It is festival time and everyone loves a good festival, I believe. While festivals and festivities are part of our living heritage, they embody many of our beliefs and customs and also our worldview. Festivals are also region-specific and linked directly with places and geographic regions and even cities. Durga Puja of Bengal is celebrated here like no other place on earth. The festivities have evolved in their own way with the changing taste of each successive generation and economic pressures. There is a certain flamboyance, an opulence and garish style that have come to dominate our festivals today and are reflective of the change in the community and their desire to show others how much they are enjoying themselves. There appears to be a move away from pure devotion and piety to grand pandals made at exorbitant costs.

Each place in India is known for some festival that keeps the country vibrant throughout the year, such as the boat races during Onam in Kerala, the Holi festivities in Mathura and Brindavan and Puja in Bengal. In December there will be the exposure of the body and earthly remains of St Francis in Goa that will draw crowds from all over the Christian world. Christmas will light up our old churches and bring music and carol singing to these great buildings. The Urz at Ajmer and Nizamuddin will bring people from every corner of India to these pilgrimage centres and give reason and meaning back to these beautiful shrines and places of worship.

Fair in place

We also have great cattle festivals like the Nagaur cattle festival in February, the Pushkar fair where people of the desert came from distant parts to buy and sell camels, the Sonpur mela and the sale of elephants for domestic work in Bihar, which are all famous now for they offer special events and experiences for us to catch a glimpse of the importance of a place at certain times of the year. The meaning of these festivals is held dear to the community which hosts the occasion and this too is beginning to change.

There are several grand occasions that the government supports, like the celebration of Republic Day, that has become part of our new Indian culture, celebrated by children and adults alike. Then there are catastrophic events like the badly planned celebration of 350 years of the building of the Taj Mahal. No one to date knows whether this occasion for government spending on a colossal level is based on when the building was started or finished, nor for whom or what it is celebrating. Perhaps such celebration and lavish spending should be turned around and instead of poorly conceived programmes, the money may be better spent on cleaning up the city and protecting the heritage building that is the object of commemoration.

End of a journey

The government in its wisdom has also started secular festivals in different places. The dance festivals at Khajuraho, Konark, Mahabalipuram have tried to reinvent the idea of temple towns being the centres of social and cultural life. Some of these festivals have failed as they have been artificially imposed and have little to do with the life of the people who live near these grand but now disused heritage sites.

Festivals around pilgrim centres form one of the best examples of community participation. The arduous journey that the pilgrims take, the simple devotion and their minimal requirements, the city where they go; the destination of the pilgrimage like the Ujjain, or the Kumbha melas, all testify to the enormous pull that places have for people. A magnetic pull draws them, like homing pigeons, from all corners of the country to come at a designated time and to a chosen place.