We are witnessing the biggest gathering of people in world history

I'M SURE, LIKE ME, READERS HAVE BEEN BOTH gripped and saddened this last month by the pictures of India's Kumbh Mela, the biggest pilgrimage in the world.

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This year, events moved from elation to tragedy with the loss of life in a stampede on 29 January. With such gigantic crowds at religious gatherings in India, there is always a risk of disaster.

Every 12 years, the mela takes place at Prayag (also know as Allahabad) at the junction of the sacred rivers Ganges and Jumna. In 2001, we took our daughters, then aged 10 and 8, staying in a tent with Tamil friends. Some 25 million bathed then on the most auspicious date, and 50 or 60 million over the whole six-week festival. This time it will be a staggering 400 million pilgrims, by far the biggest gathering on the planet in history.

The roots of the mela lie far back in Indian civilisation.

Though it only reached its present form in the British period, a Chinese visitor in AD 644 describes a huge gathering of half a million pilgrims here on the "Sands of Charity", which he was told had "gone on since ancient times". This may well have been the periodic "great synod" that was recorded by the Greek ambassador Megasthenes in 300 BC.