His name was Hiranyakashipu, and he claimed to be equal to Lord Vishnu, the Preserver of the Universe. Tragically for him, his own son, Prince Prahlad, was a devotee of Lord Vishnu. The king threatened his son with snakes and elephants, but the child remained faithful. After much thought, the king summoned his sister, Holika, the kind of woman who only appears as a narrative tool in Hindu mythology and does the bidding of male protagonists. The demoness had been given a boon, immunity from fire, provided she entered it alone. So the king covered her in a magic, invisible blanket and, when the young prince sat on his aunt’s lap, set it on fire. The prince prayed to Lord Vishnu, who burned the evil, fire-proof aunt but saved the young, virtuous prince who kept faith.
Holika’s story is a classic example of how Hindu women are cast as enforcers of patriarchy and punished for it, too. Holika’s brother burned her on a pyre, and we celebrate this annually by ritually re-enacting her burning. It is easy to cast Holika as the villain of the fire, but she is closer to a modern feminist hero than a child-burning demon, especially in Modi’s India.
Holika enters the story already labelled: A demoness. Sister of a tyrant. Accomplice. Even though she is a soldier, deployed by the king as a state policy, and seems to have no option. Besides, the little power she has, fireproof skin, comes with clauses. Conditional autonomy. Eventually, she loses her life because she was a pawn in the lives of her men.
This year, as the ritual celebration of Holika unfolds against a backdrop of constant news of gang rapes across India, the story begins to feel less like mythology and more like a warning about what happens to women in a society that normalises male power and female vulnerability.
Truth is, Holi has always felt like a festival in which Indian women are not participants but targets. It is a day when men have the social sanction to get inebriated, grab a fistful of colour, and smear it on women they barely know. “Bura na mano, Holi hai,” is the ritual cry for this unwelcome contact. It is a social disclaimer that literally means, “Don’t be offended. It is Holi!” Children shout the same thing as they pelt water balloons on strangers from rooftops because, traditionally, the phrase was uttered for pulling them into innocent, festive mischief. The spirit of Holi is one of mischief.
However, we can no longer evade that the soft boundaries of the 1980s and 1990s, if that was innocent at all, have turned into an “anything-goes” extravaganza in which women are gang-raped as loud party music drowns out their cries for help. In 2018, the BBC reported on Holi-related sexual aggression after girls had been attacked with “semen-filled” balloons. The jubilance of Holi has crystallised in a no-holds-barred rampage of sexual assault and harassment as inhibitions are down, spirits are high, and women are up for grabs. On this day, women, including those who do not play Holi, prepare to be cat-called, pelted with water balloons strategically aimed at their breasts and genitals, and groped under the guise of a friendly hug.
Bollywood has done its share by canonising sexual harassment in Holi theme songs like “Ang Se Ang Lagana” from Shah Rukh Khan’s 1993 blockbuster Darr, in which he starred as a stalker. On this day, Indian men watch women around them with the instincts of a predatory animal. I was six when I was grabbed by teenage boys in my neighbourhood in West Delhi who smeared automobile grease, and not organic colours, on me. I can still feel their hands on my body. I have not celebrated Holi since.
I would take it a step further and say that Holi is not the only festival that has lost its meaning. Increasingly, the public life of Indian festivals mirrors the wider failures of our society.
Diwali used to celebrate light, the triumph of hope over darkness. Now the sky chokes with smoke, the earth is thick with ash, and children wear masks while their parents continue to burn crackers.
Ram Navami, the celebration of Lord Ram’s birth, was once a quieter religious observance. Now it is increasingly marked by processions that intimidate Dalit and Muslim neighbourhoods.
Across festivals, the pattern is the same: We turn celebration into spectacle, and spectacle into a mirror of our own failures. This may not be easy to hear, especially on a festive day, but none of this comes as a surprise to me. We are a generation that consumes everything and consecrates nothing. Not air, not water, not food, not women. This is the organic culmination of a society that has forgotten that joy cannot exist without care, and festivity is not separate from morality. It’s almost as if a culture that is accepting of corruption and violence is producing more corruption and violence.
The horror is not in the festivals themselves.
It is in us.
Holi, like the rest of the things India considers worth celebrating, reveals us. We celebrate burning women at the stake, not just symbolically. We have created a culture in which the delight of a moment can erase the humanity of another. Our communities are so fractured that the freedoms taken for granted by women all over the world, to their own bodies, are now contingent on privilege and luck.
It was never meant to be like this. I remember Holi before I was smeared with grease, too. I remember running barefoot in my neighbourhood with other children, pooling money to buy packets of bright powder, soaking pichkaris (water guns) in buckets, taking out old T-shirts my parents did not mind being stained, and soaking in the magic of spring. If we are to reclaim any of it, the light, the colour, the music, we must first see ourselves.
We must first grieve what we have lost and admit what we allow to continue. Otherwise, all our festivals will become what they are right now: Beautiful lies.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
