DIWALI
To fly into this Festival of Light is to enter Indian culture by many doors at the same time. This is not a festival of just one religion but of three; for Hindus, Sikhs and Jains, held in the late autumn as the hot season breaks, shifting with the calendar between late October and early November. The main night of celebration comes in the midst of a festival that runs for several days, the number varying between religion and region. But on this night all the reasons and roots come together when the moon wanes at the end of the Hindu month of Ashwayuja, when there is no lunar aura, a night of absolute darkness out of which the Festival of Light can explode.
There are many stories that wind together to make Diwali, whether you look at it through the prism of Hinduism, Sikhism or the Jain religion. The myths, parables and tales are different, the rituals vary, the colours change, but they all meet loosely under the banner of Diwali, the name more commonly used in the north of India, whilst in the south it is called Deepavali. From India the festival spreads across the world, through Nepal, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Canada, Europe, America, Suriname, Thailand, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, anywhere and everywhere that any of the three religions has travelled, Diwali has followed.
The more formal southern name, Deepavali comes from the linking of two Sanskrit words that mean simply a row of lights, or, in broader terms light in the darkness, the conquest of good over evil.
The derivations create a cobweb of tales, each theme creating another fine section of minute detail. In rinsed down terms there are three main Hindu threads. The first is the return of Rama, the King of Ayodhya, to his kingdom after an absence of fourteen years. His home-coming is triumphal as he has his wife with him, the goddess Sita, having freed her from the clutches of the demon Ravana, the king of Lanka, with the help of his brother Lakshman, and Hanuman, the monkey god. Sita and Rama link back to a more ancient thread: Rama is seen as the seventh manifestation of the great god Vishnu, one of the high triumvirate in the massive pantheon of Hindu gods and demigods, beside Brahma and Shiva. Sita, Rama’s wife, is regarded as a manifestation of the goddess Lakshmi, Vishnu’s consort. In this earlier generation of the gods Diwali marks the return of Vishnu, Lord of the Universe and Preserver, from the Nether World. Lakshmi went to get him back because he had kept a promise to Bali, a demon king, who Vishnu had sent to rule the Nether World. Bali had gone on the condition that Vishnu be his gatekeeper in the world below. Vishnu had kept his promise, gone to the Nether World, and so Lakshmi went to get her man back. The third strand celebrates the beloved and hugely popular blue boyish god Krishna and his defeat of a demon called Narakasura.
In the Sikh context Diwali marks the day when the fourth of the great Mughal emperors, Jehangir, is said to have released the sixth Sikh guru, Hargobind Singh, from imprisonment in 1619. In memory of this the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the highest gurdwara of Sikhism, is entirely lit, the surrounding water of the temple complex reflecting the hundreds of thousands of lights and candles in a shivering glow.
For the Jains it is their major festival, the time when the greatest of their twenty-four main saints, Lord Mahavira, attained nirvana, the state of non-suffering, the highest attainment on the path of spiritual practice.
In the Hindu calendar the festival comes twenty days after Dussehra, another big Hindu festival that in religious terms marks the actual defeat of the wife-napping demon Ravana by Rama. Both festivals honour the natural calendar in more rural communities as time of harvest, the bringing in the crops, the turn of the season towards winter, particularly in the Himalayas where the first heavy snows usually come at about this time, cutting off high villages from the outside world until the following spring. And, acoording to the Hindu calendar, the festival begins with the Lakshmi Puja, the prayer ceremony to Lakshmi, on the day of the fully waned moon.
As well as being consort to Vishnu, Lakshmi is the goddess of good fortune and wealth, and so the card-playing begins, sometimes weeks before Diwali. If the goddess is smiling down why not play cards, why not take advantage of a time when she might favour gambling? Every night, particularly during the week before Diwali, there are card parties. These are not the orderly and upright gatherings of bridge fours. Sheets are spread out on the floor as extended card tables, the stakes rising as the less divine spirits flow. But this is just the warm up, and while old friends bicker over sleights of hand, in a mostly good-humoured way, vast numbers of people are on the move, coming home for Diwali. From all over the country, and increasingly from all over the world, they come, by every means possible, from private jet to bullock cart. This is a time a family, and for those who cannot get home it is keenly felt, that neglected emptiness in a foreign city, knowing that family is coming together, the emotional distance hard and harsh. They know that all the local markets of home will have doubled in size, trestle tables laid out in front of all the stalls so that everything from fruit to DVDs can be stacked into baskets, wrapped around in acres of shiny cellophane, and twisted about with ribbon.
