Subhas Chandra Pattanayak
Indian trading community has mastered in inventing methods of fetching monetary profits by misdirecting mass consciousness from ancient India’s glorious battles against tyranny to imagined divinity, so that the exploiters may stay safe generation after generations with the idea of eliminating the tyrants for emancipation of the tortured people pushed into oblivion.
Thus the Hori or Holi has corrupted into a festival of colors that fetches thousands of crores of rupees as profit from trade in colors and hats and apparels and squirt-guns et cetera.
The word ‘Hori (Holi) is basically found in a peculiar Oriya exposition – RAKTARA HORI – that stresses on squirting each other with the blood of the tormentor.
It has its origin in an episode in Sabha Parva of Mahabharata. Bhaumaasura was a demonic satyr who had abducted Twasta’s daughter Kasheru and kept her in a fort called Oudaka in Mani Parbata, where he had also kept confined 16,000 young women for his sadistic pleasure. Another ill-famed misogynist Muraasura had made the fort impregnable by setting around it six thousand traps fitted with sharp blades. Whosoever ever tried to enter thereinto, was caught in the trap and destroyed. Srikrushna, the matriarch leader of Mahabharata, destroyed those six thousand traps, annihilated Muraasura and freed the confined women. They celebrated their freedom by squirting each other with the blood of the cruel Muraasura in commemoration of which Hori became a festival that reminds of how bloody extermination of exploiters is also necessary if weaker section of the society is to progress without fear.
Ancient India offers many revolutionary solutions to problems that keep the people oppressed. But one is to know them by cutting open the cocoon of mindless belief in divinity in which man has kept himself incarcerated.
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