Festival of Aadiperukku

Another important festival for the people living on the banks of the River Cauvery is Aadipperukku which is celebrated every year on the 18th of the Tamil month of Aadi. At this time the river would be overflowing with new flood after the summer months. From time immemorial, this festival has been celebrated to welcome the life-giving water from the distant hills of Coorg where the river is born.

In the days before dams and disputes, the natural course for the river was to flow anew during this period as the monsoons set in in the month of June at the West coast and Western Ghats. After the hot summer the monsoon rains start in June bringing the parched lands on the banks of the river, manna in the form of new flood. Farming would start and the fields would be green with newly transplanted paddy.

This festival is celebrated all along the towns and villages on the banks of almost all the rivers in TamilNadu as the monsoon rains in the Western Ghats bring new flood in the rivers of the state. Of course, nowadays, the man made dams and reservoirs stop this natural flow of the river and has made this festival meaningless:-( But I recollect, that in my childhood days we could be sure of new flood during this period. Maybe then nature was more bountifull.

Much like the festival of Kaanum Pongal, we would prepare a picnic lunch and set off for the banks of the river. Small children would be pulling 'chapparams' (a small pull-cart with an imitation of a temple-like structure which can be pulled with a string by small kids) adorned with colourful streamers. Women would offer the River Cauvery which is personified as a woman, flowers, bangles and earrings made of palm leaves ( the most common earrings for women in days of yore). Rice and jaggery would also be part of the things offered. The women would treat this festival as yet another occasion for a get-together among the ladies. Besides offering puja to the river, they would offer puja for all the various deities in the small temples on the banks of the river.

Usually there would be big neem trees and peepul trees entwined with each other on the banks of the river as it is everywhere-trees that grow from the seeds sown by birds eating the small berrylike seeds of these trees-and so having acquired a holy status would be having various statues of snakes (worshipped as deities-Nagas) and the Seven Virgin Goddesses (Saptha Kanni) placed under them hundreds of years back. For good measure the women would offer pujas to them also. After the puja they would tie yellow threads dipped in turmeric and kept in the puja offerings, as a mark of their prayers. Men would tie these threads around their wrists.

Newly wed couples would be offering puja to the river for the first time. The bride would be staying in her parents' place during the month of Aadi and the groom would have been invited to her place for the festival and would be showered with feasts and gifts. The womenfolk of the house would change the 'thaali' made of yellow thread around the neck of the bride (which has been tied as the 'Mangalasutra' by the groom on the wedding day) to a gold chain on this day, as it is considered an auspicious day.

Various vendors and merchants would camp on the banks to sell their wares. Of course all the usual sticky boiled sweets and pink cotton candies would be the attraction for us kids! Boys and young men would show their prowess in swimming by climbing to the tallest branches of the trees on the banks of the river and diving from there. I recollect how boys jumped from the bridge on the River Cauvery in Trichy. It was a thrilling sight to see them diving even from the train just as it was crossing the railway bridge. Of course many stories of death by drowning in the floods would also be heard when these thrill-seeking youngsters meet with unfortunate accidents.

The thing I recollect most about this festival is the sight of my maternal grandfather building us a 'Chapparam' . Though they were sold commercially he prided himself in recycling the old ones made of wood with colourful papers and streamers!

Tips: For puja we use:

For Kaveri Thai Puja on the banks of the river:
Small black bangles used for newborn babies
earings made of palm leaves ('kaadholai)

For house puja:

Soaked and drained raw rice, mixed in melted jaggery (kaapparisi)

Banana
coconut
Betal Leaves
Betal Nuts
Flowers
Turmeric

All puja offerings should be placed on Banana Leaf or Silver Plate for offering.

Then do the usual puja ceremony with incence sticks and camphor lit and water sprinkled clockwise over the offerings.







Banana

Kaanum Pongal

After Bhogi, Pongal and Mattu Pongal the next day is celebrated as Kaanum pongal, literally meaning 'seeing '. This day is used mostly for going to picnic spots and enjoying ourselves socializing. Thousands of people throng the Marina beach in Chennai on this day, these days.

