> Source: https://amayakavya.com/posts/post-003

# Phoney Modernisation Is Killing Our Festivals

Culture
October 16, 2026

My take

Our festivals held this country together when nothing else could, and we are doing to them what no ruler ever managed.

Imagine you’re invited to your grandmother’s ninetieth birthday. You turn up in new clothes. You eat everything. You dance till three, you swap numbers with someone at the dessert counter, and at no point in the evening do you speak to your grandmother. You’re not even sure she was there. Next morning, would you tell anyone you went to her birthday?

No. You went to a party at her house.

That, more or less, is what we have done to our festivals. And since someone will shortly call me a conservative as if it were a skin condition, let me explain which kind I am.

I don’t think old means good. Plenty of old things deserved to go, went, and nobody misses them. My conservatism is the builder’s kind. Before you knock down a wall, find out whether it’s holding up the roof. If it isn’t, swing away. If it is, you might want to think about where you’ll be standing when it comes down.

So let’s walk round the house and see what each wall is actually holding up.

Navratri first. Nine nights at the turn of the season, when the monsoon has gone and the harvest is coming in. Each night belongs to one of the nine forms of the goddess, and a great many people fast right through. The fast is the point. You give something up for nine days to prove to yourself that you can, and self-control is a muscle like any other. Use it or lose it. In many homes, on the first day, a clay pot is set up and barley is sown in a little earth beside it. By the ninth day it has sprouted. Nine days of discipline and something has grown. Nobody needed a lecture to get the message.

Then Garba. The word comes from garbha, the womb, and the dance goes round the garbo, a clay pot full of holes with a lamp burning inside.[1](#sn-1) The pot is the body, the lamp is the life in it, and the goddess is at the centre of the lot. The dancers go round it in a circle, because life goes round. And notice one thing about a circle. It has no front row. Nobody gets a better seat. The richest man in the village and the poorest girl go round the same lamp at the same speed. That was the whole design.

1 Garba of Gujarat, inscribed in 2023, is danced around “a perforated earthenware pot lit with an oil lamp”. [UNESCO](https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/garba-of-gujarat-01962)

Dandiya tells the same story with sticks. They’re said to be the goddess’s sword, the clack is the sound of her nine-night battle with Mahishasura, and on the tenth day, Vijayadashami, good wins. Shri Ram Ji over Ravan in the north, Durga Ji over Mahishasura in the east, on the same day and for the same reason. And on the eighth or ninth day, families bring in the little girls of the neighbourhood, wash their feet and feed them, because each one is treated as the goddess herself. Nine nights that end with a whole society bowing to its daughters.

Durga Puja is Bengal’s version, and it’s built differently. In Bengal, Durga Ji is also the married daughter who comes home to her parents for four days every year, bringing her children with her. That’s why it feels like a family reunion, and why UNESCO, when it put the festival on its list, said it had come to mean “home-coming”.[2](#sn-2) It starts before dawn on Mahalaya, when Bengal gets up in the dark to listen to the same radio recitation it has been waking up to for about ninety years. In 1976 the state broadcaster swapped it for a modern version in a film superstar’s voice. The backlash was so fierce that within a year the original was back, and the minister had apologised.[3](#sn-3) Hold on to that. It’s the one time in this whole argument the public gets a vote, and it voted for the old one.

2 Durga Puja in Kolkata, inscribed in 2021. [UNESCO](https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/durga-puja-in-kolkata-00703)
3 All India Radio’s Mahalaya recitation, replaced in 1976 and restored within a year. [Outlook Traveller, 20 September 2025](https://www.outlooktraveller.com/amp/story/experiences/heritage/mahishasurmardini-the-timeless-radio-ritual-that-awakens-bengalis-on-mahalaya)

Then the days themselves. On Shashthi the goddess is woken. On Ashtami morning whole neighbourhoods offer anjali together, flowers in their hands, saying the same words at the same moment. Sandhi Puja falls at the exact minute Ashtami turns into Navami, with a hundred and eight lamps and a hundred and eight lotuses. On Dashami the married women smear each other with sindoor to say goodbye, and the idol goes into the river. Even that has a point. Nothing, not even her image, is meant to be kept. It goes back to the water, and as it goes, everyone shouts that she’ll be back next year. Asche bochor abar hobe. The whole festival teaches you how to come home and how to let go, which is most of what a family is.

