India's Festivals by Justine Hardy

On the edge of the Thar Desert a camel herder in a vermilion turban is singing a love song to the setting sun, coaxing it to be softer on the backs of his herd during the days to come. His words fall into the hot sand; his chorus is the throaty rumble of the camels that lie folded around him. He is camped for the night on the way to the fair in Naguar, a luminescent week of tribal colour and wild dancing through the desert nights to the sound of tabla drums and flutes, 135 km from Jodhpur in Rajasthan.

When the camel fairs of the desert end so begins the Hindu festival of Dussehra, a celebration of Rama’s defeat of Ravana, the demon king of Lanka. In the lower reaches of the Himalayas, in Himachal Pradesh, hundreds of deities of the Valley of the Gods are carried in loud, bright processions through the autumn villages. From the Himalayas to the deepest south and through to January’s great Elephant March in Kerala, people dance, elephants dance and even the quiet backwaters are made to dance by boat racers’ oars.

Every month another corner of India celebrates a festival bringing out the traditional dancers as the tabla drums and sitars push back the dark of the night. With each celebration the food and the festival fuse together — in Rajasthan they bank up their fire-pits to roast meat marinated from great copper troughs of glistening masala, whilst the Himachalis fry up maize flour pancakes and eat them with mountain honey to chase away the idea of approaching winter. The Keralans cook up huge rice pulaos with tamarind and ground nuts to feed the boat racers and feed melting sweets made with coconut to their festival guests.

Whatever week of the year you go a different place is coming alive, whether you choose autumn’s camel fairs in the Thar Desert, the week of fireworks during Diwali, the wild celebrations of Losar or the Tibetan New Year in February among the people of Little Tibet in Ladakh.