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.

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.

Love binds within Prison Walls

What enabled me to over score the hordes of fotog’s in Bhopal was my capability to write, and this special imbibe was induced into me by my friends Jayant Kodkani, Vinay Kamat, Sumit Chakraberti and Balasubramanium at the start of my career with the Times of India , Bangalore edition in 1987-88. They ensured and taught me the art of news writing with a little flair so that the end product is readable by the common man on the streets.
Well this story too was another plus in the Hindustan Times when I reported the scene from the field and ensuring that the paper just did not carry a stand alone image but have an overall picture of the festive mood with in boundaries of the Jail premises during Raksha Bandhan – in 2000.

Even as the Prime minister was busy in New Delhi getting rachis tied by men and women of all faiths or rakshabandhan, the scene was no different at the Bhopal Central Jail. More than 3,500 inmates queued up to get their tied with the bonds of filial love by their sisters and brothers. Religion was no bar as Muslim inmates got their rachis from the Hindu siblings of their fellow inmates. Muslims inmates, present in large numbers, freely joined in the festivities making it a unique celebrations of communal harmony within the four walls of the prison.
The scene was one of total emotion for the jail inmates and their visitors, with the prison walls being colorfully decked up for the occasion with Dharis put up inside the main wall.
For some, and among them the jailer and the superintendent, it was a busy day ensuring no untoward incident took place. But their anxiety on that count seemed misplaced, for untoward ness of any kind seemed farthest from the minds of any one within the prison walls today.
Outside the jail, the relatives were allowed in, 25 persons to a group, on a first cum first basis after registering their names at the main entrance.
Inmates, who had no visitors, were moved to tears by getting rachis tied by the relatives of their fellow inmates.

The women inmates were also given a chance to participate on the joyous occasion with rachis supplied by the jail staff to tie to their visiting brothers.
Ramlal, an inmate, shed tears of joy seeing his sister, wife and their 6-month old baby. “I had committed a crime when she (the baby) was in her mother’s womb. I thank god for giving me this opportunity to see my baby now,” he said.
Razia Begum (name changed) was equally emotional to see her husband being tied a rakhi by relatives of a fellow inmate.
As for Heera, serving time for murder and who has had no visitors calling on him for the past two years, this year has been no different. But no regrets, he says. “No one has come to tie me rakhi, but my heart wells up just seeing my fellow inmates getting heir rakhis tied by their sisters.”
But in the end, the time granted to meet their relatives proved only too cruelly short. Not a few relatives complained about the short time given (15 minutes per inmate) with their loved ones. The jailer replied that they had to be very careful as these are women we have to deal with.
After the relatives left, it was back to the prison routine. The inmates were thoroughly frisked, their tiffin boxes and other pooja items checked before being handed back to them. Checking over, it was time to go back to their cells.
For at least once in the year, on rakshabandhan, it was their brothers that the women had come to see and not a condemned criminal.

Jhabua the Land of Tribe's

Jhabua is a predominantly tribal district located in the western part of Madhya Pradesh. It is surrounded by Panchamahal and Baroda districts of Gujrat, Banswara district of Rajasthan and Dhar and Ratlam districts of Madhya Pradesh. River Narmada forms the southern boundary of the district.

The terrain is hilly, undulating typically known as 'Jhabua hills topography'. In this Jhabua hill topography the difference between the highest and the lowest points is varies between 20 to 50 meters. But this difference goes on increasing as we move towards south of Jhabua.

In Alirajpur division which is in the south of Jhabua the areas is almost entire hilly and intersected by narrow valleys and low Vindhayan ranges covered with jungles. But most part of Jhabua is without any forest cover because of low fertility of land and soil erosion even mere existence becomes a hard problem and with the failure of rains the Bhils take to crime.
Jhabua is sparsely populated area with the total population of 13.94 lakhs.

The total area is 6793 Sq Kms. There are about 1313 inhabited villages. Out of which 47 per cent of the people live below the poverty line. Thus, Jhabua is an overwhelmingly tribal and poor district. The district is devoid of vegetation cover except Katthiwada and other patches and is full of undulated, hilly areas.


