillance cameras fed into the system, with around 500 using AI-powered analytics to study crowd density, movement patterns and potential risks. Drone feeds and field information were integrated into live dashboards where officers could see inflow rates, heat maps, emerging bottlenecks and changing crowd movement.
Surveillance extended above and below the visible world. Tethered drones monitored dense sectors from the air. Underwater drones were used during peak bathing periods. Anti-drone systems watched the airspace, while Jal Police, divers, patrol boats, floating watch posts and remotely controlled rescue equipment formed part of river safety.
Behind all this was another largely invisible network. Ahead of the event, the Department of Telecommunications described an expansion across Prayagraj and the Mela area involving more than 900 new mobile base stations and over 300 kilometres of optical fibre. Within the Mela area, 78 transportable mobile towers, known as cells on wheels, were being deployed to help meet the demand for connectivity.
But what fascinated me most was the simplicity of the principle all this technology ultimately served:
Keep people moving.
I began understanding it while walking inside the crowds myself.
A moving crowd has a rhythm.
As long as the flow continues, extraordinary numbers of people can keep progressing. They enter through designated routes, move towards the Sangam, take their holy dip and continue onwards.
The moment movement stops, the psychology changes.
Perhaps those thousands of cameras, AI systems, control rooms, barriers, routes and police personnel were ultimately doing something remarkably similar to what one does beside a powerful river. They were watching the current.
I remember standing with an IPS officer, looking at the crowds, and asking him how they managed something on this scale. He smiled, looked towards the Sangam and said that we might think it was us doing it, but it was the divine, the Ganga, that made it possible.
Months before those crowds arrived, the work was already underway. As the river receded, a temporary city was taking shape across 4,000 hectares and 25 sectors: roads laid over sand, 30 pontoon bridges assembled across the river, and water, electricity, sanitation, communications and accommodation put in place. At the same time, police and emergency teams were preparing for the movement and safety of millions, training personnel, planning routes and duties, and setting up the systems they would need on the ground.
The scale was in all of it: the city, the movement of people, and the preparation needed to keep them safe. That was what we were trying to document.
Waiting for the Light
The possibility of a photograph can keep you moving long after you are tired. Sometimes it keeps you awake all night because you have imagined what the Sangam might look like at sunrise.
The early January mornings were freezing and foggy. The beautiful sunrise over the Sangam that we had imagined did not conveniently appear because photographers were waiting for it.
So we waited.
That happens often in photography. You may have seen an extraordinary image of a place made during another season, another year, under light that perhaps existed for three minutes.
You arrive expecting to find it.
It isn't there.
A photographer can decide where to stand. A photographer cannot order the sun to rise through the fog.
Eventually, the light came.
Filming the Greater Mahakumbh
Alongside the photographs, we made a short documentary on Mahakumbh. Rupali filmed Mahakumbh extensively with her team, directing both the ground camera teams and the aerial units, including the cinematic drone sequences of the snans and the immense crowds. We gathered far more footage than could fit into one film: a visual record we could return to for a lifetime.
The assignment itself grew. As the government saw the crowds extending to other religious destinations, the idea expanded into Greater Mahakumbh. We went beyond Prayagraj to Ayodhya and Kashi Vishwanath in Varanasi.
As the flow of pilgrims continued, the roads to the other cities grew increasingly congested. Moving our teams and equipment between locations became a challenge in itself.
We went on to Mathura and Vrindavan, to Shri Krishna Janmabhoomi and Banke Bihari Temple, and then to photograph the iconic Holi celebrations of Barsana and Nandgaon.
Across roughly 30–35 days, we and our teams photographed and filmed in phases. It became one of our biggest projects ever.
Turning Mahakumbh Into a Book
By the time our documentation ended, we had accumulated an enormous visual archive—photographs, films, aerial imagery, technical information and human experiences.
Now we had to make a book. And strangely, that may have been the more difficult assignment.
I had initially assumed Uttar Pradesh Police would already have a broad structure in mind. They had produced a publication around an earlier Kumbh and understood their own systems far better than we ever could.
DGP Prashant Kumar made it clear that repeating what had been done earlier was precisely what they did not want.
When I had arrived at Mahakumbh, he had laughingly told me that he hoped we would make them look the way we made NSG look.
I told him that what they were attempting here was probably far bigger than anything a single agency could ever do.
At one stage, we had a virtual conference with around eight senior IPS officers at Police Headquarters in Lucknow.
I was on one side of the screen. On the other were officers responsible for different aspects of Mahakumbh.
And the question before us was surprisingly fundamental:
What was this book actually going to be?
If I made it predominantly about policing, it would become a police archive.
If we concentrated too heavily on the spectacle and spirituality of Mahakumbh, the extraordinary security operation would disappear.
