Friday, March 22, 2013

Stories of Holi from West Bengal: when I was just a kid


When I was a kid, I used to go to this very large playground to play football in the evening after returning from the school. After the short lived winter in Kolkata, the environment will slowly warm up, and the day would start to become longer – which meant that we could play for longer hours in the evening. And we liked that.
Then there would be this one day every year – when I would just suddenly notice the arrival of the spring. It would be there in the breeze, in the trees and in the blooming of flowers, in the colour of the sky, and even if the transition from winter to spring must have been gradual – but the realization was always sudden.
The spring is here! And then I would jump up again – spring meant holi had come, too!
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I just loved holi – the food, the colours, the water pistols and balloons, the ritual of burning called nyara pora (symbolic burning of Holika, the demoness) just a day before holi – it was my favourite festival. But things changed as I grew up. In the later years, I had board exams coinciding with holi, and in college I would not be so enthusiastic about it, often escaping the mad rush of celebrations. The spirit of holi eventually deserted me as I single-mindedly embarked on the journey called career. 
I had a lot of crazy holi experiences. Maybe some of them will someday become stories I would want to tell. However, real stories of holi, or dol as we Bengalis call it, are the stories my mother told me when I was a kid. Those stories define the festival for me.
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My mother was the fourth one amongst five siblings – and my grandfather was a social worker and headmaster in a village school. My grandfather had an interesting history – he came from Faridpur district, which is now a part of Bangladesh, to Kolkata in the second decade of the twentieth century and joined the swadeshi movement. Soon, he turned ascetic and joined the Ramakrishna Mission as a bramhachary - an apprentice monk. When it was time for him to be inducted into the order of the monks, his guru asked him to seek permission from his mother as a pre-condition. The mother refused permission – which meant my grandfather could not become a monk. Instead – he married and took up social work with a zest. He travelled to the farthest villages, often working for the Ramakrishna Mission. He established the now flourishing the Ramakrishna Mission in Purnia district of Bihar. Later, he would settle down in a small village in the non-descript South Dinajpur district in North Bengal – where he would be given a parcel of land by the local zamindar in lieu of building a primary school
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My mother and her siblings never played with the colours when they were kids – because their father never approved of it. According to him, dol was a holy occasion for introspection and not for going crazy with colours or other indulgence. Neighbourhood boys and girls would come calling to their house – but they were only allowed to put ‘abir’– dry coloured powder, called ‘faag’ elsewhere in India - on the feet of the elders at home and touch a bit of the colour on the forehead of all the kids.
So no playing with colours, no water balloons or water pistols! Their holi was made special by something else altogether. I am coming to that in a bit.
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The practice of holi orginates from Vrindavan, where Krishna used to play holi with his gopikas. We dare say the institution of holi itself was not exactly started by Krishna, and it perhaps already existed. We can still presume that charming and innovative Krishna took the festival to new heights. It was a festival of love, a festival of colours, sweets, dancing and singing. In the middle of spring, this definitely sounds like a mating festival, an opportunity for youngsters to find and express love – just the same as many tribes around the world practice. Was it a unique practice to the tribe of Yadavs? I have no idea – but at least in modern day India – holi is a cultural universal. However, it is practiced with the nuances of each place and people – and probably no two places practice it in the exact same way.
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All the Bengalis are divided between two camps. The Shakto folk who worship the Shakti ­– goddesses such as Durga and Kali in one hand and the Vaishnavs - worshippers of Krishna on the other. The Shakto people were culturally dominant for a long time in Bengal. Then came along Sri Chaitanya - the social reformer who was also the inventor of the Hare Krishna dance accompanied by chanting – called Kirtan. He transformed religion into a cause for celebration – a mass participation never seen before. Thousands of people – enough to scare the army of the erstwhile nawab - would be dancing and chanting along with him on the road. He reformed how holi was played in Bangla too. With his influence, the new tweaked version of the festival of holi was soon spreading far and wide in Bengal
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According to Sri Chaitanya’s formula, holi, called dol in Bengal, was now to be played over 3 days. The first day was for playing with dry colour. Dry colour is easy to get rid of – so playing with it was a symbol of transience and the temporal nature of human experience. Then on the second day people would play with wet colours – colour that leaves a mark on clothes and faces and skin. The experience will leave many marks. At that time, very limited number of colours were available to play with – but the colour was important. And finally, on the third day, they would play with soil and clay – a reminder that our external situation can not affect our internal beings. The soil on our clothes and our body can not dirty the mind and soul. This was Sri Chaitanya’s brand of experiential learning. Playing holi was to be accompanied by continuous chants of Hare Krishna and dancing.
Much of this soon became a part of the life of the hype loving Bengali – irrespective of whether they are Vaishnav or Shakto. Still, dol is played with much more gusto for three days in North Bengal where more Vaishnavs live, as opposed to the South Bengal which has fewer Vaishnavs historically. In Kolkata and most of South Bengal, dol is to be played only for one day, not three.