Our native place would see people going to the banks of the River Cauvery to enjoy the day. Early in the morning the womenfolks would cook varieties of rice and side dishes to go with it, mostly some spicy chutneys and crunchy vadaams and pappads. Yumm! If at all the men would assist them, it was to cut some banana leaves from the backyard and make them into parcels for a picnic lunch. Loading the food into bamboo baskets, bullock carts would go to the banks of the river, the women riding in them. The children would skip behind the carts, the men having gone there long back.

My grandmother would lead the women to do the puja for Mother Cauvery and for the deity shrined in the small temple at the bank. The ancient steps leading to the river (built in the days of the long ago Chola kings) would be strewn with flowers and smeared with turmeric and kumkum. After this prayer was over, we would all have the picnic lunch and start upon various games. Men would be playing kabadi, wrestling and other boisterous games while the women would be having competitions on various indoor games like Pallanguzhi, Ezhu Kal etc., gossiping about relatives and neighbours even as their hands were handling the games! many marriage proposals would be finalized on this day as the youngsters concerned could be given the once-over by the elders in this informal setting. The children would be having a whale of a good time, with the whole mood of the crowd getting merrier as the time flew.

Girls who whose marriages were getting delayed would be made to sit in the centre of a ring of women dancing for 'kummipattu'-this was guaranteed remedy for getting their marriage fixed soon! After a siesta, the festivities would resume in the evening, the crowd disbursing as dusk fell. All our new dresses would be dirty and though our bodies were tired our hearts would be contented and happy with the day's pleasurable activities.

Our winter vacation would usually end by the year end and school would reopen around the 3rd of January. We are supposed to be present on the reopening day. But during some years, the temptation to extend the vacation to include Pongal festival would be very great. The state declares holidays for 3-4 days every year for this festival. Combined with Saturdays and Sundays, sometimes you might get 10 days of vacation if you take leave for one or two days. Our parents would decide that we could stay at our grandparents' for some more time and that we could return to our own home after Pongal celebrations were over. Despite the fact that we would face severe admonitions from the teachers for having been absent on reopening day, we would be enjoying the extended holidays. When your parents said that you could spend some more days -which were actually school working days- on vacation it was simply heaven! Of course, when we went back we had to copy all the class work done in our absence and work very hard indeed. But it was worth it!

Maattu Pongal

The day after Pongal is celebrated as Maattu Pongal -literally Pongal for cattel-in honour of the cattle which helped the farmers to plough and sow to reap a bountiful harvest. For city folks, this festval does not have any meaning at all. But in the farming community the cows and bulls would be scrubbed clean and their horns painted in myriad colours and the cattle adorned with colourful flowers around their necks and a paste of turmeric applied on their foreheads with a round spot of 'kumkum' in the centre. The pointed horns of the bullocks (In our district the horns of the bulls are left to grow unlike some other places where they would be singed at the time of growth, such cattle are called 'mottai maadu' meaning bald cattle, while our bulls were called 'kombu maadu', meaning cattle with horns-At the ploughs, mottai maadu would be paired with another mottai maadu while bulls with horns were paired together) would be covered with special ornamental brass covers with a colourful tassles at the end. Their necks would be garlanded after being smeared with turmeric and sandal pastes. We enjoyed making all the yellow and red marks on their bodies with turmeric and kumkum, though we were afraid to even go near the bulls and the men would do it themselves. As for us we would brave a visit to the stable where the cows would show their necks patiently to us! The smaller children would fight for the chance to decorate the smallest calves!

The cattle would be gathered at the riverside and a community 'pongal' would be cooked at the banks of the river (in my mother's place-though some people did it at their own backyard and stable too). The cattle would be fed this Pongal and fresh green grass. Usually the men would do this ritual. Boys and small girls also would accompany them to watch the ceremony.

At home, our courtyard would be decorated with beautiful kolams as is usual for the duration of Pongal festival. The ladies would build a shallow square at one side of the main entrance with cowdung and it would further be divided by two crossed lines into four squares, the walls around an inch high. Each square would be filled to the brim with turmeric water, milk and other such auspicious coloured things-I do not remember the things but only the sharp contrast in the different colours. All around flowers would be strewn and this symbol marked the welcome sign for the cattle when they made their grand entrance back from their sojourn to the riverside.

