Amazing Pongala

Yesterday (March 10, 2009) over 2 million (yes, 2 MILLION!) women congregated on Trivandrum to celebrate Attukal Pongala. They set up hearths using bricks along the streets and lanes of the city (and on the grounds of schools, office buildings and private homes). On these hearths they perched earthenware pots and cooked traditional sweets (most rice-based) that would later be blessed by priests from the temple and then taken home and offered to friends and family.

You can learn more about Pongala at the Attukal temple site (where you can also watch video of the day - this material should be online until April 10, 2009). Some foreign tourists actually participated in Pongala and I might perhaps do that sometime in the future - it was an amazing experience and I am very glad I went and was there when the fires were all lit at 10:30 am and a pall of smoke rose over the city. Fantastic day! Here are my photos:








A couple of weeks ago pots began appearing by the side of the road in Trivandrum proper (Trivandrum is the capital city of Kerala state, also known by its traditional Malayalam name of Thiruvananthapuram - it's about 15 km from Kovalam Beach).













Since access to the city was highly restricted most women who had not set up hearths by the morning of March 10, 2009, travelled in to town on the bus. Here are a couple with their bundles of fire material.












Pongala involves the making of a variety of sweets - some wrapped in leaves and steamed, others (for example, payasam which is a Kerala style rice pudding) made in the pot.










Most of the sweets made use jaggery - a crude brown sugar that looks like some kind of soap when you see it in the marketplace. This photo shows a woman cutting the jaggery in to pieces for inclusion in to a sweet.








Here a woman presses the sweet mixture into a leaf wrapper.













Here are some sweets ready to go on top of the payasam (which is quite wet at the beginning of its cooking) and be steamed.














The hearth in the temple is lit at 10:30 am and then the fire is passed (figuratively more than literally) throughout the city. A vast cloud of smoke quickly forms but yesterday was a bit windy and thus it was not too blinding. But there is no denying it makes breathing difficult, the heat is immense and many eyes are red and stinging.


















Various ingredients are added to the payasam including jaggery, grated coconut (scraped using a variety of ingenious tools), bananas and cardamom.



































While the women are making the pongala they are also praying for the health and happiness of their families as this next photo shows.















The next photo is taken looking down the usually frenetically busy MG (Mahatma Gandhi - every city in India has an MG road) Road.















Everyone gets in to the act - here is a specially decorated rickshaw.
















At about 3:00 pm 200 priests emerge from the temple and bless the sweets the women have made. Of course it is impossible to sprinkle the holy water over everyone's hearth and sweets so the blessing is announced on the myriad loudspeakers throughout the city. There is then a massive exodus of women from the city centre. A plane also flies over scattering flower petals. I did not stay for this part but instead headed back to Kovalam - after walking for a couple of kilometers a rickshaw stopped for me and I paid the exorbitant sum of 100 Rs (about $2.50) to get back to my seaside paradise.