What were the past Kumbhs at Nashik and Trimbakeshwar like?

It ran for a little over a year. The flag day at Ramkund was 14 July 2015, and the period ran to 11 August 2016, the day of the flag lowering, and the flag hoisting has both ends of that. In between, the calendar for Nashik had seven days marked. The flag at Ramkund on 14 July. The akhadas’ flag at their camp at Sadhugram about a month later. A first bath on 26 August, in the bright half of Shravan. Then the three shahi snans, on 29 August, 13 September and 18 September, the days the akhadas go to the river in procession and bathe before everyone else, and the shahi snan says what those days are. And a last marked bath on 25 September, Vaman Dwadashi.

An अखाड़ा akhada is an order of sadhus with its own head, its own rule, its own property and its own place in the bathing order at a Kumbh. The word originally meant a wrestling ground. The akhadas came in two sets, as they always do here: the three Vaishnav akhadas bathed at Ramkund in Nashik and the ten Shaiva and Udasin akhadas at Kushavarta in Trimbakeshwar, the arrangement the Peshwas made after clashes between the sadhus of the two sects, and why the Kumbh is at two places has the whole of it, with no year, because nobody has written one down. The akhadas has all thirteen by name.

At Nashik the camp was at Tapovan, the forest on the river below Panchavati, and at Trimbakeshwar in a smaller camp of its own, and Sadhugram has the acreage and the plots of both in full.

This Kumbh is being planned from that one. The way people moved and parked in 2015 was reviewed, and the pattern of who was given what land at Tapovan was studied, before the plan for this one was written.

The ghats. A घाट ghat is the flight of stone steps leading down into a river, and the bank they stand on, and the ghat works for 2015 ran along the Godavari at Nashik: from Talkuteshwar down to the Kannamwar bridge, from the Lakshmi Narayan temple down to where the Kapila comes in at Tapovan, and at Takli further down. At Trimbakeshwar there were ghat works for the same year. Ramkund and the bathing places on the Godavari are what those ghats run past.

It was held at Nashik and Trimbakeshwar in the year 2003–04. That is the one line there is about it.

The railway reached Nashik Road in 1862, and by the Simhastha that ran from September 1872 to October 1873 people could come to Nashik by train and go on to Trimbak by road, and far more came than before. In an ordinary year the fair at Trimbak drew its thousands. In a Simhastha year it drew many times that, and the town of Trimbak, small then as now, filled up and emptied again as the pilgrims came and went, most of them staying no more than a fortnight.

The sadhus came from all over India to the twelve-yearly fair, in their orders, each with its own math, and they went in procession from their monasteries to bathe at Kushavarta, and in 1872 it was arranged that each order’s procession moved at a different time of the day.

Walk the ghats at Nashik downstream from Ramkund and much of what you walk on dates from the works for 2015. At Tapovan the ground where the camp stood is a forest and open land again between Simhasthas, and Tapovan is the place itself. At Trimbakeshwar the kund is Kushavarta, in the middle of the town, with the lanes the processions come down running off it.