religion in Mumbai – Holy Mumbai

Shachi Phadke

While the rest of India focuses on the midnight festivities of Krishna Janmashtami, or the birth of Lord Krishna, Mumbai focuses instead on the next day, when the celebrations of Dahi Handi take place.

Dahi Handi, now a cross between religious festival and a team sport, involves a group of mostly young men creating a human pyramid, up to eight or nine layers tall, in order to reach and break an earthen pot or Handi, to get at the sweet yogurt or Dahi that it is filled with. The first team of young men or women to reach and break open the Dahi Handi, is awarded the prize money for each such feat. The higher the Handi is placed, more the prize money awarded. This contest now leads the whole of Mumbai to participate in the festival where Dahi Handis are placed higher and higher each year.

Dahi Handi does try and evoke the idea of young Krishna, whose natkhat or naughty disposition led to gathering his friends from the village where he was growing up, making human pyramids with them, and reaching and eating the yogurt and butter hung up high in earthen pots, with the sole purpose of keeping it out of the hands of little kids such as himself. This festival, calling upon the young and playful persona of the deity rather than the more popular warrior or philosopher persona, has been a major part of the city’s landscape of public religious festivals and it certainly gives it a boisterous character.

The Govinda is a moniker used for the young men who participate in the human pyramid, and also is another name for Lord Krishna and so is rather appropriate. The Govindas start very early on the day after the Krishna’s Janm or birth, which gets celebrated at midnight. They have been practicing months ahead of time in order to participate. The Govindas gather in the morning and get ready to go to a few of the Dahi Handis in and around their neighbourhood, and if they are really good, to go far and wide to gather the prize money. The loud rhythm of Dhols or Nashik drums follows them around. They start with their own Handi, in their locality and their neighborhood, where a crowd gathers to cheer them on. Usually, it rains. This is slap bang in the middle of the monsoon, so the pitter-patter of warm rain helps to keep the Govinda’s cool while they make the pyramid as tall as they can. If the rain is not around that year, and there has been no drought, then the locals would throw buckets of water on them. It feels like it’s rude. It isn’t. It’s actually part of the fun. In the chants and calls of the Govindas, which they sing and call out while raising the pyramid; there tend to be ones specifically asking for water along with the cheers. For instance, check out the song Govinda Re Gopala from the 1991 Marathi movie Hamal De Dhamal

The Hindi and Marathi movie industries which are based out of Mumbai do tend to jump on the Dahi Handi bandwagon. In the 1963 Shammi Kapoor starrer, Bluff Master, for example, the song Govinda Aala Re Aala became a classic. The festival is used often times to show the natkhat hero, impressing his heroine or to establishing himself as one of the common folk, going around breaking the Handis. In Mach Gaya Shor Sari Nagri, for instance, Amitabh Bachchan is the natkhat hero. Despite the unrealistically hefty hero being the top-most layer of the Govindas and the breaker of the Handi, the honour is normally reserved for the littlest of the lot. These songs will be played over and over again by the band and the dhol pathaks which accompany the Govindas all day.

The smallest of the Govindas, usually a skinny pre-teen, is the one on top of the pyramid and will actually break the Handi, as he/she is the representative of little Lord Krishna as well as the lightest weight for the rest of the pyramid to bear. A crowd of their squad surrounds the Govindas for encouragement and dance very ungracefully on the beat of the dhol. They are also the buffer layer that will catch the Govindas incase their pyramid fails and they all tumble to the ground. Each team gets three tries to get to the Handi and claim their prize. If the troupe is indeed successful, the prizes gathered during the day get distributed amongst the Govindas, your share depending on your position within the pyramid. Sometimes they come back bruised and injured, their tumble being too hard. The more the risks you took the more the prizes and also the more the falls. With increasing prize money and risks, governmental bodies have been trying to lay some rules, trying to set a minimum age of participation, limit the number of layers allowed as well as total height of the pyramid; and the highest courts of the land are trying to debate the matter, contemplating tradition and safety.

As one of the most visually striking festivals and communal sporting activities within the city, the Dahi Handi starts off the festival season in the Hindu religious calendar in Mumbai, starting the city off on the upcoming hullabaloo which will take us over on the beat of the dhols.

Shachi is a dyed-in-the wool Mumbai lover who wanders the streets of Mumbai aimlessly. In her free time, she works in the development sector.

