Karaga, Cricket, Garbage collide in Bengaluru

Is Bengaluru the worst municipality in the country? Living in this city, it certainly feels like it. There is so much to be angry about in Bengaluru these days. Cricket fans have died in a stampede and still the state government is passing the buck, scapegoating officers so that they can escape blame. On April 1, the BBMP imposed a 'garbage tax' collecting additional money for doing its job. This week, it crowed that the collections were so robust that the BBMP had collected half its annual target in just two months. I wasn't present in Chinnaswamy stadium on that dark day when 11 cricket fans died. But I can speak from personal experience about this garbage tax.
I live in a building in Central Bangalore. Each apartment in my complex pays the garbage tax. But here is the thing. BBMP takes away nothing from our building. No garbage, nothing. The reason is that we have contracted with an organisation called Hasiru Dala which takes away our wet waste, our recycled material and our electronic waste. We compost 10% of our waste in our building. To restate: BBMP's intersection with our building in terms of garbage is zero. Yet, we pay, and not just a small amount.
There was garbage aplenty this week in Shivaji Nagar where I live though, thanks to the annual Shivaji Nagara Karaga, dedicated to the goddess, Droupadi Amman. In the evening, thousands of devotees gathered at the RBANMS grounds for a fire-walking ritual in which lines of men, women, and transgender people wore saffron clothes, carried lemons tied to their waists and walked on hot coals. The goddess idol was taken in a procession on the streets in the area ending in front of Maverick & Farmer coffee, which seemed like a perfect metaphor for the old and new in India.
Processions are common in Bengaluru. Even death involves a procession with music bands, colourful garlands and hired weeping women. We are an expressive emotional culture after all. All of this got me thinking about what defines Bengaluru or for that matter, what defines the new India where karaga and cricket co-exist? Yet, it was not the karaga madness that caused stampede deaths but the supposedly more sophisticated sport.
I love local processions because they show me the Indian aesthetic, which is maximalist, layered and sumptuous. Yet India defies simplistic categorisation. For every burst of Holi colour, there is minimal Kerala with its white mundus and white kasavu sarees. For every Benares with its curved design elements — the vine-like flowering jaals and the ambe-paisley that cover the surfaces of Benares sarees, there is geometry of Andhra ikat.
India defies rules, categories and generalisations. That said, there are a few things we can say about India. We still remain rooted in our community. This I saw in the building of the chariots for the karaga. The whole community contributes and participates. We don't like being alone and are comfortable in crowds. This I saw when I gathered with lakhs of others to watch the fire-walking. Like the two-headed ghandabherunda, we are comfortable with holding two opposite ideas in our heads. We are comfortable with contradictions. We attend rock concerts and cheer on fire-walkers.
The sacred is common in India: sacred trees, plants, birds, rivers, animals and more. The sacred is not segregated to temples, churches or mosques. It is on the streets (again a contradiction that we are comfortable with). India exists across not just centuries; we exist across millennia. The karaga festival that happens even today is 800 years old and has its roots in the Mahabharata that is 2000 years old. At the same time, we have memes, Comicons, gaming conventions, rock concerts, and futuristic video games. The Indian is comfortable with both. He goes back millennia to the Mahabharata and embraces the future with gaming. We are local and global, modern and ancient, minimalist and maximalist. We are a supremely sensual culture. We like to adorn ourselves.
The word alankara means decorating without an inch of space left for anything else. You still see this type of adornment on our gods. The Droupadi Amman who was paraded on the streets for the karaga was covered with garlands, silk clothes, and jewellery. We are also creative in our usage of decorative elements. No other culture has anklets for instance in such varied forms. For the karaga, the devotees all had beautiful dots marked above their eyebrows. These are called gopi patravali and were traditionally made with kumkum and Chandan. In the karaga, I noticed that the same tradition was followed.
I asked a devotee why. 'Droupadi Amman loves decoration,' she replied. 'So you need to wear your makeup, your mascara, lipstick, gopi dots, and hairstyle. Whatever you like.' The lemons that she had tied in a sack around her waist too had a reason. 'This time, I only have about 20 lemons,' she said. 'Last year, I had over 50 lemons. Each was given to me by someone with a wish. I carry these wishes when I walk over fire and then distribute the lemons in the hope that their wishes get fulfilled.'
The design of the festival, its attire, its flow, all were uniquely Indian. India's design language is only now coming into its own. Part of it is a function of economic prosperity. Just as Japan's fashion, arts, manga, anime and design took over the world once its economy rose in the 90s, India and China are now on the rise. It is our turn to claim the world.
But first we have to sort out our garbage.
(Shoba Narayan is Bengaluru-based award-winning author. She is also a freelance contributor who writes about art, food, fashion and travel for a number of publications)

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