The area suffers from poor and skeletal soils with shallow to very shallow depth and erratic rainfall , high temperature . This area has two tribes named the Bhil and Bhilala.

BHIL Tribe
The Bhils are the third largest tribe in India. In the state of Madhya Pradesh, they are prominently found in the Dhar, Jhabua, and West Nimar regions. Anthropologists believe that the word Bhil is derived from the Dravidian word bil or vil, meaning a bow.

Over a period of time, the Bhils have given up hunting, and have taken to agriculture. They use very primitive tools, and even their agricultural style is very simplistic.

Bhil villages are generally dispersed, and each village consists of thirty to forty families. They worship numerous Hindu deities, chiefly a deity by the name of Raja Pantha. Bhils also worship crops, fields, water, the forest, and the mountains.


The Bhil dialect consists of Rajsthani, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi words, and also some unique words without any non-Sanskrit elements in it. Sawang is a popular form of entertainment among the Bhil tribals that consists of story telling combined with dancing and music. In the 1940s Uday Shankar tried to expose the performing arts of this tribe to the outside world.

Bhilala
Bhilala tribe is a tribal group located in the states of western and central India. They speak the Bhilala language which belongs to the Indo-Aryan linguistic family. The Bhilalas are descendants of the Bhil and Rajput immigrants.


The Bhilalas primarily work as farmers, farm servants, field laborers, and village watchmen. They grow crops such as millet, maize, wheat, and barley in the fields. The highlanders live in houses made with walls of sticks intertwined with twigs and small branches. Clay tiles, straw and leaves are used for the roof.

Each village is led by a head man, Mandoi, who takes care of the domestic disputes in his village. Familial ties are very strong, and they believe in the connection between the living and the dead. Male descendants inherit the property. The Bhilalas marry from their own class. For marrying into a different class, they have to convert to the higher class and leave behind all family ties. The Bhagoria festival of the Bhilala and other tribes in this area is unique in its own way.


This annual festival is celebrated with great fun and frolic, where a young man gets a chance to choose his bride from the crowd of women gathered there. The groom has to pay a dowry to the brides parents.

Bhilalas are known for their colorful, embroidered garments. Tattooing is very common among the villagers. Bhilalas love dance, drama, and music. They practice some type of ethnic religion. Hindu gods are worshipped commonly but catholic Bhilalas are known to exist in some states. Every family has its own guardian deity. Bhilalas are very superstitious and they believe in taboos and curses.

The Bhilalas are experts in handling the bow and arrow. The bow is a characteristic weapon of this tribe and they usually carry their bows and arrows with them. But with the change in technology they have started to use the double barrel guns.







The transport to these villages is by overloaded buses, jeeps, cycles and of course our last stretch will be by foot. Get ready to lose some weight if you do plan to visit these traibal of Jhabua but anyway one can still stay high on their toddy.

Bhagoria - Festival of Hue and Color

This colorful festival of the Bhils and Bhilalas, particularly in the district of West Nimar and Jhabua, is actually in the nature of a mass svayamvara, a marriage market, held on the various market days falling before the Holi festival in month of March every year. As the name of the festival indicates, - bhag, to run, - after choosing their partners, the young people elope and are subsequently accepted as husband and wife by society through predetermined customs.

It is not always that boys and girls intending to marry each other meet in the festival for the first time. In a large number of cases the alliance is already made between the two, the festival providing the institutionalized framework for announcing the alliance publically. The tradition is that the boy applies gulal, red powder, on the face of the girl whom he selects as his wife. The girl, if willing, also applies gulal on the boy's face.
This may not happen immediately but the boy may pursue her and succeed eventually.

Earlier, the Bhagoria Haat also the place for settling old disputes; open invitations were sent to enemies for a fight in the HAAT. Bloody battles used to be quite common in the past but today police and administration do not allow people to go to the HAAT armed.

The Bhagoria haat also coincides with the completion of harvesting, adding to it the dimension of being an agricultural festival as well. If the crops have been good, the festival assumes an additional air of gaiety.

In the life of the Bhils and Bhilalas, Bhagoria is not merely one festival but in fact a series of fairs held one by one at various villages on their specific market days, commencing eight days before Holi.