Journey

Festivals across the subcontinent, and where they fall

Twenty-nine festivals, placed. A festival is not only a date — it is a date that had to be kept somewhere, and the somewhere is usually the reason for the date.

The two largest livestock fairs in the country, Pushkar and Sonepur, fall on the same full moon thirteen hundred kilometres apart, because that is when the harvest is sold and the roads are dry. Chhath is kept standing in a river, so it needs the river low. The Rann Utsav needs the salt flat hard enough to take a tent. Ambubachi closes a temple for the days the earth is said to menstruate, and forbids work rather than requiring any, in the week the monsoon makes work impossible anyway.

Read round the year, they are an agricultural calendar with gods attached, and they cluster at the joints of the farming year: the sowing done, the plots drying, the first grain in, the harvest sold. The religious content is real and is not decoration. But the dates were set by when the granary was full, when the river was low enough to stand in, and when the ground was dry enough to walk on — which is why this is a map and not a calendar.

Stops (29)

1. Sekrenyi · February — Angami

   The year opens with a wash. Sekrenyi cleanses the Angami villages of Kohima's hills over ten days: a few drops of rice water on the leaves at each house, then the men bathing at the village well before dawn in cold February water, the young men initiated, and every outstanding quarrel formally settled, because none may be carried across the festival. Not a thanksgiving — a reset.

2. Kila Raipur Sports Festival · February — Ludhiana

   Three days of village games near Ludhiana since 1933, habitually called the Rural Olympics: bullock-cart racing, tractor and horse events, tug of war, and feats of strength that are half farmwork and half display. It is the fullest surviving demonstration of Punjab's physical culture, and it draws competitors from villages that field nothing else.

3. Chapchar Kut · March — Mizoram

   The festival of the gap. The jhum plots have been slashed and left to dry, the burning has not begun, and there is nothing to do but wait for the bamboo to cure — so the Mizo hold their festival in the pause. The cheraw is danced between bamboo poles clapped in rhythm by seated men, over moving bamboo that will break an ankle if the beat slips.

4. Bhagoria Haat · before Holi — Jhabua

   A week of markets across the Bhil and Bhilala country of western Madhya Pradesh: the harvest's selling season and the year's courtship in one. A man offers paan or gulal; if she accepts and returns it, the pair may leave together and the community ratifies the marriage afterwards. Often called elopement, which is the opposite of what it is — the leaving is public and expected.

5. Hola Mohalla · after Holi — Anandpur

   Guru Gobind Singh took Holi and made it a muster. In 1701, two years after instituting the Khalsa, he divided it in two and set them to fight for a standard; the name is masculine, holā rather than holī, which is the whole argument in one grammatical change. Nihang horsemanship, gatka, tent-pegging and a closing march to Kiratpur.

6. Chitra Vichitra Fair · the fortnight after Holi — Sabarmati

   A Garasia and Bhil fair at Gunbhakhari that begins with mourning and ends in courtship. The women go to the river at night to weep for the year's dead; at dawn the fair turns to dancing and the choosing of partners. Grief and marriage are put deliberately on consecutive mornings, and the night of weeping is women only.

7. Gangaur · eighteen days from Holi — Rajasthan

   Women make clay images of Gaurī and Īśara at home, feed them, dress them, sing to them for eighteen days and then carry them to water. Unmarried women ask for a husband like Shiva, married ones for his long life. In Jaipur the royal images come out of the City Palace in procession, watched from the Hawa Mahal — which was built partly so the women of the household could watch processions like it.

8. Thrissur Pooram · Medam — Thrissur

   A day and a night in which two groups of temples face each other with fifteen caparisoned elephants apiece and try to outdo one another, in parasols raised and swapped above the elephants and in drumming by hundreds of players. Instituted about 1798 by Sakthan Thampuran of Cochin after the village temples were shut out of another festival. The contest is judged by the crowd's roar.

