Bubbling Over: Attukal Pongala
Follow @clairevdh By Claire vd Heever Apr 29, 2011
Trivandrum was winding down as I stumbled along a stony road, dazed, back to an empty room. Burnt objects were discarded on the ground, bricks were scattered randomly about. It looked as if the city had been subject to some form of warfare. The smell of smoke was strong and little flakes of ash floated down through the air. Drum beats, trumpets and shouting voices rang in my ears as I gradually moved back towards the city centre in a current of hundreds of other people. The sun and the sounds and the smoke of the day had left everyone exhausted; we all shuffled along amidst the day’s debris. I’d endured the sting of heavy smoke; my eyes had burned to see this world. And what felt like a mirage still drifted past me, but the colours and images were slower moving than at the climax of the afternoon. It had been an assault on the senses that can only happen in India, and I was still coming to the realisation that I had been witness to a rare and extraordinary spectacle.
Every year in India’s southernmost city, millions of women build millions of fires in the open street and cook a pot of rice on the flames. They travel to the city on slow trains or local buses crammed full, spend days guarding the bricks on which their fire will burn and, during a long day of sweltering heat and crowds and noise, remind the city of their strength and devotion, to both their families and Attukal Devi, the goddess to whom the Attukal Pongala Festival is dedicated. It is their belief in her powers – to bless, to help and to heal – that once a year transforms Trivandrum.
Arriving in the city, exhausted, the previous evening, I cursed the festival that had left me with a choice between a grotty, grey sheeted hotel room and one that cost 40 dollars a night. Trivandrum was overwhelmed: at hotel after hotel, we had been turned away. “Attukal Pongala,” receptionists told us with a shrug. “Twenty five lakh ladies are coming to Trivandrum.” A lakh was 100,000. Twenty five lakh was two and a half million. We had worried – after a twenty hour train journey – that we wouldn’t find a bed at all.
The festival has become hugely popular over the past decade. When 1.5 million women assembled to cook rice for the goddess in 1997, the festival had entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest annual gathering of women anywhere. This year, there were said to be up to 3 million women participating.
During the first few days of the festival, business in the city continues uninterrupted. Traditional dance performances and music recitals begin at the temple, but elsewhere, the only indication of celebration is the enormous amplifiers stacked along major roads and intersections, blasting Hindi and Malayalam pop.
At midday, earthen pots of all shapes and sizes started to appear on the roadside, and I began to wonder what we had stumbled upon. The train station – when we returned, to book an onward train – was like a campsite: women were arriving from neighbouring states or elsewhere in Kerala, and all along the platform, women reclined on bedspreads, munching snacks, and chatting. Outside the station building, rows of bricks had been laid out on the ground. Groups of women stood around, killing time. When one middle-aged woman saw me looking curiously at the bricks, she smiled and said “Pongala, Pongala”, slowly enunciating the word. I nodded, piecing together the bricks, the pots I’d seen for sale on the side of the road, and the ritual rice cooking I’d heard about; the bricks would be little hearths for the fires. The woman smiled wider and began babbling away to me in Malayalam, somehow delighting in our mutually incomprehensible conversation.
In a nearby lane, we found a charming shrine of banana leaves and marigold garlands that was being put together, bit by bit, outside a hotel. On either side of the shrine, rows of bricks were being cordoned off for the hotel’s guests – 18 rooms of women, the owner proudly told me. The bricks would be ready for them when they began making their fires; some had scrawled their names on a particular brick in chalk, reserving a spot for their fire. An image of Attukal Devi was at the centre of the shrine: a gracious-looking woman with jewels around her neck and a trident in her hand. Below her was another goddess with her tongue hanging out, as though mad, and her breasts exposed. The image of the mismatched goddesses was all over the city: on posters, in shrines and stuck onto taxis – a symbol of the festival, I assumed.
In the nearby streets, potters who had set up shop were watching their wares disappear. A steady stream of women were carrying the clay vessels home, or to a spot on a pavement or train platform. By the time the sun set, every open space was lined with bricks. Crowds congregated at the amplifiers dotted through the city, and danced to Hindi favourites.
The music was still blaring the next morning. It woke me with a jolt. At 9am, the sun was already merciless. Stacks of bricks lined every street and at every stack of bricks sat a woman, behind piles of kindling and earthen pots with coconut shell spoons, waiting for the ritual cooking to commence. Each woman had made an offering to the goddess and placed it in front of her pot. The streets were bright with red and yellow flowers, bananas and incense, laid out on fresh green banana leaves. I cut through the grounds of a temple and came to the leafy neighbourhood of Chettikulangra. The offerings and piled ingredients here were more elaborate. There were tiny earthen dishes of oil with wicks – lamps for puja, an offering to the gods – coconuts, heaps of grain, limes, boxes of incense, sugar coated aniseed and thimbles of red powder to dot a tilak between the eyebrows. Even the occasional earthen pot wore a garland of marigolds. The women waited behind their hearths until the sound of temple bells suddenly rang out across the city. All rose to place their palms together in prayer, murmuring mantras. So many were dressed in saris made from traditional Keralan cloth, kasavu, worn during festivals, that as they stood up, one by one, they became a cream coloured wave of cotton, bordered with gold.
