Creating History at Mahakumbh, Prayagraj!
The 2025 Mahakumbh in Prayagraj is the cynosure of all eyes. It is the world's largest spiritual and cultural gathering, attracting devotees from across the globe.
According to the Uttar Pradesh administration, the Mahakumbh has become the first event in the world to have more than 500 million direct participants.
The Mela is set to garner multiple Guinness World Records with their four initiatives including 15,000 sanitation workers, 300 people cleaning water stream, 1,000 e-rickshaws, and 10,000 handprint paintings.
But our story today is on how India created history in another Mahakumbh held way back in 1911.
More than a hundred years ago, on February 18th, 1911, the world’s first official mail delivery via airplane took place in the northern area of the present-day Republic of India.
At the time, this region of India was under British rule as part of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh.
The year was 1911 and it was the time for the Mahakumbh in Allahabad. The first official flight by airmail took place from Allahabad, United Provinces, British India, now Prayagraj in India and revolutionized global communication.
Henri Pequet, a 23-year-old French pilot, delivered 6,500 letters to Naini, about 10 kilometers away.
Henri Pequet
Along with setting a new airmail record, Pequet’s airborne journey marked the first commercial civil aviation flight in India.
The plane flew a distance of five miles, from an Allahabad polo field, over the Yamuna River, to Naini. All mail received a special cancel depicting an airplane, mountains, and “First Aerial Post, 1911, U. P. Exhibition Allahabad.”
The idea for the flight came from a British military commander named Walter G Wyndham, who arranged the flight to help Holy Trinity Church in Allahabad raise funds for a new youth hostel during its centenary celebrations.
Walter G Wyndham
A Humber-Sommer biplane was used for the purpose. In a subsequent interview to a magazine, Pequet had mentioned that he had flown the machine just at a height of 120 to 150 feet from the grounds and he was actually rather doubtful when he had to pass over the holy river of Jamuna. When Pequet descended, there was no crowd to greet him. He merely handed over the mailbag to the only post-department official present there and returned to Allahabad.
He had also recollected about the herds of buffalos that baffled him and with his Sommer bi-plane with a Rotary Gnome Engine of 50 HorsePower he had to restrict the speed to less than 100 km per hour.
A large number of people participated in this event. Some of the letters were addressed to the monarch George V and these are found even now at the Buckingham Palace.
Motilal Nehru also wrote to his son Jawahar who was studying in Cambridge at that time.
Motilal Nehru
As for the boys of the new hostel, they received 2,500 rupees from the flight, which was, as Robert Bluffield notes in Over Empires and Oceans, "a princely sum considering that one gram of gold in 1911 had an estimated value of less than two rupees.
While it was the British who conceived the postal services first in the world by coming out with the first stamp on May 6, 1840, the American Wright brothers flew in the air for the first time in 1906.
But it was the Indians who transmitted letters by Air for the first time in the world and the historic event took place at Prayagraj on February 18, 1911.
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