An air of festivity has enveloped both the Telugu States of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The two major cities of Hyderabad and Vijayawada were decked up with flowers and bathed in colourful lights.
As Bathukamma, nine-day long festival of flowers and fragrance concluded in Hyderabad on Tuesday with a colourful and magnificent procession of thousands of women in their finery carrying the pots of flowers overhead in the heart of Hyderabad.
Bathukamma, symbolising the local traditions and customs was declared as the main and official festival of Telangana after the State was formed last year. Telangana Rashtra Samiti MP from Nizamabad and president of Telangana Jagruti K Kavita, who is also daughter of Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao has emerged as the leading light in the promotion of the festival as part of cultural renaissance of the State.
The procession with Kavitha in the lead and thousands of women following her started from the lal Bahadur Stadium and culminated at the picturesque Tank Bund of Hussain Sagar lake with the entire route flooded with colorful flowers, arches and festoons. All the routes around the lake were closed for the vehicular traffic to ensure free and safe movement of ladies carrying the pots bedecked with flowers of seven varieties, arranged in conical mound called Bathukamma. later, the women performed traditional dance around the mounds of flowers singing the folk song of “Bathukamma Bathukamma Uyyalo”. The performances by the cultural troupes and artists from all over Telangana also added color to the evening.
Other major thoroughfares, junctions and traffic islands and the flyovers were also decorated with flowers as the administration went all out to make the event memorable.
While in the united Andhra Pradesh Dussehra was the main festival, after bifurcation Telangana Government has decided to accord primacy to the local Bathukamma festival declaring a general holiday on Tuesday. Schools and colleges have also declared ten days holidays coinciding with Bathukamma instead of earlier Dussehra holidays. Unlike Andhra Pradesh where Dussehra continues to be the main festival, Telangana observes only one day holiday for it.
“Bathukamma is the cultural soul of Telangana”, said Kavita, who was also trying to promote the festival at the national and international level among the people from the State.
The festival was also celebrated in all the districts, major towns and thousands of villages across Telangana with gaiety and gusto. Old timers say that Bathukamma was in fact a celebration of nature and bio diversity as women of the yore used to go in to the jungles to pick the wild flowers of special varieties to decorate their homes and make the flower mounds.
In the State of Andhra Pradesh the nine-day long Dussehra festival will conclude on October 22 with the celebration of Vijayadashmi Day. This year the festival has assumed added significance as it will coincide with the laying of foundation stone of new Capital city Aamarvathi between Vijayawada and Guntur.