Tamil community all set to celebrate ‘Pongal’
KUALA LUMPUR: The Tamil community is making preparations to celebrate the “Pongal” harvest festival tomorrow.
In the Indian enclaves of the cities, items for the festival, such as clay pots and sugarcane, are on sale.
One such area is Little India in Brickfields here.
A check by Bernama found Indian grocers selling colourful clay pots, as crowds thronged the shops to buy pots, new clothes and traditional sweets.
Among the shoppers was housewife P. Amutha, 65, who was buying a clay pot.
“The essential things include sugarcane and milk, which are compulsory items for the celebration. We cook the sweet rice at an auspicious time, either in the morning or evening,” said the mother of three.
Traditional sweets, such as the famous ladoo, palkova and jilebee, were selling like hot cakes,
Trader Ram Singh, 65, said he expected more customers during Pongal.
Pongal is a celebration to mark a bountiful harvest and is ushered in with the hope for a better year ahead.
The festival is also a traditional occasion for giving thanks to Nature and the life cycles that give man grain.
Pongal is celebrated on the first day of the month of Thai in the Tamil calendar, which falls in January.
Pongal is not complete without the sweet, fragrant rice porridge, which is cooked in an earthen pot, a traditional cooking method that hails from Tamil Nadu in India from where most of the Tamils originate.
Once the milk comes to a boil, the rice is allowed to spill over to signify abundance. Family members usually gather around the pot and chant Pongalo Pongal as the rice boils over. The sweet rice is offered to the Sun God in appreciation of a good harvest.
Pongal is celebrated over several days. On Maattu Pongal, prayers are offered to the bulls, cows and other farm animals that are used for agriculture. In the villages of India, cows are bathed, garlanded and their horns painted in bright colours.
Kanni Pongal is devoted to young maidens, who dress up in fine clothes and jewellery and offer prayers in the hopes of getting a good husband.
In Nibong Tebal, R. Thulasi, 42, who assists her husband D. Reguraj, 43, in running an earthen pot business, said they had about 50,000 pots on sale this year in anticipation of a higher demand.
More than the 30,000 pots were sold last year, she said.
“This year, we were able to prepare more pots because of the good weather. We usually get orders from wholesalers, temples and individuals. Our customers are from Penang, Kedah and Perak.”
Thulasi said the family business was now into the fifth generation.
They have engaged three workers from India to produce the pots to ensure quality.
The pots are sold for between RM6 and RM35 a piece, depending on the size and intricacy of the patterns.
Muruganatham, 38, a maker of traditional clay pots from India, said making the pots required a great deal of patience, concentration and skill.
He said the manual way of making the pots, which took an hour to produce one, had given way to the new method of using machinery and moulds that allowed one to produce a pot in two minutes. Bernama