COLUMN ONE : World’s Biggest Pilgrimage : Millions of Hindus immerse themselves in the Ganges during a festival that keeps growing more spectacular. It is one of India’s last links to its mythical past, binding people with a shared fervor.

Like a great river picking up speed as it surges and foams over a cataract, the mighty flow of humanity rolled down the slope: naked, ash-smeared men with braided hair and holding aloft tridents, the population of an entire village bound together with coarse rope so no one would get lost, women clutching each other’s worn saris in fright.

Barefoot, bare-chested farmers fresh from India’s fields and paddies. Musicians in saffron robes joyfully pounding drums and blowing into shrieking flutes.

Weeping peasant women who had lost sight of friends. Children as young as 2, an unfortunate few of whom had become separated from their parents in the chaos.

A multitude of millions. In one small place, as many people as live in entire countries.

Each one was bent on plunging into the cool, muddy waters of Ganga-ji, the holy Ganges River, to cleanse body and soul.

To be part of this living, multicolored tidal wave made one feel extraordinarily vulnerable and insignificant. But it was also a matchless way of communing with timeless, unchanging India and its ancient folkways that seem to have been bypassed by the fads and inventions of the 20th Century.

“Anyone who misses this,” mused Professor G. K. Rai of Allahabad University, who came to the Ganges to watch, “misses the meaning of life.”

Every three years, when the stars and planets are in the right conjunction, the world’s largest, most colorful religious festival takes place at one of four sites in northern India. Called the Kumbh Mela, it has a taproot that runs deep into Indian mythology, astrology and geography.

No two versions of what it celebrates seem to wholly concur. But in a land that often seems stupefyingly, impossibly diverse, this mela , or festival, is one of the invisible but strong-as-steel threads that bind people together.

North and south. Rich and poor. Brahmin and low-caste. Village and town. They all come.

On a single day of this year’s festival, an estimated 18 million people tramped to the most sacred site in the Hindu world--the confluence of the Ganges, the Yamuna River and the mythical, subterranean stream of knowledge known as the Saraswati.

One by one, in a mighty flow that lasted for hours, they stripped to their loincloths or hiked up their saris and waded into the hallowed water.

Among them was the wispy-bearded Ram Chandra Das, five feet tall, from Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh state, the legendary birthplace of the god-king Ram. Shedding the worn plaid rug wrapped around his loins, the poor farmer dunked his head 15 times. A lifeguard armed with a stave would not allow him to go in deeper.

As drops rained onto his chest from his goatee, Ram Chandra Das carefully filled an aluminum pail with about two inches of water. He would take his precious part of Ganga-ji back to his village to drink when he needed a special blessing, he said. He scoffed at the idea that it might be bad for him.

“Nothing will happen,” he said serenely. “It is nectar.”

Such simple, unshakable faith--or would public health workers call it stubborn ignorance of basic hygiene?--is the bedrock upon which the Kumbh’s popularity rests.

Exactly a century ago, Mark Twain visited the Ganges at Allahabad, 350 miles southeast of India’s capital, New Delhi. He was astonished by the outpouring of long-suffering piety he witnessed.

“These pilgrims had come from all over India; some of them had been months on the way, plodding patiently along in the heat and dust, worn, poor, hungry, but supported and sustained by an unwavering faith and belief,” Twain wrote in “Following the Equator.”

“It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that. . . .”

Ever larger throngs of Hindus from throughout India attend the festival in search of salvation and moksha : release from the dreary cycle of birth and rebirth to which all souls are condemned.

Unfortunately, such fervor and the Kumbh’s mammoth scale have on occasion spelled disaster.

In 1986, when the rite was held at Haridwar, upstream on the Ganges from Allahabad, about 50 pilgrims perished in a stampede when a police barrier gave way.

In 1954, 10 times that many pilgrims were trampled to death when then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, a native of Allahabad, was present.

At first blush, one might take Hinduism’s most awesome mass ritual as its equivalent of the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is the duty and joy of every pious Muslim. But the Kumbh is much, much more: simultaneously a carnival, a general assembly of Hinduism’s many schools and a thriving mega-mall for the mind and body.