Religion and Violence in Sacred Games

Sumanya Anand Velamur

When I began my PhD, people would ask me what my topic was. In the interest of brevity, I would say Religion and Violence in Mumbai, the umbrella theme that my PhD was nested in. Prodded to explain more, I would say I was specifically working on religious residential spaces and residents’ memories of violent events like the Bombay (Mumbai was called Bombay until 1995, when the name was changed to Mumbai) riots. Many of these well-meaning, sometimes even officious, people would then tell me what they thought I should be studying. More often than not this would include the violence perpetrated by the underworld. I found this interesting. In the context of religion, violence and Mumbai, and specifically in the context of the Bombay riots that took place in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition, why was this a recurrent theme amongst my middle class, (possibly) upper caste acquaintances? One reason could have been that this was really the case and that they had hit the nail on the head. After all, the underworld is universally acknowledged to have orchestrated the bomb blasts in 1993. But probe just a little deeper and one realizes that gangsters of Bombay could only explain part of the story. Why then this insistence that to understand the riots, one had to understand Bombay’s underworld?

Sacred Games, the Netflix Original series from India, explores the trope that religion and violence are indeed linked to organized crime in inextricable ways. Based on Vikram Chandra’s novel of the same name, the series is set in 80s and 90s Mumbai and the gangwars of that time. Given the superlative reviews it has garnered, it is important to reflect on how the series manages to portray this complex relationship. Why? Bollywood, or the Hindi film industry, is not new to the gangster movie genre. But most often, such films focuses on one man’s (or woman’s as is the case in Haseena Parkar) rise to become a gang leader;almost eulogistic stories of rags to riches where the individual is but a victim of extreme circumstance. In Ajay Devgn’s Once upon a Time in Mumbaai, for example, the story revolves around two underworld dons, characters fashioned on Haji Mastan and Dawood Ibrahim. Sacred Games too, begins with Gaitonde’s story from being a poor village boy to a gang leader in Mumbai. However, primarily it is the story of Mumbai and not that of Gaitonde. With a show this realistic, Sacred Games’ credibility increases and with it, its responsibility towards an honest portrayal.

God and religion take center stage in this series on Mumbai’s underworld in the 1990s. Some of the episode titles, Ashwathama for instance, are borrowed from Hindu mythology or mythological characters, stories that find themselves woven into the narrative. The opening dialogue in the first episode has Gaitonde asking rhetorically, “Do you believe in God?” Answering the question himself, he says, “God doesn’t give a fuck?” In his account of his life, he uses religion as a metaphor. Escaping, for example, from the religion of his childhood home, characterized by his Brahmin mendicant father, to the new religion of Bombay. The series also contains religious iconography. For instance, Ramanand Sagar’s TV series Ramayan makes an appearance to suggest, among other things, the mass consumption of religion. The fault lines within Gaitonde’s own gang seem to be on religious lines and therefore, the cause of his downfall also.

But what does all this have to do with violence? Gaitonde tells us, “A chicken bone in a Hindu hotel can cause more damage than a gangster; it’s been happening since pre-independence days. To create a rift amongst the Muslims, dump pork in a Mosque. To incite riots among the Hindus, dump beef in a temple. From the Hindu hotel I learned how religion can fuck anyone over.” I believe it is this aspect that my acquaintances refer to when they tell me that to understand religion and violence in Mumbai, I have to understand the workings of the underworld. The idea that religion provides an opportunity for gangsters to manipulate people for private ends is not new. And I dare say there is more than an iota of truth to it. But the assertion takes away from the fact that a large part of humanity was thus manipulated.

Organised crime, as Sacred Games demonstrates, provides us a platform on which we normalize violence. The 80s and 90s are often thought of as a violent time because of the underworld, and therefore, communal violence a normal, even logical occurrence of the period. I remember an incident when I was in school. I was probably in the 7^th or 8^th standard. One of the things that happened at morning assembly was that a student read out the day’s headlines, first in English and then in Hindi. On this particular day, the Hindi news reader decided to spice things up a bit and sang the headlines to the tune of popular Bollywood numbers of the day. I distinctly remember her voice booming into the microphone, “Kandivili mein kal, goliyan chali…” (shots were fired in Kandivili yesterday), in the tune of “churake dil mera, goriya chali…” ( the fair one walks after having stolen my heart). Retrospectively, I remember thinking what a morbid headline to set to the tune of a romantic number. This normalizing allows us to judge the events of the times with a different yardstick. But more importantly, to claim that someone like Gaitonde was to blame for the riots, was to absolve oneself of any crime (acts of omission as well as commission) because Gaitonde’s Bombay seems so far removed from the Bombay of my acquaintances.

Sumanya Anand Velamur is a PhD candidate at the Department of Archaeology, History, Culture Studies and Religion in the University of Bergen.

Tag: religion in Mumbai

But for a little Dahi

Gaitonde’s Bombay or Our Bombay?

Religion and Violence in Sacred Games