Bada Udasin Akhada

At a glance

• Family — Udasin sampradaya
• Venerates — Sri Chand, elder son of Guru Nanak, called Guru Chandradev; with Ganesha, Lakshmi, Vishnu and Shiva also honoured
• Founded — Basant Panchami, 1825, at Har Ki Pauri, Haridwar
• Main ashram — Krishnanagar, Prayagraj — with around a hundred ashrams across India
• At the Mela — raises a flag some seventy-five feet high

Between two traditions

The Udasin sampradaya traces itself to Sri Chand (1494–1629 by tradition), the elder son of Guru Nanak, who did not follow his father into the householder's path of the Sikh Gurus but took to renunciation. The Udasins hold him as Guru Chandradev and regard him as an incarnation of Shiva.

This places the Udasin akhadas in a genuinely unusual position: their lineage begins in the family of the first Sikh Guru, while their practice, their deities and their place at the Kumbh Mela are those of Hindu renunciate orders. They honour Ganesha, Lakshmi, Vishnu and Shiva alongside Sri Chand. The arrangement has at times been a source of tension with mainstream Sikh institutions, and it is stated here plainly because it is central to what this akhada is.

Foundation and reach

The akhada records its founding on Basant Panchami in 1825, at Har Ki Pauri in Haridwar — the same ghat where the Amrit is said to have fallen. Its founding is credited to Yogiraj Shri Nirvandev Maharaj, though an alternative account within the tradition attributes it to the sant Santokh Das; both are held, and this page records both rather than choosing.

Despite the Haridwar founding, the akhada's main ashram is at Krishnanagar in Prayagraj, and it maintains around a hundred ashrams across India. During the freedom movement the akhada trained and sheltered independence fighters — one of several instances in which the akhada network functioned as more than a religious institution.

At the Kumbh

The Udasin akhadas process and bathe in their own group, after the Shaiva and Vaishnava blocs in the traditional order. Bada Udasin's presence at the Mela is marked from a distance by its dharma-dhvaja — a flag raised on a mast of some seventy-five feet, among the tallest in the Mela city and a reliable landmark for anyone trying to find the Udasin camps.

Its government, like the other akhadas', is by a council of senior mahants rather than a single head — the panchayati pattern that its formal name carries.