On Holi

Human festivals, religiously motivated or otherwise, are occasions for us to express our innate sociality. For a short while, we can forget all about our individual day-to-day lives, our personal fears and anxieties, in order to become part of something much bigger and grander. Something that makes us feel, to use a fashionable catchphrase, as if "we're all in this together". However, there are also a few of us who are unable to truly participate, even though we might like to, because of our sheer social ineptitude. So whilst the rest of the world gallivants about, playing and laughing and making merry, those like me sit in solitude, observing and pondering...

Festivals can also be great levellers, because by their very nature, they suggest a subversion of one's individual ego. I think Holi is especially humbling in this sense. Our other great North Indian festival, Diwali, is partly a celebration of wealth (or at least its modern avatar has taken on that character); an occasion for fancy lighting and decorations and lavish gifts and generally showing off one's wordly success, whilst praying for more of the same. This is not to criticise it; Diwali too has many wonderful aspects, and it too is fundamentally about indulging our social selves. However, it's hard to deny that to a large extent, the Diwalis of the rich and the poor are played out in rather different worlds.

Holi, on the other hand, is egalitarian at its very core. The magic of Holi is the breaking down of social barriers: class, caste, religion, age. I recall how as children, every Holi, we loved to patrol the street outside our family home in Bareilly, making sure that no passerby, human or vehicular, escaped without being hit by a mild jet of coloured goop. It didn't matter how well-dressed they were, or how fancy their car was; on this day everyone was fair game. Everyone would be daubed and soaked and generally made into a multi-coloured clown; all human vanities would be rendered defunct.

To me, even the apparent craziness of these riots of colour has a potent symbolism. Our external appearance as multi-coloured clowns reflects the many different facets of life that go into making us what we are. Holi is about a blurring of identities, and in doing so it reinforces how fluid and messy the very notion of identity is. When someone asks me who I am, what should I say? Do I say I'm an Indian? Or a Hindi-speaker? Or a Hindu? Or a Baniya? Or a man? Or a teacher? Or a scientist? Or a brother? Or a son? As Amartya Sen writes in his fascinating book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, all of us have so many different identities that become relevant in different contexts. And it's when we begin to be obsessed with one particular notion of identity, at the cost of all the others, that we sow the seeds for so many of our social evils.

Holi is a reminder that, despite all the artificial barriers we like to construct, we're not really all that different. Man or woman; rich or poor; Brahmin or Dalit; Hindu or Muslim; Indian or Pakistani: we're all a multi-coloured, multi-faceted mess. We all have much more in common than we like to think. To slightly tweak Shylock's famous oration from The Merchant of Venice:

Hath not [we all] eyes? Hath not [we all] hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer [...]? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?

Perhaps Holi teaches us that the best answer to the question "Who am I?" is simply this: A messy, crazy, human being.