Kite Festival in Rajasthan: Driven to Distraction by the Deafening Din

January 18, 2016

Me kite-flying from the roof of our hotel

The childlike character of Indians is at no time more apparent than during its many festivals, when everyone, old and young, forsakes all else and literally leaps into the spirit of the always colourful and usually exceedingly noisy event.  To the foreign observer, it may seem like there are more festivals, holy days, and holidays than there are either school days or work days.  Furthermore Indians have a way of stretching what is gazetted as a one day festival into a week-long event – or longer.  As an example, the Rajasthani kite festival, celebrated every year in every town in the region, was this year scheduled to be on January 14, a Thursday. 

About a week before that there was a frenzy of kite, reel and string buying.  Colourful, but very simple tissue-paper and bamboo stick kites, with no tails, were sold by the dozen.  Everyone was buying as many kites as they could, as the kite festival is just as much about kite-fighting as kite-flying, and losses can be heavy.  The kite strings are impregnated with small shards of glass, designed for cutting the strings of other kites – before the string of your own kite is cut.  Contrary to the ridiculous assertion of our hotel owner that the kites fly 3000 feet in the air (it’s amazing how Indians can make statements such as this with such vehemence, and respond so dismissively when questioned about the veracity of their claims), the highest kite we saw might have been 500 feet or so – certainly high enough, but not 3000 feet.

Our hotel in Mandawa

Three days before the actual day of the festival we were in Mandawa, a small town (population around 30,000) in the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan, just north of Jaipur.  Whether it was related to the festival or not, this is when the nightly Hindu temple ‘music’ started; and carried on, from around 10 at night to around 2 am, or one night to 4 am.  There was a brief hiatus – from 4 to 5:30 am – at which time the Muslim mosques began their call to prayer.  Thankfully the mosque calls, while there are a lot of them, are somewhat more sonorous and less loud than the Hindu temple music. Truly one cannot call the temple music ‘music’ at all.  It is a dysphonic chanting to the piercing shrill of flute or horn, and the beat of drums, interspersed with manic screaming.  The ‘music’ becomes increasingly more hysterical with each passing minute, the chanter apparently working himself into a religious ecstacy, or frenzy.  

Our room, all concrete

The ‘music’ is blasted out from massive speakers on the tops of every temple in the town, like an aural competition for hard-of-hearing believers.  The sound was oppressively loud inside the concrete walls of our hotel room, which was at least a few blocks away from the nearest temple. Even ear plugs were only partially effective at dampening the din – it penetrates all.  As bad as it was for us, it is hard to imagine what it must have been like for those who are closer, sleeping in flimsier dwellings or on rooftops (or likely not sleeping at all).

On the first day of the kite festival the ‘real’ music began.  Massive speakers appeared on rooftops, their volume controlled by young boys who, having lived here all of their lives, are likely harder of hearing than a half-deaf 90-year old.  They played the usual awful, repetitive, Indi pop music, with thundering bass tones and whining, screeching ‘singers’ at volumes so high that the sound was, in addition to being without appeal, distorted.  The racket began at around 10 in the morning and carried on without let-up all day and well into the night, drowning out both temple and mosque sounds, although they added to the din.  There was no getting away from it – the rooftop speakers were everywhere.  There was perhaps an hour or two of relative quiet between 2 and 4 in the morning, at which point the Hindu temples fired up their loud speakers, and the screeching of preaching filled the air.

Hotel staff, and my kite-flying mentors

Our hopes that the festival – and the din – would last just one day were of course vain (despite assertions by our hotel staff that the festival was just one day and that there would be no more kite-flying or music after that).  The kite-flying and fighting, and the dreadful deafening music carried on for another two days – until Sunday when, for some reason, all was quiet.  Even the temple speakers shut up, for once – at least during the day – although they still carried on with their nocturnal serenades.

After a few days of this constant din I can truly say I felt ‘driven to distraction’, ready to throttle the boys on the rooftops, pull out the plugs on their speakers and hurl them (and the boys) down onto the street below, gleefully watching them (the speakers, not the boys) smash into pieces.  I realized how effective sound and noise could be as an instrument of torture.  I was almost moved to pray for peace.  But which god or goddess would I pray to?  If what goes on at the temples is any indication, the Hindu deities are in cahoots with the noise-makers, indeed are the inspirations for it.

On another rooftop, a family quietly making sweets

From a foreigner’s perspective India is an incredibly noisy place.  Wherever you are in India, you are subjected to an almost constant cacophony of noise.  If it’s not the screeching tones of temples and mosques, or the blaring of Indi pop music, it’s the din of truck, bus, car and motorcycle horns.  Some of these have sounds so piercing they actually hurt the eardrums (even Indians cover their ears!), and drivers use their horns almost non-stop, at every street corner (there are no lights, so honking is the standard procedure), when passing or overtaking any kind of vehicle, and when approaching every pedestrian, cow, goat, dog or pig.  So basically, horns are blasting away all the time.  Even away from the noise street, there is no refuge.  The loud voices of Indians carry for miles.  It seems they all have to yell to be heard.  ‘Quiet voices’ are an unknown phenomenon. Perhaps, after years of constant aural assault, Indians must yell to be heard - or want others to yell, so they can hear.

Philip Ward, in his book ‘Rajasthan, Agra, Delhi’ makes reference to the deafening din of India when he was traveling here in 1981:

At three next morning I was woken up by chanting in Rajasthani, and at five by loud laughter outside my room.  By six the screeching of foraging peafowl had been challenged by the call of myna birds, and within fifteen minutes radio music had begun to blast out not only within the castle, but from the town far below: there it must have been literally deafening. 

But Ward was fortunate indeed to hear the birds.  Over the past several days here, birds haven’t stood a chance of being heard over the deafening din of Indi pop music, temple chant and mosque call.  Here in India it seems that ‘peace’ refers only to absence of war, not to a state of being, or at least not to a state of being in most of the country.