Every year in India‘s southernmost city, Thiruvananthapuram, millions of women build millions of fires in the open street and cook a pot of rice on the flames. They travel to the city on slow, fully-crammed trains and buses , spend days guarding the bricks on which their fire will burn and, during a long day of sweltering heat and crowds and noise, remind the city of their strength and devotion, to both their families and Attukal Devi, the goddess to whom the Attukal Pongala Festival is dedicated. It is their belief in her powers – to bless, to help and to heal – that once a year transforms Thiruvananthapuram (formerly Trivandrum).
The festival has become hugely popular over the past decade. When 1.5 million women assembled to cook rice for the goddess in 1997, the festival entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest annual gathering of women anywhere. This year, there were said to be up to three million women participating. It was tricky to photograph the event, and tricky to just move through Trivandrum’s narrow streets. Smoke from the fires was irritating my eyes – as well as the women’s – and in the middle of so much movement and noise, I felt some sense of what war photography must be like, without the mortal danger of course.
Read more about the Attukal Pongala festival at Old World Wandering: A Travelogue, the story of a South African couple’s journey home.
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