Gathering of the Faithful: LIFE at India's Colossal Kumbh Mela, 1953

 The great American writer Mark Twain, of all people, also captured (or at least suggested) the unimaginable scale and the depth of faith on display everywhere during the phenomenal gathering:

"It is wonderful," Twain wrote in 1895, after witnessing that year's Kumbh Mela, "the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining. It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is. No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination."