It must be great to be a BBC news presenter. The side hustles! Anyone made too weary by stonewalling politicians and all those late nights under an umbrella in Downing Street will almost inevitably find, courtesy of a generous boss, some light relief in the form of an easier, lovelier gig elsewhere (unless you’re Mishal Husain, the most talented of them all, in which case you’ll unaccountably have to head to the wilder shores of Bloomberg without passing even so much as Start the Week). Sophie Raworth gets to float round the Chelsea Flower Show. Fiona Bruce verbally polishes other people’s antiques. Clive Myrie is not only in the quiz master’s chair on Mastermind; he also gets to tootle around the nicer parts of Italy and the Caribbean with the BBC Two crew.
Amol Rajan presents Today on Radio 4, and the “toughest team quiz tournament”, University Challenge, on BBC Two, which should be enough for anyone. But now here he is on BBC One, in an hour-long film in which he travels to India for the Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela, a gathering of more than 400 million people – yes, really – that takes place at the confluence of the rivers Ganges and Yamuna near the city of Prayagraj approximately every six to 12 years. The twist here, though, is that before he sets off, one senses some anxiety, even dread, at what lies ahead. Speaking to his mother, who has been on a similar pilgrimage herself, he worries about hygiene: he favours two showers a day. My guess is that he turned his trip into an assignment as a way of forcing himself to do it. I know this because I’ve done the same thing myself; for no other reason but a deadline would I have travelled across Yemen with an armed guard who was half my height.
Rajan, though a cradle Hindu, describes himself as an atheist. But he has a feeling of emptiness. Struggling to deal with the death of his father three years ago, he’s envious of the spiritual toolkit his mum has at her disposal. In the waters of the Ganges, he’ll both purify himself and set the soul of his father on its way, his last great service to a man he adored, and this will be cathartic – even if his two-in-one conditioner is going to be of little use for the duration of his stay. He’ll feel the cosmic energy that’s all around, as well as the feet of a holy man he’ll massage as a sign of respect for his elders.
I think he goes for the cosmic energy a bit too soon. “I feel small and humble and pious!” he proclaims from the melee, a declaration that suggests the precise opposite is true (see also when someone announces: “I’ve got a great sense of humour!”). But never mind. Events soon intervene. As Rajan and his fixer attempt to head towards the waters, news reaches them that people have been crushed in the crowd; 30 are dead, many of them sleeping pilgrims who were trampled under foot, and 90 others are injured. Rajan is struck by people’s attitude to such a disaster. For him, it’s horrifying. For the more devout, including Aunt Lakshmi, who’s shortly to help him perform pind daan, an ancient funeral rite, for his father, it’s nothing to get too heated about. There’s no difference between life and death, she tells him calmly.
Rajan chose not to interrogate this: by now, he was all in. “What a privilege to sit at the feet of a wise lady,” he said, as if he hadn’t worked with Martha Kearney all those years. Around him, the temporary city the Modi government had built for the Kumbh Mela – 30 pontoon bridges, 135,000 toilets – ceaselessly shimmered and shook. Rajan might, he thought, have stepped through a wormhole. In the Ganges at last, he felt “as high as a kite”. What his audience will make of this film, however, is a different matter. Part documentary and part vanity project – there’s just no escaping his swimming trunks – it seemed to me to be half-hearted, somehow, its sincerity both unquestionable and strained. If the story of one man’s ordinary grief and how he soothed it is to work on screen, good writing is vital: a narrative voice that paints the pictures we can’t see. But alas, Rajan was often lost for words, his epiphany no more expressive than a honking Prayagraj car horn.
Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges
BBC One
[See also: The savagery of Alexander McQueen]
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This article appears in the 25 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, State of Emergency