Holi is the oldest trick of the lot, and the cleverest. It falls on the full moon of Phalgun, when winter is finished and the wheat is nearly ripe. The night before, the bonfire. Holika, who believed she couldn’t burn, sat in the fire holding Bhakt Prahlad, a boy whose faith would not bend, and only one of them walked out. Farmers roast the first ears of the new crop in that fire, and the village throws in whatever it wants rid of. The old season goes up in smoke. Next morning, the colour, which once came from flowers, the orange of the palash, because spring had arrived and it seemed rude not to wear it. In Braj, where Shri Krishna Ji grew up, it’s his festival, and the women of Barsana chase the men through the streets with sticks, which, to be fair, the men usually deserve.

But the real cleverness of Holi is the rule that comes with the colour. Bura na mano, Holi hai. Don’t take offence, it’s Holi. For one day the boss looks as daft as the peon, because everyone is the same shade of green. And it’s the day you go round to the house of the man you fell out with and hug him, because you can’t keep a grudge going against someone who is bright green. Holi is a nationwide day of forgiveness, disguised as a mess.

So those are the walls. Discipline, equality, family, forgiveness, and a lamp at the centre of it all. Here’s the rule I’ll judge everything else by, and you don’t need a degree to follow it. Keep the reason and you can change anything you like, the music, the venue, the clothes, and it’s still the festival. Take the reason out and it doesn’t matter what else you keep.

Right. Let’s test it.

Start with the money, because money never lies. In Ahmedabad last year, a season pass for one of the big Garba grounds cost ten thousand rupees.[4](#sn-4) The lamp, as far as I can tell, is free. It has always been free. You can dance round one in any housing society in Gujarat for next to nothing. So nobody is paying ten thousand rupees for the lamp. They’re paying for the singer, the sound system, the lighting rig and the chance to be photographed in an outfit that took three months to plan. That’s a concert. It may be a very good concert. But a concert held in October is still a concert. And look at the shape of it. A stage at one end, a VIP enclosure at the front, everybody else behind. We’ve taken the one dance in the world with no front row and sold tickets to the front row.

4 Season pass prices at Ahmedabad’s Garba grounds. [DeshGujarat, 2 September 2025](https://deshgujarat.com/2025/09/02/garba-pass-prices-soar-up-to-%E2%82%B910k-in-ahmedabad-navratri-commercialization-in-spotlight/)

Then there’s the music, which is god-awful, and at a festival for a god that takes some doing. A song at a puja is addressed to someone. That’s what makes it devotional. Now listen to what’s actually coming out of the speakers. Remixes. Item numbers. And, best of all, quote unquote aashiqui, songs about some lovesick hero who has lost his girlfriend and would like everyone within four kilometres to know about it. We call the goddess Maa. Mother. So picture it properly. You’re standing in front of your mother, at a volume that’s setting off car alarms, playing her a song about how you can’t live without your girlfriend. Who exactly is that meant to please? Not your mother. Not even the girlfriend. The DJ, and he’s already been paid.

Then the dating, and here I’ll be fair, because fairness is the whole point of doing this properly. People have always met at festivals. Couples have met in Garba circles for as long as there have been Garba circles, and good luck to them. People meet their wives at weddings too. Nobody minds. But if you went to forty weddings a year, never once looked at the bride, and spent every evening working the dessert queue for phone numbers, you wouldn’t be a guest. You’d be a problem.

So ask yourself one question. Would you still go if there was no chance of meeting anyone? If the honest answer is no, then whatever you’re going to, it isn’t Garba. It’s a singles night wearing Garba’s clothes. And once enough people are doing that, nine nights that end with a society washing the feet of its little girls turn into nine nights of sizing up the grown-up ones. You’d struggle to get further from the point if you tried. I think that’s wrong. I suspect you do too, which is why the jokes about it make you laugh.

