Eat, play, grope! Why these women have stopped playing Holi

This story was first published in March 2021The last time Diksha Sethi, 36, played Holi was when she was 13. “That year, one of my distant uncles came to visit us in Chandigarh. I hid myself in the bathroom because I wasn’t keen on playing but he followed me inside, put his hand inside my T-shirt and felt me up,” says Sethi, who had no idea how to react to such a violation. She just sat under the tap and let the water run over her. When they finally left, she told her mother what had happened in tears. “She immediately picked up the phone and told him that he was not allowed into our house ever again. That was the last time I saw him.” The uncle disappeared from her life but that bitter incident has stopped her from taking part in the festival.Holi can be a great occasion for fun and frolic. The sweetness of gujiya, the mellow highs of bhaang and the vibrancy of gulal…what’s not to like? Yet for many women, the festival of colours has been marred by the dark shadows of harassment. medium nocaption81722139So often these experiences happen at a very young age, when girls don’t even understand what is happening to them, let alone know how to tell their parents. Shachi Nelli, a 26-year-old Mumbai resident who works in politics, posted a Twitter thread last year about her experiences of harassment on Holi and why she no longer plays. She had been groped by older boys she knew, and remembers one instance of being hit by water balloons thrown down from the eighth floor. “I remember feeling uncomfortable in the sexual sense and it was also physically painful. It was a violation on so many fronts. At that point, I had no language to express this so as soon as I got my period, every year without fail I would pretend I got it on Holi,” she says.Actor and poet Shrutee Choudhary has been inventing excuses for years to evade Holi revelry. “I started coming up with excuses like I get a skin rash from colour, I have a headache and after a certain age, it was my board exams.” She still remembers the “dirty icky feeling” she felt as a 10-year-old child when her friend’s elder brother behaved inappropriately. “He got the pichkari and covered me with colours, and his eyes were just fixated on my breasts,” she says. “My mom had her own experiences with touchy-feely uncles. She said it was very uncomfortable and disturbing, but it’s the festival so what can you do?” medium nocaption81722121Any groping, inappropriate touching and leering can and has been classified under the ways of the festival, with alcohol and bhaang serving as an extra layer of protection. After all, “bura na mano, Holi hai”.Public spaces become a hazard not only on Holi but on the days preceding it as well. Nelli says that when she was a kid, her mom and grandmother would not go out on Holi day. “Then it became two days before Holi. Now, it’s a full week.” Women being hit with balloons — filled with water, and in some cases, semen — is common.Kalpana Viswanath, co-founder and CEO of Safetipin, an app that uses maps to indicate safe and unsafe areas in urban centers, says that many female students in Delhi University leave the city one week before Holi as it amplifies the kind of sexual harassment women have to deal with every day. She says that while Holi has been a way for women in North India to occupy public spaces, sexual harassment of this kind gets in the way. “Holi has become unsafe for women and an excuse for sexual harassment.” While increased policing can help, she says, we have to ultimately change the perspectives and behaviours of men.The perpetrators behind these incidents often happen to be people these women personally know as well. Payoshni Saraf, 37, grew up in Kanpur where she had a tight group of friends, many of whom were boys. “I used to love Holi. We used to be a big gang of 20 people who used to play. It started going downhill for me at about 13. There was a boy I was very good friends with who took a lot of colour and put his hand under my shirt and started rubbing me. The fact that your own friends became predators under the guise of ‘bura na mano, Holi hai’ was heartbreaking.” medium nocaption81722166By the time Saraf was in Class XI, she began to open up with her female friends about these experiences, and discovered that she wasn’t alone. “Many girls talked about how they had also been harassed. We started playing by ourselves. If boys would come, we would form a chain around each other.” What frightens her, particularly when she thinks about her two-year-old daughter playing, is this idea that with enough colour on your face, one becomes largely unrecognisable.Natasha Ramarathnam used to love the festival as a young child. “Somewhere around 7th or 8th grade, one of our friends in the building started becoming a woman before all of us. Without us knowing, this guy in the building had invited his friends over and the carrot he had given them was ‘oh this really sexy woman is there and you can play Holi with her’,” says the Hyderabad resident. That group of boys used the pretext to pull the girls’ shirts and put colours under it. Independent researcher Deepthi Krishna Thota says no rules seem to apply on Holi. “Men think it’s okay to touch people, and violate boundaries because Holi is like a contact sport.”Last year, when Nelli tweeted about her experiences, she was met with a lot of hate — accusations that she was “Hinduphobic”, blaming her for the “kind of company” she was around, for instance. But she also got a flurry of messages from women who had been in her shoes. She says, “I got comments saying, ‘Holi is the victory of good over evil and you’re letting the evil win by not playing it. Great, teach kids that, but what happened to justice now?”Untitled Carousel 81735902Illustration: Chad Crowe