15.2 — India's Festivals and Why Regions Differ

A Bengali who moves to Mumbai discovers that the biggest festival of the year is one their family barely marked, and that the one their whole childhood was organised around is a modest affair there.

Durga Puja in Bengal and Ganesh Chaturthi in Maharashtra occupy the same emotional space and are different festivals to different deities in different months.

Both are Hindu. Neither is more authentic than the other.

Understanding why is the point of this chapter, and the answer involves agriculture, regional history, and — in two of the most important cases — nineteenth and twentieth-century politics.

Why the diversity exists

Four causes.

Agricultural cycles differ by region. Most Indian festivals sit at a point in the farming year: sowing, harvest, or the arrival or end of the monsoon. Since the crop calendar differs between the rice-growing east, the wheat-growing northwest and the millet-growing Deccan, the festivals differ.

Local deities were absorbed rather than replaced. Hinduism has no single authority, no single scripture and no mechanism for standardisation. When a regional deity was incorporated, it was frequently identified with a pan-Indian one while keeping its local form, name, story and festival.

Regional dynasties patronised what was local. A Chola or a Maratha or a Bengali ruler funded the temples and festivals of their own region, which entrenched the local form.

And calendars differ (Chapter 15.1). The same lunar date falls in a differently named month in the north and the south, and the solar and lunar new years fall on different days.

The major festivals

Diwali is the closest to a pan-Indian festival and it commemorates different things in different places.

In the north it marks Rama's return to Ayodhya after fourteen years of exile, from the Ramayana. In the south the emphasis is on Krishna's defeat of Narakasura, celebrated a day earlier as Naraka Chaturdashi. In Gujarat it is the new year and the day merchants open new account books, and Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, is the focus. In Bengal the same night is Kali Puja. For Jains it marks Mahavira's attainment of liberation; for Sikhs it is Bandi Chhor Divas, marking Guru Hargobind's release from imprisonment along with fifty-two princes (Chapter 6.14).

One night, five or six distinct commemorations, all genuine.

Holi, the spring festival of colour, marks the end of winter and is associated with the story of Prahlad and Holika. Its regional forms vary substantially — the Lathmar Holi of Barsana, the Basanta Utsav of Bengal, the Shigmo of Goa.

Durga Puja in Bengal, Assam and Odisha marks Durga's victory over the buffalo demon Mahishasura, celebrated over five days in autumn with elaborate temporary structures — pandals — housing commissioned idols that are immersed at the end.

Navratri and Dussehra cover the same nine nights elsewhere with different practice: Garba and Dandiya in Gujarat; the Ramlila performances and burning of Ravana's effigy in the north; and the royal Dasara procession in Mysore, which traces to Vijayanagara (Chapter 6.10).

Ganesh Chaturthi, the Maharashtrian festival discussed below.

Pongal, Makar Sankranti, Lohri, Bihu and Baisakhi are the harvest and solstice festivals — and Makar Sankranti is one of the very few Indian festivals fixed to the solar calendar, falling around 14 January, because it marks the sun's entry into Capricorn rather than a lunar date.

Onam in Kerala marks the annual return of the mythical king Mahabali, whose reign is remembered as a golden age of equality — and it is celebrated by Keralites of all religions as a regional rather than a strictly religious festival.

Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, on the Islamic lunar calendar (Chapter 15.1), which is why they move about eleven days earlier each year.

Christmas, with a distinctive Indian character in Kerala and Goa, where Christian communities long predate European contact (Chapter 5.8).

Guru Nanak Jayanti and the Sikh gurpurabs.

Buddha Purnima, marking the Buddha's birth, enlightenment and death, held by tradition to have occurred on the same lunar day.

And Mahavir Jayanti and Paryushana for Jains.

The two constructed festivals

This is the most interesting part of the chapter, because two of India's most prominent public festivals were deliberately built into their modern form for political reasons within the last 130 years.