Towards evening the men would return driving them home, with the boys beating drums (and those who didn't get a drum would get hold of brass plates and sticks). All would be running behind the bulls very fast indeed! The sound of the hooves, the men's shouts, the boys' drums-the whole atmosphere in the evening twilight was very thrilling to watch! At the back the few cows would be tottering behind slowly masticating the grass and not at all bothered by the boisterous behaviour of their companions! This is a small scale 'manju virattu' taking place in almost all the villages and small towns every year. (In some parts of the state, like in Alanganallur in Madurai district, this would be conducted on a grand scale and madly rushing bulls with sharp pointed horns, trained through the year for this occasion, would be valiantly brought down by unarmed youth braving injury and death. )

When they reached home the cattle would be given a grand welcome with 'arathi' and 'kumkum' and would be made to cross the threshold over a rice-pounding wooden stick (ulakkai) and a fewstalks of burning hay, which apparently brought good luck to them and the household, according to my grandmother! This royal welcome would mark the end of this festival.

The same evening people would offer food to their forefathers in a special ceremony at home. For this they would prepare all sort of dishes, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian, along with many sweets and savouries. As it was supposed to be offered to the spirits of the dead-and-gone, the dishes would be given to us only after 10 pm or so. I can recollect how we used to grumble about being woken up at what felt like midnight and told to eat a grand feast! Finally we would eat the sweets and savouries when we got up the next morning.

The next day is celebrtated as kaanum pongal which merits a separate blog! Watch for it!

Pongal Festival

Pongal, the festival Thanksgiving to the Sun God for a plentiful harvest, is celebrated throughout Tamil Nadu around January 14th every year. In the agrarian society of Tamil Nadu, this is the original major festival celebrated from ancient times. So we used to get new clothes for Pongal. Our grandparents owned lots of lands and cattle and this festival is very important to the farming community of our state.

Actually this festival has some customs which are based on sound scientific principles of aintaining hygiene. It marks the end of the rainy season and the ensuing damp winter by which has given rise to mouldy patches on the roofs and walls of the dwellings. Traditionally you are supposed to clean the whole house from top to bottom (including all the clothes, blankets, beds and unused things reserved for occasions). All mattresses would be dried in the sun. Then the house will be given a whitewash. The whole house would be sparkling clean by the day of the festival.

The things to be discarded would include all organic use and throw articles like baskets and 'moram's made of bamboo sticks and mats made of reeds as they would have become mouldy at the end of the rainy season and the following cloudy winter. The day before Pongal is called 'Bhogi' and all these threadbare mats and baskets would be used to make a bonfire and disposed off.

On the evening of Bhogi we used to have elaborate special festival cooking comprising of many sweets and special meals. The next day was Pongal. In the morning the women would draw elaborate 'kolams' in front of the main entrance. It was a visual treat to view all the different patterns in front of each house, adorned with colour powders. We children would help the women to colour the kolam patterns and we would have got out of our beds early enough to do this, on our own! it was so very interesting and enjoyable to assist that creative art. In the centre a lump of cowdung would be kept. A pumpkin flower would be stuck on to a lump of cowdung kept in the centre of the kolam to add to its beauty.

In fact, all through the previous month of 'Margazhi' the beautiful kolams in front of all the houses used to give the women an opportunity to display their artistic skills, in the more than elaborate kolams required for this month in praise of Lord Krishna. Pumpkin flowers would be delivered by the farmhands every morning to adorn the kolams which used to be a different one each day. We children used to go around our street trying to judge which one was the most artistic/complicated/ new pattern etc., every morning. Our winter vacation would start just before the 25th of December. So we had the chance to appreciate all the Margazhi kolam in our grandparents' place. It is a temple town and most of the people conformed to all these traditional practices. In fact, every girl started saving all the new kolams she saw every year in a notebook/diary. This picture is from one of those diaries!

Of course the Age of Internet has information for everyone and the flollowing link is a good one for learning kolams, recommended by my daughter:

http://kolangal.kamalascorner.com/


For pongal festival our grandmother would lead all the ladies in our street to bring water from the River Cauvery nearby. They would each take a 'kudam', a pot made of brass, silver or even mud- and after bathing in the river they would bring back water in the pots. This water would be used for cooking the Pongal which was to be offered to the Sun God that day.

