Tradition · camel & livestock fair · India
Pushkar Fair
A livestock market that became a pilgrimage and is now both. It runs for the week up to Kārtika Purnimā beside the Pushkar lake, and at its height moved twenty thousand camels, horses and cattle between Marwar breeders and buyers from across northern India. The bathing on the full moon is the religious half; the trading, the racing and the moustache competitions are the other, and the two have never been separable — the fair happens then because the pilgrims were coming anyway.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 26.488, 74.556
Worth knowing
Camel numbers have fallen by more than half in two decades as trucks replaced them, so the largest camel fair in the world is now attended mainly by people who have come to look at camels.
Connections (2)
- Shrine within cityPushkar
The fair is at Pushkar because the pilgrims were coming anyway. Bathing in the lake on Kārtika Purnimā is the older observance — Pushkar holds one of the very few temples to Brahmā anywhere — and the livestock market grew alongside it, because a week when every Marwar household is already travelling to one place is the week to bring animals to sell. The camel trading and the temple bathing still share the same few days and the same ground.
- In the same set asSonepur Mela
The two great livestock fairs of northern India are held on the same full moon, thirteen hundred kilometres apart. Pushkar's opens on Kārtika Purnimā beside a Brahmā temple and a lake; Sonepur's on the same day where the Gandak joins the Ganga, at a temple that puts Vishnu and Shiva in one shrine. Both are bathing festivals with a market attached, or markets with a bathing festival attached, and neither has ever needed to decide which.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Pushkar Fair”. Rajasthan tourism department fair records; Marwar livestock census figures.
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