Durga Puja has gone the same way, only with better food. People queue for two hours to get into a famous pandal, spend forty seconds in front of the goddess and the rest of the visit photographing the ceiling. Give the building two hours and the goddess forty seconds, and you’ve told everyone what you came for. You’re an architecture tourist with a phone. And the anjali on Ashtami morning, the one moment in the whole festival when a neighbourhood actually does something together, is the part people skip, because they were out till four looking at ceilings. Go back to the name. Durga Puja. Take the puja out and what’s left is a very well-lit queue.

And Holi has moved to the swimming pool. The bonfire is optional now, and the colour comes with a wristband, a DJ, a rain dance and gulal by the kilo. Take the bonfire out and what you’ve got is a paint fight, and paint fights are available anywhere on earth. Worse, a ticketed party can’t do the one thing Holi was built to do. You can’t make up with the man you fell out with, because he isn’t on the guest list. Holi has gone from the day you forgive your neighbour to the day you meet a stranger in a pool, and neither of you will remember the other’s name by Tuesday.

I can hear the objections already, so let’s take them one at a time.

The first is that festivals evolve. Of course they do. So do cars. A car gets a better engine, better brakes, a stereo that works, and it’s still a car. Take out the engine, the brakes and the steering wheel and keep the paint, though, and you haven’t evolved anything. You’ve made a very expensive garden ornament. That’s the difference between modernisation and what we’re doing, which is phoney modernisation. Keep the paint, throw away the engine, and charge people to sit in it. Remember Bengal in 1976. When someone tried to modernise the one thing Bengal really cared about, Bengal made them put it back within a year. People can tell a better engine from no engine at all. They just have to be paying attention.

The second is that it’s good for the economy. It is. So is a concert. So is a cricket match. Nobody needs a festival to sell tickets to a cricket match. If the money only comes in because the festival’s name is on the poster, then what’s being sold is the name. The thing the name stands for was never in the price.

The third will be in the comments within the hour. “Stop moral policing, grandpa, and go back to your armchair.” Fine. I’m in it. Feet up, chai in hand. Now listen. Nobody is stopping you dancing. Nobody is checking who you dance with. Dance on any of the other three hundred and fifty-odd nights of the year and I’ll lend you the speakers. All I’m saying is that if you take the worship out, you don’t get to keep the festival’s name. You check the label every time you buy a packet of biscuits. You’d be furious if a shop sold you a chicken burger with no chicken in it, and you’d be right. I’m asking you to check this label too.

Which brings me to the roof.

Think about what actually held this country together during the long stretches when somebody else was running it. It wasn’t the government. That was theirs. It wasn’t a language. We have twenty-two in the Constitution alone. A Tamil and a Punjabi don’t share a script or a breakfast. What they share is a calendar. In the middle of January, when by tradition the sun turns north, Punjab lights the Lohri fire, Tamil Nadu lets the Pongal pot boil over, Assam sits down to its Bihu feast and the sky over Gujarat fills with kites. Different names, different languages, the same week and the same reason. Nobody planned that in a committee. It’s how the country is wired.

And the wiring isn’t one faith’s. Eid begins with charity, given before the prayer so that the poorest house in the street can celebrate too. At a Gurpurab langar, everyone eats sitting in the same row on the floor, whoever they are. Paryushan ends with Jains asking forgiveness of everyone they might have hurt in the year. Look at what all of these were built to do. Put the rich and the poor on the same level for a day. Bring the family home. Feed the hungry. Settle the grudge. It’s the reasons that bind people. The dates just tell you when to turn up.

