- This thought
provoking FAQ includes origin of Onam festival, traditional role of SC
community in singing Onam songs, why is Onam celebrated over 10 days, is it a Harvest
festival, rituals associated with Onam and similarity with Ganpati immersion.
In recent years, Onam, the official festival of Kerala has attracted a lot of attention. Every year there are so many views and counterviews that come up for discussion. This is a positive development as it forces people to research further about the festival. And each year brings new insights and learnings. This churn is good so indigenous festivals don’t go the way of pagan religions for e.g. Easter is now the only festival known but its origins as a pagan
festival
are erased.
A friend Binu
Padmam (delves deep into Onam and is a I.T. professional) put up a Youtube
video on Onam in Malayalam. After listening to it I decided to pen down some
thoughts and new insights that I got from it in English. Hindu Parenting had
done a podcast on Onam in 2024 and here is the link to
it.
For ease of
understanding I have put my thoughts in a Q and A format. The answers are sourced
from Binu Padmam’s video.
I also did some further Q and A with him after listening to his video to
clarify some further doubts.
1. When
are the first references to Onam found in Malayalam literature? Or what are the
origins of this festival?
Literary
references to Onam are not too many according to Binu. Paanan paattu or pulluvan
paattu on Onam are the references we have about this festival. What are
these then?
These are songs on
Onam sung by Paananmmaar in northern to central Kerala and Pulluvanmmaar
in southern Kerala. This was a community of wandering bards or minstrels
somewhat like the Bauls of Bengal. Today these wandering bards are called
Scheduled Castes under our colonial Constitution.
Given the stigma
associated with SC in some parts of India, it is immensely interesting to note
that it is this community or jati that was
entrusted with the task of spreading in song form the charithram or the
stories / histories / praises of deities and kings throughout Kerala!
This was their only means of livelihood.
Early references
to Onam can be found in their songs. It is not to say that references to Onam
are found only in their songs. There are some documents referring to Onam but
none are authoritative or extensive says Binu. Please note that I could not
find a single paanan paattu on Onam when I searched for them on YouTube. This
means that this tradition has mostly been erased atleast online. It may be
surviving in pockets but as a tradition, it seems to have vanished with the
paanans progressing in life with modern education and opportunities.
Effectively, we can say that the tradition has been lost and what remains is
mostly performed as an exotic art form; a sort of museumization of a part of
culture which denotes its death.
Binu shared
insights of one of his friends from the community. The person said that no one
in his community knows any of those traditional songs anymore. In fact, some of
them have progressed to learning classical music etc. but most are engaged in
singing folk songs and songs in movies many a times even without formal
training. Singing without formal training means
that something that they had been doing for generations has left a genetic
imprint in them to be able to do so effortlessly.
Onam related
paanan songs interestingly have absolutely no reference to King Mahabali who
has become practically the logo and emblem of Onam along with the flower
rangoli! The Onam related paanan songs have references to Mahadev and
Mahavishnu but none to Mahabali.
One of the songs
goes as follows:
Onamkolle,
Onamkolle, Thrikkakara Mahadeva
Atthathin
Naal Thale Divasam Ezhunarulum Mahadevan
Kondenum
Kudapidicch Ezhunallum Mahadevan
Thekkunnu
Vadakkottu Ezhunnallum Mahadevan
Translated as-
Greetings to
Mahadeva of Thrikkakara
Who will come down
here on the eve of the Attham day
He will emerge and
walk down with his umbrella and in pomp and glory
He will walk from
the south to the north.
It is interesting
to note that the song talks about the Thrikkakara temple whose deity is now the
Vamana murthy avatar of Mahavishnu and refers to him as Mahadeva. So, was
Thrikkakara a Shiva Kshetram before and when and why did it become a Vishnu Kshetram?
The Thrikkakara temple is the nodal point for the Onam festival even today and
one wonders whether a festival initially revolving around Shiva came to be
associated with Vishnu when for whatever reasons, the murthy of Thrikkakara
temple changed. It gives us food for thought.
For credits see
end of article.
2. How
did Mahabali come to be associated with this festival?
This question is a
tricky one to answer. As I stated before, King Mahabali has almost become the
logo of Onam. He is represented as a pot-bellied, portly king walking gaily
with a wooden umbrella, almost like a Keralite version of Santa Claus! As a
mere personal conjecture, it might be possible that when the story around Onam
moved from Mahadev to Mahavishnu, the story of Vamana and Mahabali started to
be associated with Onam.
