PHAGWAH SHUBH!    HAPPY PHAGWAH!    

Mar 09, 2025 Consumer Concerns, Features / Columnists, News, Waterfalls Magazine

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CONSUMER CONCERNS

  By PAT DIAL

Kaieteur News- Phagwah or Holi and Diwali are the two most ancient holy days celebrated in Guyana in that their provenance could be traced to the late Bronze Age.  This year, Phagwah will fall on Friday, 14th March.  It falls on a different date each year of the solar calendar which Guyana uses because Phagwah is computed on the lunar calendar.  Indeed, all holy days of Islam and Christianity similarly use the lunar calendar and likewise fall on different dates from year to year.

In Guyana, the festival is more generally known as Phagwah but worldwide it is more usually called Holi and we will use ‘Holi’ for it in the rest of the article.

Holi, like all ancient festivals, has had various traditions attached to it as it traversed the centuries.  The most ancient tradition of the origin of Holi is most likely as a Spring Festival.  In the Temperate Zone, the passing of the cold bareness of Winter and the advent of Spring with its new life and fruitfulness of the Earth was always a time of celebration in Agricultural Societies.  Holi, with its general house cleaning and sanitizing surroundings, its communal feasting, singing, dancing and atmosphere of abandonment to fun with the sprinkling of coloured water and powders on each other and the making of new friends and the full participation, of men and women was a unique celebration.

Another Holi tradition is the celebration of marital love in the persons of Krishna and his consort Radha.  Krishna asked his mother why was it that he was so dark in complexion as compared with Radha who was very fair. His mother told him that difference in complexion was of no importance and playfully told him that coloured powder could change Radha’s complexion.  Krishna and Radha joined in the Holi celebrations and sprayed each other with various colours expressing their love and all the citizens imitated their example.

The most important tradition is the story of Prahalad which affirms that Good will always triumph over Evil and that belief and commitment to God will always protect the believer from all dangers:  King Hiranyakashipu was ruler of a kingdom in northern India who practised the most stringent austerities (tapasya) until he came to the notice of Lord Brahma who wished to reward him.  He asked Lord Brahma for the gift of Immortality but the Lord told him that was impermissible, but he could ask for other boons.  He asked that he could never be killed by either Man or Animal; at either night or day; or on the earth or in the air in space and those gifts were duly conferred on him.

Hiranyakashipu was immediately transformed into a megalomaniac and declared that he was God and must be worshipped and not Lord Vishnu.  All the citizens had to conform on the pain of death if they did not. Prince Prahalad, Hiranyakashipu’s small son kept on worshipping Lord Vishnu in defiance of his father who tried to kill him on several occasions- he was thrown off a cliff, thrown down a well, put in a cage with man-eating tigers and thrown among fierce cobras, but he was rescued on every occasion.  Eventually, he was given the deadliest poison to drink but this was turned into nectar in his mouth.  Holika, Hiranyakashipu’s sister who was a witch, offered to help her brother solve his problem.

She possessed a coat which protected the wearer from being burnt by fire.  Wearing the coat, she would take Prahalad in her lap, sit on a pyre which was then lighted.  When the pyre was burnt out, however, Prahalad emerged alive and well but Holika was burnt to ash.  Prahalad was saved because the sudden swirl of the flames blew the coat off Holika and covered Prahalad who was thus protected from the fire.

Next afternoon, the king, in a demented state, went to the main temple where his son had also gone to worship Lord Vishnu.  As the king strutted about proclaiming that he was God, Prahalad told him that God was everywhere and he angrily unsheathed his sword and slashed the largest column in the temple shouting “if God is there, let him come out”.

As he did so, Lord Vishnu, in the form of a Man-Lion, Narsingh, sprang out of the column and attacked Hiranyakashipu.  They fought each other until they got to the entrance of the temple at dusk.  Narsingh managed to grab the king by the throat, sat down, got him across his knees and strangled him.  Hiranyakashipu was thus killed by neither Man nor Animal; neither at night nor day since it was dusk; and neither on earth nor in space since it was on Narsingh’s lap he met his demise.

The citizens were overjoyed at the death of the tyrant and his wicked sister Holika and celebrated by burning effigies of Holika in large bonfires in the evening and next morning erupted into spontaneous joy with singing, dancing, feasting and sprinkling each other with coloured water and coloured powders and this tradition continued in all future Holi celebrations. In later centuries, these colours became stylized into four-Red, Green, Blue and Gold- with each having its own symbolism.

And so, we again felicitate our readers with Holi Shubh!!

 (PHAGWAH SHUBH!    HAPPY PHAGWAH!)    

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• CONSUMER CONCERNS, Diwali, Holi, Phagwah, Worldwide

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