Bells soon clanged again and trumpets sounded through street side amplifiers. I stood beside a neighbourhood shrine, where a priest lit a bundle of sticks from a fire he had made and began moving along a row of women, lighting their fires. Men took smouldering sticks from the same fire and carried them swiftly down the rows of women, transporting the flame. Within a minute, smoke was wafting through the street, and only a couple of minutes later, the water in the women’s pots had begun bubbling.
Several thousand women making fires in the open street can come very close to chaos, and hundreds of additional policemen had been deployed to keep the situation under control. Almost every business in the city was closed; a few among them would open in the late afternoon once the smoke and crowds had dispersed. The city had given itself over to the festival, forgoing commerce for the sake of communal worship and ceremony. The men who were working as volunteers in the Chettikulangra community struck me as being well prepared for mishap; minutes after the fires were lit, I saw a handful of men running down the street to help a young woman whose sari had caught fire. They reached her before more than a little hole had been burnt in the cloth. One was a stocky young man in jeans and a black and white checked shirt. Pradeep had all the energy in the world for “supporting the women in Pongala”, as he put it. Radeesh, another volunteer, said his reason for helping out every year was “for the worship.”
There were women from every class or caste sitting cooking on the pavement: well-educated women, hard-up farmers’ wives, and everything in between. In a country where people are continuously grouped according to their religious and social differences, the festival is refreshing. I met Suja, an attractive woman in a kasavu sari with a bright blue choli underneath, sitting on the pavement beside her mother. She had been living in Trivandrum and making an offering of Pongala for the past three years; her mother had been making a fire on the street once a year for longer than she could remember.
The two or three hundred fires within sight steadily clouded the street with thick smoke; the women tending to them sat inside this furnace, stirring pots and dabbing at their streaming eyes. Suja’s eyes had been red and watering when I sat down beside her, behind her simmering pot. As she told me about what the festival meant to her, why she went through this particularly exhausting ritual, mine grew as red as hers. “It is to have a happy house; a shanti house – a peaceful house,” she explained. Other people might be hoping for riches or good health, I suggested, and she gave an affirmative waggle of her head; different people desire different things from their offerings to the goddess, it seemed. She was boiling rice, sugar, ghee – clarified butter – and coconut together and said it would take half an hour to cook. Pongala literally means “to boil over”, which the rice dishes often do when they’re ready.
There were various rice-based dishes being cooked around us, sweetened with sugar or jaggery and while hers was simmering away in its earthen pot, I asked Suja about the image I’d seen all over the city – of the two goddesses. One is Attukal Devi, she confirmed; the savage, angry goddess is Kali. “They are the same,” she explained. “But when she is angry, she is Kali.” Hinduism is as multilayered as its gods are numerous; there are said to be as many as 330 million deities. While they all represent a single, all-powerful god, each deity has personal attributes and characteristics as diverse as human beings themselves. Like people, they are three dimensional and cannot be categorised easily. The goddess Kali is referred to as both the Protector and the Destroyer; she can be a volatile, bloodthirsty goddess who requires litres of animal blood each week, which her most devout followers willingly provide. Animal sacrifices are regularly made at Kali temples, one of which is in Calcutta, where several goats are sacrificed every Friday.
Smoke was still pouring into the street. Pradeep guided Iain and I into a community hall, where women were staggering in to drink cups of a local drink called sambharam, made from curd, salt, and a few pungent spices. “It has powerful cooling properties,” Pradeep assured me, “and will give you energy.” Its taste was strong: spicy, bitter, laced with cardamom. “Today, almost everything is free” – for the women – Pradeep explained. “Their lunch, rickshaws, buses…”
It was lunchtime, and women had started to line up in the street with metal tiffin pails or plastic containers in hand. I could see at least a kilometre long line of women, all waiting to reach a lunch station that had been set up nearby. Pradeep took us through the back entrance, where women shuffled towards enormous pots, all lent by local families, full of south Indian “pure veg” cooking – vegetarian, and egg-free. The cooks, all men, had begun cooking the night before and all the families in the neighbourhood had contributed towards the meal: some gave bottles of oil, some gave rice, some gave money instead. The women moved past each pot, pausing for an instant to allow the men to dish up rice, thin red sambal, a mushy green vegetable called avial, green beans in a red sauce and mango chutney – atchar – for extra kick.