Gurus (teachers), babas (old men), quacks and hucksters come together to compete for souls and customers, offering everything from balm for the spirit to home remedies for piles.

At the latest Kumbh, which will run through Monday, tent city after tent city has sprouted on the Ganges’ spongy western bank to plug the merits of rival swamis. In one canvas-roofed compound, gray-bearded guru Barfani Dada (Snowy Grandpa) flies banners advertising cures for heart disease, arthritis, impotence, gynecological disorders, high blood pressure, diabetes and poor vision.

“People by the lakhs (hundreds of thousands) are coming to see me,” the wise man from the Himalayas, baring teeth stained dark red from chewing betel nuts, happily replied when asked how business was. The guru claims to be 205 years old.

The festival’s origin lies in ancient Hindu legend, which recounts how, during the creation of the universe, the gods and demons churned the oceans and finally extracted the prized kumbh , or pitcher, containing the nectar of immortality.

A mighty struggle for possession ensued, and Jayanta, son of Indra, the ruler of the heavens, changed into a crow and whisked the kumbh away. Flying for 12 days with the demons in pursuit, the god descended to rest. He perched in succession at four Indian locales, one of which is today’s Allahabad.

Drops of spilled nectar sanctified those spots for all time. At the very latest, the powers of the kumbh were being celebrated in lavish style by AD 644, when a Chinese historian wrote of witnessing a 75-day-long ceremony at Allahabad that was attended by half a million people.

Originally, Kumbh Mela was celebrated every 12 years. But now, every three years, a festival occurs in one of the four cities where Jayanta alighted.

The next full-blown Kumbh, marking the original 12-year cycle, is due in 1998 at Haridwar. But this year, pilgrims flocked in unprecedented numbers to Allahabad in 3,000 government-chartered buses, 60 special trains and tens of thousands of private trucks, cars, buses, horse carriages, pedal rickshaws and tractors, as well as on foot.

On the eve of the date that astrologers had deemed the most auspicious for self-immersion in the Ganges, Hindus were arriving at the rate of 150,000 an hour--nearly twice as many people every 60 minutes as attended last month’s Super Bowl. Dropped off by train or road transportation 10 miles or more from their destination on the riverbank, they had to trudge the rest of the way.

Such an outpouring of faith has compelled officials to carry out extensive preparations, in part to prevent a repetition of the murderous stampede in 1986.

During the years that the festival takes place in Allahabad, the main bathing beach and its surrounding area, drably re-designated by bureaucrats as the 66th Temporary District of Uttar Pradesh, becomes the newest city in the world.

After the monsoon-gorged Ganges recedes and the western reach of the riverbed dries out in November, frenzied work begins.

This time, 22 wells were dug, 140 miles of temporary water main were laid and chlorination and storage tanks were built to provide pilgrims with free, clean drinking water.

Power lines were strung to supply free electricity, and telephone lines were erected to allow gurus and leaders of the Hindu religious orders that are the backbone of the Kumbh’s festivities to stay in contact with the faithful.

Hundreds of open-air latrines were dug. Prefab headquarters for a fire department, telephone exchange, telegraph office and the government’s Mela Office went up.

Twelve pontoon bridges were floated onto the Ganges and Yamuna and anchored so that believers could cross to the most prized bathing site, known as the Sangam.

Uttar Pradesh state, the Hindu religious orders and public and private agencies such as the Indian equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service and the World Brahmin Council erected so many tents to shelter pilgrims that government officials could estimate their number only as “hundreds of thousands.”

Ten thousand police officers were sent to patrol the 2,710 acres on the spit between the Ganges and the Yamuna.

With such enormous crowds, only so much could be done beforehand. What happens at the Kumbh, government officials say, ultimately is in the hands of God.

“All this is only possible with the blessing of the Almighty,” L. B. Tiwari, 50, the bespectacled Indian Administrative Service officer in charge of the 1995 mela , said at his carpeted, prefab office.

In truth, this Kumbh started badly. The turnout was disappointing on the first main bathing day, Jan. 14, in part because of cold, foggy weather and a strike by state government workers.

Members of the Hindu religious orders, angry with Tiwari and his subordinates for planting their tent sites too far from the Sangam, boycotted the event.

