He is known as the onearmed baba. For the past 24 years, Mahant Amar Baharati has kept his right arm up in the air. He can no longer bend it, and his nails have turned into spiralling claws. He has to perform all other functions with his left arm. But the esoteric feat of endurance - his disciples agree - has earned him much spiritual merit. "By holding his arm in the air he gains long life and other powers," one disciple explains.
Next to the sadhu, as holy men are called, a group of other Hindu saints are relaxing after lunch. One, naked and smeared in ash, is peeling an orange. Another is lighting an enormous chillum stuffed with hashish. This is later passed to the one-armed baba, whose arm is still raised, like a schoolboy with a persistent and awkward query. The saints pay no attention to the large group of Indian pilgrims who have gathered to gawp at their antics.
The sadhus have abandoned their hideaways in forests and caves to play a starring role in the Kumbh Mela, India's largest and oldest religious festival, which kicked off yesterday. Over the next month, they will be joined by an estimated 70 million other pilgrims, in what will almost certainly amount to the biggest gathering in human history. For some, it marks the culmination of life's spiritual journey; for others, merely a pleasant excursion with friends and a chance to dip in the warm waters of the Ganges.
No one is quite sure when the festival began, although a Chinese traveller makes mention of pilgrims gathering in the town of Prayag - now Allahabad - back in the seventh century. Its origins lie in one of Hinduism's creation myths. Vishnu, while carrying a pot or "kumbh" or sacred nectar, got into a scuffle with the gods. Four drops were spilled. There are "fairs", or melas, every three years at each of the north Indian towns where the drops landed. The most important of these, the Maha Kumbh Mela, is held at Allahabad every 12 years.
The town is sacred because it is at the confluence of two real rivers - the Ganges and the Yamun - and one mythical one, the Saraswati. For the faithful, bathing where the rivers merge at the Sangam, cleanses them of past misdeeds, and helps them on their way to heaven. Though it is mainly the rural poor who strip off, the educated middle-class take part too. There is even a separate bathing area for VIPs.
To cope with the millions expected to arrive daily in Allahabad, the authorities have constructed a giant tent city. It is on a truly epic scale - stretching across 50 square miles of sandy floodplain. Some 8,000 "turd-pickers" have been employed to maintain hygiene, 6,000 public lavatories have been erected, and 12 pontoon bridges built. There are 35 police stations, 12 hospitals, and half a million tents.
The world's largest public address system, with 4,500 speakers, has been employed to prevent a repeat of the last Kumbh Mela in 1989, when 3,000 people were separated from their families and permanently lost. Included in this number were 252 children who have never been seen again by their parents. They are rumoured to have been kidnapped and auctioned off to labour contractors to work in city sweatshops.
As dawn breaks over the tented city, known as Kumbhnagar, the earliest pilgrims are already on their way to the sacred bathing ghats next to Allahabad's medieval fort. At the confluence itself, dozens of vessels gather around wooden pontoons stuck in the mud. Here, ancestral Brahmin priests - or pandas - give blessings with holy water and fill in records of family genealogies.
On the bank opposite, I strike up a conversation with Gulwan Singh Chaudhary, a local advocate who has been given the day off work. He has just bathed and is clutching a bottle of Ganges water.
"This has no bacteria in it. It is holy. I will distribute it among my friends," he explains. How was his swim? "We are pukka Hindus. We enjoyed it very much," he says.
Down at the water's edge, old women are disrobing, while young men jump in dressed in their underpants. Some splash around and laugh, while others stand piously in the water with their hands clasped together.
At the top of the bank, barbers shave the heads of the faithful with razors while chai wallahs sell cups of tea to those emerging from the waters for three rupees (5 pence).
The first Kumbh Mela of a new millennium is not, though, just about religion. It is also about politics - and about India's increasingly uncertain future as a secular country. It is about whether Hindus and Muslims can live peaceably together.
On January 21st, a group of right-wing Hindu extremists will meet at the Kumbh Mela to decide when a controversial Hindu temple will be built in the north Indian town of Ayodhya. Hindu zealots destroyed the Babri Masjid, a medieval mosque, on the same site there in 1992, prompting the worst communal riots in India since partition. Thousands - mostly Muslims - died.
The destruction of the Babri Masjid catapulted the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into power and ended decades of Nehruvian Congress government. India's BJP prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, has tried to distance himself from his hardline Hindu revivalist supporters.
But, facing the prospect of defeat in crucial local elections later this year, he recently appeared to ditch his moderate image and back the construction of a Ram temple at Ayodhya. The issue now ticks like an unexploded bomb at the heart of India's fragile polity.
Not surprisingly, the one-armed baba and other members of the militant ascetic Juna Akhara sect are big fans of the Ram temple. India's Supreme Court has stayed construction. "Sixteen wheels, 108 pillars and the first floor of the temple have already been constructed," Swarmi T. Bharati tells me. "We have to rebuild it."
The sadhus are ready to intervene to save Hindu religion if the army lets the country down, he adds. On display in the tent of the extremist World Hindu Council is a 21-foot model of the proposed temple, complete with dinky flashing lights.
While the stage is being set for a bloody Hindu-Muslim confrontation, this year's Kumbh Mela will probably be remembered more for the foreign media who have descended on the festival for the first time to broadcast it to a global audience. Channel 4 has a crew of 50, staying in a luxury tent encampment, and is transmitting 10-minute daily highlights. CNN is here too, and the event is being shown live on the Net. Journalists have been forced to sign a declaration saying they will not consume alcohol or eggs. The strain is already showing.
Upmarket tour operators have moved in too, and several European and American tourists are experiencing the festival from a luxurious perspective denied to the average pilgrim who sleeps under the stars on a rolled up mat. Many western pilgrims, though, have genuine spiritual motives for coming.
They include Tom, a 50-year-old Californian hippy, who grows marijuana at his ranch north of San Francisco. "I spend most of my time with plants. I have an eclectic philosophy," he says. After some dilly-dallying, Madonna has decided not to come. But Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell are turning up.
So are a handful of British tourists. They include Doug and Sarah Stewart from Buckinghamshire. Sarah, a florist, was so moved by the event she took a dip in the Ganges yesterday. Her husband describes himself as a 1960s child and says: "A lot of my friends have been to India and had amazing spiritual experiences here". Stewart, who is in construction, adds that the Kumbh Mela is a lot bigger than the agricultural shows he has visited back in the UK.
As night falls over Kumbhnagar, the makeshift city with its 10,000 policeman and metalled roads, the air echoes with the competing strains of tabla singing and chants of "Hare Krishna". More pilgrims are on their way. On the biggest day of the Kumbh - January 24th - 25 million are expected to bathe. They are coming from across India by train, bus and on foot. One British official expressed bemusement during colonial days that so many people could turn up to an event without an invitation card. "But who has invited them?" he demanded.
No one has invited these modern-day pilgrims, but still they come.