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Festive quirk: Kansa’s domain in Orissa
Anil Singh, the flabbergasted driver, takes a while to get the joke after bystanders tell him to pay just Rs 10 as a fine. “It’s good fun,” he says, when told that the act is part of the Bargarh’s legendary Dhanuyatra (festival of the bow). Since Monday, mythical tyrant King Kansa has been calling the shots in the in this small western Orissa town, reports Priya Ranjan Sahu.
Sitting on a caparisoned elephant, a burly, moustachioed man with a crown on his head, signals a truck driver to stop.
Looking straight out of an Amar Chitra Katha comic book, he hollers: “You’ve entered my kingdom without permission. Pay a fine of 10,000 gold coins immediately.”
The location: National Highway-6 on the outskirts of Bargarh town, about 370 km west of Bhubaneswar.
Anil Singh, the flabbergasted driver, takes a while to get the joke after bystanders tell him to pay just Rs 10 as a fine. “It’s good fun,” he says, when told that the act is part of the Bargarh’s legendary Dhanuyatra (festival of the bow). Since Monday, mythical tyrant King Kansa has been calling the shots in the in this small western Orissa town.
Kansa’s writ will continue till Pausa Purnima (January 31) when he would be ‘killed’ by his nephew Krishna.
The festival has been celebrated for the past 77 years. Every year, Bargarh transforms into the mythical ‘Mathura’. The Jeera River becomes ‘Jamuna’ and the Ambapali village on the other side of the river, a make-belief ‘Gopapur’.
The entire town, with a population of about 170,000, metamorphoses into an open-air stage, arguably the biggest in the world, and the people Kansa’s subjects.
The festival is based loosely on ‘Krishna Leela’ in which King Kansa invites his nephews Krishna and Balaram to witness the Dhanuyatra with the intention of killing them but ends up being killed.
During the 11-day Dhanuyatra, none of the ‘subjects’ mind the ‘tyranny’ they are made to undergo.
Riding an elephant across the town, nothing escapes Kansa’s scrutiny. He orders civic officials to clear drains and penalises them on the spot for apathy.
Every evening, Kansa holds a court sitting a high platform. Government officials are summoned in good humour and ‘punished’ for negligence.
“In the early1990s, the king summoned the then chief minister Biju Patnaik and the latter obliged,” recalls Sureshwar Satpathy of the Dhanuyatra festival committee.
