This Village keeps Govardhan Puja Spirit Alive

This story was part of the Diwali package which I had written for the Hindustan Times, Bhopal in 2001. During my ride to visit the village side I had go a whiff of what kind of fun they will have one day after the Diwali festival. So I followed it up and landed at the village where every year this play is enacted to keeps the tradition going.

The Bovine element in the cow-belt festival psyche may be withering away in the urbanized settings of the State Capital but the traditions of Gavardhan Puja, performed to worship Lord Krishna the next day of Deepawali, come into their own in villages on the city’s outskirts.
It’s another matter that the same day, a religious Chief Minister Digvijay Singh was performing the traditional foot march around the Govardhan hill in Mathura that , as mythology has it, was lifted by Lord Krishna to save his devotees from a downpour of catastrophic portions.
Gora Gaon, a tiny village near Bhadbhada reservoir – the type that dot the City’s boundaries without ever being noticed was the scene of a traditional challenge thrown at a mendicant drifter “Baba” by a snake-charmer to prove his prowess of the occult.
The wide-eyed villagers gathered in large numbers to watch the exchange in awe in the hamlet dominated by Meena tribe that hails from Rajasthan but who has sizable population in pockets of Western Madhya Pradesh.
Starting his rituals, the Baba soon went into a trance, shaking, shivering and mumbling incoherently. He claimed to possess recondite powers to even transform the fortunes of men.
The snake- charmer followed up by doubting his claims, derisively mocking at the Baba for being a phony. As the snake-charmer, Raghu Sapera, began to blow his pipe, Baba’s gyration and incantations grew more fierce. Women crouched and kids shrank away behind elders in fear.
Both swore at each other in a dialect for more than one hour while running into knocks and corners of the village and in between creating an mock fight. After a half a dozen such mock fights the Baba finally settles the score by ensuring the death of the snake –charmer, thus ending an generation old tradition of the Evil (snake-charmer) being killed by the Good (Baba).
Soon the elders started to stand up and gave away loads of money to the traditional artists who have played this very same role for more than a decade now.
The tradition village skit over with the elders happy that the evil in the village has been killed, while the middle aged were seen assuring the their young ones had learnt a lesson or two, so that they could keep the alive the tradition and festivity of the Govardhan Puja going in future too.