Every 12 years, a part of Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad) in Uttar Pradesh turns into a town of countless tents. Millions gather at the confluence of the Ganga, the Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati—many Hindus believe the third flows underground—to take a dip in the holy waters during the Maha Kumbh Mela, believing it would wash away their sins. Sadhus of a myriad sorts, some with naked bodies smeared with ash, are seen acting in ways that most communities would frown upon outside this hyper-religious context. Many claim to🍸 have supernatural powers or great wisdom, and only some get labelled as fakes. This grand confluence of belief, blessings and business has long enjoyed the reputation of being the world’s largest religious gathering.
Much of the attention this year, howeve🐷r, was also grabbed by several mishaps. A stampede at the venue killed at least 30, and another at a railway station took 18 lives. Pilgrims attacked the overcrowded trains they couldn’t board. A scientific report revealed the water at the site for holy dips had high levels of faecal coliform (microbes from human and animal excreta) that made it unfit for bathing. Nothing, though, could stop the millions from landing in Prayagraj until the end of the 45-day event.
The media hype was unprecedented. The Centre, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the Uttar Pradesh (UP) government helmed by ‘Yogi’ Adityanath, a saffron-clad monk-turned-BJP-politician, ꧅aggressively promoted the myths around Kumbh—the Puranic tale of the churning of the ocean to obtain amrit, the nectar of immortality. Social media and a section of the mainstream media widely spread a claim that the 2025 Kumbh was happening at such an auspicious time that occurred after 144 years and would reoccur only after a similar gap, making it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the holy bath.
On February 26, the concluding day, Adityanath told the media that more than 663 million people—roughly 46 per cent of ♓India’s estimated 2024 population of 1.45 billion—visited Prayagraj during the event, making it the religious event with the greatest footfall ever recorded. This enormous figure is five times the attendance at the last Maha Kumbh in 2013 and implies that nearly half o𒐪f the world’s most populous country attended the 2025 edition. While many on social media doubted the numbers, the attendance had indeed prominently increased from the last time.
This massive feat was achieved amidst a surge in pilgrimage and religious tourism in the past decade, with the Modi government aggressively promoting Hindu religious sites and festivities, aptly backed by similar efforts by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led state governments. The BJP has set the tone so well ဣthat🌼 even its rivals emulate its display of Hindu faith in competitive engagement to promote Hindu festivities.
Pilgrimage is one of the world’s early reasons for travel. It was associated with hardship and dedication to reach sacred sites, often distant ones, for spiritual benefits. Over time, it became increasingly involved with comfort and leisure, which are major aspects of secular forms of tourism such as travels to natural or cultural sites. The commercialisation of pilgrimage has birthed what is now more often described as religious/spiritual tourism. While the categories are not watertight, a gro🐎wing number of scholars believe commercialisation and politicisation of the religious sphere have significantly contributed to the growth of religious tourism. An apt example of combining the two is the West Bengal government’s state-sponsored building of a grand Jagannath temple in Digha, a traditional beach destinatio꧅n bordering Odisha.
According to a 2024 report by KPMG, spiritual tourism accounted for nearly 60 per cent of domestic tourism in India, apart from drawing international tourists. The report noted a special surge in the post-COVID pandemic period. The traditional pilgrimage sites🅷 like the Vaishno Devi temple in north India, the Tirupati temple in south India or the Gangasagar fair in east India are also recording steadily rising numbers of tourists. Similar is the case of the Sikh pilgrimage site of Amritsar’s Golden Temple and the Sufi dargah of Ajmer Sharif.
Besides these traditional destinations, the new Ram temple in UP’s Ayodhya has emerged as a crowd-puller since its consecration in January 2024. Located on the land where the med🧜ieval Babri mosque stood until December 6, 1992, when Hindu-nationalist zealots demolished it, the Ram temple had been an electoral promise of the BJP since the 1990s. Built in just about four years, it became UP’s most-visited tourist attraction by the end of 2024, drawing more than 1 lakh visitors daily, surpassing the Taj Mahal, the medieval Mughal structure considered to be one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Global Growth
Th🎐e Indian scenario is not an isolated affair. Record gatherings are also being witnessed in all major traditional pilgrimage sites—the Vatican, the Mecca, the Lumbini—as well as in relatively new miracle-oriented Christian sites like Lourdes (France), Fatima (Portugal) and Medjugorje (Bosnia-Herzegovina). A January 2025 report by the India-based Business Research Company predicted an 8.5 per cent growth in religious tourism until 2029. It identified West Asia as the largest region in the religious tourism market in 2024 and expected Europe to be the fastest-growing region in the forecast period.
Take the case of the town of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. A popular European pilgrimage destina💝tion in the medieval period, its popularity had been dwindling since the 15th century, with its festivals largely becoming local events, until an 1879 claim that the remains of St. James, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus, were found in the medieval cathedral there. Consistent state support since the late 1980s led to a surge in pilgrimage since the 1990s, resulting in the 2010 Hollywood film, The Way, which furthered its popularity. Today, it is one of Europe’s most popular pilgrimages—about half a million pilgrims visited the cathedral in 2024, marking a new record.
