Chapter 8: Festival and Leisure Activities

At the beginning of this chapter, it was describing festivals as times of “intensified social and ritual interaction”. I read this and thought…do we have festivals in the US? Of course we do, but there for a split second, I did not realize it. But just think…Christmas, Easter, the 4th of July, Mother’s Day, etc. Of course, we see them as holidays, and “festivals” seems like a word for something foreign that goes on in other countries, however, we think that just because it is unfamiliar. So, there before I really even got into the reading, another assumption in me was disproven!
I found the frequency and variety of festivals in India interesting to me. This states that every “village, city neighborhood, and squatter settlement probably has at least one…committee that plans…and organizes its festivals.” (142) I found this interesting because I feel like, at least in my experience, “festivals” that I am familiar with are not organized or planned by a committee, but are celebrated in their own ways by families, friends, neighbors, or religious groups…not by a committee specific to a political location. Does this mean that Festivals are celebrated by the majority of people in the same way in a specific area?
The seasons in India also directly reflect the season. People have more time to celebrate in the cold season because planting does not consume their time, whereas it does in the hot season. Therefore, sometimes festivals revolve around that. However, festivals are often also focused around times of harvest, which reminded me somewhat of our Thanksgiving.
However, as static as festivals can sometimes seem, the author points out that like everything else, things have to change. An intriguing example of this was how Hindus noticed that many Indians were converting to Christianity and Buddhism because of how they had suffered from lack of economic gain in the 1990’s. (felt excluded under Hinduism) So, the “Sanskritization of festivals” was adopted to be more inclusive.