His name was Hiranyakashipu and he claimed to be equal to Lord Vishnu, the Preserver of the Universe. Tragically for him, his own son, Prince Prahlad, was a devotee of Lord Vishnu. The king threatened his son with snakes and elephants, but the boy remained faithful. After much thought, the king summoned his sister, Holika, the type of woman who only appears as a narrative tool in Hindu mythology and does the bidding of the male protagonists. The demoness had been granted a blessing: immunity to fire, as long as she entered alone. Then the king covered her with a magical, invisible blanket and, when the young prince sat on his aunt’s lap, he set it on fire. The prince prayed to Lord Vishnu, who burnt the evil aunt by fire, but saved the young and virtuous prince who kept the faith.
Holika’s story is a classic example of how Hindu women are considered enforcers of patriarchy and also punished for it. Holika’s brother burned her on a pyre, and we celebrate annually by ritually re-enacting her burning. It’s easy to present Holika as the villain of fire, but she’s closer to a modern feminist heroine than a child-burning demon, especially in Modi’s India.
Holika enters the story already labeled: A devil. Sister of a tyrant. Accomplice. Although she is a soldier, deployed by the king as a matter of state policy, she seems to have no other choice. In addition, the little power it has, fireproof skin, comes with clauses. Conditional autonomy. Finally, he loses his life because he was a pawn in the lives of his men.
This year, as the ritual celebration of Holika unfolds against a backdrop of constant news of gang rapes across India, the story is beginning to seem less like mythology and more like a warning about what happens to women in a society that normalizes male power and female vulnerability.
The truth is that Holi has always felt like a festival in which Indian women are not participants but targets. It’s a day when men have social permission to get drunk, grab a handful of color, and smear it on women they barely know. “Bura na mano, Holi hai,” is the ritual cry for this unwanted contact. It’s a social disclaimer that literally means, “No offense. It’s Holi!” Children shout the same thing while throwing water balloons at strangers from rooftops because, traditionally, the phrase was said to entice them into innocent, festive pranks. The spirit of Holi is one of mischief.
However, we can no longer escape that the soft boundaries of the 1980s and 1990s, if that was innocent, have become an anything-goes spectacle in which women are gang-raped while loud party music drowns out their cries for help. In 2018, the BBC reported on Holi-related sexual assault after girls were attacked with balloons “filled with semen.” The joy of Holi has crystallized into an unbridled rampage of sexual assault and harassment as inhibitions are lowered, spirits are high and women are at stake. On this day, women, including those who do not play Holi, prepare to be heckled, have water balloons strategically aimed at their breasts and genitals, and groped under the guise of a friendly hug.
Bollywood has done its part by canonizing sexual harassment in Holi theme songs like “Ang Se Ang Lagana” from Shah Rukh Khan’s 1993 blockbuster Darr, in which he played a stalker. On this day, Indian men observe the women around them with the instincts of a predatory animal. I was six years old when some teenagers from my neighborhood in west Delhi grabbed me and smeared me with car grease, and not organic colors. I can still feel his hands on my body. I haven’t celebrated Holi since then.
I would go a step further and say that Holi is not the only festival that has lost its meaning. Increasingly, the public life of Indian festivals reflects the broader failures of our society.
Diwali used to celebrate light, the triumph of hope over darkness. Now the sky is choked with smoke, the earth is covered in ashes and children wear masks while their parents continue burning cookies.
Ram Navami, the birth celebration of Lord Ram, was once a quieter religious celebration. It is now increasingly marked by processions that intimidate Dalit and Muslim neighborhoods.
In all festivals, the pattern is the same: we turn the celebration into a spectacle and the spectacle into a mirror of our own failures. This may not be easy to hear, especially on a holiday, but none of this surprises me. We are a generation that consumes everything and consecrates nothing. Not air, not water, not food, not women. This is the organic culmination of a society that has forgotten that joy cannot exist without care and that festivity is not separate from morality. It is almost as if a culture that accepts corruption and violence is producing more corruption and violence.
The horror is not in the festivals themselves.
It is in us.
Holi, like the rest of the things that India considers worth celebrating, reveals it to us. We celebrate the burning of women at the stake, not only symbolically. We have created a culture in which the delight of one moment can erase the humanity of another. Our communities are so fractured that the freedoms that women around the world take for granted regarding their own bodies now depend on privilege and luck.
It was never meant to be this way. I also remember Holi before I was smeared with grease. I remember running barefoot around my neighborhood with other kids, collecting money to buy packets of bright gunpowder, soaking pichkaris (water guns) in buckets, pulling out old t-shirts that my parents didn’t mind getting stained, and soaking in the magic of spring. If we want to recover some of that, the light, the color, the music, we must first see ourselves.
We must first grieve what we have lost and admit what we allowed to continue. Otherwise all our festivals will become what they are now: beautiful lies.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