9. Moatsu Mong · May — Mokokchung

   The Ao have finished clearing, sowing and mending the granaries, and the crop is in the ground with the anxious months ahead. So the village drinks, sings and rests for three days around the Sangpangtu fire, where men and women sit together to be given meat and rice beer. Among its observances is mending the village gate and the paths — the one week the shared infrastructure is certain to be repaired.

10. Raja Parba · June — Odisha

    Three days in which the earth is held to be menstruating and therefore not to be broken: no ploughing, no sowing, no digging, no cutting, and no housework for women either. Girls spend the days on rope swings hung from trees. On the fourth, a grinding stone standing for the earth is bathed and anointed — the soil given the bath a woman takes at the end of her period.

11. Hemis Tsechu · fifth Tibetan month — Ladakh

    Masked cham danced in the courtyard of Ladakh's largest monastery for Padmasambhava's birth: his eight manifestations, and the black-hat dance that subdues obstructing spirits, to shawm, long horn and cymbal. It is liturgy, not performance — the dancers are ordained and the steps are prescribed. Every twelfth year, in the monkey year, the great thangka is unrolled down the wall.

12. Harela · before Śrāvana — Kumaon

    Seven grains sown in baskets indoors and kept dark, then cut when the shoots are a hand high, worn behind the ear and given to elders. It doubles as the marriage of Shiva and Pārvatī. The shoots are grown without light on purpose, so the festival's name is the colour they are not — harela, the green one, for what the grain would have been outdoors.

13. Minjar Fair, Chamba · Śrāvana — Chamba

    The tassel of the flowering maize, worn for a week as a silk ornament and then thrown into the Ravi with a coconut, a rupee and a seasonal fruit. The whole point of the object is to be given to the river. It commemorates a tenth-century victory and the Ravi changing its course, and it is the fullest surviving festival of the Chamba hill state.

14. Bonalu · Āshādha — Hyderabad

    Women carry bonam — rice cooked with milk and jaggery in a decorated earthen pot; the word is a corruption of bhojanam, a meal — to the Mahākāli temples, beginning inside Golconda fort and moving through the city over following weeks. It began as thanksgiving after the plague of 1869 spared the twin cities. The morning after, a woman standing on a pot speaks as the goddess and is asked about the year.

15. Wangala · after the harvest — Garo Hills

    The Garo offer the first grain to Misi Saljong, the sun god who gave cultivation, and thank him for the year, danced to long drums in two rows with buffalo-horn trumpets and gong. A hundred drums at the modern gathering, which is where the name comes from. Most Garos have been Christian for a century, so the rites are now performed by the few who hold the old religion and danced by everyone.

16. Bathukamma · Āshvayuja — Telangana

    Nine days in which women build a cone of the flowers that bloom on tank beds and bunds after the monsoon — gunugu, tangedu, marigold, lotus — worship it as Gaurī, sing around it each evening, and float it on a tank. Several of the flowers are mild water purifiers, so the festival puts them into village tanks at the end of the monsoon whether or not anyone intends the effect.

17. Nuakhai · after Ganesh Chaturthi — Sambalpur

    Western Odisha's own new year: the season's first rice offered to the presiding goddess of each place, Samaleswari above all, then eaten by the household in order of age, followed by the juhār that settles the year's quarrels. The hour is fixed by the temple at Sambalpur and announced for the whole region, so the first mouthful is taken at the same moment across the Kosal country.

18. Kullu Dussehra · October — Kullu

    The Dussehra that begins when everyone else's has ended. Two hundred or more village deities are carried in palanquins from their own temples, some walking for days, to attend on Raghunāth — the Rāma image a raja had brought from Ayodhya to expiate a wrong. Precedence, seating and who may enter the tent are settled by custom and argued about annually: a political event as much as a religious one.

19. Pushkar Fair · Kārtika Purnimā — Pushkar

    The week up to the full moon beside the Pushkar lake, where twenty thousand camels, horses and cattle once changed hands between Marwar breeders and buyers from across the north. The bathing is the religious half and the trading the other, and they have never been separable — the market is then because the pilgrims were coming anyway. Camel numbers have halved in two decades as trucks replaced them.

