A huge number of women woke up cross and hungry across North India on Friday. They were braced to starve through the daylight hours until the sun set and the moon was sighted. This self-mortification is supposed to ensure that their husbands have long lives and good health.
The actions and their supposed consequences do not correlate or compute: Why would a woman starving through a given day affect the lifespan of the man who shares her bed? Unless of course, she got irritated enough to stab him with the kitchen knife.
However, there's a quid pro quo. Husbands are expected to cough up with generous presents as compensation for the wives starving, and so, the wives starve with more ostentation each year because they expect the presents to get more generous. That makes sense in a circular sort of way.
Karwa Chauth may have existed for centuries as an obscure medieval custom, followed by some North Indian families. It's gone viral in the last 10-20 years entirely because Bollywood and the serials love it. There are a half-dozen mythological stories related to its possible origins and those origin legends show signs of the kind of retro-fitted plots that movie script writers are so adept at.
Karwa Chauth was certainly not the first religious festival, if it can be called a festival, to be promoted by the Indian entertainment industry. I remember another Bollywood-driven set of rituals that involved propitiating a deity, Ma Santoshi, by doing obscure things on Fridays. Ma Santoshi was invented by Bollywood and the movie, Jai Santoshi Maa, spawned a cult, which thankfully seems to have tapered off in popularity. For a while, there were sadhvis grabbing likely looking plots of land and setting up Santoshi Maa mandirs all over North India.
These are just two examples of the remarkable speed at which religious ritual can be conjured up, remoulded and rebooted. Many young and youngish North Indian women appear to believe that the KC starvation is an ancient and honourable tradition. But their mothers and grandmothers, and mothers-in-law (who mostly seem to enthusiastically endorse it) did not necessarily starve themselves, when they were young brides. The festival was then far less popular.
Political considerations have also often driven changes in religious mores. Both Ganesh Chaturthi and Durga Puja are highly popular festivals, which are now considered pretty definitive symbols of Maharashtra and West Bengal.
Both festivals have their origins in recent history. Both were promoted for political and nationalistic reasons. Ganesh Chaturthi was pushed by Bal Gangadhar Tilak who promoted it and turned it into a major community affair.
Durga Puja is more complicated. The community thing is big of course. Durga Puja and more generally, the worship of the mother goddess, also has strong links to the nationalist movement. Many of the young Bengali gunslingers went to the gallows shouting Bande Mataram after chucking their bombs for the cause of Independence. Some of them saw no contradictions between swearing oaths to the mother goddess, venerating the motherland as a goddess and being committed Marxists as well. To add to the complex nuances, Durga Puja was also supported generously by sundry zamindars, who were all loyal servants of the British.
There are many reasons why religious festivals are popular and why every region has its own festivals. Money is one of them. It is easy to build a consumption-driven business model around a religious festival. Form a committee, arm-twist locals and corporates to contribute, spread the cash around by building pandals, commissioning idols, scheduling community meals, holding cultural programmes, etc.
The sad thing is, it is easier to start a religious festival with rituals invented wholesale than it is to get people to devote their energies and resources to any logical cause. People who will not bat an eyelid at donating large sums for some religious festival will jib at the thought of contributing to the building and maintenance of a public toilet or library.
Twitter: @devangshudatta
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