Pongal - Tamil festival

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 1984 by Guy Deleury

PONGAL

WHAT could be more usual for a farmer or villager of southern India than to boil his rice? What could be more common than the potbellied vessel in which the women of his family prepare the meals each day? Between the Equator and the Tropics, what could be more familiar than the Sun? And yet these are the three commonplace ingredients which, along with cows and oxen, form the centre of the annual cosmic festival of Pongal in the land of the Tamils.

Some civilizations have tried hard to separate the sacred from the profane and to confine religion to the sacristy. The Hindu has a quite different approach. He creates his liturgies from the humblest objects and the activities of the daily round. For him the cosmos is an organism in which the trembling of a blade of grass on earth affects the most distant stars. The castes gravitate around the village like planets around a sun, each in its own orbit. The caste system is a solar system, like every atom of the human body, the cycle of the seasons, and the revolutions of the Moon.

Festivals are the nodal points at which all the vibrations of the Universe concentrate in a sound imbued with meaning. Pongal is the most notable example of such a festival. Every Hindu country has its own variant in which it expresses its specific identity. The festival of Ganpati in the land of the Marathas, the festival of Durga in Bengal, and the festival of Onam in Kerala are examples of these manifestations.

Pongal is the festival of the winter solstice, when the Sun returns to its northern course; soon the days will begin to lengthen again. Even if today the solstice actually falls almost a month earlier, around 21 December, the ritual solstice is still observed on the same date as in the sixth century, perhaps because the Sun's entry into the constellation of Capricorn takes place at the same time as the harvest of the new rice. The date highlights the relationship between the Sun and rice, the ritual extends the relationship to man and society. The Sun causes the rice to emerge from water and become food and life for man. The instruments of this two-phase transmutation are the oxen which work in the rice-fields and the pot in which the rice is cooked. The festival brings together these four participants in the new life: the Sun, rice, the cooking pot, and the ox--as well as a fifth, village society.

The festival may last two, three or four days; its length varies in different parts of Tamil Nadu. The first day is the vigil, known as bhogi or "enjoyment', of the kind that is celebrated at the summer solstice, or diwali, the festival of lamps. This is the day when people cleanse themselves of the year gone by. The boys pick up any scraps of wood or pieces of basketwork that happen to be lying around; the outer walls of houses and temples are whitewashed. In the afternoon rice boiled in water is eaten. Sometimes sacrifices are made to Mariayamma, the goddess of epidemics; more generally there are rituals in honour of ancestor spirits. Old earthenware pots are smashed, and the potter gives new pots to his customers. Just as they do for the festivals of Durga in Bengal and of Ganpati in Maharastra, the potters work day and night for weeks beforehand to make the pottery that will be used during the festival.

Today it is increasingly common for this pottery to be bought at the bazaar. In the past there was a nexus of links, governed by the jajmani system, between each family of potters and a number of families of village peasant-producers. Pongal was one of the festivals at which the links between village families of different castes were bolstered and reaffirmed.

This was the purpose of the celebrations on the second day, known as the day of the great pongal or, in some cases, the pongal of the gods. Each family boiled its pot of rice and went, according to traditional rules of precedence, to offer portions of it on banana leaves to other families. Sometimes the high castes cooked their pongal in the morning and the other castes in the afternoon. The communal pongal was also boiled before the temples. On this day the favourite form of pongal is sugar pongal; its preparation is accompanied by a variety of customs involving the use of brown cane sugar, coconut, raisins, fried lentils, cardamom, saffron, and a hint of edible camphor. Each family was proud of its own recipe, and for the children this delicacy is the very heart of the festival, along with the sugar cane and the new clothes.

For the children are given fine stalks of sugar-cane to chew. We know that the Indians invented sugar, since the very word can be traced back to Sanskrit. Pongal is also pre-eminently a day for sugar. In Maharastra, where the festival is called Makara-Sankrant (entry into Capricorn), tiny sesame pellets are given to elders and friends to whom the giver says, "take this sweet and tell me sweet things'. By giving and receiving these titbits the villagers vow to put honey into all their relationships in the coming year.