EVERYBODY now celebrates Holi without knowing context or the real romance of the festival! It’s like we as a people have degenerated the celebration to a bloody free for all…I’m not sure if this is good or bad in a multi-religious, multi-cultural India but I do wish we would be progressive in a better sense, as in celebrate Holi or play Holi in eco-friendly ways.
In the old world when there were no plastics which rule us like demons today…I remember once being in Barsana, the editor of The Daily, Rajeev Bajaj, assigned me to go see lath-maar Holi in Barsana and write about it. I went away for a week for those days I was forever ready to run away from home (like I still do marriage or no marriage)!
Holi’s many folk legends are traced to a change of season, Shivratri is over with and mahadeo and Parvati are honeymooning in the mountains of the Himalaya may be…all that. With spring time in the air the birds are in full song, the mango tree cuckoo never tires of calling out for a mate and yes, Holi has many stories about Lord Krishna and his consort “wife” Radha, born in Barsana.
Nearby is Nandgaon where Krishna was born. A popular story has it that Krishna as a young boy was forever teasing and harassing the cowherds or gopi while they went about their daily chores and especially Radha, a married woman he fell in love with…the rest is folklore or religious romance around which so many stories are woven in and out in various books of testimony. What to believe and what to just accept as divine stories, up to you.
Anyway, lathmaar Holi is played in Barsana between the villagers of Barsana and Nandgaon today, when costumed women with sticks chase out costumed men of yore – as enactment of the Radha-Krishna stories born around Mathura area of Uttar Pradesh. I remember going to the Banke Bihari Temple for the Holi aarti – a most colorful scene – and being doused with warm pinkish water redolent of the flowers of the red dhak tree flowers of springtime, the priests were using these long lovely silver pichkari (traditional equipment to spray water) to bless the gathering of worshippers, pilgrims, tourists from around the world.

Absorbed in taking photographs of the laathmaar holi enactment going on at a Barsana garden square, one of the long-tailed black langur monkeys came and snatched away my sunglasses from my face! Later I got it back, all broken of course. Anyway, this was one of my most educative escapades during my years in Mumbai that was Bombay in the 1980s.
Myriad are the stories of the Radha-Krishna romance in Hinduism’s mythology and there’s much more. Holi also celebrates the legend or story of Holika and Lord Vishnu bhakt Prahlad…the son of demon king Hiranyakashipu who wanted his pious son Prahlad destroyed and got his sister, the demoness Holika, to hold him in her lap and sit atop a bonfire. Of course Lord Vishnu saves Prahlada and Holika burns to ashes. Evergreen moral to learn somewhere here.
Anyway, all this is to say by all means celebrate the stories of Holi, but do so with natural colors and natural waters and best of all with all manner of the blossoms of springtime and confetti leaves, not plastic tinsel, okay! It’s also okay to quench thirst with legendary delicious milky drink thandai (with or without bhang – extract from the cannabis plant leaves, otherwise called marijuana, has a narcotic effect on the senses)!
There is so much to the celebration of Holi. Please don’t turn into a paisa feko, tamasha dekho, okay. We want a better world in 2025 in memory of Lord Krishna, the feminist god of Hinduism or so I like to think. By all means take a break and go to Mathura to catch up with the scenes and sights of Krishna country…don’t forget to eat bal kakdi and petha. The first are slender long refreshingly long tender cucumbers and the second refer to the icy looking sweet made from white marrow or ash gourd. They are the two favorite takeaways from Uttar Pradesh.
ON that note it’s avjo, selamat datang, poiteverem, au revoir, arrivedecci, hasta la vista and vachun yeta here for now.
–Mme Butterfly