A bonfire the night before
HOLI is a HINDU FESTIVAL of SPRING, held at the full moon of the month of Phalguna, which usually falls in March. It begins the evening before with Holika Dahan, a BONFIRE. The story behind it tells of a young prince called Prahlad, who kept praying to the god Vishnu even though his father, a demon king, had ordered everyone to worship him instead. The king's sister, Holika, had a shawl that protected her from fire, and she sat in a blaze holding Prahlad, meaning to burn him. Instead the shawl flew from her to cover him, Holika burned, and Prahlad walked out unharmed.
The bonfire remembers good winning over evil, and families gather around it to pray, sing and roast grains from the new harvest.
Colours from a love story
The next morning is the famous day of COLOURS. It is linked with the god Krishna, who in the stories has dark blue skin. As a boy, the legend goes, he worried that the fair-skinned Radha would never like him, and his mother playfully told him to colour her face to match. So Krishna and his friends went out smearing colour on Radha and the other girls, and the game became Holi. Our Hindu mythology page covers more of Krishna's stories.
In the Braj region around Mathura, where Krishna is said to have grown up, Holi lasts more than a week. In the village of Barsana, women playfully chase and beat the men with long sticks while the men shelter behind shields, a tradition called Lathmar Holi.
Powder, water guns and flowers
On Holi morning, everyone is fair game. FRIENDS, neighbours and strangers chase each other THROWING GULAL, coloured POWDER, in PINK, YELLOW, green and every shade of the RAINBOW, and firing coloured WATER from a PICHKARI, a squirting water gun. Nobody stays clean, and many people wear old white clothes so the colours show. By afternoon the streets are VIBRANT, SPLASH-covered and full of MUSIC and DANCING.
The colours were once made from flowers and plants, such as the bright orange blossoms of the flame of the forest tree, turmeric and beetroot. Some modern powders use harsh chemical dyes, so there are campaigns in INDIA to return to natural, skin-safe colours.
Sweets and a festival that travelled
Families share SWEETS, above all gujiya, crescent-shaped pastries filled with sweetened milk solids, nuts and dried fruit. Holi is also a time for putting quarrels behind you and visiting relatives. It has spread around the world with Indian families, and its coloured powder inspired the colour runs held in many countries. The JOY of the day is the point.
Holi is also known as the festival of love, and for one day the usual divisions are supposed to melt away, as young and old, rich and poor, all end up the same colour. Paintings from the royal courts of the Mughal emperors in the 1600s show them joining in. Wherever Indian families settled, Holi went too: in Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad it is called Phagwah and is a public holiday, and it is celebrated in Nepal, Mauritius and Fiji.