Rites of spring

It?s Basant Panchami today and while everyone who can will rush out for an eyeful of blooming yellow mustard in Punjab and Haryana, rustic Rajasthanis will wear yellow turbans or veils and maidaani Indians flourish yellow saris and handkerchiefs.

It’s Basant Panchami today and while everyone who can will rush out for an eyeful of blooming yellow mustard in Punjab and Haryana, rustic Rajasthanis will wear yellow turbans or veils and maidaani Indians flourish yellow saris and handkerchiefs. City-slickers deck the halls with strings of button chrysanthemum and marigold and feed each other tiny motichoor laddoos from pleated paper cups. This fifth day of the pleasant month of Magh is a special Indian holiday, rocking to our ancient six-season cycle. RWAs across the North will hold Saraswati pujas with dance and songs in Raag Basant, since the day is poetically dedicated to the deity of wisdom, arts and culture to symbolically re-green the minds of this civilisation.

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But while such jollifications may elude most city folk rushing to work on yet another week-day, spare a thought for our neighbours in Pakistan who have to ride two horses at the same time. Their own, as ‘South Asians’ and that of the ‘Arab religion’, whose home terrain is not favoured by Basant and whose theology, therefore, does not recognise it.

Lahoris, who make the biggest deal of Basant with kite-flying as their millennia-old rite of spring, have had to postpone their Basant to March 5 in deference to the Islamic month of mourning, Moharram. Hanging ominously over future celebrations is the proposed Pakistani Supreme Court ban on kite making, ostensibly out of concern for life and limb. Some mullahs, predictably, have opposed it as ‘unIslamic’, though even Zia-ul Haq, a Jalandhari, had the sense to leave Basant alone. But whose gift is spring anyway, if not the Creator’s?