However, there are
inherent contradictions in this. Vamana is the 5th avatar of Vishnu
and Parashurama, the 6th. Parashurama is said to have carved out the Konkan area including present day Kerala from the sea in his avatara rupa. If that is the case, then how can Mahabali who was in the story related to the avatar before Parashurama ever have set foot in Kerala? Kerala didn’t exist then according to the Dashavatara story.
Having adopted the
Vamana and Mahabali story with its initial contradictions, it has got mangled
in recent history, perhaps since the start of the 20th century. The popular version goes that Mahavishnu in his dwarf avatara asked his most ardent devotee Mahabali for land that he could claim in three steps and in claiming those, he grew to such a size that with his first step he conquered the heavens, with the second he conquered the earth and when he asked where he would place his third foot, Mahabali replied that he should place his third step on Mahabali’s head. Till this point, the story stays true to its original interpretation in the Puranas, mainly the Bhagavata purana. Incidentally, these Puranas are also not part of Kerala’s literary past, been written in the northern parts of Bharata.
It is said in the
Bhagavata Purana that Vamana blessed his devotee for his pious devotion and
sent Mahabali to sutala loka (which is not paatala loka as is said today and
which is not also corresponding to hell as translation. Indian Puranas talk
about 14 lokas of which sutala loka is one of the subterranean lokas) as its
king, saying that he (Mahavishnu) would stand as the dwarapalaka or the guard
of the kingdom. He also blessed Mahabali saying that in the next epoch or
manvantara, Mahabali would be the king of gods or Indradeva. All these events
are said to have happened in the environs of the Narmada River in modern day
Madhya Pradesh. But by some miraculous time-space journey, the story seems to
have been transplanted into Kerala.
However, in the
modern telling of this story in Kerala, Mahabali is pushed into paatala loka or
hell (bad translation) by Vamana as a punishment. The tone is one of punishment
to Mahabali and the lens of oppressor-oppressed, a favourite Marxist trope is applied
to this story.
Thus, a story
which arrived with contradictions in the distant past because of the switch of
deities from Mahadeva to Mahavishnu, got knotted further with these erroneous
misinterpretations of the Vamana-Mahabali katha.
3. Why
is Onam celebrated for 10 days?
In the Bhagavata Purana
it is said that the Thiruvonam day in the Malayalam month of Chingam is the
birthday of Vamana or Vamana Jayanthi.
The Thrikkakara
temple has its annual temple festival in the Malayalam month of Chingam and it
runs for 10 days from Attham to Thiruvonam. Since the Vamana-Mahabali story has
been adopted as being the one defining Onam, and since Thrikkakara deity is the
ruling deity of Onam, the festivities for Onam coincide with the temple
festival dates. Here is a short
video on the Thrikkakara temple festival.
4. What
are the rituals associated with the festival?
The floral rangoli
of Onam is another signature element that is associated with the festival. One
of the stories around this is as follows.

There was a feud between the Kochi and Samudiri kings who ruled the Malabar region whereby the Samudiri’s people could not go to pay their respects to Thrikkakaraappan (Vamana murthy). Troubled by this, the Samudiri king ordered his subjects to decorate their own homes and place representations of the deity and worship him from their homes itself when Attham day dawned.
Thus, started the
practice of worshipping the deity in individual homes placing clay towering
pyramids in the centre of the floral rangolis during the 10 day Onam festival.
For Credits see
end of article.
In the Valluvanadan
parts of Kerala comprising of Perinthalmanna, Mannarkkad, Ottapalam and so on,
these clay pyramids are called Mathevars
which I believe is the corruption of the word Mahadeva. This signals that it
was a festival initially dedicated to Mahadev. In other parts of Kerala, these
pyramids are called Thrikkakarappans
which in present times denotes the Vamana or Vishnu deity at Thrikkakara.
In any case, these
clay pyramids were an intrinsic and essential part of the festivities. They
were esp. worshipped on these days and food offerings were made to them just as
one would make naivedya to the gods. At the end of
the 10-day festivities, these clay pyramids were dissolved in water much like
it is done with Ganpati murtis during the Ganesh festival which incidentally
also runs for 10 days and in fact occurs very close to Onam dates (In
2025, Ganapati Immersion is on Sept 6 and Onam on September 5). The reason for
making these clay murtis and then dissolving them is that they are a temporary
representation of the deity. Hindus believe that
there is Chaitanya or consciousness in the murtis even if they are temporary.
