Each spring, millions of Hindus worldwide celebrate Holi, a multi-day religious festival.

The festival falls on a different two days every year, always coinciding with the final full moon of the Hindu lunar month Phalguna. In 2011, it fell on March 19 and March 20. The Indian Students’ Association, however, won’t be celebrating it until May 8 — the day after Iowa State’s spring commencement ceremony.

Holi is one of the best-loved holidays on the Hindu calendar, but many rituals associated with it don’t travel well. This is because they were devised on the Indian subcontinent, where the early spring is generally warm. Some Holi traditions — such as people splashing each other with colored water, or smearing each others’ bare limbs with a pigment called gulal — would have been hard for students to bear during Ames’ cold mid-March days.  

Priyanka Nandi, public relations officer for ISA and graduate in architecture, acknowledged the timing of the event is less than ideal, but said poor weather and schedule conflicts with other ISU events gave them no choice.

“We thought it was probably best to have it May 8, so everyone will be done with their finals and everything,” Nandi said.

In the millennia since Holi was first observed, Hindus have developed a multitude of celebration rituals, inspired by many different pieces of Hindu lore.

The Festival of Love

As mentioned above, one of the most famous Holi traditions is the playful smearing and splashing of colors on people’s bodies. This is an especially prominent part of Holi celebrations in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

Chitvan Mittal, graduate in biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology, said the ritual is largely inspired by stories about the Hindu god Krishna and his boyhood love, a girl named Radha.

“In the days when Lord Krishna used to inhabit the earth, he is said to be the lord of desires, or something like that. Basically, many women used to fancy him. He used that festival to play with women using colored water and colored powder,” Mittal said.

One story has Krishna complaining to his mother about how dark his complexion is compared to that of Radha, who was fair-skinned. In response, his mother suggests that he smear Radha’s face with pigment to change its color.

In the Indian city of Barsana, Hindus celebrate a ritual known as Lathmar Holi, which reenacts Radha and her friends’ response to a prank Krishna played on them. He is said to have travelled from his native town of Nandagon to Barsana and stolen their clothes while they bathed. Radha and her friends retaliated by beating the young god with sticks.

Today, Indian men still travel from Nandagon to Barsana for Lathmar Holi. Taking the role of Radha, the women hit them with sticks. The men wear helmets and kneel beneath large leather shields for protection.

Though the women sometimes strike the men quite hard, they do so in the spirit of play. Sometimes the men goad the stick-wielding women on by singing provocative songs.

As they do during many Holi celebrations, people tend to let go of their inhibitions during this ritual. Mittal attributes this in part to the tradition of eating candies laced with cannabis during the festivities.

“In Hindi, we call it ‘bhang,'” Mittal said. “It’s a drug which gets you high—ecstatic. And that’s the reason why people do stuff they would not normally do.”

Good’s triumph over evil

Nandi said a major theme of all Holi celebrations is the triumph of good over evil. This victory is exemplified in Hindu lore by the story of Prahlad, son of the demon king Hiranyakashipu.  

Hiranyakashipu tried to kill Prahlad for daring to worship the god Vishnu instead of him. He made Prahlad drink poison, but it only turned to nectar in his mouth. He set venomous snakes on the boy, but their fangs withered before they could pierce his skin. He even tried to have elephants trample him to death, but he survived that as well.

In frustration, the demon king commanded Prahlad to sit on the lap of his sister Holika in the middle of a fire. Holika was a demoness who was protected against fire by a divine boon. Her brother expected to see his son burn up while Holika survived, but just the opposite happened. Amid the flames, Prahlad won protection by chanting prayers to Vishnu. This show of devotion allowed him to survive while Holika—supposedly impervious to fire—burned to death.

The festival’s name, Holi— which means “burning” in Hindi — alludes to this event.

Hindus celebrate the burning of Holika on the first of the festival’s two days, in a bonfire ritual called Holi Dahan.

Nandi said the Indian Students’ Association had no plans to hold a bonfire, but also mentioned that members find this theme very important.

“I think all over the world it’s the same,” Nandi said. “Why do you celebrate generally? It’s because of the good winning over the evil.”

There are other stories that attribute different significance to Holi, but the stories of Radha and Pralhad are two of the best known.

Holi, ISU style

The Indian Students’ Association’s Holi event will be held in front of the Campanile from noon to 3 p.m., May 8. Participants will be invited to douse each other with water and smear pigment on each others’ skin. Both will be provided at the event. Mittal advises all attendees to wear clothes they don’t mind staining.

Free pizza and soda will be available at the event, as well as a milk-based Indian desert called gulab jamun.

Mittal is grateful that Indian students on campus celebrate Hindu holidays, but thinks that their spirit is “hard to capture” for international students in the United States.

“Back in India, it’s a colorful land, and people are celebrating so very often,” she said.