I was at Bengaluru Karaga recently. And wrote about it for The New Indian Express. An edited version of the story was published here today. Read it here below.
With a population of ten million and
some more, Bangalore ,
not yet officially Bengaluru, is a sprawling metropolis with glass façade high
rise buildings, many symbols of new money and the chaos that comes with the job
description of being a city. Yet, if you peer behind the sanitized campuses of
MNCs, there are plenty of vestiges of the small town Bangalore used to be, before it suddenly
found itself to be a city and didn’t know what to do with that novel idea.
There are plenty of lanes too narrow for a man pushing a bicycle to pass
through, labyrinths of roads and precariously placed old houses above shops
which require you leave your footwear outside.
It is in these lanes that Bangalore continues to
exist as if somehow time has never moved on. It is in these lanes every year at
the famous Bengaluru karaga that a village fair wakes up with a yawn for a few
days before and after the first full moon of the first month of the Hindu
calendar. There are cheap toys and joy rides, snacks served with dirty hands and
fake jewelry, plenty of noisy children, harassed mothers and entourages of
extended families. There are bright lights, some neon signs sneak in here and
there as well, it is still the city, after all. There are fortune telling
robots and shiny paper swords. There are chants that rent the still balmy
evening air. Taking this opportune distraction, the street hawker demands an
extra rupee for the balloon that the little girl has set her heart on. There is
haggling but the parents have other things to see and do before the crowds
bulge some more, so they grudgingly give the hawker that extra rupee.
There will be, over the all night
procession, some lakhs of people overflowing into the narrow lanes of
Thigalarapet, Sunkalpet and the other old ‘petes’ (towns) of Bangalore. Yet the
famous Bengaluru karaga never shakes off its small town look and smell and
feel. This is a side of Bangalore
that is comfortable with itself.
The Bengaluru karaga is famously
amongst the oldest community festivals in the city, pretty much up there with
the famed Mysore Dasara, though not perhaps as international as the latter. It
is lead by the Thigala community; descendents as per legend from an army of Veerakumaras
that Mahabharata’s Draupadi is said to have created to destroy a demon. The
community has historically been known to be gardeners from Tamil Nadu who were
invited during Hyder Ali’s time to help lay out the gardens at Lal Bagh in
Bangalore.
In a retelling of the feminine
narrative, a man, in a role that has come to him hereditarily, dresses up like
a woman, complete with an overflowing jasmine headgear and a mangal-sutra
and walks the night in procession; for that night, after weeks of penitence and
rituals, he embodies Goddess Draupadi. “The procession first goes to Mastan
saab dargah and then to the temples in the area, following the route of the
original precincts of Kempegowda’s Fort. While the karaga carrier is always
from the Thigala community, the other duties of the festival belong to other
castes,” says Chalakari Narayana Swamy, spokesperson at the Dharmarayaswamy
Temple, where the festival is held.
Forty-three year old C M Lokesh
carried the karaga for the fourth time running this year. His turn comes every
alternative year. “During the year, I go and do many rituals at the
Dharmarayaswamy Temple every day. For six months of the year before the karaga,
I live in a purified room within the temple and can go home only to see my two
young children,” he says. On the night of the karaga, he dresses up in a saree,
embodying Draupadi. After that night, his wife gets her husband back. “We are
chosen by the community for our abilities,” he adds, refusing to elaborate
further. The rest of his time is spent in running a printing press in
neighbouring Nagarathpet.
“The temple is unique too, for there aren’t
many other places of worship in the country dedicated to one of the Pandavas,”
Swamy continues. The festival and its origins are, like most things in the
country, shrouded in the unwritten years of history. But banking on
archaeological records and oral history, he estimates that the festival goes
back over 500 years. “It is the oldest festival in the region and is
instrumental in bringing together people from all castes, classes and
communities,” he insists.
Buddhist antecedents?
Dr Taltaje Vasantakumara, a Buddhist
scholar has proposed, rather controversially, that the festival might have
Buddhist origins. “Dharma is a word that is at the base of Buddhism. The
rituals and the act of karaga itself may have originated from the idea of
dharma. Over time, thanks to the act of myth making, it got associated with
Hinduism and attached to the epics to form a new history,” he says.
As with all community activities,
the politics of religion isn’t too distant here either. But for a week or so, Bangalore slips back to
how it started out once upon a time, a smallish town that used to be dazzled by
the city lights.
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