Too many dignitaries and it would become a VIP album. Too much technology and it would begin resembling a technical report.
There were suggestions that the book should also cover the numerous other government departments responsible for electricity, infrastructure, healthcare and the many services required to create a temporary city of this magnitude.
Their contribution was undoubtedly enormous.
But I was very clear about one thing.
This was not a department book.
Before showing how Mahakumbh had been secured, we first had to establish what was being secured.
The faith.
The journey.
The sadhus and akharas.
The six principal Snans, including the three Amrit Snans.
The Sangam.
And above everything, that almost incomprehensible ocean of humanity.
Only after experiencing that could the reader understand the magnitude of creating order within it.
Among the senior officers in that discussion was ADG Law & Order Amitabh Yash. His response gave me considerable confidence. In substance, his view was simple: everyone understands their own profession best. The police would provide the operational and technical knowledge; as creators, we should be trusted to decide how the story needed to be told.
That trust mattered.
Additional SP (PRO) Rahul Srivastav also remained closely involved as this enormously complicated project moved through its different stages, helping bring together the many threads required for the documentation and eventually the book.
We still needed a thread that could connect worlds that seemed almost impossible to put into the same publication.
Eventually, the answer came from something much older than any contemporary security system.
Sanskrit shlokas.
I began researching shlokas whose meanings could introduce the philosophy behind different sections of the book. A Sanskrit thought could establish an idea; the photographs and contemporary narrative could then carry the reader forward.
We developed the thought and structure, bringing Sanskrit shlokas into the book’s narrative. The book credits Professor Ramnarayan Dwivedi Acharya of BHU for the Sanskrit verses.
Suddenly, faith, philosophy, people, photography, policing and technology could coexist without competing with each other. The book had found its voice.
Order Within the Divine Surge
Then came the cover.
What represents Mahakumbh?
A sadhu?
Millions of pilgrims?
The Sangam?
Chief Minister Shri Yogi Adityanath, under whose government this enormous exercise had been undertaken?
The police?
We designed multiple possibilities.
The Chief Minister's Office was remarkably clear that the book was about Mahakumbh and the cover was ultimately a creative decision.
That freedom allowed us to think of it not as a portrait, but as a story.
The final cinematic composition brought together the elements we felt couldn't be separated: the spiritual world represented by the sadhu, the enormous congregation, the sacred waters, Chief Minister Shri Yogi Adityanath with the senior police command, and mounted police, whose ability to move through dense crowds made them such an important visual symbol of policing at Mahakumbh.
And finally came the title:
Mahakumbh — Order Within the Divine Surge.
The back cover went in the opposite direction.
After a front filled with humanity, faith, administration and movement, there was simply a beautiful sunrise and a solitary bird flying through it.
For me, it suggested renewal.
A new morning.
Perhaps a new meaning of life.
There were many photographs we loved that never entered the final book. That is one of the hardest parts of becoming the publisher of your own photography.
A beautiful photograph doesn't automatically deserve a page. A book cannot simply become a collection of beautiful pictures. Every image has to earn its place within the larger story.
The physical object itself was treated with the same care. We chose 200 GSM Natural Evolution White paper, hard binding, premium finishing and electroplated detailing. Special copies were housed in an elegant black presentation case with Mahakumbh detailing on the top.
It had begun as an assignment to document an event. It had become an object intended to remain in an archive long after the temporary city itself had disappeared.
The finished book was eventually released by Chief Minister Shri Yogi Adityanath along with senior officials of the Government of Uttar Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh Police.
Beyond the frame.
But when I think about Mahakumbh today, the release isn't the first thing that comes to mind.
I remember Rupali returning from her first phase, and how proud I felt looking at the photographs and footage she had brought back.
The kilometres we walked.
The freezing mornings.
The impossible crowds.
Camera and drone teams trying to find positions in a world that wouldn't stop for them.
Policemen refusing to move a barricade five feet even for the people making their own book.
Officers explaining their systems until I understood what I was actually photographing.
Nights spent managing and backing up enormous amounts of footage from multiple cameras.
Waiting for access. Waiting for light.
And sometimes putting the camera down and simply watching a son carry his elderly mother towards the Sangam.
Documenting Mahakumbh brought a responsibility too.
The same Mahakumbh could have been photographed entirely as chaos.
Our story was about finding the method within that apparent madness—the extraordinary attempt to create order within the divine surge.
A photographer or filmmaker always makes that choice.
The world in front of the camera contains countless simultaneous truths. The frame can contain only one.
By the time it was all over, I realised that what we had witnessed, photographed and filmed was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for us.
And none of it might have happened had Rupali not insisted on going to Mahakumbh.
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