While the matriarchs stock up on everything edible for countless family and friends, many of these hampers are the core of a huge corporate gift-fest. In the business world everyone ‘gifts’ everyone else that they are doing business with, and particularly those they would like to do business with—after all Lakshmi might be smiling down.
And beyond the mounds of food and fruit, the hampers and ribbons, displays of pyrotechnics spread out beyond every small boy’s wildest dreams.
This is not just a festival of light, but one of noise too.
From first thing on Diwali morning firecrackers cackle in every street. This is no carefully planned Guy Fawkes display but a wild firework marathon. In North India the festival comes at the edge of the cool season, when the days begin to close in. The earlier sunset is battered down by the sound of firecrackers, great mounds of them set off and thrown about with more than faintly nerve-wracking abandon. Twilight is pre-empted by a thick cordite fog as neighbourhoods flair. Diwali neophytes flying into town are unsure whether they are entering into a war zone or the biggest party on earth. Pets and their owners are sedated, and the firework averse leave town or wear earplugs. The noise and smog pollution has, in some cities, led to curfews. In Delhi, the capital, it has been ruled that firecrackers can only be let off between 6pm and 10pm. But how do you police a nation in celebration?
And indeed how can you police a nation with a staggeringly sweet tooth when it comes to Diwali?
For several years I lived near what is probably the best sweet market in Delhi, the Bengali Sweet Market. This is not a location to be taken lightly. Mithai, Indian sweets, are a culture unto themselves. They are too rich for most people who aren’t used to them, based as they are on a fudgey mix of reduced milk and sugar. It is their visual appearance that stuns, mounded up at mithai shop counters, layered in elegant honeycomb piles, some prickling with cashews, almonds and pistachios, others like tiny Chinese New Year kites flecked with silver. They come in every pastel shade from faintly sickly lime green to fully blown herbaceous border rose pink. Leading up to Diwali the mithai-makers are in over-drive, whilst the Delhi matrons are in mithai-buying super-drive. Quite a sight they are, their fabulously long and polished finger nails flailing across the counters, grabbing at the attention of one of the sweating servers, the women’s mithai-plumped arms waving from under the tight sleeves of their fitted sari bodices. These women, and indeed men (though the latter are less silken-sari resplendent in their mithai shopping) do not buy in grams but in tens of kilos. Box upon box of mithai need to be bought and sent off to Auntie Ayesha in Jaipur, Uncle Partha in Bangalore, Cousin Madhu in New Jersey, and many more besides, the boxes accompanied by sparkling Diwali cards that will be opened in other countries, bringing with them that particular sweet musty smell of over-treated paper and buttery sugar that means ‘from India, with love’.
But beyond the jangle, the be-ribboned packaging and pyrotechnics Diwali is simply the Festival of Light, a time to reflect on inner light. To find a place beyond the commercial hullabaloo is really to witness the heart of this time. In a city like Rishikesh, a spirituality-central on the banks of the river Ganges in the foothills of the Himalayas in North India, Diwali is practiced in its essence. This is a holy city of ashrams, wandering holy men, pilgrims and seekers. Diwali in Rishikesh can be summed up by the image of a single diya, a small clay butter lamp, set afloat on the waters of the sacred river. The windows of every house and ashram are lined with these little lamps that are so much a physical manifestation of the meaning of the festival. Their clarified butter-soaked wicks flicker as they emerge through the twilight. Crowds gather on the riverbanks to set diyas on the water in leaf boats. The surface of the river is spotted with tiny brave lights in the darkness. Even the great lorries, the jauntily painted juggernauts of India’s road haulage, have their bumpers lined with flickering diyas. The whole city is washed in the light of butter lamps, and temple bells ring out across the water to chase away the darkness.
(originally published in Morning Calm, Korean Airlines magazine)