How festivals have become stages for fear and control
As spring swiftly turns into summer, it is worthwhile to revisit the months gone by for the ideals they have long represented: renewal and new beginnings. World over, spring augurs hope and joy, and the most explicit way to legitimise this spirit is by celebrating festivals. Perhaps, more than any other country, India presents a masterfully diverse vocabulary for such celebration as the events honouring the season are manifold and distinct in style and sensibility. From Basant Panchami to Holi, Baisakhi to Ugadi, Vishu to Eid-al-Fitr and more, the list is a long one. Along with food, festivals define the core of ‘Indianness’.
And yet, for some time now, there is a disturbing codicil that has come to sully this marker, acting almost out of habit. This is an aggregate of violence and vindictiveness, condescension and control that is commonly observable across the country, where power manifests itself in the ugliest fashion. The festival of Holi arguably presents us with the largest number of negative examples, ranging from inflicting mischief upon members from within the Hindu community to those belonging to other faiths. From until a few decades ago, when one didn’t think twice before participating in the joyous madness of colour and water, to the current times, when so many of us have become scared of even stepping out during the season, the jubilant mood of yore has become tarnished.
Women have been at the forefront of such suffering as well as people from non-Hindu faiths. From using stones to semen in water balloons to causing ruckus outside mosques and Muslim homes, the frequency of malicious examples is increasing. Politicians have found it easy to threaten their bodyguards to ‘dance’, lest the latter get suspended (like Deepak Kumar, a constable-turned-bodyguard from Bihar, who was bullied into the act by his boss, RJD MLA Tej Pratap Yadav).
This year’s Holi was fraught with added anxiety as it shared the day with the second Friday of Ramadan. To ‘allay’ communal tensions, the UP Government was prompted to ‘cover’ 10 mosques with tarpaulins, advising Muslims to stay in.
This took me to my Delhi University days, where, instead of controlling the haywire behaviour of male students during Holi, the onus of responsibility fell on female hostellers, who were instructed by the warden to lock themselves in their hostels.
It is also telling that we have now reached a stage where inter-faith expressions of solidarity and celebration within educational institutions (let alone general society) provoke hatred and intimidation. A few weeks ago, when the principal of a prestigious convent school in Shimla suggested Eid celebrations in customary clothes for nursery and primary class students, numerous parents and Hindu nationalists found it impossible to contain their anger over the perceived ‘hurt’ and ‘sacrilege’, forcing the head to withdraw the appeal. This is a country where we are quick to sing praises of our ‘inclusivity’ when we see a burqa-clad woman taking her son to a fancy-dress competition dressed as a Krishna or Rama. The opposite, however, is something we find hard to digest or even appreciate.
It isn’t only traditional festivals that have become besmirched by spite. The spirit of celebration spreads across other forums, especially victory events in sports, when the whole country finds instant justification to indulge in Diwali-like festivities. Once again, nasty expressions of power become visible, as was observed in Mhow during India’s recent ICC Champions Trophy victory celebrations, where stone-pelting and heated confrontations quickly got the better of a rally march. And on the same day, a man and his sister were harassed, chased and threatened in Faridabad for not participating in the celebrations, with the sister sustaining injuries from fireworks and their car damaged from physical attack.
Popular cinema has occasionally broached this entanglement of power and celebration in subtle ways. In Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s 2009 film Delhi-6, when low-caste trash collector Jalebi (brilliantly played by Divya Dutta) visits an upper-caste household to make her offerings during the Navrarti aarti, she is stalled from doing so on account of her ‘impurity’, that too by a house-help (clearly belonging to a ‘better’ social strata than her). More recently, towards the end of the much-acclaimed film Mrs (2025), directed by Arati Kadav, lead protagonist Richa decides to cut off her relationship with her married family during the birthday celebration of her father-in-law. For, this event marks the culmination of the series of harassments and societal pressures she has been put through, particularly through her confined position as an unacknowledged cook for one and all.
One could find more examples where power-politics connected with festivities forms the fulcrum of countless rituals. For instance, in my maternal homeland of Kangra Valley, the ongoing month of ‘Chaitra’ is traditionally supposed to be inaugurated only when members of the ‘low-caste’ community of ‘Mangalmukhis’ go from house to house, singing songs of yore, invoking gods and legendary figures. The scenes and sounds presented by them are considered auspicious to behold and listen, but the ‘Mangalmukhis’ themselves are hardly allowed to occupy a central position in the verandahs or courtyards for their performance. For, notwithstanding the ‘holiness’ of their pursuit, their bodily presence has been kept at bay, often at a corner or an edge of the house, from where they ‘must’ articulate their role.
Given the abandon and allure they signify, festivals and celebrations often go uncritiqued. But surely, there is space for reflection, especially in times like these when religious and communal fault lines are deepening. Amidst the fervour and feasting, there has to be a pause that makes us reconsider who is it that gets to feel ‘good’ and ‘validated’, and who is it that faces the brunt of the merriment-turned-misery.
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