Many women also paint the earthen pots in vibrant colors. Before cooking, they tie mango leaves and palm leaves around the neck of the pot. The newly cooked rice is offered to the sun at sunrise to express gratitude for the harvest. While women in Puducherry were seen drawing kolams in the street, none were sighted in the city cooking out in the open.
Gomathi said, “In villages people still cook [Pongal] over an earthen stove, but in Chennai I had to cook it over my induction stove. In cities we feel embarrassed to do it out in the open where [the] street is the only open place.”
According to Gomathi, while earlier the cooking was done for everyone in the neighborhood, today in cities people cook only for themselves. “The culture of exchange is over.”
The third day of the festival, called Muttu Pongal, was traditionally celebrated to thank cattle, which play a very important role in the farmer’s life. While the urbanites in Chennai have no reason to thank cattle, in Puducherry, people showed their gratitude by drawing cows as kolams.
In many areas of Puducherry, the kolams on the streets were marked by numbers in order and some were marked as prizewinners. Deepalakshmi, a young girl was excited that her kolam won the first prize among hundreds of houses in her locality.
While some cooking utensils lay out in the sun drying, her brother sat on a computer in their tiny, single-window home. Deepalakshmi came out and stood near her kolam and said, “I got up at 4 a.m. in the morning to draw this. It took me and my sisters two and a half hours to finish.”
Traditionally, kolams were done with rice powder and natural powder colors; however, these days people draw them with chalk/lime powder, synthetic colors, and colored salt crystals, which are cheaply and easily available in coastal areas. Deepalakshmi’s kolam was made with colored salt crystals.
On the first day, before sunrise, about 200 women participated in a kolam competition on Promenade Beach organized by the Puducherry government’s Tourism Department. Competitions are one way in which people are encouraged to maintain their traditions amid urban life.
