A few hours before I was to leave Sonepur, I went to meet Vishwanath Singh, who at 93 is the oldest surviving freedom fighter in town. I wanted to hear him talk about Sonepur's volatile political environment in the pre-independence years. Instead, he said, "Mela ab kamjor ho gaya hai" (the mela has grown weaker). This was one of the few clear sentences that the senile man had successfully summoned, and he said it with a tone of finality. But I had heard this from too many mouths during my stay, and it appeared little more than a sentimental adage of a dying upper-caste man.
This notion was less apparent to me on the first day, though. Arriving from Patna as a first-time visitor to this ancient pilgrimage site, I had been strolling around, bemused, trying to make sense of the multitude of traditions here, all the while jeering at the contrived attempts at branding and promoting the site. The Bihar tourism department had – along with an event management company from Delhi – strewn posters across important points at the mela, each with a garish, verbose quote.
On one of the posters sat a pristine gold Buddha against a pink horizon. The quote, for which ample space was reserved on the right side, read, "Bihar: The fountainhead of the first republic of the world." But here too – as much as anywhere else in Bihar – a calm, quiescent Buddha didn't fit into the cacophony of the hundreds of loudspeakers from the sectarian kirtan mandalis which populated the mela on the first day, all desperate to outcry each other. Local politicians spoke copiously of how cultural and historical branding would help us 'preserve' our heritage. Government stalls sang paeans to the incumbent. Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) stalls hawked 'new' commercial products.
Sonepur is located at the confluence of two rivers, the Ganga and the Gandak, in west Bihar, 27 km from Patna. Something between a village and a trifling small town, it is quiet and insignificant for most of the year. In the month of November, however, the place starts bustling with preparations for this ancient mela. It opens on the full moon of the month of Karthik on the Hindu calendar, when Hindu devotees gather for Ganga-snan, a holy dip at the confluence. This is followed by a month-long mela, traditionally popular for its cattle fair, somewhat grotesquely known as the 'largest in Asia'.