The Turning Toward Light

Almost every festival in this treatise wanders. They ride the moon, and so they slide across the Western calendar from year to year, the reader having to consult an almanac to know when Diwali or Holi will fall. The first volume explained why, at length.

There is one great festival that does not wander. Year after year it lands on nearly the same day, the fourteenth of January, as fixed as a Western holiday. And the reason it holds still is the reason it matters: it is keyed to the sun rather than the moon.

This is Makar Sankranti, the festival of the turning, and with it the year comes down out of the long autumn dark and begins, at last, to climb back toward the light.

The sun enters Capricorn

The third chapter of this treatise taught the sankranti, the moment the sun crosses from one sign of the zodiac into the next, twelve times a year. Most pass unmarked. Makar Sankranti, the sun’s entry into Makara, the sign of Capricorn, is the one the whole subcontinent keeps.

Because it tracks the sun and not the moon, its date is stable, falling on the fourteenth or fifteenth of January almost every year, drifting only with the slow centuries. And it marks the turn the third chapter named: the beginning of uttarayana, the sun’s northward course, the auspicious half of the year, the road the grandsire Bhishma waited for on his bed of arrows. The Bhagavad Gita, in Telang’s translation of verse 8.24, set this northward path among the roads of light by which the knowers of Brahman depart. Makar Sankranti is the festival of stepping onto that road. From here the days lengthen. The light is coming back.

The honest complication, which the third chapter set out and which belongs here too, is that the sun’s true seasonal turn, the winter solstice, now falls around the twenty-second of December, some three weeks before the festival. The two have drifted apart over the centuries because the festival is fixed to the stars and the solstice to the seasons, and the slow wobble of the earth has separated them. The tradition keeps the star-fixed date. It celebrates the turn toward light on the day the sun enters the constellation, faithful to the old appointment even though the sky has moved the meeting. The reader who has come this far knows by now that this is the tradition’s way. It keeps the rite.

One turning, many harvests

If Navaratri was the clearest case of one festival kept in many ways, Makar Sankranti is its equal, and here the variation runs across the whole map of India. The same solar turning is a different festival in every region it touches, and the differences are worth walking, because together they show the festival year at its most local and most rooted in the land.

In Tamil Nadu it is Pongal, and it is four days long. The name is the dish and the act at once: rice boiled with milk and jaggery in a new pot until it rises and spills over the rim, the overflow itself the blessing, abundance running over. The days honour in turn the discarding of the old, the sun, the cattle that work the fields, and the wider family. It is a harvest thanksgiving in the most direct sense, the crop brought in, the sun thanked, the animals that pulled the plough garlanded and fed.

In the Punjab it is Lohri, kept on the eve with a great bonfire into which sesame, popcorn, and sweets are thrown, the community gathered around the flames against the January cold, the songs of Dulla Bhatti sung, the rabi harvest celebrated. In Assam it is Magh Bihu, the harvest Bihu, with its feasting and its bonfires of meji and its temporary huts. In Gujarat it is Uttarayan, and the sky over the cities fills with kites, thousands of them, the rooftops crowded, the air a tangle of strings, a whole region looking up on the day the sun turns north. In Bengal and the east the day is marked by pilgrimage to Ganga Sagar, the island where the Ganga pours into the sea, where the faithful bathe at the meeting of the holy river and the ocean.

Sweets of sesame and jaggery run through almost all of it, the warming foods of deep winter. So does the theme of the new beginning, the turn, the fresh start the lengthening light promises. And so does the sun, thanked across every regional form, the star that the whole calendar, from the daily sandhya to this January turning, is built to keep time with.

The winter observances

Around the great turning cluster the cold months hold their own quieter observances, and they are worth naming because they lead toward the next chapter’s vast subject.

The cold season is a season of bathing and of austerity. Vaikuntha Ekadashi, the Ekadashi of the month when the sun sits in Dhanu, falls in this window, the day the gate of Vishnu’s heaven is held to stand open and the northern door of the great southern temples is unsealed. In the south, Thaipusam honours Murugan with the vow and the kavadi, the burden carried in penance, kept hugely across the Tamil diaspora. And in the cold month of Magha, on the rivers of the north, the faithful gather for the Magha bathing, the Magha Mela, the month-long austerity of the riverbank that the tradition has kept at the meeting of the rivers at Prayag for as long as memory runs.

That annual Magha bathing is the steady ground from which, every few years, the largest gathering of human beings on the face of the earth rises. The winter has turned the year toward the light and brought the harvest in. Now it carries the reader to the rivers, and to the pot of nectar.

The sun has turned north.

The pilgrims are walking to the water.