Beyond the Chettikulangra neighbourhood, a steady stream of women was rushing back to their pots before the ceremonial blessing of the Pongala began. Some were walking back from lunch stations further afield; others had used the time to glimpse Attukal Devi in the form of her idol in the main temple. We were heading in the opposite direction, against the crush of people, to the temple. All through the streets, the festival had taken over: the women striding, purposeful, back to their pots, the men and the children hanging around to see the action, the street side stalls with balloons and trinkets. It was all for Pongala. Even the ambulance parked on the side of the road was strung with tinsel, with the words Pongala – rather alarmingly – obscuring its windshield. The medics jumped out when they saw us and – shrieking and laughing – posed for a photo in front of the vehicle, all high on festivity.
We reached the temple and, just beyond it, a stage, from where the mass blessing would begin. Thousands of women were squeezed into the area around the stage. In years past, when the festival had far fewer participants, the temple and its surrounds had been the sole site of the festivities. Amplifiers around the stage were transmitting the temple’s goings-on. Following the music, I went in. I was immediately forced to dodge a procession of men with white lungis wrapped around their waists who were marching past, drumming wildly. They were followed by a few hundred young boys, also wearing white lungis, looking sheepish. They each had a plastic token tied to their arms, with a number on it, and as they plodded along, circling the central shrine, they looked more like zombies than festival-goers. Two were dragging their feet along, crying, and three of the oldest boys were being propped up by a priest, who urged them along the circuit through the temple.
These boys’ parents had put their sons forward for one of 865 places in a week-long programme, during which they lived at the temple and were, in effect, given to Attukal Devi. The parents offered their sons to the goddess as an expression of gratitude, perhaps because the goddess granted a wish or cured a family member’s disease. The boys, between seven and thirteen, endure a week of separation from their parents during which they eat food that is cooked at the temple and sleep in an open area with a stone floor. They spend their time worshipping, bowing to the goddess 1008 times every morning and again every night. This was the next-to-last day, which explained the expressions of pain some of them wore. Their parents pay a fee of around 15,000 rupees for the week of asceticism.
Just as I began to pity the boys, a chirpy group came past and, jumping in front of Iain’s camera and posing, shouted “Hello, Hello, Hello!” – until a policewoman ushered them back into the procession. Among the boisterous children were a couple of devout little men, carrying urns of holy water which they flicked repeatedly onto their faces, bending to touch stone-carved idols, and then their heads.
Outside, in front of the stage, the water used to bathe Attukal Devi’s idol was being carried in buckets by an army of priests, and flicked onto each woman’s pot of food, blessing it. Despite the number of priests, this was a mammoth task; half an hour after the blessing began, there were still a few priests hurrying through the crowds, flicking water frantically from the end of palm leaves. Some of the women had obviously done this before. With their cooking utensils and other belongings already packed into bags of canvas or sacking, and the pot of rice on top, they opened the bag as the priest came by so their Pongala dish caught a few drops of the holy water. In no time, they had covered the pot with a banana leaf and a piece of rope and were hustling with bags balanced on their heads towards the train or bus station, where they would make their way home.
“This is the one day when everybody is the same,” Pradeep had told me proudly, before I left him to continue assisting in his neighbourhood. “This festival does not discriminate; anyone can participate.” Pradeep estimated that, being a Hindu festival, 95 percent of participants are Hindus, but Kerala’s Christians and Muslims also take part, as well as people from foreign countries. I wasn’t entirely convinced that foreigners participated until I met Mariana, a Russian in a pretty orange salwar kameez, who had cooked her own pot of rice for the festival. “The best way to get the essence of a festival is to participate,” she told me, noticing my surprise. It was about 35 degrees in the city before the fires were lit; she had sat in the heat from morning until the mid afternoon blessing – after hours in the heat claiming a spot for her fire the day before. Mariana had managed to get a prized place just in front of the stage, beside the Attakul Devi temple. Now she was lining up to see the Attukal Devi idol in the temple shrine.
Layla, a chatty middle-aged woman, was also on her way to see the idol when she asked me “Where are you from?” I told her, and then, as though there was a thread connecting the two thoughts, she said “Oh, I have a friend from America.” The friend was, she said, living at Amma’s ashram. Amma is Kerala’s best-known guru, with devotees around the world. “I was the headmistress of the school near the ashram. Amma gave me these.” Layla showed me a string of beads around her neck. Kerala’s favourite guru reveals a lot about its culture: Amma is a woman – one of only a handful of female gurus – and her philosophy lies in the simple power of hugging. When she makes an appearance in India or abroad, thousands of people – devotees, sceptics and the curious among them – wait in queues for half the night just to be hugged by her.