Astrologers had fixed Jan. 30 as Mauni Amawas, the most auspicious date of all for what Indian headline writers call the “holy dip.”

It was a Monday, the moon was new, and the moon and the sun were in Capricorn. Jupiter was in Aries. The heavens were in the same alignment as during Jayanta’s flight. Divine nectar would be raining down on the Sangam.

The day before, vast crowds began to head to the mela site, plodding in silent single file through Allahabad and multiplying by many times the city’s year-round population of 841,000.

On their heads, they bore firewood, water pots, stoves, lunch pails, straw for bedding, quilts and dirty jute bags of unleavened bread.

They hailed from as far away as Canada, from Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, from Kanchipuram, the southern Indian temple town. Like India as a whole, however, most were rural and poor. One saw scant signs of the vaunted middle class, about 250 million strong, or of India’s Westernized yuppies.

More typically, from a village near Gwalior in central India, a truck christened “Mother’s Blessing” brought 60 farmers. Throughout the 27-hour drive, Sumer Singh, 60, who grows wheat and mustard on a small scale, sang devotional songs with his fellow villagers.

Anand Kumar Pandey, 27, a university graduate in law from Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, came with his grandfather, a frail 82-year-old veteran of the anti-colonial struggle against the British.

“It’s his last desire,” Pandey explained.

As dusk fell, women scooped holes in the soft soil of the riverbed to make tens of thousands of cooking fires. Ascetics lay on beds of straw near the Sangam. For a month, they bathe in the river three times a day and eat just once.

Rows of beggars mutely held out aluminum pans, hoping for a bit of rice or a coin. They had crushed limbs, digits claimed by leprosy, unseeing eyes or mangled bodies.

Under the starry sky, the main bathing began. Pilgrims of modest means who had arrived only a few hours earlier trooped down to the Sangam carrying their belongings in humble sacks or battered suitcases. They would bathe and then immediately start the homeward journey.

Blaring public address messages reminded the faithful to keep their wits about them, even if the occasion was holy.

“Don’t hand over your belongings to anybody else so you can take a dip.”

“Don’t eat anything offered by strangers.”

“Keep a card in a child’s or illiterate person’s pocket giving his name and village.”

At the shore, people sprinkled their heads with Ganges water or cupped their hands for a sip. Some devout bathers made small rafts of cardboard to carry burning incense and pictures of their gods.

Thousands of young, naked or half-naked members of the Hindu orders conducted a raucous, joyful procession, mustered behind gurus who rode on cars and tractors decorated with banners and marigold garlands.

The relentless press of the colossal crowd, the unending movement, was an incredible spectacle, one that was frightening to many.

Rama, 55, of Fatehpur spent 30 minutes in the river and lost his sandals in the tumult. “There are a lot of people, and everyone wants to get into the water,” he said.

Uttar Pradesh officials said attendance that day was unsurpassed, exceeding even the estimated 15 million who came to bathe at the Sangam on Feb. 6, 1989. That gathering entered the Guinness Book of Records as the “greatest recorded number of human beings assembled with a common purpose.”

The extensive groundwork by Tiwari and his subordinates proved enough to prevent the worst. One of the hundreds of frail pilgrims’ boats plying the Yamuna capsized. But all aboard were saved. There was a minor stampede, but no more than five were reported injured.

A 75-year-old woman died of cold after bathing at 2:30 a.m. Another pilgrim gave birth to a son.

In following days, there would be more trouble. Three Russian women, devotees of the Hare Krishna movement, allegedly were raped. An ascetic was murdered. An outlawed band of Hindu extremists openly ran an exhibit blaming India’s problems on Muslims.

But for millions of pilgrims, the only thing that counted was the ancient bathing ritual and what it represents. Nageshwar Prasad, 40, walked to the Ganges from the Neja subdistrict of Allahabad. The eyes of this Brahmin farmer of modest means, who had painted a yellow and red trident on his forehead, shone when he explained why he was at the Kumbh Mela and why he would attend the next.

“If I keep coming, I might get higher rebirth,” Prasad said. “I might get salvation.”

Dahlburg was recently on assignment in Allahabad.