1.2 My experience during and after the mela:

In 2015, Nashik hosted the Kumbh Mela. I grew up in this city to see it grow and expand, but as I witnessed the Kumbh Mela unfold, my perception towards the city changed completely. Nashik witnesses a lot of infrastructural changes to hold this massive carnival together. A lot of money is invested by the state to provide these facilities to the pilgrims. The city also benefits from this. Public infrastructure such as roads and buses undergo a lot of upgrades. Some of these infrastructure remains, and others dissolve after the mela. This experience has left many images of the city in my memory ranging from how the city scape changed itself to how my household used to function during the three months of high footfall. The schools remained shut for a few weeks, as transportation on roads were only limited to essentials.

During these days, I remember my father walking me from our home to the ghats every other day to witness this grand religious gathering. Out of these memories, the one that was most prevalent was of the walk within the sadhugram. For me, I had never seen this part of the city, even though it was in a close proximity to the city center. The streets were flooded with people, engaging in various activities within this designated area, which is uncommon to the everyday life of Nashik. The carnival is a city, built to host a hundred thousand people and millions more. The walk went on for hours, as I saw the carnival unfold into public demonstrations, performances of bhajans, keertans, kathas, various groups/ akhadas engaging in storytelling of gods, large gathering tents for bhandaras and other religious cultural events. One could roam around the streets to engage with any of these activities, and visit akhadas which were connected through large streets. The city functioned as how a normal city would function, with its own set of clinics, surveillance, sanitation infrastructure, and a visitor center, all built only to last for three core months of the mela. The entire city is built on the idea of “dissolving” back.

In 2021, my mother took me back to Tapovan to buy plants for our home. The experience of space had changed. The hustle and bustle of the mela had vanished and only things remained were the infrastructure like street lights and wider roads. The cries of children, continuous repeating religious chants, millions of simultaneous conversations and tents are gone. It felt like the space “died”. It was stripped from all its characters and vibrant colours of the festival. The memories of the Mela, still were reminiscing in my head, and how the space did not justify what I thought it might have been.

But interestingly, after the Kumbh Mela ended, the space transformed itself and the city started to appropriate the spaces. My interest rose in how the space gets appropriated for this duration of 12 years. This interest grew not only because of its vicinity with my home but also because of its vicinity with the city. Being near the ghats of the river as well as highly connected to highways, the space holds a lot of potential, not only for residence but also for industries, but the space is especially reserved for the Sadhugram. This process will continue till the next Kumbh Mela. The idea of reservation of land with respect to an event at such a scale, where there are multiple parties and individuals involved, grew my interest in how the land shapes itself for its timeline. Mainly, during the non-event times, where the land finds itself different user groups and individuals to carry out different temporal activities. These activities are shaped by tradition, by nomads, by citizens, by regulations, by practice and also mainly by the event.

1.3 Romanticizing of the temporaries:

The idea of temporary is discussed in architecture perpetually. In the modern era, cities started to be theorized with the idea of permanence. Many architects started to critique this practice.

Rahul Mehrotra talks about how cities should be made with this idea of temporary kept in mind. He talks about it by studing the temporal nature of Sadhugram built in the Kumbh Mela of Prayagraj in 2013, and the Ganpati pandals that emerge everyyear in the city of Mumbai. Using this examples, he calls them the “pop-up city”, which is built for an event, by then dismantles itself and vanishes, absorbing itself in its surroundings.

Looking at this, the affordability of this city is due its toolkit of materials, and high coordination of state infrastrucutre. This toolkit consistes of bamboo, rope, nails, a cover material like tarpolene sheets and tadpatri. These materials built the aesthetics of this pop-up city, by forming “tents” as typology to cater to many functions in this city.

In a better understanding, this landscape essentiantially could be understood as a camp space, as it is also called as “Simhastha camp”. An “ephemeral megacity”, having its own logics of organising and production of saptiality.

But in his works, the land on which this megacity is constructed upon, is built on banks of the river. As the cosmological cycle suggests that the event takes place during the month of February, which means the water in the river resides, providing acres of land for the event to harness in the banks. Looking at this, the temporal city, has a clean slate to built on. The metaphor of “pop-up” remains valid due its tabula rasa of banks. Hence a climatical phenomenon affords such a city.

In modern architecture, cities are often theorised with the idea of permanence. Events then are part of the city where this notion of permanence is seen to be broken. The aesthetics of these spaces are ephemeral, meaning the way we theorise cities need newer analogies. The need to understand this ephemeral nature of the city, temporal activities become ground to study its complexity, form and politics revolving around them. A concern that emerges is that cities are theorized with the idea of permanence, but there is a romanticizing of the temporary city as well which does not negotiate with land politics.