Villages doll themselves up to welcome Diwali

During one of my weekly scooter rides into the villages I happened to see the ladies of villages paint their home wall exteriors and interiors with cow dung and chalk powder. After talking to them, I got to know that this was their way of ushering in the festival of lights. Most of the other newspapers in Bhopal had stories of people preparing for the festival of lights while we at the Hindustan Times, Bhopal showed the village side instead.

Barely a few kilometers from the loud and shimmering Diwali celebrations in the State Capital, the rural hamlets are abuzz with preparations for a more simple and traditional festival of lights. Despite the in-efficient rains – which have spelt a difference of fest-harvest bounty and disaster for adjoining villages separated by just a few kilometers – the villagers are upbeat about welcoming the festival.
Houses with the thatched and tiled roofs are being given a new look with women shading from the front by applying fresh cow dung paste on the outer walls of their homes. Come to think of it, they’ve never even heard of the oil-based distemper that’s so popular in the nearby State Capital.
Villages on the Old Sehore road have a different pattern for decorating their homes than their counterparts from the Hoshangabad road side. The villages of Gora, Bisankedi, Ratibad, Neelbad and Sehore first plaster the walls with cow dung and then paint drawings with white and red limestone water.
In other parts, they just make do with the cow dung paste. “This is because we on the Misrod road have forgotten our traditional values,” says 70 years old Umrao Singh Patidar. He adds that since the city of Bhopal is growing in all directions, they had to stop performing the tradition “Gau Pooja” on Diwali. “The BDA has acquired the land on which the entire village used to get together every year to perform the Pooja,” he rued.
The villages on the Old Sehore Road have managed to keep alive their reverential rites for the bovines.

Fourty years old Sharda from Ratibad village feels that city slickers should watch the full pooja rites collectively performed by the villagers to go back to their roots. She adds that the tradition cuts across caste and creed.
25-year old farmer Ganshyam Patidar from Jaatkhedi village off Misrod says that this Diwali is a happy one for him and his family because the rains were enough to reap a good harvest.
However 60 years old Hari Singh, a farmer from the Neelbad village on another side of the State capital, says it is a poor festival for him because of the excessive rainfall towards the end of monsoon that damaged his standing crops.
The cow owners strike a rich harvest during Diwali with the demand for milk going up by 75%.
Harvest or no harvest, the quaint Diwali traditions of the rural folks will go on for the time being, till such time that being, till such time that the State Capital’s miasmic urban sprawl engulfs their little hamlets and fields.