1. It starts out as curiosity-seeking field trips to bring back exotic reports, mostly benign and respectful at this stage.

2. More formally trained anthropologists and social scientists enter the arena and develop frameworks into which mappings are made. This privileges certain ways to see and understand the phenomena. It is a technique to make the strange look familiar (and safe) in terms that Westerners can deal with. Of course, the new framework is alien to the insiders of the tradition.

3. Elitist Westernized Indians, as well as some naïve traditional Hindus, buy into this new framework to understand the mela. This is when their drishti gets reprogrammed with the Western (whitened) gaze. Such Indians become very important in the spread of the Western mind set into the mainstream.

4. Many useful things learned get digested into Western knowledge systems.

5. Christian groups (followed by Muslims as well), initially seen as champions and as our friends, take over the greater share of the mental space of the mela participants.

6. The result is the rejection of many elements that have been important in the tradition, and this rejection is postured as a sort of “reform movement”. In fact, it is a distortion and relies upon one-sided facts and flawed analyses.