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The countdown for holi always started with collecting things to burn during the ‘nyara pora’ – where you burned all the dry leaves, wasted small pieces of timber or anything that is garbage and will possibly burn (not plastic of course). On the evening prior to the holi day, we’ll make a huge pile out of all of that and set fire to it.
Fire making is an art after all – those who have camping experience would know about this. Also, we collected the burning material for days – and all that will be burnt in a matter of minutes. We used to watch the fire rise high before it slowly dies down, and then would go home with a strangely heavy heart.
In one particular year, the holi was just a few days after the general election. As soon as the election was over, we were quick to tear down the posters, flyers etc and piled everything under the staircase in the building where I lived. The next day, a snake chose the pile of papers as its nest. I don’t know who exactly drove away the snake, but we got our pile back before the eve of holi in time for the fire ritual. While picking up the stuff from under the staircase however, we were quite scared and were almost getting goose bumps imagining that a snake may surface out of the pile of papers without warning.
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One is supposed to place a potato in the nyarapora bonfire before lighting it – and then supposed to eat that potato when the fire goes out. However, we never managed to cook the potato sufficiently to eat when we lit the ‘nyara pora’. My mother will take the potato home and burn it on a gas burner – and then laugh at us kids when we excitedly ate the potato with some salt.
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My mother’s stories were far more eventful. Once on the day of holi, when she was a toddler, somehow she managed to evade everyone’s attention and went to the cow-shed. In the cow-shed, there was this cow called Lali. Lali had a reputation due to a history of terrorizing people and even attacking them with her horn even without any provocation. When people found my mother standing under the cow and holding her udders trying to copy the milking action she had seen earlier, everyone gave up hope of getting her back alive. No one even dared to go anywhere close to the cow – she would threaten with her horns if anyone tried to go anywhere near her. My mother was, however, standing or sitting under Lali for 3 hours without incident – at which point my grandfather arrived and managed to retrieve her (Lali was fond of the master and allowed him to come near her). That’s how my mother survived a holi that her family and the neighbours thought she would not survive. Later on in life, my mother showed an amazing ability to easily befriend animals on the first encounter.
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The holi lunch can be an exquisite and tempting affair. It was more so in the old days. Imagine the thrill of a holi lunch in an era when there was no access to restaurants, and cuisines from several continents as we know today – especially in a village in North Bengal in the 1960s. For Bengalis, cholar daal, more commonly known as chana in other parts, happens to be delicacy, often served with luchi (puri, flatbreads fried in oil or ghee). Why is such a dish which is available in common places these days, was considered to be a traditional delicacy?
In those days, when there was no microwave, gas stove or even kerosene stove, cooking was done on fire created from timber, cow dung, fire wood and on great occasions from cooking coal which was too costly for everyday use. It is difficult to cook chana, and takes a lot of time, and a lot of fuel. Hence, it was a rare treat. This was true for a lot of other dishes as well.
Apart from luchi-cholar daal, on the day of holi, Krishna was offered many other delicacies by devotees, which of course in turn would be shared by human beings since idols have never known to eat the food offered to them. Holi food had to be exclusively vegetarian in Vaishnavite tradition. Some of the remarkable dishes were kichudi, ghonto, potoler dolma. Malpua and payes was must in the sweet dishes apart from local delicacies – such as sorpuriya at Krishnanagar.
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Another remarkable phenomenon preceding holi was something called horir loot, which is a lost practice at present. Old women of the village, often widows, after performing a puja will be throwing sugar candies all around them, chanting some rhyming words. Small children will gather to collect the candies and eat them. This would usually take place in the courtyard – which would be kept clean – so I guess hygiene was not a big concern although the kids picked up the candies from ground and ate. According to my mother, this used to be a majorly fun activity and kids used to look forward to this. The widows earned good karma from this activity which was in their spiritual interest. It was so easy to make kids happy in those days.
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On the day when holi would be played with clay and soil, a big pool of mud used to be created in someone’s courtyard by pouring water into a lot of collected dust. Then a coconut will be thrown in the middle of this pool of mud. Then the children, irrespective of age and sex, would wrestle to win the coconut. This sounds like a version of Indian mud rugby. The first person to get out of the wrestle with the coconut would win the coconut and can keep it. My elder aunt used to compete and win in this event every year – and share the coconut proudly with the four siblings. That’s how the three days of holi would end for them.
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I don’t know how I will celebrate holi this year, or if at all I will celebrate it. However, writing down these holi stories was definitely a good way to relive the past – the people, the places, the times that I have left behind. Every festival, after all, is about the people we loved and spent the time with. Festivals are our clever ways to design our way back to our families and relate to our past. Relive your memories and reconnect to your family with a bit of colour, fun and masti at www.imlee.com



Ramanuj Mukherjee is a lawyer turned entrepreneur who is passionate about writing and culture. He has received President of India's award for creative writing. he works for online education startup iPleaders