The previous week our grandfather who believed in making anything from scratch, would have prepared five blocks made of bricks and mud, dried in the sun. These would be arranged in the centre of the 'mutram' on a bed of sand (square of courtyard inside the house, open to the sky) inside the house in a pattern that made them into two woodstoves. (Pongal, the rice offering of the festival, is traditionally prepared under the open sky, not inside the kitchen.) The sand would protect the floor of the courtyard from the heat and by placing the firewood in the two openings between the blocks, two stoves were ready to function. He would also bring home a big bunch of paddy stalks and tie it on the roof of the front 'thinnai' where the sparrows would make a meal of it flying in and out of the house to feed. The women would draw elaborate kolams of rice flour which would feed the ants. This practice of feeding birds and ants taught the children to respect and live with nature, along the course of the festival.

We children would gather all the dry twigs, dry coconut trees' leaves, coconut shells etc which made very good fuel for the fire, from the backyard where a coconut grove and various trees grew. Grandmother would have consulted the astrologer to know the most auspicious time for cooking the Pongal rice. At the time she would keep the new mudpots (you should use only new pots) on the two stoves. She would shape a lump of cowdung on a brick in the courtyard and adorn it with 'arugampul' and flowers. This was the symbolic God for this festival. After doing camphor 'arathi' she would put the burning camphor on the twigs in the temporary stoves and start the fire. She would throw a small bit of the paddy stalk (vaikkol). When it started turning black from the heat, she would announce the pots were heated enough forthe cooking to follow. Now a mixture of milk and water would be poured in the pots. When it started boiling and sometimes flowing over the kids would start shouting 'Pongalo Pongal!'.

The newly harvested rice would be added into the two pots and cooked on the fire which was kept burning by feeding various indigenous materials gathered from the backyard. After much begging, we children would also feed the fire with the twigs etc., I remember a sort of competition to throw the coconut shells in the fire as they burnt very brightly all of a sudden, after reaching the burning point in a matter of minutes. Small thrills, never forgotten! Again we would keep shouting 'Pongalo Pongal' every time the pots were overflowing. Literally 'Pongal' means 'overflowing'. As it is a thanksgiving to the Gods for a bountiful harvest, this tradition had been followed through the ages.

When the big pot is cooked, grandmother would keep the rice in the big pot as it was, bland and white, cooked to a pulp. This was called 'Pongal' Now she would add jaggery, ghee, cashews and dry grapes to the smaller pot and flavour it with cardamom. This was the 'sarkarai Pongal', the sweet dish. After taking it off the heat, she would cook a stew of mixed vegetables consisting of the fresh harvest of the season. This was the side dish for the plain pongal. After my grandmother offered the two pongals to the Sun God, by showing burning camphor kept on a plate towards the sky., we would all sit for the meals consisting of the two pongals and vegetable stew. By this time all our excitement in the proceedings of the festival would have been exhausted and we would gobble up the food and run off to play.

The next two days were also part of this festival. They deserve a separate blog each!
Watch this space!

December Flowers!

Our half-yearly vacation was always looked forward to very eagerly by all of us. For one thing the weather was very pleasant, the winter temperature never going below 20 degrees celsius in our state, in the plains. In the summer vacation we would be scolded for playing outside too much in the sun but the winter vacations were just right for the kids and we could play all through the day. Only when dusk fell we would be called home lest we caught any chill from the 'cold' weather.

My grandfather's place in the village must have registered lower temperatures as it was the only time I ever saw the coconut oil in the house freezing solid. It was always a pleasure to look forward to the scooping of the oil with our fingers (no spoon!) and letting it melt in the warmth of our palms and applying it on our hair. We used to apply oil daily on our hair and plaster it into pigtails or close-cut crop, depending on whether we grandchildren were girls or boys. In fact we came to see shampooed hair only in our teens when we moved into bigger towns! If anybody's head sported a single hair out of place from the slicked-back oily look, we were admonished by the elders why we were going around with such a beggarly appearance! Apparently only the poorest of the poor couldn't afford oil for their hair!

