In this deeply moving and cathartic film, the presenter confronts his father’s death by going on a holy pilgrimage … and ends up releasing his soul in the sacred river. Beautiful
Three years ago Amol Rajan’s father died unexpectedly of pneumonia. Ever since, as the BBC journalist and broadcaster puts it at the start of Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges, “I’ve been in a bit of a funk.” I get it. As a fellow second-generation kid of Indian immigrants (and journalist from southwest London to boot) I, too, have been in a funk since my mother died (two years before Rajan’s father, at the same age, 76, as him). In Rajan’s case, his grief plunges him into a search for belonging and an attempt to reconnect with his Hindu roots. Where might such a quest take him? To the largest gathering of humanity on earth. The Kumbh Mela, where over 45 days at the start of this year half a billion Hindus gathered on the sacred banks of the Ganges. The question Rajan poses, and it’s a pertinent one for many, is whether “an atheist like me can benefit from a holy pilgrimage”.
This is the deeply personal premise of what turns into an intimate, moving, entertaining yet oddly depoliticised documentary considering both the day job(s) of its presenter and the fact that the Kumbh Mela is the world’s biggest Hindu festival, funded by a prime minister whose success is built on his identity as a Hindu nationalist strongman. Only once is Narendra Modi mentioned, halfway through, and it’s in the context of his government investing £600m in the biggest Kumbh Mela to date: a mega-event owing to a specific celestial alignment that occurs once in 144 years. We know, watching Rajan’s film in the aftermath, that at least 30 people were killed and many more injured in terrifying crowd crushes. As much as he is spiritually shaken, even altered, by the experience, he’s also traumatised by what he sees. “The people in front of me were just stepping on women,” Rajan says after he and his fixer are forced to turn back due to reports of a stampede 800 metres ahead. “Lots of very poor, very old, very fragile, possibly quite sick women … they were like human debris on the floor. Kids as well.”
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