Beyond rituals of division: Imagining an inclusive Indian festival
Festivals are not just about tradition and gathering, they are a blueprint for a society where equality and dignity thrive.
Festivals in India are always about gathering. Streets swelling with people, kitchens flooding with smells, drums beating louder than memory. But the question is never just what we celebrate. It is also who gets to gather and celebrate, and under what terms. The answers are rarely innocent. They carry centuries of exclusion, of walls around holy sites, of rules about who could touch water, of songs that only some were allowed to sing.
Still, against that weight, another current has always flowed. A quieter, riskier, stubborn one. A current where festivals were not tools of control but sparks of freedom. Where joy was not rationed by caste but shared as breath. Where devotion itself was justice. Buddha, Sant Ravidas, Kabir, the Phules, Babasaheb Ambedkar, they all carved out this other history of celebration. And it is this history, often ignored, that might give us a blueprint for the festivals we need today.
Joy becomes resistance
Imagine Ravidas, the leatherworker, hammer in one hand and song on his lips. His verses carried people into Begumpura, a city without sorrow, without taxes, without caste. Imagine that as a festival: no barricades, no rules of purity, no humiliation. Just music, community, food and dignity mingling into the air.
Imagine Kabir, he too sang festivals into being. Not the ones of idols and holy sites, but the ones where a weaver’s loom was enough to gather people. He mocked the pomp of rituals, yet gave people something bigger to hold on to: a God beyond walls, a love that didn’t ask for caste certificates. Imagine their gatherings, where festivals were reimagined as classrooms of dissent. Each song a sermon, each verse a firecracker against hierarchy.
For both Ravidas and Kabir, festivity was rebellion wrapped in rhythm. A reminder that joy can be resistance, and resistance can be joyful.
Fast forward a few centuries. Pune, 19th century. Imagine being a part of Satyashodhak Jalsa, the street theatre performances steeped in ideas of equality and reform started by the Phules. Streets swelling with people of all shapes, colours, genders and castes. Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras and Atishudras, all becoming one.
Such festivals didn’t need idols or repeated verses from holy books. It needed questions. It needed women and men sitting together, eating together, reading texts that people wrote from their hearts. A festival where people worshipped equality. Where joy was not about ritual but fraternity. Where the loudest sound was not fireworks or a holy call but the shock of asking “Why?"
Imagine Savitribai Phule, who faced stones while walking to school, turning every gathering into an act of defiance. For her, festivals had to be spaces where daughters were free to learn, where widows were free to remarry, where farmers could demand justice. The Phules knew that celebrations cannot be neutral. They either deepen chains or break them. They chose to break.
Now imagine Babasaheb Ambedkar. If festivals were about gathering, he gave us gatherings that shook empires and centuries’ old traditions. Imagine the Mahad Satyagraha in 1927. Dalits drinking from a public tank. It was not just a protest; it was a festival. Imagine the sound of water hitting metal pots, echoing louder than any temple bell or any holy call to prayer.
And then imagine Nagpur, 1956. Half-a-million people renouncing caste, renouncing their old religion, renouncing humiliation—together. If you want to see what a festival of liberty looks like, look there. It wasn’t just conversion; it was rebirth. Each “I take refuge in the Buddha" was also “I take refuge in my dignity." A new calendar began that day.
Babasaheb showed us that joy without dignity is hollow, and dignity without joy is incomplete. For him, festivals had to affirm both—liberty as dance, fraternity as meal, equality as vow.
Rehearsal for equality
And where are we today? Festivals still crowd our streets, but too often they carry the wrong weight. Processions that intimidate, not liberate. Holy gatherings where the marginalised enter only as labourers, not participants. Gatherings, where women fear the colours of joy turning into harassment. Rituals, where lamps are lit and food is shared but darkness of inequality remains untouched.
At the same time, other festivals are blooming. Bhima-Koregaon every 1st January, where thousands of Dalits gather at a pillar that remembers the fall of the casteist Peshwas. A festival not of gods but of history, where drums beat out the story of the oppressed fighting back.
Savitribai Jayanti, Phule Jayanti, Ambedkar Jayanti—these are not “events." They are festivals. Streets filled with processions of books instead of idols, speeches instead of chants. Women’s Day marches where banners and songs become rituals. Farmers’ protests where langars became the daily festival of solidarity.
Some festivals are invisible to the oppressors but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. They are just split. Some bind. Some liberate. Some give external joy. Some bring internal peace. Some hide into the past, some lean towards the future. The battle continues.
So, what would it mean to reclaim festivals fully? To shape them as rehearsals for the world we want, not the one we suffer? It would require us to see equality as participation. Everyone eats together. No separate plates, no separate cooking utensils, no separate kitchens. No separate food. Food as a weapon against inequality of all sorts. It would require us to see liberty as an expression. No silence forced by tradition. People free to sing, question, paint, refuse. A festival that celebrates imagination, not obedience. And we’d have to see fraternity as belonging. Not mass spectacle, but shared joy. Not crowds reduced to numbers, but communities that see each other, care for each other.
Remember the humans who lived and died for you, and water the sapling of wisdom. Celebrate those who were erased by violence. Light lamps and candles for every woman who resisted, every farmer and worker who fell, every marginalised who fought for dignity.
These are not fantasies. They are extensions of what has already been dreamt. Ravidas’s Begumpura. Kabir’s irreverent verses. The Phules’ satyashodhak meals. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s Nagpur vow. The blueprint is already written. We only have to follow it.
Festivals will not vanish. Humans will always need joy. The question is: joy for whom, and at whose cost? If joy depends on someone else’s exclusion, it is not joy. If joy grows out of justice, then every gathering, every drumbeat, every shared meal becomes sacred. The festival becomes a rehearsal for the society we deserve.
That is what Ravidas dreamt in Begumpura. What Kabir sang in verses. What Savitribai enacted in her classrooms. What Babasaheb Ambedkar thundered in Nagpur.
Every festival is also a struggle. Every struggle can also be a festival. To forget that is to keep repeating old mistakes. To remember it is to make joy revolutionary.
The festivals of the future cannot remain chained to rituals of division. They must be living classrooms of democracy. They must be memory and imagination at once. They must be both wound and healing, both reality and dream.
Only then will festivals truly belong to all of us. Only then will joy carry no shame. Only then will the three words written into our Constitution—equality, liberty, fraternity—rise not only in the courtrooms and Parliament but also in the streets, in the kitchens, in the songs, in the lamps, in the colours.
Siddhesh Gautam is a Delhi-based artist, writer, and storyteller whose work reimagines histories of resistance and celebrations through visual, textual, and public art.
topics