“Catapulted by the ease of contemporary travel, it (religious tourism) grows in such an unstoppable way that each year new places of pilgrimage are put on offer—or are invented by political and tourist agencies alike—intertwining contemporary awareness and its confused search for ‘meaning’ and transcendence,” Anton M. Pazos writes in Pilgrims and Politics: Rediscovering the Power of the Pilgrimage, the 2012 book he edited.
Jerusalem, a site holy for all three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianit🍃y and Islam—has also seen an increasing number of visitors, despite being a disputed territory partly under Israel’s occupation. While Israel occasionally restricts entry to some Muslims to specific sites, a survey carried out by the business intelligence company Euromonitor International reported a 38 per cent growth in tourism to Jerusalem in 2019. The tourism industry is one of Jerusalem’s main pillars of economic activity due to its historical and religious importance. It is home to the Western Wall or the Wailing Wall, the holiest site for the Jews. The Temple Mount houses the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque—two major Islamic shrines. It is also home to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of the holiest sites for Christians. And it is so important from a religious perspective, especially to Jews, that land plots for burial at some places can go as high as $20,000-$30,000 and beyond.
Factors behind this global surge include people’s increasing inclination towards religion and spirituality, commercialisation of pilgrimage tours and sites, improvement of infrastructure and governmental backing, as well as promotion of religious markers by right-wing populists. According to a 2024 report by Grand View Research, an India and US-based market research and consulting company, religious tourism among the 40-60-year-old age group accounted for the largest market share—around 35 per cent in 2023—followed by the 20-40-year-old age group. Religious tourism among the second🔴 group is expected to witness a significant growth at the compound annual gr🌜owth rate of 16.5 per cent from 2024 to 2030, as this age group is “increasingly interested in immersive travel experiences that offer both personal growth and connection to cultural heritage”. The report said social media and digital platforms play a key role behind this increase in interest as young adults’ sharing of their travel experiences inspires peers and creates trends around religious destinations.
Monetising Myths
In the 20th-century Bengali writer Shibram Chakraborty’s short story Debotar Janmo (Birth of a Deity), the protagonist digs out a large pebble protruding from the ground that was a stumbling block on his way out of home and dumps it on the roadside. A few days later, some people start worshipping the pebble. Then it is removed and installed along the roots of a large peepal tree. The pebble now looks like a half-buried Shiva Lingam. Some sanyasis camp there and devotees begin flowing in. The pebble gradually finds its way inside a temple that draws devotees from faraway places for offering miraculous solutions to small pox. In popular culture, R K Narayan’s novel, Guide, which was turned into the Dev Aanand-starrer eponymous movie, shows ho𝔍w easy it is to deceive common p🦩eople and pose as saints.
In real life, on June 24, 1981, six students from Medjugorje village in Bosnia-Herzegovina claimed to have received apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Since then, they became known as ‘visionಌaries’ and Medjugorje emerged as a major tourist destination, complete with a grand statue of the Virgin Mary installed in 2006. Between February and July 1858, Bernadette Soubirous, a young girl from the French town of Lourdes, claimed to have received 1🌌8 apparitions from the Virgin Mary in a cave on the town’s outskirts. The cave, now known as the Grotto, soon became a popular pilgrimage spot. Similarly, three shepherd children in the Portuguese town of Fátima claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary six times between May and October 1917.
Today, Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje are major pilgrimage sites—Lourdes is France’s most popular r🍎eligious tourism site, Fatima is Portugal’s, and Medjugorje holds the same status in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Now that the Vatican has approved pilgrimages to Medjugorje in September 2014, the eastern European town is expected to see even more tourists. As of 2025, tourism is among the main sources of income for Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje.
In 2014, UNWTO Secretary-General Taleb Rifai said leveraging the growing interest in religious tourism worldwide is not only beneficial for the tourism sector, but also crucial in building cultural dialogue and peace. “Relig♚ious tourism can also be a powerful instrument for raising awareness regarding the importance of safeguarding one’s heritage and that of humanity, and help preserve the⛎se important sites for future generations,” Rifai said.
A major driver behind the growth in religious or spiritual tourism is the rise in religiosity in the first quarter of the 21st century that is sometimes seen as a reaction or counterblast to the secularisation that societies have gone through🐷 over the past two centuries. It is also seen as a response to the rising socio-economic insecurity in public life with the ceaselessly growing wealth inequalities. There is also social fatigue with an overdose of consumerism. And, above all, right-wi🎃ng populists are actively promoting religious practices as part of ‘national identity’, often leading to greater emphasis on traditional gender norms and attitudes against homosexuality, restrictions on scientific thinking and democratic practices, and rising social polarisation.
In the words of Simon Coleman and John Eade, who co-edited Pilgrimage and Political Economy, pilgrimage is not only a source of popular religious activity, but also subject to varied forms of control by national churches, denominations, social movements, commercial enterprises, regional and national governments, and transnational organisations such as UNESCO. As Alokparna Das writes in a 2016 essay in the International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, since the political relevance of religion in our contemporary world cannot be disputed, particularly in the context of a growing consumerist culture and the divisive tactics of most political organisations, pilgrimage traditions and centres are perio🌠dically taken over by political groups. “As a particular pilgrimage tradition evolves, sacred sites become formalised into organised socio-political systems with economic overtones,” she writes.