Ganesh Chaturthi. Household worship of Ganesha in Maharashtra is old. The large public form — community mandals, street pandals, processions, and immersion — was created by Bal Gangadhar Tilak from 1893 (Chapter 6.20).

His reason was specific and tactical. British regulations restricted political assembly. A religious festival was a legal way to gather large crowds and address them. Tilak organised the public celebration explicitly to build a mass political constituency, and the festival became a platform for nationalist speeches, songs and organisation.

It worked, and it had a cost. It brought ordinary people into public political life on a scale nothing else had. And it fused nationalist mobilisation with Hindu religious symbolism, which made the movement harder for Muslims to identify with — a criticism made at the time and one Chapter 6.20 records.

Durga Puja's public form has a related history. Household worship is old; the community sarbojanin — for all — form dates from the early twentieth century, and it became a vehicle for both community organisation and, in the colonial period, for nationalist expression.

And the general point is worth extracting. Traditions that feel immemorial frequently have datable origins, which is Chapter 10.7's invented tradition applied to India. Knowing that a festival was constructed does not make it less meaningful — a hundred and thirty years of a community's shared life is real — and it does mean that claims about timeless practice should be checked.

What festivals actually do

Four functions, and they are why every society has them.

They mark time. Before widespread clocks and calendars, festivals were how a year was divided and how agricultural timing was remembered.

They redistribute. Feasting, gift-giving and charity are built into nearly all of them, which moves resources within a community. The obligation to feed guests and to give to the poor is explicit in most.

They bind. Shared ritual, at the same time, by the same community, is the most reliable mechanism social science has identified for producing group cohesion.

And they release. Holi's inversion of ordinary conduct — anyone may throw colour at anyone, hierarchy is temporarily suspended — is a recognised type: the carnival, in which normal rules are relaxed under licence, which is found in many cultures and which is generally read as making the rules more bearable the rest of the year.

The syncretic layer

Worth stating because it is the part most under pressure now.

Sufi shrines — Ajmer Sharif, Nizamuddin, Haji Ali — have been visited by Hindus and Muslims alike for centuries, and the urs commemorations draw both (Chapter 6.9).

Bhakti and Sufi devotional traditions borrowed from each other in poetry, music and practice. Kabir is claimed by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs (Chapter 6.9).

Regional festivals like Onam are participated in across religious lines.

Muharram processions in several regions have historically included non-Muslim participants.

And this shared practice has been diminishing in some places under communal pressure, which is a documented sociological change rather than a political claim.

The practical layer

Two things that are less romantic and matter.

Festivals are the largest economic events of the Indian year. Consumer spending, gold purchase, travel and retail all peak around Diwali, and the festival season drives a large share of annual sales in several sectors.

And there are real environmental consequences that are now being addressed with mixed success. Idol immersion using plaster of Paris and synthetic paints contaminates water bodies, and the shift to clay idols and to artificial immersion tanks is a genuine change in practice. Diwali firecrackers add substantially to air pollution in already severe conditions (Chapter 14.6), and restrictions have been imposed and are unevenly enforced.

Both are examples of a tradition adapting, which traditions do continuously and which is easier to see in retrospect than at the time.

Where this shows up in your life

Your holidays, your family's calendar, and the specific ache of being away from home during the festival your childhood was organised around — which is a real phenomenon and which is why migration and festivals are so closely linked in Indian literature and film.

And the observation that best summarises the chapter. India does not have one Hindu festival calendar with regional variations. It has many regional calendars that share a vocabulary. The unity is in the grammar rather than in the sentences, which is a reasonable description of Indian civilisation generally and which Volume VII takes up on the philosophical side.

What the next page covers

Chapter 15.3 covers the festivals and holidays of the rest of the world — what Christmas, Thanksgiving, Chinese New Year, Ramadan and the rest actually commemorate, how many of them sit on top of much older seasonal observances, and what the pattern of festivals across cultures reveals about the things human societies consistently mark.