The winter saw the arrival of 'December flowers' in the markets. It was so called because they were aplenty in the month of December though they started flowering in November and would still be available till the end of February. All the girls in Tamilnadu used to wear flowers in their hair everyday after tying their hair into plaits, double or single.This part of our culture is still alive in the villages though the city girls have dropped this habit. The December flowers were very much sought after by us as they came in many colours and we could choose the exactly matching shade for our dresses! The flowers didn't have any fragrances and now I know why older women didn't use them so much to adorn their hair but children were crazy after the flowers. The deep blue ones and the plain white ones which were matching our uniform dresses were favoured for our school days. We used to wear long strings of these flowers.

When we went to the small town where my other grandparents lived, the December flowers were sold at a house which had a back garden full of these flowers in various colours. They were not professional flower vendors but they used to sell these seasonal flowers to make a bit of money rather than letting them fall to the ground at the end of the day, being of no use to anybody.

The only difficulty was that these flowers would have sold out by 7 am. We should reserve which colours we wanted the previous day itself. The light pink colour was much in demand and I remember one occasion when I had set my heart for this colour but the lady of the house said that it was already sold out! Seeing my diappointment she said that the order was for 300 flowers (Yes, they would count them out) but if the shrubs happened to produce more, I could have them.

The next morning, the minute I was awake, I remembered the lady's promise and jumped up from the bed. The day was just dawning. Straightaway I ran to their house which was just at the corner in the next street at the end of our street. Seeing me running, two of my cousins who were also staying at my grandparents' followed me, without even knowing what was up! Breathless from running, we knocked at their door and the sleepy-eyed inmates opened their door to see three disheveled children waiting to buy the flowers which had not even started opening their petals yet! Their son who would usually pluck the flowers muttered something and went back to sleep! In the end, myself and my cousins plucked the flowers ourselves, helped the lady to count them out and managed to buy the extra flowers for ourselves.

We returned home triumphantly and were soundly scolded by our mother for having presented ourselves like beggars at a stranger's house, without even combing our hair or washing our faces. So what, we had the pleasure of wearing our favourite coloured flowers that day! Nothing I bought later on when I grew up into adulthood had ever matched the joy I felt when I got those flowers!

Village Story

Can you believe it when I say that we never ever got any pocket money from our parents? We used to have money only when we went to our grandparents' place during school vacation or when our relatives visited us.

For that one day we would feel like kings and queens! We would run around to the little shop at the corner to get a candy or would wait for the 'ice cream' bell. In those days there were no multinational branded ice candy but locally made 'ice fruits' or 'kuchi ice' which were nothing but frozen ice sticks with flavoured and coloured sugar syrup poured on them. They cost only five paise each. At the end of licking them we would be sticking out our numb tongues to show off the orange or pink colours that stuck them! If we could afford some more money we would get the richer kind of milk ice ('paal ice') which would have milk and cooked semilina or sago balls, to make them tastier. Of course we would keep licking them very very slowly to make them last longer. It was actually an art to lick to the last bit without making them fall off in chunks when they melted!

In our grandparents' place, a sleepy village on the banks of the River Cauvery, as I have already said elsewhere, you could not spend money even if you wished to. There were no shops nearby. We had to depend on the very rare appearances of various sweet vendors on bicycles or even on foot, once a week or so, taking their turns of business along all the small villages.

One man used to sell a kind of gooey sweet, very pink in colour which was rolled on the top of a sturdy pole in a bundle of ribbon-like sheets. When we handed over our small change he would unroll a small length and pull it to form a thin strip. He would then proceed to tie it around our wrists like watches. We would be happily showing off our 'wrist watches' before licking them off and smearing our entire face with pink coloured sticky sweet! I don't remember what it was called but the memory of having a longlasting candy lingers. (Later on, when we lived in Calcutta we saw the same type of candy being sold at the school gate! Of course, now being a hygiene-conscious-mother, I didn't buy them the 'wrist watch'. I was very surprised to see this rustic candy in a metro. It is a fact that you get all sorts of village goodies in Calcutta even now! Besides this wristwatch candy, I saw 'kodukka puli' also being sold in the Lake Market in South Calcutta.)

