The Onam That Never Is

I was touched by a post someone sent me on WhatsApp. It stirred nostalgia and a bit of sadness.

There was a photograph in my grandmother’s house in the village of Manali. It’s the kind you see on Instagram but is a real one, yellowing at the edges, taken sometime in the early 1960s. In it, she stands in a mundu, its border gleaming burnt gold, and her hair dark against the jasmine flowers. Behind her, the Onam pookalam is a riot of colors: reds and yellows and whites arranged in spirals. It was a patter she had learned from her own mother, who had learned from hers. The hibiscus flowers had been gathered fresh that morning from the garden. The arrangement must have taken hours and wasn’t meant to be photographed.

That photograph exists in a Kerala that feels like it was taken in another age.

In 1961, the Marxist Kerala government made a decision that was hailed as modern, enlightened, even revolutionary. They declared Onam the “national festival” of Kerala. It was not just a Hindu celebration, but was everyone’s festival. It was inclusive, secular and the kind of move that newspapers celebrated with bold headlines.

Nobody warned us then the cost would be so high.

Then something began to happen, year by year, like a slow fade in a film. Vishnu became “Some God” in the textbooks. The stories that once lived in the household such as tales of Vamana, the dwarf avatar who came to test King Mahabali and pressed him into the earth; the entire cosmology of that one festival were abstracted away. Not removed, exactly but made generic. Made, in fact, safe.

Thrikkakara Vamanamoorthy whose temple in Kochi connects Kerala to Onam’s story, and whose presence once defined the theological heart of the festival became “Unknown Extras” in the new cultural imagination. The temple remains as it is, but its significance has been diffused. Atham and Thiruvonam, the two celestial bodies whose alignment marks the festival’s timing, were shrunk into a single day. Its ten-day passage through the Malayalam calendar became a public holiday.

My mother still makes the onasadya, but it’s no longer the ritual it once was. Traditionally, every thing on the freshly cut banana leaf meant something. The avial signified harvests. While the parippu was simplicity the sambar was complexity. A narration was embedded in every dish, told through flavors and ingredients, with each component being placed on the leaf in a specific order that conveyed esoteric meaning. Now the Ona sadya can be a buffet in a hotel for those too lazy to cook so many courses or didn’t know how. It’s eaten on a plate that was probably used for lunch service three hours earlier. The onavilakku that once glowed softly in homes as an heirloom oil lamp with multiple wicks kept alive by family hands is seen more in emporia and brass shops. Iit has been replaced by Chinese LED lights that run on batteries and wash the house in cold white fluorescence. They’re brighter for sure and last longer. They are convenient, require no oil or ritual maintenance. That makes them the perfect metaphor for what we have lost. The Sacred Pookalam now doubles as an Instagram backdrop for which young fashionable women arrange flowers not for the gods, orctradition, but for likes. The photograph has become the point making its meaning secondary. The arrangement matters less than the holy aesthetic of the arranged.

Onakkodi, new clothes that announced renewal is now a selfie costume - just a prop for personal branding.

And Mahabali the legendary king who, in the mythology, was so beloved by his subjects that the gods allowed him one day each year to visit them- after the Brahmin avatar obliterated him/became “the funny fatty king in sunglasses.” Theme parks created grotesque versions. Costume shops sold caricatures. The entire theological structure of his story constructed on the tension between divine law and human love, between perfection and compassion is replaced by comic relief. Harvest gratitude became the shopping season. Folk tradition is a stage performance. Family transmission metamorphoses, or should I say metastasised into event management.

Devotion is entertainment.

This is the process of cultural amnesia works. It doesn’t scream. It keeps the photograph and then deletes the meaning.

Consider what this means: If a generation cannot answer the basic questions, what exactly is it celebrating? If you ask a child today who Thrikkakara Appan is You’ll get a blank stare. Why Atham the specifically the two highest asterisms in the Malayalam calendar? Why Thiruvonam? Or Vamanan? Why Mahabali? Why Thrikkakara?

Why are these not interchangeable? Why isnt it any king, or any avatar, or any god?

Because the answer to each of these questions is a thread woven into the vast tapestry of cultural meaning which took centuries to weave. Onam isn’t just a harvest festival. It’s the only Malayalam festival where a Dalit king (in the traditional narrative) is celebrated as the ideal ruler; a meditation on justice and equity embedded in mythology. It’s a conversation about governance, about when obedience must yield to compassion, about what a good king means. Today more than ever these questions remain urgent in a democracy.

But these threads are being cut, one by one.

Don’t call me communal but something troubles me hugely. Christmas arrives, and the world knows exactly who Christ is. Yes, there is commercialisation and Santa and consumerism infiltrated the holiday. But the core story of Christ’s birth, its meaning, and the religious weight remains understood and taught and transmitted. Eid-ul-fitr arrives, but Ramadan is not edited out. The fasting, the spiritual discipline, and the communal  have remained central to the celebration. The tradition was not sacrificed for “inclusion.” Diwali, by contrast, is becoming just “lights.” Holi has become “colors.” Navratri has been reduced to “dance night.” Janmashtami to “costume day.” Vishu is a “holiday photograph.” And now Onam is following the same trajectory. While festival as celebration survives the culture underneath is made to fade. This isn’t progress. This is forgetting repackaged as modernity.

In 1976, “secular” was added to India’s Preamble. The intention was maybe noble: perhaps to guarantee that no one religion would dominate the state. This was maybe important or even necessary. But somewhere along the way, Malayalis conflated secularism with the erasure of its meaning. We confused coexistence with forgetting ourselves. We believed that to include everyone, we had to extract the soul from our own celebrations. The hard question no one asks is did secularism teach us coexistence? Or did we use secularism as an excuse to empty ourselves of our specific heritage? Look around. This pandemic came before the preamble amendment. It crept in long before 1976 marking the moment we started apologizing for who we were, and began doubting whether our traditions had a right to exist in a “modern” India. The real work of secularism isn’t sanitising the truth. It’s about preservation alongside respect and about keeping your meaning intact while making space for others to keep theirs.

We chose the simpler path of erasing everyone’s meaning equally.

My grandmother’s photograph is in a drawer now. Nobody looks at it. The knowledge to do pookalam arrangement she performed with such care died with her. My sister knows the basics and can make one if required. My niece orders it from a florist and arranges it for photographs. Three generations and the transfer of knowledge isn’t even complete. While generation forgets the follow generation calls forgetting “progress.” A third generation doesn’t even know what was forgotten.

All civilisations ultimately end not with violence book-burning or temple desecration. It dies at the hands of choices that seemed reasonable at the time, through decisions that prioritized inclusion over depth, accessibility over meaning, and celebration over transmission. Onam is still celebrated. The festival still arrives on time. The rituals still happen but in diluted, simplified, Instagrammed forms. But this is what I need to know is much Onam is left in Onam? And when your next festival loses its meaning entirely because its stories are forgotten and only the Instagram backdrop remains will you even notice? Or will you still be taking selfies?