20. Sonepur Mela · Kārtika Purnimā — the Gandak mouth

    Asia's largest cattle fair, for a month from the same full moon, where the Gandak meets the Ganga at Harihar Kshetra — a temple that holds Vishnu and Shiva together. Elephants were traded here into the 2000s, when wildlife law ended the sale; the enclosure is still laid out each year and elephants still come, but can only be displayed.

21. Chhath · Kārtika — the Ganga banks

    Four days on the riverbanks of Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and the Nepal Terai: women standing in the water to offer to the setting sun and again to the rising one, after some thirty-six hours without water. No priest, no image, no temple — the largest surviving Vedic solar rite performed with no intermediary at all, carried by migrants to Mumbai, Delhi and Mauritius.

22. Rann Utsav · November to February — the Rann

    A season rather than a day. From November, when the salt flat is dry enough to take a tent, a city is pitched at Dhordo and the crafts of Kutch are shown on the white Rann — Ajrakh, Rabari and Ahir embroidery, Rogan, bandhani, bell-metal, and the Agariya families' salt from the same flats. Twenty years old; everything it presents is centuries older.

23. Torgya, Tawang · January — Tawang

    Three days at the largest monastery in India, in which the Monpa and the monks drive out the year's malevolent spirits: masked cham in the courtyard, and on the last day an effigy holding the accumulated evil carried out and burned before the whole valley. Every third year it is expanded into the Dungyur — the same rite, done longer, because the accumulation is reckoned greater.

24. Losar · the Tibetan new year

    Kept across Ladakh, Spiti, Sikkim, Tawang and the Nepal highlands, and the clearest measure of how far the Tibetan calendar reached. The days before are for clearing out: houses swept, old food eaten, guthuk dumplings with objects baked inside that tell a person's character, torches carried out to throw away the year's ill. Ladakh keeps it two months early, by a fourteenth-century king's order before a campaign.

25. Pang Lhabsol · Sikkim — the mountain as guarantor

    Instituted by the third Chogyal in the fifteenth century: Khangchendzonga worshipped not as a mountain but as the state's guardian deity, and the blood-brotherhood between Lepcha and Bhutia renewed. Monks dance the Pangtoed Chaam in warrior dress. Sikkim's climbing ban follows from it — the summit is the deity's person, so the 1955 expedition stopped short by agreement and the ascent has been illegal since 2001.

26. Kharchi Puja · July — Old Agartala

    The fourteen deities of the Tripuri, kept as heads without bodies, carried from their temple to the Saidra river, bathed and worshipped over a week. The priest is a Chantai of the indigenous line, not a Brahmin, but the temple was built by a Manikya king in 1770 — a dynasty of Sanskritised kings maintaining the worship of the people they ruled. The images are heads only because the full ones were too heavy to carry.

27. Tarnetar Mela · Bhādrapada — Surendranagar

    Three days at the Trinetreshwar Mahadev temple and the most explicit marriage market in Gujarat. Young men of the Koli, Bharwad, Rabari and Charan communities come to be looked at, carrying mirror-worked umbrellas up to a metre across that they have embroidered themselves — the stitching is the advertisement, read as evidence of the household. Women choose. The craft exists for this one fair and is made for nothing else.

28. Poush Mela, Santiniketan · Poush — Santiniketan

    Begun in 1894 to mark the anniversary of Debendranath Tagore's Brahmo initiation, and the reason the Bauls of Birbhum have a national audience: Rabindranath took their melodies and their refusal of caste and temple into his own songs. Suspended for several years from 2020 in a dispute over who runs it, during which the Bauls held it outside the grounds — the tradition outlasting its venue.

29. Magh Mela, Prayagraj · Māgha — Prayagraj

    The Kumbh's annual, unnoticed version: a tent city on the sands each winter, millions bathing at the confluence, and the kalpavāsīs camping the whole month under vow, eating once a day. The great Kumbhs are the sixth- and twelfth-year enlargements of this. The kalpavāsīs are largely elderly and largely women, and they are the least photographed part of the largest gathering on earth.

Sources

• Wikipedia