The Burning and the Colours

In the weeks after the great vigil, the fields of the north turn yellow. The mustard comes into flower, sheet after sheet of it, and the cold that the night of Shiva sat inside begins to break. The tradition meets the change the way it meets everything, with a festival, and the festival of spring’s arrival comes in two movements: first a goddess in yellow, and then a fire and a storm of colour.

The first movement is quiet. The second is the loudest day in the entire Hindu year.

The Goddess in yellow

Spring announces itself on the fifth tithi of the bright fortnight of Magha, in late January or early February, with Vasant Panchami. Vasant is spring. This is the day the season is welcomed, and the goddess of the day is Saraswati.

Saraswati is one of the oldest divine presences in the tradition. She begins in the Rigveda as a river, and as the goddess of the sacred speech that flows like one. Griffith’s public-domain translation of the hymn at 2.41.16 addresses her plainly: “Best Mother, best of Rivers, best of Goddesses, Sarasvati.” In time she becomes the goddess of learning, of music, of the arts, of every form of knowledge that flows. On Vasant Panchami she is worshipped by students, by musicians who lay their instruments before her, by artists who set down their tools at her feet. Children are often given their first lesson in letters on this day, the vidyarambha, the beginning of learning, timed to the beginning of spring.

The colour of the day is yellow, the yellow of the mustard fields and the turning season. People wear it, offer yellow flowers and sweets, and in the north fly kites into the warming sky. The festival is gentle, a clean threshold: knowledge honoured, the cold ending, the year leaning toward growth. It is the first breath of spring, and it sets up the explosion that follows about forty days later.

The fire

The second movement begins at night, with a bonfire.

On the full moon of Phalguna, the month after Vasant Panchami, communities build a pyre, and after dark they light it. This is Holika Dahan, the burning of Holika, and it carries the festival’s central story.

The story is old. The frame of it, the tyrant Hiranyakashipu and his devoted son, is preserved in H. H. Wilson’s public-domain translation of the Vishnu Purana, and the episode of Holika in the fire is given more fully in later Puranic sources such as the Bhavishya Purana. The king had won a boon that made him all but impossible to kill, and in his pride he demanded that the worlds worship him in place of every god. His own son refused. The boy Prahlada loved Vishnu and would not stop saying so, and no threat the furious king devised could shake him. At last the king turned to his sister, Holika, who the tradition says was protected from fire. She took the boy in her arms and sat with him in a blaze, meaning to burn him alive while she sat unharmed.

The fire turned. Holika burned. The boy walked out untouched, his devotion the only shield he had needed.

This is what the bonfire recalls: the burning of cruelty, the survival of faith, the triumph of devotion over the tyrant who would be god. In the deeper story the king’s destruction follows soon after, when Vishnu takes the form of Narasimha, the man-lion, and ends him. But on this night the image held in the flames is simpler and older. Pride burns. The devotee is spared.

The colours

Then comes the day, and the day is unlike any other in the calendar.

On the morning after the bonfire, on the first tithi of the dark fortnight, the colour comes out. People throw gulal, coloured powder in fierce reds and greens and yellows and blues, and douse one another with coloured water, until faces, clothes, streets, and strangers are painted past recognition. The festival is called Rangwali Holi or Dhulandi, and it does something the rest of the sacred year never quite does. It dissolves the ordinary order. Age, status, and the usual distances between people come apart under the colour. The servant colours the master. The young colour the old. For one day the lines are down.

The colour-play is woven to Krishna. The tradition tells that the boy Krishna, dark-skinned, complained to his mother that the fair Radha would never love one so dark, and his mother laughingly told him to colour Radha’s face whatever shade he pleased. So he did, and the gopis with her, and the playful smearing of colour at Braj, at Mathura and Vrindavan where Krishna grew up, became the heart of the festival. To this day the Holi of the Braj country, with its temple celebrations and the famous Lathmar Holi of Barsana, is held to be the truest. It is spring as divine play, as the love-game of god and devotee made visible in a cloud of red dust.

The anthropologist McKim Marriott, who watched Holi closely in a village near Mathura, read the day’s reversals as a sanctioned overturning, a release that lets the ordinary hierarchy be inverted for a day precisely so that it can be reaffirmed when the colour washes off. The tradition would add that the reversal is Krishna’s, that the god of play is the one who briefly turns the world upside down. Both readings can sit on the same morning.

Many beginnings

It would be tidy to say Holi means one thing. It does not, and the treatise will not pretend otherwise. Holi is a festival with several true origins, and which one a person keeps depends on where they stand.

In the north it is Holika and Prahlada, devotion over tyranny, and the colour-play of Krishna at Braj. In the south it is Kama Dahanam, the burning of Kama, the god of desire, whom Shiva reduced to ashes with a glance from his third eye when Kama dared to disturb his meditation: the spring fire read as the burning away of desire itself. In Bengal and the east it is Dol Jatra, the swing festival, tied to the appearance of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and kept with the images of Krishna and Radha on a decorated swing. In Manipur it is Yaosang. Across the Bhojpuri country and the diaspora it is Phagwah.

These are not corruptions of a single original. They are the festival as it actually lives, several stories gathered onto the same spring full moon, each carried by its own region and its own lineage. The survey position holds here as everywhere in this treatise: where the traditions converge, on the burning of the old and the welcome of spring, it speaks plainly; where they diverge, it names the divergence and ranks none.

What they share is the gesture. The old year, the old pride, the old desire, the old order, is burned down in a fire on the full-moon night. And the next morning, over everyone who survived the burning, the colours of the new season are thrown.

The vigil opened the year in the dark.

Holi answers it in every colour there is.