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Partying with the Village People

“Mehla” means “festival.”

One of the first things a Westerner might notice about India is the sheer number of festivals and holidays. Every couple of weeks, it seems, there’s another holiday honoring a god, a season, or some aspect of the family. Rural India, our friend Pia tells me, has so many festivals because they provide a kind of emotional relief for the poor. For a day (or two), even the poorest person can stop work, put on their best clothes, sing, dance, and eat treats they don’t normally do.

Well, the latest mehla to rumble through Rewalsar is Baisakhi Mehla, a festival marking the Punjabi new year. After all the madness that was Losar/Kumbh Mehla/Shivatri etc., I thought we were due for a little normalcy. But, um, no. Baisakhi is significant to the Sikh religion. And just to add to the festivities, Baisakhi also coincides with the Hindu New Year. Since Rewalsar is home to a pilgrimage site that’s holy to both Sikhs and Hindus as well as Tibetans, people are properly motivated to put on a party. Or two. Or six. The town’s population has literally tripled with the sudden influx of annual pilgrims and vendors. That’s how the sleepy area around the Hindu temples turned from this….

to this:

The Sikhs have festooned Rewalsar’s gurudwara with enough holiday lights to illumine the entire valley. The Hindus, in turn, have also dressed their temples in lights. So far the last couple of days, street lights aren’t really necessary in our neck of the woods. Or, for that matter, night lights. As with most religious festivals, the bells, drums and chanting started nice and early around 5:30 AM Saturday. Actually, they didn’t start at 5:30, because they hadn’t really stopped from the night before. During the day both Sikhs and Hindus had their respective processions. The Sikh procession included a group of blue-garbed warriors demonstrating their martial arts sword-swinging skills. One of the things I like about the Sikh religion is the sheer practicality of the “fifth K“– carry a nice sharp “kirpan” (sword) with you at all times, in case you need to defend yourself or the helpless and oppressed from any godless idiots who don’t know no better. Meantime, the Hindu processions included parade after parade of local gods from the surrounding villages. For Baisakhi these deities all wander down from the hills, to the sound of drums, flutes, and horns, and have a big convo down by the temple. Each one also goes on kora around the lake, and pays obeisance to the big honchos like Shiva and Ganesh.

Despite all the religious hoo-hah, though, Baisakhi is really about two things for most folks: eating and shopping. This is one of the holidays where villagers and pilgrims who don’t normally come to Rewalsar actually trouble to make the trip, piling themselves and about 8 or 10 other family members into a jeep or truck to get here. The first wave of visitors are itinerant vendors, hoping to making a killing within the three days or so of the festival. The kora path on both sides is solid with vendor booths. By 5 or 6 o’clock they’re all awake already, making breakfast, washing up, setting up their wares. The Sikh dentist-optician wallahs are the most surreal: they have tables out, filled with dentures, crowns, and eyeglasses. I’ve actually been told the dentist wallahs are pretty good, bearing in mind that anything they put in your mouth has been sitting out on the table in the street for a while, with the dust and the cows and the dogs. Okay! Moving on!

With all of the vendors selling …

shoes, bracelets, underwear, cap guns, plastic storage containers, stove lighters, knives, coffee cups, radios, belts, chappali, bubble toys, foil hats, fresh pressed sugar cane juice, posters of the gods, vermilion powders, “action bindi”, curtains, dolls, glassware, neon-toned plastic flowers, Vedic astrology readings, jalebis, socks, watches, silverware, plastic buckets, jewelry, hair ties, fabric, toy kitchenware, “ready-made” children’s clothes, samosas, “OM” stickers, buzzing toy magnets, flutes, peacock feather fans, dhoop (incense), toe rings, pepper peelers, soaps, cosmetics, pujabhu (ceremonial Hindu puja plates), bill hooks, axe heads, and so on….

…the kora path looks like someone exploded a K-Mart (or maybe a Woolworth’s–remember them?) and artlessly dropped the various shelves around the lake. Then there is the pasture/playing field north of the lake, which in normal times is home to maybe a few piles of construction materials and the hard-working horses who carry it up into the hills. Every so often the monklets from the different gonpas will play a cricket match. Now, the same field looks a little different:

Like everything else in this part of India, the carnival rides are carried in and pretty much assembled by hand. There’s a lot of screaming involved whenever these things are in operation, but whether the screaming is happening out of happiness or fear is beyond me. As a spectator–especially one who’s seen the rides being assembled by hand–I would vote for fear, but that’s just me.

By far the trippiest aspect of Baisakhi is the traffic jams in front of the house, which is nowhere near town. Yesterday a bus, two jeeps, and two scooters vied for dominance over the one-lane road that runs between Rewalsar and some villages to the west and the holy caves. All vehicles were literally stuffed to bursting with people. I think each scooter was carrying a family of four. Just for reference, a typical Rewalsar traffic jam happens maybe once a week, and looks like this:

April 14th, 2007 Posted by admin | Travel, India | 2 comments