Juna Akhada

At a glance

• Family — Shaiva Sannyasi — Dashanami order
• Iṣṭa-devatā — Bhagavan Dattatreya, in his Rudra-avatara form
• Principal seats — Haridwar (Maya Devi temple, Kankhal), Kashi, Prayagraj, Ujjain
• Tradition holds — revived at Karnaprayag in 1145 CE — the akhada's own parampara
• Known for — the greatest number of naga sadhus of any akhada; the Avahan and Agni akhadas are traditionally allied to it

The order and its deity

Juna — from jūnā, "the ancient" — is the largest akhada of Sanatana Dharma and the most numerous body of renunciates at any Kumbh Mela. Its iṣṭa-devatā is Bhagavan Dattatreya, the three-faced master in whom Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are held together, and whom the tradition regards as the first teacher of the avadhuta path. To take Dattatreya as one's deity is to take a particular temperament as one's ideal: the wandering renunciate who owns nothing, belongs nowhere, and learns from everything.

The akhada belongs to the Dashanami order — the ten monastic names organised in the tradition of Adi Shankaracharya — and its sannyasis carry the suffixes Giri, Puri and Bharati among others. Its full formal name, Shri Panchdashnam Juna Akhada, carries the "panch-dashnam" that marks it as a house of the ten names governed by a council of five.

The naga regiments

Juna is, above all, the akhada of the naga sadhus — the renunciates who wear only ash, who took the vow that once made them the standing army of dharma. Initiation into the naga order happens at the Kumbh Mela itself and nowhere else: the candidate's final rites, including his own shraddha performed for himself, are conducted in the akhada camp during the Mela, and he emerges from them legally and ritually dead to his former life.

The ash the nagas wear is bhasma, and it is not decoration. It is the reminder carried on the skin of what every body becomes, worn by those who have already performed their own funeral. When the naga regiments run into the Ganga at the head of the Amrit Snan, they are the oldest thing in the Mela made visible.

At the Kumbh

Juna enters the Mela city in its Peshwai — the royal procession that announces an akhada's arrival, with the deity carried at the front, the mahamandaleshwars on chariots, elephants and horses where tradition permits, and the naga regiments dancing before them with swords and tridents.

On each Amrit Snan morning the akhadas bathe in a fixed order, negotiated between the Akhil Bharatiya Akhara Parishad and the Mela administration, and Juna's position in that order is among the most closely watched details of the whole gathering. The order is not vanity: with tens of millions of people moving toward one ghat, it is also the crowd-control spine of the day.

Since 2019 the Kinnar Akhada — the akhada of transgender sadhus — has processed and bathed under Juna's affiliation, the first such recognition in the history of the akhadas.