Tamatar Touche And Patna’s Holi Ghost

It’s a riot of red, squishy messiness.Scores of pulp-covered boys and girls, uncles and aunties, and teenagers with tomatoes in their hands and stars in their eyes, screaming, squealing, laughing and bombarding each other in a tomato-filled pool. This wasn’t Spain or laidback Bangalore. It was ‘La Tomatina’ in the unlikeliest of places in the world: in Patna, the capital of backward Bihar. This was the  brand-new Bihari Holi ritual, tamatar maar, debuting for the first time in Patna’s only water park. Going by the rave reviews of the event in the local media, Bihar’s burgeoning middle class dubbed the event an unqualified success. Bihar, as every Indian and his pet parrot know, has been springing a lot of surprises.

Nobody was perhaps more surprised than the tic­ket-checkers of the Indian Railways. For the first time in recorded history, some would say, the locals actually bought railway tickets on their way to the Ramlila grounds in Delhi to “celebrate Bihar” with a “special status rally”. Every person travelling to Delhi for the Nitish Kumar rally was specifically instructed to buy tickets, and they did so. The usual practice is to just clamber on to trains and displace everyone by brute force. Bihar is changing. “What next, Biharis giving up khaini?” gasped one surprised Bihari, pointing to the newspaper in utter disbelief.

Bihar’s own ‘La Tomatina’ Holi points to a new chapter  in the chronicles of Patna’s city life. No doubt Patalipolis­—the Pataliputra of new­found dreams—is evolving, much like Gotham City, with high-rises of glass and chrome, a new international airport being laid out, new traffic lights to replace the defunct ones (which were only recently installed), and new eyesores being built in the name of civic beautification projects.

There are some women activists who have been screaming themselves blue in the face that incidents of disfigurement of women by acid-throwing are on the rise. In March, before International Women’s Day, Chanchal Kumari narrated her story to the Patna media. It was a five-month-long tale of horror, intimidation, apathetic local police, lapses in investigation and recording of evidence, discrimination, and apathy bordering on open hostility on part of the doctors and medical staff at the Patna Medical College Hospital. It was after the media carried the story that the superintendent of the Patna Medical College expressed regret. The media then turned from Chanchal’s hideously disfigured face to the beautification of the Gandhi Maidan and Nitish Kumar’s ‘plans for a beautiful Bihar’. It was after all, Bihar’s 101st birthday bash, and the virtual Nitish-Narendra Modi sparring bouts had infinitely more possibilities than some shrill women’s group crying foul over some stuff happening to the lower castes in rural Bihar.

Anyway, who says that women have a bad deal in Bihar? Right now, there are nine women ‘top cops’ in Bihar, and some, such as superintendents of police Harpreet Kaur and Dhurath Sayali Sawlaram have been posted to supposed male bastions such as Begusarai and Jehanabad, both “infested with Maoists”, as one local English daily put it. Will these women in top posts bring much-needed gender sensitivity to Bihar’s police force? That’s not a question on the mind of the average Bihari, though.

Bihar’s 50 per cent reservation for women in panchayats only served to create another powerful ‘unofficial’ post: the mukhiapati. The local strongmen who couldn’t get themselves re-elected merely set up their wives as puppets. These mukhiapatis were the power behind the panchayat. The government did try to crack down on the practice, but like the dowry system, it just doesn’t go away, several people point out. Chief minister Nitish Kumar’s push for 50 per cent inclusion goes on relentless.

“SP Kim, a woman, will handle Purnea district, noted for smuggling and terrorist activities. SP Meenu Kumari will be expected to take on the stone-quarrying mafia of Sheikhpura district. Bihar has gone where the Indian army fears to tread: watch our Calamity Janes leading from the front,” a man in khaki tells me, smirking, over a chilled Cobra beer, produced with pride in brewery-friendly Bihar.

Back in Patalipolis, newly resplendent with billboards for the flagship stores of internationally known brands, one chokes and fumes at the horrendous traffic snarls along the narrow streets bursting with gas-guzzling, oversized suvs of every description in the “got it, flaunt it” attitude of Bihar’s new spending class.

Many of those flaunting it are the new owners of mobile phones loaded with ‘internet’ and cameras, members of the newly empowered Bihari working class, high on the raunchy Bhojpuri songs and videos that make middle-class mummies blush and cover their ears. “Like it or not, Bhojpuri songs—earthy, rustic and raunchy—are a multi-crore industry, fuelled by the working classes. And the working classes have their own stars,” says Ratnakar Tripathy, one of Bihar’s respected researchers. This thriving subaltern pop music and cultural movement is underground, independent and huge, but not represented in Nitish’s vision of art or culture. This is the ‘other’ Bihar that needs to be swept under the carpet.

Let’s get back to the festival of colours. In the city water-park, on the event of Holi, well-heeled, well-fed and manicured madams and their bitter and better halves also got dirty at the mud pool. They shelled out a good bit of cash to have a good old watery mud fight. “A great way to unwind before Holi. And such a decent and well-behaved crowd. It was like being in Australia,” gushed a pretty, not-so-young thing, who obviously doesn’t watch cricket.

Mud festival? This is a capitalistic makeover of that great rustic Bihari tradition in which Dalit kids, and the poor in general, throw gooey mud on each other and have mud fights because they can’t afford to buy expensive colour. It used to be a practice rather looked down upon by the snooty, educated middle classes. But now, thanks to the new branding of Bihar, mud festivals of all sizes will be offered by high-class entertainment companies as a part of the unique Bihari tourist experience during Holi.

Bihar is changing, evolving and morphing into something surprising, strange and schizophrenic. But rest assured that the schizophrenia will be uniquely Bihari.

(Krishner is a writer, media trainer and activist who lives in Patna.)