Layla’s reasons for making Pongala were quite different to Suja’s. She does it “to pray to god – for devotion,” she told me. She had been making an offering of Pongala to the goddess for 25 years. If she shows her devotion, she explained, the goddess will give relief from pain and suffering. Good fortune, a happy household – these were things that people asked the goddess for. “But Devi won’t give all these things.” What if she isn’t suffering, I wanted to know; what would the goddess bring relief to? “Then, my devotion is for pain and suffering in the future.” Whether she was talking about her future in this lifetime or in a subsequent incarnation, I couldn’t tell.
She lived near the temple, and said I was welcome to stay at her house that night. I was leaving the following day anyway; she also didn’t know that, with me, came Iain. I thanked her and declined. She insisted on giving me her address and phone number in case I changed my mind and, smiling, walked away saying “Call me!”
I noticed a group of fresh-faced twenty-somethings near the temple’s entrance: they were Brahmins who had just returned from blessing the Pongala pots. The young men were not priests, but because they belonged to the Brahmin caste, they had assumed the role today, to assist with the proceedings. After arriving at the temple at around 11 o’clock that day, they had been given a sash to wear and, with buckets of holy water in hand, had set off through the crowds to “provide a service” – as the 22 year old, Praveen, pragmatically put it. The women who wanted their blessing to have extra clout would hand the Brahmin a note. If they were providing a kind of service, did that mean that the money they received was like a tip, I asked Praveen. “No,” he said, frowning at how difficult it was to explain the practice. They accept the money on the goddess’ behalf, he explained, but the money is theirs to keep. “How much did you collect today?” I asked Ramesh, a smiling 18 year old. He didn’t know, he said; he hadn’t counted it yet. It was in the range of two thousand rupees he guessed – a tidy sum for an hour’s work, by any standards. The seven students who I met had all grown up in the same neighbourhood, where they were now returning, to play computer games, or football, or to sleep.
I, too, decided to return to my home for the night. I began the hour long walk back; the streets were still far too crowded for auto rickshaws or buses. The day’s events floated before my mind; images, sounds or other sensations occasionally surfaced, flickered, and then subsided, as if from a dream. Bed was a very welcoming prospect. Grotty, grey sheets couldn’t have mattered less – given all the colour I’d seen.
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Wonderful writing and photographs.
very cool, don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before-
Neither had we!
Nice article Claire – glad to know Trivandrum can be a bit more exciting than when we visited it! Was this the most interesting/exciting festival you experienced this time around? Hope you’re having an enjoyable Buddhas’ Birthday today… we’re off to see a temple (imagine that!)…
Thanks Anderson. Yes, Attukal Pongala was without a doubt the most interesting festival we’ve witnessed anywhere. India’s festival of colours, Holi – as you well know – is more fun though, with the advantage that you can really throw yourself into the festivities with the locals. We weren’t participants in Attukal Pongala – just awed onlookers.
From what I’ve heard, Buddha’s birthday in Hong Kong certainly sounds like a big event! We didn’t see any sign of celebrations or festivities here in Laos, and strangely enough, the event isn’t even marked on the Laos tourism website. Although Buddhist culture seems to be alive and well here, either Gautama’s birthday isn’t considered particularly important, or people recognise it with more private rituals – I don’t know which.
More than Attukal Pongala, it is the Onam celebration that takes you to a real festive spirit. Attukal Pongala is only for ladies and is confined mainly to one part of the city. But the Onam festival celebrations can be seen all over the city with women, men and children taking part and rejoicing. Onam falls in Aug/Sept.
Nice write up . Im from Trivandrum near to attukal temple , and like the way you described your experiences .Glad to know you enjoyed it .
Thanks, Jaggy. I hope you’re enjoying the festival today! I wish I was there…
I felt I was there with you in Trivandrum, my eyes are watering even though I am sitting in my study 1000′s of miles away. What a fantastically written travelogue, I look forward to the next chapter, as always. Best wishes
Thank you for your kind comments, Megan. I am thrilled to hear that – in the absence of the ability to transport you physically – I could transport you with words.
Layala approaching you is no big surprise. If Amma’s Amrita institution has to grow in india they need to showcase many Foreign White people as their Devotees.
Amrita claim their philosophy to love,compassion,service but recently they revealed their true nature. They have big hospitals and Educational institutions where they charge huge amount of money from their patient and students but they do not pay their staff even decent enough salary and is any poor weak nurse asks for a decent pay, she is attacked by rowdies.
You’ve introduced an interesting subtopic, Nebu. Though I doubt very much that Layala’s motive for inviting me to her home was to turn me into one of Amma’s devotees, the point you raised about the integrity of hers and – by extension – other such institutes is valid and thought-provoking. Just because an organisation calls itself an ‘ashram’, it doesn’t make them any less likely to exploit their staff. I am certain that there are several other charitable institutions in the world (and ashrams in India) that have their own secrets to keep.
@nebu…This is a travelogue,not a place to show your hatred towards a particular community.