Bathukamma

When it falls

Nine days from the Mahālaya amāvāsyā, the ancestors’ new moon, to Durgāṣṭamī, in late September or October. It opens the day before Navarātri and closes two days before it, so the two run alongside each other without sharing a calendar.

The Phala almanac gives the exact day for your own city; the lunar and solar rules above are what it computes from.

The story

Bathukamma means ‘come alive, mother’. The stack itself is the goddess: seasonal flowers packed in widening rings on a brass plate, tallest at the centre, with a cone of turmeric standing for Gaurī set on the top. It is built at home in the morning and carried out at dusk.

The season is what makes it possible. The monsoon has just ended, the tanks are full, and the uncultivated ground is thick with gunugu (celosia), tangedu (tanner’s cassia), marigold and lotus. These are flowers nobody plants and nobody sells; the festival is made of what the rain left behind.

Each of the nine days carries its own name and its own offering, from Engili Pūla Bathukamma on the first to Saddula Bathukamma on the ninth and largest. Telangana made it a state festival in 2014.

How the day is kept

• The women of a street bring their stacks to one courtyard at dusk and circle them clapping, singing the Bathukamma songs. There is no instrument; the clapping is the accompaniment.
• The circle widens as more women arrive, and the songs run through the evening. They are the tradition’s own, passed from woman to woman rather than written down.
• On the ninth evening the stacks are carried in procession to a tank, a stream or the Hussain Sagar, set on the water and pushed out, and the flowers are left to it.
• The turmeric Gaurī is lifted off the top before the stack is floated, and the women mark one another with it.
• Boḍḍemma, a smaller clay-and-flower observance kept by unmarried girls, runs in the week before and closes as Bathukamma opens.

At the table

Maleeda, roṭī crumbled into jaggery and ghee, and sattupiṇḍi, roasted flour with jaggery. The day-named offerings are food too: soaked rice, moong dal with jaggery, sesame, and on the last day the five saddula rices — curd, tamarind, lemon, coconut and sesame.

More victory and deliverance