You have the non-Hindu bather who has bathed in the river for as long as he can remember and is frankly puzzled when someone trained in the tradition of modern-day politics asks him foolish questions about why he is there if he is not a Hindu. You have the sadhu with the cell phone - urged to strike the pose by some enterprising press photographer, or eloquent symbol of tradition and modernity thriving side by side in a country about which one of the most insightful cliches is that it casually straddles the fifteenth century and the twenty-first? It puts you in mind of the `hyperreality' of the sociologist Jean Baudrillard, where in the postmodern medley of today's world the representation of the real takes on greater authenticity than reality itself. It is even the security and organisational nightmare of a state that is itself a monument to the struggle between tradition and modernity, both modifying each other, that is underway in the land called India.

What it is, the Kumbh mela, is nothing less than India in microcosm in all its colour, variety, excitement, tradition modernised and modernity masquerading as tradition. Above all, it is a spectacle beyond compare, a post-modernist delight, with its incredible energy, its surrealistic painting over of the antique with the new, its deep spirituality alongside its pop spirituality, its depthlessness, pastiche, its sheer spiritual and commercial frenzy. And not least, it is an awesome manifestation of the interaction of the local with the global, the theme song of the world in these last several decades: the global acting upon the local to modify it, yes, but not so as to yield global homogeneity but rather a local variant that is so distinct as to be unique. It is also a stern lecture to politicians trying to simplify the idea of India: observe the complexity, it seems to say, and cheer. Amen.