Of Mothers and Rivers: Beyond the Political Overtones of Chhath

The month of Kartika ushers in the festive season in India. After the sheer grandeur of a string of names of festivals: Pitru Paksha, Navratri and Deepavali, the faintly clownish name of Chhath once raised light-hearted expectations among those of us who did not belong to Bihar, Nepal, Odisha or eastern parts of UP. Yet judging by the sheer size of planning and festive cheer that it has been raising here in north western parts especially the capital of India, it is no longer true. 

Chhath is actually an ancient Vedic, pre-Sanatan festival celebrated for centuries in the agriculturally rich Magadh-Kosal region. Its name, rooted in the agricultural calendar, is an abbreviation of Shashthi Pujan (sixth day) that jointly celebrates the benign energies of the Sun in early winter as also Mother Shashthi. 

The latter, one among a band of six divine beings who roam the earth looking out for new borns during the crucial first week when neonatal mortality is an ever looming threat (hence the celebrations on the sixth day for a new born, as  Chhathi) when he/she is first brought out to see sunlight. 

Until recently, post Diwali, Chhath was when hordes of migrants from poverty stricken regions in Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and Nepal working as field labour in the richer western states, left to participate in the weeklong family festivities much to the chagrin of their employers who had to hurry up and get their paddy fields harvested before those ‘Purabiyas’ left. For the migrants going home for Chhath, the pooja was to be part of their families once again. 

The natural rustic exuberance of Chhath, celebrated without any elaborately carved and decorated idols of Sanatan pantheon gods, reintroduced them to their faith as a direct interaction between the families and benign natural forces that protected them all. 

Slowly as the diaspora from the regions expanded down south and even across the Vindhyas, Chhath celebrations have surfaced all over in new fangled forms because now hordes of educated young are migrating en family for blue collar jobs in the vast services sector.

Also read: The Sun Rises For Everyone: Chhath Puja and the Song of a People

With crucial state elections pending in Bihar, the Chhath festivities this year seemed to have acquired awesome political overtones from Delhi to Patna. Once it was a jolly peoples’ festival resounding with sonorous folk songs for Shashthi Maiya, and made fragrant by combined smells of home cooked food, incense and fires along the river on which food was being cooked by a vast sea of gaily attired married women faces bifurcated with thick bright lines of sindoor. 

Men and women stepped into the river, offered river water cupped in their palms to the Sun God and Chhathi Maiya, then offered baskets of seasonal vegetables, fruits, sugarcane bits and home cooked sweets made of jaggery and hand ground wheat flour. 

Now comes Chhath and Delhi creates small ponds of water everywhere. This easing of the fasting devotees’ passage to the water to dip in, was usually done by local residents of bastis. 

This year their local political representatives with deep pockets stepped in with camera men, TV anchors gingerly tippy-toeing in watery lanes mic in hand, gathering bytes praising the ruling party. 

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

The effort was to showcase Chhath as a grand Hindu event. So for four days city parks reverberated with faux folk techno music blaring from marquees in shades of saffron, red and pink with strings of tinsel glittering in the sun. The visitors were a usual combo of children strolling in with parents in sleepy obedience, fathers carrying family’s offerings, mothers faces smeared with sindoor (vermillion) and sweat, singing and scolding misbehaving children in that order. Teenage boys walked at a distance wearing jeans and T-shirts stamped with funny, (mostly) pirated western images or logos and eyeing nubile girls in salwar kameez.

The Delhi politicians from the ‘double engine sarkar’ had been in the media for weeks supervising the bandobast, petting babies, female representatives hugging women and applying sindoor on their foreheads in a rare act of bonhomie. Then there were the pop songs sung by Bihari singers hired by the ruling party. Overtaken by techno sounds, their voices had the scuttling vitality of shallow streams in Delhi.

In images of political rallies being held around the time in Bihar, one sensed a pervasive frustration over poverty and unemployed youth that have remained after the decades-long rule of Nitish Kumar led-coalition governments. Scarce jobs and high prices are therefore the main themes the opposition has been highlighting constantly. 

Back home in Bihar, the government and its pet media are jointly trying hard to turn the poverty in the state to a series of bearable shots. They used a trick of sunlight or musical charm of a very young Maithili Thakur, a singer with local roots, also being fielded as an NDA candidate during these state elections. 

But one was aware of the trees and semi-arid fields in the rain deficient villages; the images of recent flooding in some parts were largely kept out while the focus shifted to stout gates decorated gaily with tinsel. 

Was it because of this that several motor mouth Bihari leaders sent for canvassing from Delhi appeared tame as lambs as they carried the baskets of Chhath offerings over bowed heads and walked barefoot in homespun cotton clothes? 

In Delhi, the crowds moved with a shuffling dislocated pomp towards Yamuna river whose dirty waters, they were told, had been cleaned at great expense so they could safely take a holy dip in it. Even though the media was by then reporting Yamuna was a dubiously clean river, for onlookers, the ultimate beauty of the ceremonial arose not out of political patronage for rituals, but from voices and gestures of simple underprivileged migrants’ joyful immersion of self in the waters of the Ghat.

Suddenly, they brought alive the ancient personality of Magadh, the hierarchical half-magic land of the Buddha, king Bimbisar and emperor Ashoka who laid down his arms after a bloody battle and entered the peaceful religion of the Buddha.

As they cradled the water in their cupped hands, offered it to the Sun and Shashthi Maiya sprinkled it over their heads and faces, the holiness of nature turned palpable, liquid. These, here, were fasting women who had survived so much deprivation and poverty over centuries. And even in these sacred and chaotic water holes, as they offered a loving last watery farewell anjuri (cupped hands) to the Sun and the Mother Shashthi, the world seemed to make sense to them.

As the song goes:

“Rahiya mein poochhey batohiya, Behengi kekar jaye ?/Andher chhai tohi batohiya, Behengi Chhathi Maay ke Jaay/ Chhathi Maay ke hoy sub baratiya, Sub Arag daiyal Jaye.

(On the way the passersby ask, ‘where are you carrying the offerings on bamboo poles?’ We say, are you blind? Can’t you see we are going to offer it to Chhathi Maiya. We have fasted in her name and now we are going to make our final offering with hands cupping rivers.)”

Mrinal Pande is a writer and veteran journalist.

Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.

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