Growing Stories from India: Religion and the Fate of Agriculture

Chapter 5. The Festival of Holi: Celebrating Agricultural and Social Health

The Festival of Holi The springtime festival of Holi in Braj, the setting for the story of Balaram and the Yamuna River, celebrates the importance of agriculture and fertility in the social realm. The agricultural narrative embedded in Holi has broad religious, social, and cultural implications, and demonstrates that agricultural practice reflects and shapes social practices . Holi rituals confirm that agriculture is central to the social realm in Braj—and, I argue, in the contemporary United States as well. Although both the Braj pastoral narrative and contemporary environmental thought marginalize agriculture, Holi ritual practice, an example of Vaishnava devotion, reveals the inadequacy of this construct because human survival relies upon agricultural bounty. Despite the relative anonymity of food production in the contemporary United States, the intersection of food and social tensions shapes social hierarchy and food production, and I draw parallels between Braj and the United States to explore how agricultural tensions both reinforce social hierarchy and provide opportunities to rethink these relations. Although the Yamuna River demonstrates agency in her relationship with Balaram, his obligation to protect his region’s fertility renders her subject to his force. Similarly, the human need for agricultural production can result in commodified and objectified relations between humans and the earth. Assessing the expression of agency and protection in Balaram’s relationship with the Yamuna River provides conceptual tools to consider how these themes might emerge in alternate agricultural paradigms. For example, although humans often assume a protective role toward the earth, protection can engender attitudes of Chapter 5 Celebrating Agricultural and Social Health 122 Growing Stories from India entitlement and ownership; and protection, whether of the earth or people, may be used to justify hierarchical or oppressive structures. Balaram and the Yamuna River’s story is situated during the springtime festival Holi, and Holi ritual practice in Baldeo, India, celebrates the renewal of social and religious bonds and agricultural fertility . The relationship between Balaram and the Yamuna River, for example, reveals anxieties related to social hierarchies, sexuality, and agrarian fertility that could weaken social structures if not resolved. Holi ritual practice enacts social anxieties related to agriculture, hierarchy , and sexuality, and the ritual enactment of these anxieties defuses tensions that emerge between classes, genders, and generations, thus maintaining existing social hierarchies. Although the temple guides and priests of Baldeo state that Balaram’s actions and the accompanying Holi rituals reflect concepts of protection and agriculture, these practices also provide a vent for forces, such as sexuality and violence, that might otherwise prove destabilizing to society. While Holi’s comedic rituals perform the serious work of resolution , however, the temporary instability manifest in Holi’s play and role reversals creates a disorienting space from which we might question existing social structures and ask what is sacrificed to ensure social stability . Anxieties about famine and survival—irresolvable tensions between death and the need to eat—add an ironic dimension, a competing theme, to Holi, and memes such as ambivalence, ambiguity, and disorientation offer possibilities for us to imagine different relations between humans and food. The Holi practices of Baldeo, then, offer an opportunity to revisit Balaram’s role regarding agriculture and relations between agricultural and social health. In short, Holi rituals embody the intimate ties between social and agricultural health, and in this chapter I illustrate how Holi ritual practice mediates the social and agricultural tensions that appear in Balaram’s story. Baldeo’s Holi rituals illuminate broad concerns about human relations with the earth because they articulate, through practice, narrative structures that guide human behavior toward the earth. Acknowledging dilemmas of hierarchy and demand for production that are inherent in agricultural practice is a step toward developing alternative narratives for agricultural practice. This festival, celebrating fertility and the renewal of social bonds, mitigates fears related to food, famine, The Festival of Holi 123 and hierarchy, and simultaneously exposes human ambivalence about human treatment of the earth and procurement of food. A Celebration of Spring The springtime agricultural festival of Holi commemorates Balaram’s redirecting the Yamuna River to restore the fertility of Braj. During Holi, Hindus across India celebrate the return of spring and renew social bonds. Devotees in Baldeo read this episode as a testament to Balaram’s status as a guardian, both of society and of agriculture, and the Holi rituals of Baldeo embody social and agricultural renewal. Balaram is the king of Braj and the patron of agriculture; he...