The New Diwali

A festival like Diwali was a moment of folklore,of myth. They marked moments of production,and the family in engaging with it showed its culinary and creative skills. Mothers and wives were known by their skills at cooking or rangoli. However,the home is no longer the unit of production but of consumption. You do not decorate a house,you ornamentalise it. My friend claimed that Diwali is no longer about household skills. It is an act of consumption,an extension of the mall; it is becoming a new kind of public display determined more by consumption,market and advertising than by folklore. The new sacred is consumption. The consumer is the new pilgrim as he moves from boutique to boutique,happy with the new digitalisation of the puja. The event no longer centres on the home. The rituals do not focus on household or community. There is a new jajmani model not of traditional crafts but a network of boutiques,malls and designer shops.

I stopped my friend8217;s harangue. There is a hybridity you are ignoring,I said. Diwali is still a blend of the household,the bazaar and the mall. He replied,Change comes from the exaggerations. Watch how the old crafts decline. Let me give you some examples. The most obvious is the decline of the clay diya. Today people prefer electric lights. They are less labour-intensive and come in all the garish colours of the imagination. Think of more insidious changes. The entry of Cadburys chocolates in the Indian mindset denotes individualism. The box of barfis evokes a sense of collectivity. Today advertising is altering the balance. The chocolate is rampant during festivals,ready to give sweets a complex. Think of clothes. All of us wore something new on Diwali. It was a family affair. That style is gone. The kind of dress people want are cinematic,designer affairs. It is not newness as renewal but expense that is sought for. The old style where families exchanged sweets and namkeen has become different. Boxes of sweets create a circuit of corruption. Diwali is when you can bribe people in the name of celebration. It is a form of extraction,not gift-giving. The idea of households exchanging sweets they have made is almost extinct. I realised he was right. The old forms of memory and ritual which anchored Diwali were declining.

My friend laughed. He said a festival is always a festival of memory. It reminds you of the old order or pushes toward the new. He suggested I try a simple exercise: Think of five things you did during your childhood. How many of those rituals can you track now? I remember my mothers sweets. They had a character to them,especially the Mysore Pak. She decides to get them now from Grand Sweets,a legendary shop in Adyar,Chennai,and now makes dishes only when her grandchildren are around. I thought of the joy of sparklers,lighting a Vishnu Chakra,coaxing a damp wick to light. Today I realise that it would be almost effeminate in an age that wants a big bang for its buck. I thought of the oil baths early morning and rushing out to visit neighbours with little stainless steel plates of homemade goodies. Today,I would need a huge pompous box as a visiting card. The homemade feels shy,almost modest in front of the new concoctions. Once,one had a sense of home and household. Today,the social rotates around the evening party. For the children of the south,Diwali worked between four and seven in the morning. I felt depressed thinking of all the electric lights laughing at my search for authenticity.

My friend was relentless. Diwali, he said reflects new myths. It brings out new contradictions,the tensions of the new consumerism. We talk of sustainability and probably create more garbage and pollution on these two days. Think further of how conspicuous consumption meets child labour.

Diwali also highlights all the silent sufferers of respiratory diseases. Instead of being a festival of cleanliness,it is an ode to the Goddess of Asthma.

I felt my friend was cynical but his comments made me uneasy. Earlier,festivals had a sense of the joy of consumption but never of consumerism. One thought of a further irony. Now many corporate offices distribute assorted biscuits rather than traditional sweets. My fingers itched for the soft texture of a gulab jamun. A biscuit seems ungenerous on Diwali day,a dry bone-like object instead of the fleshy decadence of my traditional sweet. I thought of the joys of the simple,the expectation of clothes. New clothes were rare events then. I also thought of the way I stretched my little supply of crackers bought for a princely sum of Rs 150. One of todays chain-reaction Chinese crackers,a single piece,would cost about Rs 300. A little something was missing,a silent fragment lost in the noise of todays festival. Call it nostalgia,call it loss,it stuck like a dry biscuit in my throat. But my friend would not give up.

The party,he says,is the new core of activity not the family. It is as if the festival has reinvented its audiences. As the local idiom goes,Diwali is party time for party plots. The party represents a more select blend of community half-family,half friends and is an act of conspicuous consumption. Diwali at parties is the new soap opera of consumption. The Pacific Islanders had the idea of the potlatch,a display of hospitality where the chief gave presentation to increase his status. The Diwali party is the new potlatch. In fact,despite our sense of folklore,Diwali for the new middle class is a hybrid space of old-style renewal and new-style invention,where class,status and mobility find new forms of expression. Diwali is part of a new religious-entertainment complex where the middle class turns the mall and the party into the core elements of its imagination. Consumption replaces renewal and the battle of good and evil as a new myth. There is a struggle taking place between religion as the folklore and consumption as the folklore of the new sacred. There are ironies here,contradictions,hybridities that we need to recognise. Our festivals are no longer old rituals. They are,like Diwali,incorporating the new discoveries of consumption.