ಹೋಳಿ | Holi

Holi is the day of colours, kept on the morning after the bonfire of Holika Dahana. Coloured powder and coloured water are thrown, and for one day the ordinary rules about who may do what to whom are suspended.

When it falls

The tithi is Prathama of the dark fortnight of Phalguna, the first tithi after the full moon, and the reference moment is sunrise. The day on which that prathama is running at sunrise is Holi. There is no midday, dusk or midnight condition to apply, which makes this one of the few festivals in the year whose date almost never comes into dispute.

The month name does come into dispute, though only on paper. In the amanta reckoning used in Karnataka the dark fortnight belongs to the month that has just begun its second half, so this is Phalguna Krishna Prathama. In the purnimanta reckoning of North India the full moon ended Phalguna, so the same day is Chaitra Krishna Pratipada there. The tithi is identical and the day is the same day.

What is done

The ash of the previous night is taken first, on the forehead, before anything else. Then the colours: dry powder, water, and in towns where the festival is large, water from buckets and hoses. Bhang is drunk in the north; in Karnataka the accompaniment is more usually a sweet, holige or kajjaya, and a meal.

In Karnataka the day is quieter than the north supposes. In the old Mysore districts the second day is modest, and the substance of the festival was the fire and the Rati songs the evening before. In the northern districts, Belagavi, Vijayapura, Bagalkote, Dharwad, Kalaburagi, it is a street festival with halagi drums and processions, closer in scale to Maharashtra, which is what a shared border produces. On the coast the Kodagi and Konkani communities keep their own forms, and in some villages the colour play is spread across five days rather than one.

Maharashtra calls the day after the fire Dhulivandana, the honouring of the dust, and plays colours not then but on Rangapanchami, the fifth tithi of the dark fortnight, four days later. Anyone who assumes the whole country throws colour on the same morning will be wrong about Maharashtra, and about parts of Madhya Pradesh.

Braj

The elaborate form of the festival belongs to Braj, the country around Mathura and Vrindavan, where it is Krishna’s festival and runs for the better part of a fortnight. Barsana keeps the lathmar, in which the women of Radha’s village drive off the men of Nandgaon with staves; Vrindavan has its widows’ Holi and its flower Holi. These are local observances of one region that have become, through photographs, the image of the festival for everybody else.

What the day means

Two readings sit side by side and neither cancels the other. One is the burning of Holika and the survival of Prahlada, devotion outlasting force. The other, the older one, is seasonal: the cold is over, the harvest is in, and the year turns towards spring. The licence of the day, the abolition of rank for a morning, belongs to that second reading rather than to the first.