Festivals and Rituals

The festival calendar is the practice’s engine. The daily drawing keeps the tradition alive; the great occasions are when it performs — designs scaled up, colour opened, whole neighbourhoods drawing at once, the year’s rhythm made visible on the ground. This chapter holds one article per documented occasion, from the pan-Indian festivals to the regional observances of the Tamil and Telugu calendars. How the calendar structures ordinary practice is described in Rangoli in Everyday Life; the fullest single festival treatment is Muggulu at Sankranti; and the corpus-ranked view of which occasions carry the most documented designs is generated live in the Atlases chapter. The articles below give each occasion its own account: timing, meanings as the sources attribute them, and what is characteristically drawn.