Bonalu is like a garland of individual celebrations continuing over
the space of several weeks. Families and neighborhoods come to be linked
together in the festival. Non-Telugu speakers, villagers, and tribal peoples
may be integrated into the city through their participation in the festival,
even while they maintain their specific ‘identities’ through their worship
of a particular goddess and maintenance of a particular shrine. The goddess
is invoked, not so much any longer to assure good crops or a successful
monsoon, so much as to assure prosperity in the time of any adversity and
to provide a sense of safety in the face of external threat.
At another level the festival has also been used by such agencies as the
A ̄rya Sama ̄j to attempt to homogenize the practice of Hinduism and to
integrate “folk” and tribal people into the Hindu fold. In fact, processions
of Bonalu have been used as rituals of confrontation as, in the mid-1980s,
paraders made their way through Muslim neighborhoods, thereby insti-
gating resentment, even skirmishes. The festival has now become, along with
Ganes.a Cha ̄thurthi, one of the most popular festivals of Hyderabad; plan-
ning committees have come to work with participants at specific shrines
to co-ordinate the whole enterprise and provide a semblance of structure.
Yet spontaneity persists as individuals and families participate and interpret
their experience in their own terms.
204 Religion in Contemporary India
Figure 9Bonalu Festival, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh: worshipers bearing gifts (gatham)
for the goddess atop Golkonda Hill. Photograph by Rob F. Phillips.