Tradition · flower festival · India
Bathukamma
Nine days in Āshvayuja across Telangana in which women build a conical stack of seasonal flowers — gunugu, tangedu, marigold, lotus — on a brass plate, worship it as Gaurī, sing around it in a circle each evening, and on the last day carry it to a tank and set it afloat. The flowers are the point: they are the ones that bloom in the weeks after the monsoon on tank beds and bunds, and floating them returns their seed to the water the crops depend on.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 17.978, 79.594
Worth knowing
Several of the flowers used are mild water purifiers, and the festival puts them into village tanks at the end of the monsoon — an observance whose effect on the water is the same whether or not anyone intends it.
Connections (1)
- In the same set asBonalu
Telangana's two state festivals, three months apart, and both done by women with their hands. Bonalu in Āshādha carries cooked rice in a decorated earthen pot to the Mahākāli temples; Bathukamma in Āshvayuja builds a cone of the flowers that bloom on tank beds after the monsoon, worships it as Gaurī for nine evenings, and floats it. One is food taken to the goddess, the other the goddess built out of what the season produced — and neither needs a temple's permission to begin.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Bathukamma”. Telangana government records; Telangana State Biodiversity Board on tank-bed flora.
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