Teej is a monsoon festival here that happens to fall right after Raksha Bandan. It is generally celebrated by the lower classes, although many groups recognize it. In order to see what the festival is all about, we went to go hang out with our didis (our cooks and housekeepers here). They were incredibly welcoming and gave us some cream rolls (sort of like éclairs nom nom nom). After eating and meeting some family, we went up to the roof, where we celebrated the festival properly, which is to say the didis sang some songs. Almost all of the songs were about the monsoon, but some of them were also about life as a woman. For example, one of the songs is about the hardships of floods during the monsoon season and the different problems that people encounter. Other songs apparently had subversive messages about the family structure, which is understandable because of the amount of power that the mother-in-law has over the daughter (since many families are joint families, the mother-in-law has a lot of control over the daughter-in-law, and tends to pass all cooking-cleaning-household activity responsibilities off to her.
All of the songs were sung in groups of 2, and the groups would sing back and forth to each other. The didis also knew all of the words (or at least some people), which is impressive (1) because these songs only are sung during Teej and (2) because the songs are very long.
Afterward, we got jaleba, which is like jalebi but so much better! (imagine funnel cake in sugar syrup and you have a pretty good idea of what it is…)The only not-fun thing about the night was that we got back home at around 12:15 or so…
No comments:
Post a Comment