Pilgrimage and Polarisation
In India, the use of myths or legends to create new religious festivals has a sectarian angle, apart from the economic benefits. In 2006-05, Hindu-nationalist monk ‘Swami’ Aseemanand used existing local legends among Adivasis in Gujarat’s Dang district to launch a temple and an annual ‘Kumbh’ fair named after Sabari, a Ramayana character whom some Dang district tribals considerꩲ their ancestor. This was the ‘fifth’ Kumbh—outside the four traditional Kumbh locations of Prayagraj, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nasik. While the fair found full state patronage from Modi, the then Gujarat chief minister, said that the temple and the festival were conceived as part of a plan to ‘reconvert’ tribal Christians into the Hi🍎ndu fold. The Hindutva camp, on the other hand, claimed they were merely trying to stop Christian missionaries from converting Adivasis into Christians.
PM Modi also lauded yet another ‘Kumbh fair’ that sprung up in 2021 in West Bengal’s Hooghly district. It was later revealed that a doctored doctoral thesis from the University of Oxford was♉ used to claim the existence of a ‘Kumbh Mela’ that supposedly got stopped seven centuries ago “due to Islamic aggression” and which the organisers were supposedly “reviving”. Despite Canadian anthropologist Alan Morinis calling out the doctoring of his paper to “revive” a non-existent festival, the Trinamool Congress-run local civic body continued to back the Hindu-nationalist initiative. The civic body chief argued that supporting the fair could earn the tꦗown revenue from pilgrimage, while opposing it could hurt Hindu religious sentiments.
Such promotion of religion and religious tourism, however, may not always work politically. One case is that of Ayodhya, where despite fulfilling its promise of erecting a Ram temple, the BJP lost the local parliamentary seat in the 2024 general election. The tourism push had generated some resentment among the locals who feared losing out to richer players from within and outside the state. “The promotion of religious toꦓurism often prioritises capital accumulation and development, resulting in substantial investments in the religious sites’ surroundings at the expense of neglecting t🌊he rest of a town and community. Frequently, successful religious tourism benefits local elites rather than residents and small and medium-sized enterprises,” Jaeyeon Choe of the School for Business and Society at the UK’s Glasgow Caledonian University writes in a 2024 article.
The 2025 Maha Kumbh was also unprecedented in another respect—the absence of Muslims. First, the Akhil Bhartiya Akhada Parishad, an apex body of Hindu seers, demanded non-Hindus be proscribed from setting up shops during the event and that only Hindu cops be deployed. “Although Muslims are our brothers, and we don’t have any enmity with them, they shouldn’t set up shops during the Maha Kumbh Mela as they will corrupt our religion. They shouldn’t set up grocery shops, juice shops, food stalls a𝔍nd tea shops, as they spit on the food delibꦇerately,” said the Akhara Parishad chief ‘Mahant’ Ravindra Puri early in January.
On January 13, asked about the proposed ban on Muslims from setting up shops, CM Adityanath said only people who respect and honour Hinduism were welcome at the Kumbh Mela as it was a confluence of believers. He said Muslims who acknowledge that their ancestors converted to Islam under certain pressuresཧ and now trace their lineage to their original Hindu identity were welcome to take the holy dip in the Ganga. “But, if someone comes with an ugly mentality, it wouldn’t be a good feeling for that person and people may treat them differently. Those kinds of people better not come,” said the saffron-clad CM.
This was not the first Hindu pilgrimage to see such exclusion of𒉰 Muslims. During the Kanwar Yatra—a pilgrimage taken out by the devotees of Shiva that has become increasingly popular in recent years—the administration in UP and Uttarakhand asked shopkeepers along the journey route to prominently display the names of shop owners so that pilgrims could buy only from shops owned by Hindus. As of 2025, the BJP governments in UP and Uttarakhand were busy setting up a wide network of Hindu pilgrimage sites, organised into circuits, including sites like the Vishwanath temple in Kashi and the Krishna Janmabhoomi temple in Mathura—two other sites caught in disputes between Hindu and Muslim claimant🐈s.
Amidst such state patronage of Hindu festivals, the Modi government in 2018 cancelled the subsidy that the Centre used to give Muslims on Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Hindu nationalists criticised past governments that gave Hajj subsidies for ‘appeasing’ Muslims. Such exclusionary policies are not rare when politics uses pilgrimage for social polarisation. In Saving the People: How Populists Hijack Religion (2016), the authors contend that religion for the populists is more about belonging than belief. Olivier Roy, one of the co-editors, writes that for populist parties, “Religion matters first and foremost as a marker of identity, enabling them to distinguish between the good ‘us’ and the bad ‘them’.” They are deploying religious identitie𒀰s and traditions to define who can and cannot be part of “the people”.
Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is a Journalist, author and researcher
This article is a part of Outlook's March 21, 2025 issue 'Pilgrim's Progress', which explores the unprecedented upsurge in religious tourism in India. It appeared in print as 'Turn Right for Religion'.
