Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 1765-1954

Kama Maclean is a historian of modern South Asia, and this Oxford University Press book is her academic history of the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage at Allahabad and its relationship to political power from 1765 to 1954, spanning the late Mughal, colonial and early independence periods. Its strength is that it treats the Mela not as an unchanging timeless ritual but as an event whose organization and meaning were actively shaped by shifting political authority across nearly two centuries, grounded in colonial administrative and Indian sources. Its limit is chronological, it covers this specific historical window ending in 1954, so a claim about the Kumbh Mela's more recent organization or its ancient origins needs a source addressing those separate periods rather than this one.