For First Time In 150 Years, Bengaluru’s Karaga Festival Cancelled As HC Puts Stop On Low-Key Celebration

For the first time in almost a century and a half, Bengaluru will not witness its famous Karaga festival.

As the moon rises this day every year, silicon city Bengaluru transforms into a whole different space. On this night lakhs of people gather in parts of old central Bengaluru to witness the arrival of the divine mother Shakti as Draupadi who makes her annual visit to meet her Veerakumaras, the soldiers she created to finish Timirasura at the end of the Mahabharata.

But this year for the first time in recent history the city and the temple will be deprived of this opportunity owing to the lockdown regulations in place. While Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa had on Saturday said the festivities will be conducted in a low-key fashion, the high court yesterday ordered the state government to not allow the festival.

After the state government’s conditional permission last week, the Shri Dharmarayaswami temple at Nagarathpet that conducts the Karaga had decided to hold the festival with no crowds. But with the high court order, the temple administration cancelled those arrangements too and said the temple would stay closed today.

As oral tradition has it, ‘the Karaga had been conducted even when the British announced a curfew as well as when there was a plague outbreak’. But the Corona pandemic has brought this historic festival to a halt.