Amol Rajan: 'My new BBC series helped me confront grief over my father's death I'd been avoiding'

At 9.13am on 17 January 2022, I was in a cab in London, on my way to meet Sir Ian McKellen for my BBC series Amol Rajan Interviews. I received a call from a withheld number – never a good sign when a loved one is in hospital. “Please come immediately,” said the nurse. “He’s not responding.”

That was the day everything changed. In retrospect, aged 38, I was quite an old child that morning. But I’ve been in a funk ever since. Grief hit me extremely hard. My father’s death, aged 76, after catching pneumonia, was a shock. Time is a healing balm and all that, but I’m ashamed to say that I have actively avoided thinking about him.

Grief is both universal – we all experience it – and particular, in that every grief is different according to the bond that’s broken. Yet there comes a moment when you think, “Maybe I should confront this; I’m not a kid any more.”

In my case, that moment coincided with an out-of-the-blue email from a venerated executive producer, Anwar Mamon, who said the BBC were keen on making a film about the Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest religious gathering, and asked if I would be interested in fronting it. Not really: I didn’t want to think about my dear dad, thank you very much. But a conversation with my beloved mum and my kind wife, in the presence of my four young children, softened the scepticism.

The Kumbh Mela is astonishing. Every six or 12 years, Hindu pilgrims from all over India, and the world, gather to bathe at the confluence of three sacred rivers: the Ganges, Yamuna and the mystical Saraswati. But this was more than that. Once every 144 years, and by chance in 2025, the alignment of Jupiter, the Moon, the Sun and the Earth creates a supreme, numinous energy in that confluence – a Maha Kumbh Mela. Hindus believe that by bathing there, you can emancipate not just yourself but loved ones from the eternal cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

That seemed like just the sort of thing a son should do for his dear, departed dad. And the film could be a deep dive, not just into my past and grief, but an ancient civilisation and global faith still little understood in the West.

What resulted was – well, you will see for yourself. Together with director Brigid McFall, sound supremo Mark Roberts, Anwar and a brilliant local team, I had the most intense, riveting, surreal, trippy, emotional, purposeful four days of my life.

Truly, you have never seen so many people in one place. This was the biggest gathering of humanity ever. And right there in the middle of it was your humble correspondent: an atheist embracing his Hindu heritage; a grieving son trying to do right by his dad; and tens of millions of devotees heading for these rivers.

Everything about it was both terrifying and reassuring, moments of panic and ecstasy mingling within the same minute. The sensory, spiritual overload will last a lifetime, maybe several. At one point, news reached us of a crush. We were just a few hundred metres away. Reports of casualties vary, but dozens died. I will never forget the feeling of gratitude to have been looked after while so close to such suffering.

I’ll always remember this trip. It has brought me closer to a tradition, and a father. In undertaking the same rituals conducted by millions of people over thousands of years,

I felt a profound sense of membership. I left with a suspicion confirmed: religion answers enduring human needs in a way that secular societies often struggle to. Those needs include the consolations of belonging and participation in epic stories much larger than ourselves. I won’t tell you if I made it to the water, or to the confluence. But I think my dad would have been proud of the effort.

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Amol Goes to the Ganges premieres on BBC One and iPlayer at 9pm on Wednesday 25th June 2025.

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