We are in the middle of festival season here in Mumbai. That’s not to say there aren’t celebrations and events at other times during the year, but between August and October, give or take a few weeks for lunar shifts, there is a high concentration of festivals. And for us, this means plenty of occasions to dress Jasper up in traditional Indian clothing and blow his ever-curious mind with some of the colourful, noisy and acrobatic customs associated with each festival.
So far, we have had Raksha Bandhan, Dahi Handi and Ganpati, and we have a Dandiya folk dance party to celebrate the Gujarati festival of Navratri, and of course, Diwali, coming up. If there’s one thing we can be sure of so far, it’s that Jasper really, really loves drums.
RAKSHA BANDHAN
This is the festival to celebrate the bond of protection between a brother and sister, and was on August 11th, 2022. The bond is symbolised by a red bracelet which a sister ties around her brother’s wrist. By accepting the gift, the brother agrees to protect and watch over his sister, and the ritual is repeated every year. The tradition is rooted in a need for young women who are married off to families far away to have some protection so far from home. It was not customary for the parents to visit their daughter’s new, married home so a brother would be sent as an emissary instead, to ensure her safety and to offer support.
It’s largely symbolic now, especially somewhere as cosmopolitan as Mumbai, but that didn’t stop me from worrying about the potential financial and protective obligations we might have to someone who managed to hold Jasper still enough to tie a red string around his wrist. At school he wore his first, new traditional bandhani top and dhoti trouser set, and made himself a wrist band, which, naturally, ended up on the floor as soon as he arrived home.
DAHI HANDI
This festival celebrating the birth of Lord Krishna, a Hindu deity who started out life as a mischievous child, fell on 19th August in 2022. And since then, we have not heard the end of it from Jasper. Limited as he is by the, as yet, minimal vocabulary at his disposal, Jasper has spent the past month telling people to “man up” whenever he gets the chance.
There is a reason for Jasper’s motivational chant; at the centre of the Dahi Handi celebration is a human tower building competition, a spectacle which took place on the street right outside our apartment complex. Dahi is the Hindi word for curd or yoghurt, and Handi is the Hindi word for a pot. Once a team of men have climbed up into a very impressive tower, four or five stories high and often with a daredevil child up at the very top, they attempt to smash a clay pot full of yoghurt. This is an ode to Lord Krishna’s mischievous ways and his supposed love of yoghurt. As the story goes, his mother used to have to hide the dahi somewhere high up, out of reach of the naughty Lord Krishna. As anyone who has ever met a toddler will know, that will only make them climb. For days after we watched it, Jasper would demand to be accompanied to the gates to check if there were any “more man up”.
The way Jasper tells it, a month later and with a few more words in his arsenal, goes something like this:
Man. Up. Pot. Smash. Yoghurt. Head. Boom.
I mean, he has the story straight. The men clamber up in a tower, to reach the pot. If they are successful in both building the tower and in smashing the pot, the top person gets covered in yogurt. And then they all either fall down or gracefully climb down, depending on how the base people are faring by this point. Jasper does actions too, holding his hands above his head with his fingers doing some spidery climbing, and then smashing an imaginary pot above his head.
From what I understand, the modern-day celebrations are not only about honouring Lord Krishna, there is also money to be won from smashing handis. Teams of men walk from handi site to handi site, looking for unsmashed pots suspended from cranes. The money isn’t in the pot, because that would be too yogurty. But apparently there is money stashed somewhere nearby to be handed out to the victors. Once all the pots are smashed, and all the monetary prizes distributed, it turns into a festival of strength and balance. The teams arrive, form their tower simply to show that they can, climb back down, have a short rave to some hard house music on the ground, and then move on. Jasper also greatly enjoyed watching the men dance after their ascent and descent, and has adopted a crazed, arms-in-the-air-like-ya-just-don’t-care, moshpit style of dancing which he deploys with gusto whenever he hears a drum beat.
It was amazing to watch the towers assemble and more often than not, tumble, but it has been even more amazing to see what a lasting impression it has made on Jasper. Only time will tell if he will still be looking for the man ups in a year’s time, but so far, he seems to remember it so vividly, even though a whole month has passed since the festival.
GANPATI
The most recent of the festivals was Ganpati and lasted ten days from 31st August to 9th September. These dates also coincided with a visit from Jasper’s grandpa Tony, who popped over from Vietnam.
Daadaa, as Jasper now calls all men of a certain age, but which is also technically the correct term for Tony as the Hindi word for a paternal grandfather, was more than happy to carry Jasper down our street to take a closer look at the Ganpati festivities. As told by Jasper:
Daadaa. There. Pati. Ella. Drum man.
I’ll help you out. Ganpati is a festival of worship around Lord Ganesha, the Hindu god with the head of an elephant. While this festival is celebrated by Hindus all over India, in Mumbai they go absolutely nuts for it. Ganesh is the God of New Beginnings and the Remover of Obstacles, and the festival comprises anywhere between three to ten days of worship to a Ganpati, or Ganesh, idol before the idol is carried to the sea where it is submerged. There are some enormous Ganpatis which are trucked down Mumbai’s main roads in a procession towards the sea at the end of the ten day period. These are easily ten feet tall, and are accompanied on their float by a man with a stick whose job it is to move power cables out of the way as they pass. There are also smaller, household sized Ganpatis which people keep in their homes for a few days and then which are submerged in community water tanks. The way to find these community water tanks seems to be to listen for the drums.
Oh how Jasper loved those drums. When they went on their little walk down our road, Tony and Jasper came across a small band of drummers down a side alley and went in to get a closer look. I confess I wouldn’t have done this were I alone with Jasper, because experience has taught me that without someone running defence, taking Jasper out into a festival crowd leads to people sneaking up on us to take photos, or worse, to try and touch Jasper while I am facing the other way. With Tony there, however, we were able to get right into the festivities, and after watching the drummers for a while, we moved on to the shrine where the larger, community Ganpati was housed. To the untrained eye, the entrance to the shrine looked like a grand, stone temple, but in fact, it was a temporary plaster structure they had built a couple of days earlier to disguise an otherwise uninteresting stretch of pavement. We were given the VIP treatment, ushered in to see the Ganpati idol and to have our photo taken with someone or other important looking. Jasper put his hands together in prayer and was given an orange, which made him extraordinarily happy.
For days after this little excursion, Jasper would jump at the sound of drums, dancing a little jig and shouting “ooh ooh ooh drum man drum man” while pointing at the gates to the compound. Again, sadly, this festival too came to an end. There are still some posters and billboards around the city which are advertising the festival and the location of the Ganpatis, which makes Jasper shout out “pati” as we drive to school. But unfortunately, it is another year until he can see another idol.
I don’t yet know what to expect from Diwali, but I already know that Jasper is going to love it. And in turn I know that I am going to love hearing him tell his version of events for months afterwards. Sometimes, when he gets over excited and can’t quite get his words out about the Dahi Handi or the Ganpati, I summarise for him. He listens intently and then simply nods and then says, “that”.
Little does he know that I am barely one step ahead of him on all these festivals. There is so much to see, to hear and to learn about what is clearly a very festive culture.
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