Then the small berry-like fruits 'Elandhapazham' would be sold, both as whole fruits or, as the season ends, made into small cake like pieces called elandha vadai, which can be preserved for sometime. When we swallowd the seeds inadvertentlt, while relishing these fruits, our uncles who made into a point to tease us would tell us that the seeds would grow into trees from inside our stomachs. I still remember a sleepless night worrying over whether my head would be sprouting leaves in the morning! I was three or four years old then. seeing my worried face my mother explained that nothing of the sort would happen and then proceeded to scold her brother-in-law (my uncle) for frightening us!

Our 'town' grandparents' place was no better in these respects. A slight improvement was the presence of a petty shop run by an old woman on the 'thinnai' (raised platform in the front of the house, used for socializing) of her house. This lady used to sell 'kamarkat'-the tough candy made of jaggery and coconut-made to last for a long time, elandhavadai etc., We needed only five paise to buy a candy here. Like Smiley had commented we could use even the 'ottai kalana' (the coin with a hole in the middle, released by the Bristish I think) in this shop, though the rest of India had started using the new 'paise'! My father used to comment that this street is a 'separate economy'! I remember his words even though I could hardly understand what it meant.

Learning a Foreign Language!

Most of us recollect many a funny incident in the process of learning any foreign language. For us Indians English is the first foreign language we ever had to learn. It was easier for a student to learn English in the big cosmopolitan cities. For one thing the medium of instruction would be mostly English and practice made it perfect. Besides that every other person would use the language, as English was the first status symbol you acquired when you moved up in the social ladder. It showed anybody within earshot in a public place instantly that you were ‘college-educated’. They had to speak English to communicate with the sizable population of the city whose mother tongue might be any one of the fourteen official languages of India. Though these occasions were few and far between, they provided the practice, which was all that mattered in mastering a language.

Life in small towns, as I had already said, made it very difficult for the students to learn English, with none of the above opportunities at hand. What was taught in the classes stayed in the classes, as all of us, including the teachers, talked in our mother tongue. Our English teacher would talk in English only when she taught. There was no conversational English lessons (now they have revised the syllabus, I think). We would simply learn all the comprehension questions at the end of the lessons by heart and pass the ‘language’ exam.

Any other reading material was confined to the books we could borrow from our school library. But they stocked only the Classics as they were the ‘recommended’ books for young students of the ‘High School’. So, instead of any Enid Blyton or Nancy Drew mysteries that we could have read without much difficulty, we were given the Tale of Two Cities, Mayor of Casterbridge, Treasure Island, Gullivers Travels etc.,- of course in the abridged versions- during the ‘library’ period. I read them all and used to exchange my quota of books with my classmates until I had exhausted the meagre collection of English books in the library.

When we went to higher classes, we got the original novels, by which time we knew the storylines and could get to read the book with all its ‘hard’ words and try to enjoy the richness of the words and nuances of meaning in the unabridged versions.

In the small towns where reading contemporary bestsellers in the English language had been unheard of, we had developed a vocabulary where all the words were ‘pure’ and classic, with their meanings stuck in the century in which they were written! Thus we could use ‘gay’ for being happy and not know the different meaning it evoked in the present day world.

The group of classmates who shared my love for reading the library books lost no time in using any new word we came across in the course of our reading. This led to a sort of competition. We tried to use new words and phrases in our ‘composition’ notebooks whenever we were given assignments to write about a chosen topic. As my father read an English newspaper in the morning (which was again the sign of an educated man!), I got to know more words by sight and occasionally would ask my father its meaning so that I could use them in the next occasion.

I was nine years old when I was given an assignment to write an essay on Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of our Nation. It happened that just that morning my father had been explaining that there are different ways of expressing the same thing. The next day I got severely admonished by my teacher when she read aloud my essay where I had written Gandhiji kicked his bucket in 1949! I had picked up the slang my Dad had quoted in explaining the synonyms of ‘dying’ out of context.

I didn’t know that there was such a thing as slang in any language. (Whenever there was a possibility of our hearing any ‘wrong’ words in our language, for example-in a heated exchange between neighbours etc., our mother sent us all inside and we never could get familiar with those words all our childhood!). Only when I started reading the (then) best-selling crime novels by James Hadley Chase and other such thrillers, (borrowed from my city-bred friends in college) I could realize what an outrage it must have been!