Holi’s evolution in Santiniketan

the tradition of playing Holi only with dry colours. The cultural events in the morning and evening based on Tagore’s songs and dance dramas remained the highlights, with the playing with colours restrained.

What was particularly unique to the Dol Utsav of Santiniketan was that even after the official programme was over, students would gather under trees in clusters to continue the music and dance and outsiders were welcome to participate. The simplicity of the dressing of the students in traditional yellow sarees or kurtas with flowers as adornments made Tagore’s legacy come alive even so many years after his death. I remember how, to me as a teenager and even as a college-going adult, the atmosphere had seemed magical.

Now that I have been staying in Santiniketan for a decade, I have no shame in admitting I have gone nowhere near the official Holi celebrations. Because, now the number of tourists that it attracts has run into lakhs. Many of those who come probably listen to Tagore music only once a year on this occasion. For them, the attraction is the crowds and of course the selfie opportunity that a festival of colour naturally offers. On its part, the university puts up a show for these visitors. The songs are in keeping with tradition, the dance sadly not. In order to make larger number of students participate, so as to provide a kind of valuefor-money, the quality has taken a beating.

Strangely, however, over the last decade, some of the wealthy Bengalis, who have homes in Santiniketan, have taken it upon themselves to uphold the mantle of Dol or Holi with their style of elitist celebrations. As the invited crowds gather on their manicured lawns many of the same songs are sung and danced to. The lumpen crowds are missing but the lumpen behaviour seems now so embedded in our collective psyche. As the rich and wealthy of Kolkata, not to forget the NRIs, sip their drinks, their private party music blares on loudspeakers fitted for this occasion. Perhaps, they think this is the best way to advertise their wealth or maybe they feel that blaring of music on loudspeakers is not a public nuisance if it is Rabindrasangeet.

But Santiniketan is now surrounded by encroachers. Many among them are from Bihar. Although their Holi was the day after, they also decided to engage in some pre-Holi masti. So much of this elitist Bengali bhadralok celebration was drowned out by the pre-Holi DJ box dhamaka of the non-Bengali residents. But the bhadraloks do not take offence. They come back every year for more.

We had a friend visiting us during the Holi weekend, who is not a Bengali. As we tried to converse through the fight of the loudspeakers he asked a simple question that I was not able to answer: “What did the Bengalis do for Holi before Tagore?”