Garba season of the Indian diaspora
It's officially that time of year where the weather starts to get colder, the leaves lose their green, and the Trader Joe's aisles are filled with pumpkin-flavored everything. As the city gears up for spooky season, it signals the start of another important time of year, garba season.
Garba is an Indian folk dance originating from the state of Gujarat, and is performed for several reasons, most notably (at least for me), for Navratri. The nine-night festival of Navratri celebrates divine feminine energy through the worship of three significant goddesses in the Hindu tradition. The dance acts as a form of worship and prayer during this period, but is only one of the ways Navratri is celebrated.
Woman dances garba while the crowd takes a break in Schaumburg, Illinois. Photo by author.
Theoretically, people gather and spend upwards of five hours dancing during each of the nine nights. The “hard-core” people will also observe a kind of fast, in which only certain foods are to be consumed. Those who don’t may choose to give up meat and alcohol for the nine-day period. The levels of commitment vary, but essentially, it is a holy time of dance and celebration honoring feminine divinity. That’s what I was taught growing up in the United States. That’s what most of the people around me were taught too.
There is always a vague awareness in the Indian American community that our celebrations, while lovely, aren’t ever going to live up to the celebrations in India. So I grew up romanticizing what celebrating Navratri in India would be like, imagining it like a scene from the movies. Though this seemed like a distant dream, we were always happy to celebrate in the way that was available to us.
Garba celebration in Schaumburg, Illinois. Photo by author.
Year after year my friends and I attended garba celebrations held at our local temples. As we grew older, we started seeking out the larger, more intense garbas held at universities further away. We took the time to get decked out in traditional attire, even when we had no time to spare. Spending the entire night dancing just to come home exhausted with busted feet. It became one of those things you look forward to, waiting all year long with bated breath, like waiting for Christmas morning. Turns out, this is not a universal feeling.
Over the past couple years I have come to discover that Indians don’t take garba seriously as consistently as Indian Americans do. It’s spoken about as some relic of youth, or something only done by people from Gujarat. In fact, because Navratri is celebrated differently in different regions of the country, many Indians outside Gujarat might not even have easy access to garba events. Indians are often shocked to hear that I even know how to do garba, much less that it is my favorite time of the year. Of course there are Indians who take garba VERY seriously, but they are much more scarce than I once imagined.
Short glimpse of the celebrations at my first post-pandemic garba. Video by author.
While Navratri celebrations in India are highly divided by region, in the U.S. there is considerably more unity within the Indian diaspora. Communities with a large concentration of Indian immigrants like in New Jersey, Texas, and right here in Chicago, hold massive garba events before, during, and after the official Navratri period. These events are filled with people of all ages, and from all the different parts of India, not a sight you are likely to see if you’re actually in India. The immigrant experience ends up homogenizing the diaspora just enough to make it feel like we’re all one people, and the borders that divide Indians in India don’t have to matter as much here.
This year, the garba season is particularly important, having lost last year’s to the pandemic. While Navratri falls from Oct. 7 to Oct. 15 this year, the festivities have already begun in Chicago, with last Saturday marking the return of garba’s undisputed queen, Falguni Pathak. Despite this garba season being unseasonably warm and surrounded by a cloud of COVID-19 regulations, that Christmas morning feeling is here and it's here to stay, at least for another week or so.
The blur of garba, from within the chaos. Photo by author.
