It might be easy to believe, looking at the advertisements on television, social media and various shopping apps, that the true purpose of festivals is shopping. This is, in fact, not too far from the truth. Conspicuous consumption has been part and parcel of sacred calendars, as have lean periods in that same regard: Christmas followed by Lent, Ramzan by Eid and the various harvest festivals across the Subcontinent that are a way to celebrate, connect and yes, eat and procure, after a season of hard labour.
But there’s more to celebrations than just their economy. Festive revelry is both religious and social, immanent and transcendent. And the connection between these opposites – the destruction and renewal of society, in essence – is most visible in Holi.
Story continues below this ad
For Emile Durkheim, “the father of sociology”, communal celebrations served two interdependent purposes.
First, they were a form of “collective effervescence” – an almost spontaneous, emotional and spiritual occurrence when the group participates in the same sets of experiences and in doing so, comes as close to becoming a single entity as possible. Anyone who has been taken in by a live concert, or even cried and laughed during a play or movie with the audience has tasted this feeling. The hall or venue, even the music itself is not the cause of the experience, it merely facilitates it. A bad concert or terrible stand-up comedy set has the opposite effect: It does not take you out of yourself but rather, causes boredom.
The second function of the festival is to reinforce society, as a whole. Ironically, it does so by breaking certain conventions. Sharing – meals (particularly in a caste-based society), rituals, emotion and play – can help strengthen bonds among parts of the social structure that often interact only through rigid hierarchies.
Story continues below this ad
Holi, unlike Diwali, fulfils these needs for transcendence in society. The latter is based heavily on receiving and giving gifts, which Durkheim’s nephew and equally seminal thinker Marcel Mauss has shown to be the basis for setting up hierarchies. In the festival of water and colour, boundaries are not set between patron and client, elder and younger, master and servant. Rather, sometimes aided by psychoactive substances (bhaang is all but legal, even encouraged), Holi breaks down boundaries and in doing so, takes us to the edge of a truth that we avoid in our daily lives, so that we may be able to live with ourselves.
A fascinating account of Holi in North India comes from anthropologist McKim Marriott, who wrote of his experiences in the village of Kishan Garhi in the 1950s. Like many festivals, it began with rituals (the burning of Holika) presided over by priests and elders, following the caste conventions of the region. Things changed, however, over the next night and day. Young boys and men, then and as now, were loud and aggressive in their celebrations. The social hierarchies were diminished, even reversed. Women from what are now considered OBC communities chased the landlord’s family. Marriot, an “outsider” experiencing all this for the first time, seemed taken aback by what he witnessed: “I was not sure just what I could find in anthropological theory to assist my understanding of these events. I felt at least that I was sharing Durkheim’s sense (when he studied Australian tribal rites) of confronting some of the more elementary forms of the religious life,” he wrote.
By the afternoon, though, those who had seemed aggressors were bathed and dressed in new clothes, the social mores back in place and the young anthropologist was somewhat perplexed at being told that what he had witnessed was a “festival of love”.
Marriot’s seeming bewilderment, like so many others (a recent episode of the hit show The White Lotus showed wealthy American women shocked by Songkran, the Thai festival similar to Holi), of the spring festival, comes from an attachment to order and structure. No society can survive without boundaries, dos and don’ts – in essence, order. Perhaps that’s why, in cities (which are arguably the pinnacle of ordered societies), Holi is now celebrated in enclaves, with gates shut. Or at parties in hired farmhouses and offices (in the latter, HR will give you an “ethnic” dress code to eat some snacks and gingerly sprinkle colour on a colleague). Yet, order is by definition at least somewhat oppressive.
Enlightenment and salvation, in the subcontinental traditions – Sufi, Vedantic, Buddhist, Jain — involve moving beyond the “order” of society, beyond segregation to a larger oneness. Standing on the precipice of that singularity is both challenging and rewarding. Holi, in its purest form, invites one and all to forget oneself and one’s status and celebrate together, as one.
Disclaimer: We do not own any of the content, ideas, images, or text presented here. All rights belong to their respective owners. For more information and to view the original source, please visit the following link: