Bollywood is indeed a huge equaliser. In a way, it could be said that next to cricket, the great passion hereabouts, Bollywood is hugely instrumental in creating a pan-Indian feel. Especially noteworthy is the fact that it has popularised certain religious rituals across the length and breadth of India. Karwa Chauth is one of them.
Well, if you were to look up the traditional tale of Karwa Chauth, it has clear echoes of the Savitri story. It is about a woman's determined effort to make her dead husband come alive, to get back her dead husband's life even after a wait of a year, it seems. It has a dash of a brother's concern for his sister's welfare and well-being as well.
Even a child anywhere in India would know the elaborate rituals of the Karwa Chauth, popularised as they are by Bollywood. Like the nine sarees of nine different colours (Major newspapers list them a day before! A full page is devoted each day to pics of women draping the special colour of the day!) that women wear during the Navratri, Karwa Chauth, too, is an occasion to deck up. Lovely mehendi patterns, great "joodas" of bangles from the wrist almost up to the elbow, nathani, new saree, literally the works!
Once upon a time, the vrat and the rituals must have been a way of giving at least for a day some focal importance, a central role to the otherwise much ignored, hugely sidelined woman of the household. Undoubtedly, like everything else celebrated en masse now a days, this day, too, would inevitably be a consumerist frenzy now.
Well, the feminists versus the traditionalists debate rages each year when it comes to celebrating such festivals during the contemporary times. Women have been sending space shuttles to the moon now!
Well, such a critique could be dangerous in a fraught polity like ours wherein the moon and the fasting both are central to very many traditional practices, and across religions, Ramzan Rozas to the forty days long Lent fast before the Easter to give two well-known examples, right?
May be, one should be civil and generous enough to accept the individual right to celebrate any festival, observe any ritual in the personal space without violating any human(e) rights or without vitiating the public sphere, I would say. Each (wo)man to her/his own personal priorities so long as everybody respects everyone's right to be, I suppose!
Pratima@ "A (daily) ritual means I am voting for myself; I am taking care of myself," says Mariel Hemingway.
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