But as long as they are the manifestations of the deity, they have to be
worshipped in the proper paddhati and that is why they are given naivedya every
day. The dissolution is done because individual households are not in a
position to worship the deity in all the ways they are supposed to be, every
day of the year.
But the practice
of placing these deity representations within floral rangolis has all but
vanished today because the festival has become secularized (meaning de-Hindu).
Today we see beautiful and elaborate floral rangolis empty of the mathevars or
thrikkakarappans in the centre.
The state of
Kerala declared Onam to the state festival in 1961 and since then, an already
knotted festival has progressively been stripped of its Hindu roots to make it acceptable
to minorities of Kerala who also want to celebrate this festival because of its
vibrancy and colour. Thus, removing the mathevars is akin to removing idolatory
which is anathema to the Abrahamic faiths. That step made the festival more
palatable to Christians and Muslims and since then, the gradual stripping off
of every connection of Onam to Hinduism has rapidly gained ground.
As Binu has said in his video, “A flower rangoli without the thrikkakarappan is akin to a sanctum sanctorum without the vigraha.” Binu says that the flower rangoli has even been compared to the Sri Chakra in old paanan paattukal or songs of the paanans, signifying worship of the feminine formed an aspect of Onam too.
5. Why
is Onam called as a harvest festival?
Another distortion
of narrative has happened with the christening of Onam as a desacralized,
de-hinduized harvest festival. Today, Onam is also called a harvest festival
and this year, X was flooded with people
questioning what crop was being harvested in Kerala on the back of a wet and
non-productive monsoon period. As we all know, Kerala has one of the
wettest monsoon periods when every activity practically comes to a standstill.
Thus, how can there be a harvest festival so soon after a heavy monsoon. Binu says that he doesn’t know how the tag of harvest festival came to be attached to Onam. There is no reference to this aspect historically but this perhaps began to get attached to Onam when the secularization of the festival began, to make it accessible to non-Hindus. It is true that one rice harvest is done in the Chingam month when Onam falls. This perhaps explains the grand feast or the Onasadya that is another signature feature of Onam.
In older times,
this was the only time when rice was available to the common populace and at
other times, people lived on whatever was available locally during the season.
According to Binu, most households never had a staple grain as their base food.
It was just produce that was locally available that was cooked. So, during the
summer months it would be mango and jackfruit, at other times, it would be yams
and tapioca, at others, just things made from different parts of the banana
tree. Hence, rice as a grain used to be available only during Onam festival time and thus it became a reason to celebrate with rice and a plethora of dishes, the occasion of Vishnu’s birth as Vamana avatara.
We are yet to
uncover the reason for the celebration if it was a Shiva festival to start with
as is evidenced from the songs of the paanans. That exploration is for another
day.
This is a long
article but is worth it because every churn on this subject will just help untangle
the numerous knots surrounding this festival and prevent it from getting
digested and assimilated into some secular melting pot of cultures. As Binu
says at the end of his video, Onam was a deeply
local festival with multiple ways of celebration.
We do not want to stop anyone from celebrating the festival but to strip it of its Hindu identity to suit a predatory agenda is something we must resist. When you don’t nourish the roots of any culture, it just atrophies and dies.
Bharat’s strength is Sanatana Dharma and her unarguable diversity. Destroying the roots of Hinduism will leave the world a poorer place because when the roots die, the plant ceases to exist.
Finally, since my
thoughts have been triggered primarily by Binu Padmam’s video and my extended
conversations with him, I thank him immensely for his beautiful video. May we
all thrive and prosper. Let Mahavishnu/Mahadeva/Devi grant us all health and
wealth and the ability to create and expand in diversity.
Wish everyone a
very Happy Onam!
Binu Parmam X handle As per his tweet, “Onam is celebrated in some parts of Tamil Nadu, at the Tirupati and Badrinath temples as well.” Photo
credits see tweet
by Ramaswamy Iyer
Also
read
1. Easter Traditions
2. Another thread on
X on the subject of Onam with a lot of overlaps with this writeup is also very
useful to read
3. Why is Onam
celebrated in Kerala