Tradition · Kumaoni sowing festival · India
Harela
Ten days before Śrāvana in Kumaon, in which seven grains are sown in baskets indoors, kept dark, and cut when the shoots are a hand high — the harela, the day of green — then worn behind the ear and given to elders as a blessing. It doubles as the marriage of Shiva and Pārvatī, with clay figures of the pair, and it has been turned in the last decades into the state's tree-planting day, so an observance about germination now plants forests.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 29.380, 79.450
Worth knowing
The shoots are grown without light on purpose so they come up pale and soft, and the festival's name is the colour they are not — harela means the green one, for what the grain would have been outdoors.
Connections (1)
- In the same set asMinjar Fair, Chamba
Two Himalayan festivals of germination, in adjacent hill states, both about the first green of the monsoon. Harela in Kumaon sows seven grains in baskets indoors and cuts the pale shoots ten days later to wear and to give to elders. Minjar in Chamba takes the tassel of the flowering maize, wears it for a week as a silk ornament, and drowns it in the Ravi with a coconut and a rupee. One grows a crop in order to bless with it; the other grows one in order to give it to a river.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Harela”. Uttarakhand culture department records; Uttarakhand Forest Department Harela plantation programme.
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