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No One Is Too Poor: Harvest Festivity in India's Southernmost State
| Article
# : |
19970 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
2,229 Words |
| Author
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Lalit Gambhir
Lalit Gambhir is a free-lance photojournalist affiliated with
The World & I Photo Agency. Based in New Delhi, he engaged in
field research in Manipur during September and October 1990. |
Onam (literally, feasting and rejoicing) is the most important annual festival in the calendar of Kerala, India's southernmost state. The festival marks a time of abundance: The harvest is completed, the granaries are overflowing, and nature's bounty calls for celebration. Abuzz with excited customers, the marketplaces burst with prodigious piles of coconuts, bananas, vegetables, and flowers. In the front yards of their homes, young girls create athappoo (circular floral decorations). The athappoo is completed on the last day of Onam, a floral layer or pattern having been added during each of the ten days of the festival.
As every festival day dawns, males and females bathe, put on their finest clothes, and worship in the village temple. Subsequently, ritualized feasting takes place in the homes. This is followed by distribution of presents of new clothes, perhaps the most significant feature of the festival according to historian K.P. Padmanabha Menon.
V.R. Tampi, younger son of the princess of Travancore, comments: "In feudal society, landlords, kings, and other men of power used to give the gifts to the peasants and the land workers. This was characteristic of the ruler/ruled relation: The onus of the celebration of festivals lay on the ruling class. Later, this practice changed. The head of the joint [extended] family became the chief patron. In Kerala, the situation remains more or less the same because families are not as nuclear as in the rest of India, especially the north."
For the feasting, family members sit on the floor, in a row facing eastward. A brass lamp is lit and placed at a distance before them. In front of the lamp (to its western side) is a small plantain leaf. Leaves are placed in front of each family member. Dishes are cooked, prepared, and served by the women of the house. Everyone eats with his fingers from the plantain-leaf "dish." Guests must adhere to this and other traditional practices or risk severely insulting the household. A typical menu has rice as the staple, six or seven curry preparations (basically, vegetable leaves and shoots), and vermicelli boiled in milk and eaten with small bananas for dessert.
The food on the leaf near the lamp is an offering to the Hindu elephant god, Ganapathy. Toward the end of the meal, before the diners leave their places, the lamp is removed. One of the servers sprinkles water round the lamp three times, then removes it toward the north--never toward the south, for that would be considered inauspicious. The soiled plantain leaves are discarded. Fresh
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