The British understood this better than we do. For decades they told our processions which road to take and what time to take it,[5](#sn-5) whether the procession was carrying Durga Ji to the river, a tazia in Muharram, Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji on Guru Nanak Dev Ji’s Gurpurab, or a Jain rath. They banned whatever their Victorian morals called licentious. And they still couldn’t kill a single festival. Holi and Muharram, in the words of one historian who studies this, “could not be stamped out altogether”.[6](#sn-6) Nothing else could be either. You can licence a procession. You can’t licence what a grandmother tells a child about why the lamp is lit. That lived in people, out of reach of any police law, and so it outlived the Raj.

5 Police Act, 1861, Section 30, in the form it took in 1895. [Tripura High Court copy](https://www.thc.nic.in/Central%20Governmental%20Acts/Police%20Act,%201861..pdf)
6 Jagjeet Lally, historian at UCL, “Colour as Commodity: Colonialism and the Sensory Worlds of South Asia”. [Third Text, 9 May 2019](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10106291/1/JAGJEET_LALLY_COLOUR_PDF_1.pdf)

Now look at what we’re doing. We’re taking the reasons out ourselves and keeping the dates. And a festival without its reason is just an event. Events are easy. Whoever owns the venue owns the event. You can sponsor an event, ticket it, tax it, move it, cancel it or sell it to whoever pays most. So when the next lot comes along, whoever they are and whatever they’re selling, they won’t need a police law from 1861. They’ll buy the title sponsorship. And when somebody stands up and tries to call the country together to say no, what exactly will they call it together with? A season pass?

That’s the part nobody will notice, because it won’t happen in a day. Nobody will ban Holi. It’ll just turn, one year at a time, into a paint party. Garba will turn into a nightclub with sticks. The pujas will turn into a queue for photographs. One festival at a time, one playlist at a time, until one morning there’s nothing left that a Tamil and a Punjabi and a Bengali all still share for the same reason. And there’ll be nobody to blame. No foreign ruler, no police law. Just us, having done it ourselves, voluntarily, with an early-bird discount.

The rest of the world, meanwhile, has noticed what we have. In under ten years UNESCO has added the Kumbh Mela, Durga Puja, Garba and, last December, Deepavali to its list of things humanity ought to protect.[7](#sn-7) Indian families abroad will drive for hours to a rented hall to dance Garba, because far from home a festival is often the only thing that tells a child what being Indian means. And the world learns India from whatever we send it. Send it a paint party and it will think Holi is a paint party. It already does in Berlin, where some businessmen turned Holi into a ticketed brand and started selling franchises.[8](#sn-8) Franchises. Like fried chicken. A nightclub in Mumbai is exactly the same as a nightclub in Berlin. Same lights, same drinks, same song you hate. A Garba with the lamp in the middle exists in one place on earth. Every time we turn a Garba into a nightclub, we swap the one thing nobody else has for the one thing everybody has. You can’t build a national identity, at home or abroad, out of things everybody has.

7 Deepavali was inscribed at the committee’s session in New Delhi in December 2025, India’s sixteenth entry on the list. [News on AIR](https://www.newsonair.gov.in/unesco-adds-deepavali-to-intangible-cultural-heritage-list)
8 The “Holi Festival of Colours” brand, from 2012, ticketed and franchised. Jagjeet Lally, UCL. [Third Text, 9 May 2019](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10106291/1/JAGJEET_LALLY_COLOUR_PDF_1.pdf)

None of this is politics, by the way. No party owns Holi, and nobody here is asking you to vote for anyone. It’s something duller and more important. A country is more than a flag, a map and a growth figure. It’s also the handful of things its people do together, at the same time every year, for the same reasons. That’s why a few things have to be kept on purpose. Old isn’t automatically good. But once these go, there’s no shop that sells them back.

So I’m not asking for a ban. I’m asking for things to be done in the right order. Light the lamp before the speakers go on. Light the bonfire before you buy the colour. Do the anjali before the ceiling photographs. Go and hug the neighbour you fell out with, then go to your pool party if you must. Then dance till four, swap numbers, play your terrible songs. Knock yourself out.

I’ll be in my armchair, where I’m told I belong. But at least I’ll know what we were celebrating.

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