Inside Amritsar’s Lohri Celebrations

We arrived in Amritsar on the chilly morning of 13 January and the city was dressed in celebratory festive hues. Almost every street was decorated and every corner building up for the upcoming festivities. Even our hotel reception greeted us with some gajak and rewari (desserts). It was 7 am and around 10 C, but it felt like the warmth of the festival of harvest, Lohri, was enough to keep everyone on their toes.

Lohri is celebrated to mark the harvest of rabi crops and so has evolved as an important festival for farming communities in North India. While numerous states celebrate it, Punjab, the wheat basket of the country, marks it with a special glee and grandeur. The key tradition of the festival is the lighting of the ceremonial bonfire after sunset as a representation of the sun god, the source of physical and spiritual energy. The bonfire also marks the end of dreadful winters and celebration of the new wheat harvest.

Celebrants encircle the fire in a “parikrama” and toss food items such as sesame seeds, gur, popcorn and rewari into it as sacred offerings (prasad). Folk songs are sung like "Aadar aye dilather jaye (May honour come and poverty depart”) along with celebratory folk dances of Bhangra and Gidda. Once the fire subsides and the celebration comes to a close, people take home the dying embers from the fire, believed to bring abundance and prosperity.

While the celebrations might last only for an evening, the preparations start days in advance. The streets are filled with stalls selling savouries such as gajak, rewari, groundnut and jaggery, all offered as prasad after the festive bonfire.

Kite flying is another important tradition; the skies become full of thousands of colourful kites during the day. One would spot families gathered on rooftops and engaging in friendly kite fights with their neighbours and kids running across streets to chase kites. Kids also flock to people’s homes days in advance and ask for Lohri by singing a Punjabi song that goes like ‘sunder mundriye ho!’ In return, they get jaggery, money and other eatables from the elders of each house. The festival is, in that sense, not only a celebration of the new harvest but also of community and brotherhood.

An interesting lore associated with the festival is of ‘Dulla Bhatti’. The central theme of many Lohri songs is the legend of Dulla Bhatti, a sixteenth-century matchmaker who was regarded as a hero in Punjab. Besides robbing the rich, he was known to rescue poor Punjabi girls who were forcibly taken to be sold in the slave market of the Middle East from the Sandal Bar region. He arranged their weddings to boys and provided them with dowries. So some of the Lohri songs are an expression of gratitude to Bhatti.

A traditional dinner of sarson da saag and makke di roti is what most Punjabis relish at the time of Lohri. And as no Indian festival is complete without a generous dishing of sweets, Punjabis make “ganne ki kheer” (a sweet dish made out of sugarcane), which is made on the eve of Lohri and had the next morning.

In older times, young men would seek out for partners during festivals such as Lohri. They would propose marriage to them by breaking a sugarcane stick in front of everyone. If the girl wanted to accept his proposal, she would offer grains into the bonfire. But if she wanted to refuse him, she would break the sugarcane stick. (This interesting ceremony has been represented in several films, including Veer Zara.)

As the times have changed, however, so has the festival. We had the opportunity to attend a few Lohri celebrations and interact with the people there. Gursevak Singh and Karamjit Kaur, a newlywed couple from Uttarakhand, had come to celebrate the festival at a resort. He remarked that while the first Lohri after a wedding is special for a couple and generally celebrated within the family, they couldn’t visit their village as he worked in Amritsar.

Mrs Jasmina, who had come to celebrate the festival with her relatives in Amritsar, remarked that the traditions and celebrations around the festival were dying out, especially in the more urbanised and industrialised towns such as Jalandhar. She said earlier the whole neighbourhood and extended families would come together and light the bonfire in the family “aangan” (courtyard) and kids would go around asking for Lohri gifts. But as people have moved towards the nuclear style of families and given the hectic lifestyle, no one really has the time for such community celebrations any more. Even the traditional sweets such as bukka (made out of dates and milk) have been replaced by packed chocolates.

Changing times have however also bought in some delightful change in customs. Traditionally, a family would throw a Lohri party for a newborn boy, but according to Mrs Chandir Kaur, who hailed from Hoshiarpur, people these days also celebrate the birth of a daughter with equal abandon.

(A special thanks to Mr Sukhbeer Singh for accompanying me to Amritsar, helping me understand the language and traditions of Punjab and taking beautiful pictures for this article.)