A narrow winding lane, lined on both sides with antique-looking rustic dwellings, leads up to the Nand Rai temple on top of Nandiswara hill in Nandgaon, the village near Mathura where myth has it the god Krishna spent his boyhood years, hiding from his murderous mama Kansa. On this day of “lathmar holi” — the famous battle-of-the-sexes Holi where women beat men with sticks, celebrated in Nandgaon and nearby Barsana village, where Radha is said to have lived — there are boys and men everywhere, some of them grinning down from first-floor terraces while wielding impossibly long brass pichkaris with which they spray all incomers with water. No one is allowed to pass without this rude baptism but women are special targets as they are drenched, manhandled and smeared with gulal.
Even more boys and men stand waiting on the terrace above the temple gate, pichkaris poised and sketching long arcs of coloured water as they follow entrants who run pell-mell for cover. Inside, the atmosphere is riotous. Groups of men mostly, some of them dressed as women, dance to dholaks in the large open courtyard, their faces and bodies a riot of red, pink, yellow, green and blue. Dozens of photographers mill through the crowds, their high-tech digital SLRs wrapped in layers of plastic to protect them from water. The air is a haze of colour because every once in a while someone flings a fistful of gulal into the air, shouting “Holi hai!” The courtyard’s marble floor is a thick, slippery red slush into which young boys are laid flat and dragged by the feet and devotees fall in full dandavat obeisance.
The temple is a rather new structure. “It was renovated around 18 years ago, when it was covered in white marble,” Sushil Goswami, one of the priests, tells me, shouting into the din as he flings gulal at the pious crowds and hands out little packets of gulal as prasad. “Earlier, there was a simpler structure built by Roop Singh, the Jat ruler of Bharatpur, around 250 years ago; this is where the palace of Nand Maharaj [Krishna’s foster father] used to be. But the black-marble statues of Krishna, Balaram, Nand and Yashoda are far older; they had been found 1,650 years ago by Devkaran in one of the caves on Nandiswara Hill.”
This mythical explanation of Nandgaon’s history has been contested. In a well-known essay on the Holi celebrations of Vrindavan, American anthropologist McKim Marriott writes, “The villages named Nandgaon… and Barsana… were probably seventeenth-century inventions… that were contrived to attract pilgrims to the summer circuit of Krishna’s rediscovered and refurbished holy land of Vraja.” The reference is to the role of Sanatan and Rup Goswami, followers of Vaishnava bhakti saint Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, in designating Vrindavan as the land of Krishna-leela.
But, of course, such dry exegesis has no meaning in this land of myth and legend where Nand baba is a living god who “plays Holi with his gopis in Nandgaon and Barsana”. And not just priests like Goswami but almost everyone you meet speaks of the deity as if he were indeed a little boy who played, spoke, ate and bathed.
Lathmar holi is a re-enactment of an episode from the life of the deity. Krishna, so goes the myth, visited Barsana and teased Radha and her friends, at which the women beat them with sticks. Ever since, men from Nandgaon go to Barsana and get beaten with sticks; a day later men from Barsana come to Nandgaon where the women return the treatment. It’s a ritual beating, of course, with the women dressed in all their traditional finery and the men wearing pughs — a style of pagris worn in these areas which is heavily padded near the crown “so that the sticks don’t hurt us”, the boys tell me. Another interesting fact about lathmar holi is that it is only wives in the village who take part in it, never daughters — “the relation between the people of Nandgaon and Barsana is one of bhabhi-devar, which is why there are never any marriages between the two villages,” Goswami explains.
Goswami traces his ancestry to Anand Ghan, who established the temple, and whose descendents now manage it. “Anand Ghan split the temple three ways between his five sons, and we, his descendents of the 27th generation, now run it.” he explains. “There are now around 5,000 of us and each of us gets a day or half-a-day to do seva. The temple donations are also split according to our share of the seva.”
