Fantastical Origin of The Holi Festival

Suproli is a Zagaic kingdom based festival. It’s a festival of magic, colour, wonder and harmless joyful violence. This is one day when people get to break their routine and physically fight with each other without any long lasting consequences. Nobody holds back their punches and those on the receiving end happily accept the beating and then fight back with full equal amount of force.

This is possible due to one strange phenomenon. Only on this day, every year, a soapy bubble wall appears around the entire kingdom. (It’s called an Inertia Bubble). It appears for exactly 682 minutes (i.e. a little about eleven hours). Anything that happens inside this bubble is free of long lasting consequences. So if you fight, you break or blow up the entire kingdom, everything will reset to what it was before the bubble was formed.

Further, while the wall is up a spell is cast around the kingdom that allows people to have fantastic physical powers; flight, agility, strength, you name it! With these abilities people create havoc around the kingdom. When they fight people don’t bleed, instead wonderful colours spray out of their quick healing wounds turning the bland kingdom into a rainbow city.

If that’s not enough all characters from myths, legends and fictional stories come to life and the people get to spend time with them. Nothing is left to the imagination. They talk, they argue, they fight, they celebrate; they do anything that allows them to de-stress. For once people get to forget their problems and worries and just live a vibrant day. At the end when the bubble comes down the people wake up. After that, this beautiful event remains only as a dream and how it made them feel.

When it happened the first time, people shook it off as a meaningless dream. But then people started talking. They realized that it was a shared experience. The conversations grew. Next year when it happened again this event became something special. It became an insignificantly significant dream.

All of the things I said above is a made-up story. A fantastical tale created by a 16th century fantasy fiction writer Jarima Kalkkan. For all the time she had been writing stories she was heavily criticized by the society for adding unreal fantastical elements to them. In those times, even in stories, something magical was not allowed. The governing institution ensured it. The only way this story was made acceptable is by calling it all a dream. Once she realized that her story was not censored, Jarima did not hold back on adding fantastical elements to her story which she later published as a book called Zagaic Kingdom (1603).

Although it started as a work of fiction this ‘Suproli festival’ had real world implications. When philosophers from other parts of the world read this story, they found something very interesting in it. The idea to take a break from the routine, have harmless fun with each other and just de-stress.

When one of the philosophers returned to his home state Arsa he introduced this festival called Holi. Taking the fantastical elements out, he proposed the idea of deciding a day when people keep their differences aside and simply have fun playing with colours.

“It is one day when people will throw water at you, colour you from top to bottom, still you shouldn’t be angry because it’s the festival of Holi.”

बुरा न मानो होली है!

MEANING: Don’t get angry, it’s Holi!

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