By now, every year during the last week of February or the first week of March in the Malayalam month of Kumbham, we are used to seeing photos and videos of row after row of smouldering ovens and earthen pots bubbling with a rice and jaggery mix, stirred by women with devotion in their eyes and a prayer on their lips. 

This is the famous Attukal Pongala festival of Thiruvananthapuram, the state capital of Kerala, which draws more than four million women every year. Pongala means to boil over. The goddess, it is said, likes paysam (kheer).

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But what happens behind the scenes? How do the women choose their pots? What drives them to park themselves on the road three days before the festival, to book their spot, ideally close to the temple? Virtual Bharat, the series of documentaries conceptualised by Bharatbala that showcase slices of India, takes you to pincode 695009 in Attukal Pongala.

This is a 10-day festival at the Attukal Bhagavathy Temple, and on the ninth day the women of the city and elsewhere (people even come in from Tamil Nadu and Karnataka for this) cook a feast for the goddess. The Guinness World Records calls it the largest gathering of women in the world.

This pandemic year, however, there was no bonhomie or sisterhood on display during the Pongala on February 27 — local authorities decided to ban public gatherings to avoid yet another COVID-19 spike or cluster. The only reference to the pandemic in the documentary, shot in 2019, is the recent footage of empty streets and police personnel in front of the temple.

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Usually, the awe factor is seeing the multitudes of women. Rarely does the camera zoom into the individuals that make up the teeming crowd. Rarely does it capture tangible vignettes of faith. This Virtual Bharat segment, directed by Goutham Soorya and with cinematography by Syamprakash MS, does just that. The eyes of a woman brim over when she speaks of the goddess; there’s a look of complete surrender in an elderly woman’s face; women speak of their sisterly love for the goddess and how she has been a part of their lives for as long as they have lived. One of them describes Pongala as a celebration for women.

The five-minute documentary also throws the spotlight on the men who feed the huge gathering. The night before, they boil drinking water, break and scrape coconuts. Meanwhile, the women are at their designated places. They’ve already marked their names on the bricks that will double up as an oven. Twigs have been bought, and fresh pots have been sourced from the market, after they have been tapped to check their quality. Coconut husk has been sourced too, so that the fire will light easily. The night before, the women sleep on the roadside, lulled by the music streaming out of loudspeakers.

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In the morning, the women line up and wait for the fire at the temple kitchen to be lit. Once they get the signal, and the lit wood from the temple kitchen is brought out, women fire up their ovens and pass on the light to the next woman. Imagine this happening every year, with about four million stoves. One of the women in the documentary says that this is a festival where the prayer from millions of such temporary ovens is sent up to their sister and mother, the goddess Attukal Bhagavathy Amma.

Besides the paysam cooked with rice, jaggery and banana slices, the women also steam green gram for Lord Shiva, Bhagavathy Amma’s father, and therali (bay leaf) appam, where a sweet rice mix is placed inside a shaped bayleaf and cooked.

Pongala is open to all. Grandmothers, mothers, young women and girls come by, bearing a bag filled with all they need to propiate the goddess. The documentary concludes with shots of women ululating in tandem, a primal show of solidarity. Like one of the women featured in the documentary says: Attukal Bhagavathy Amma is their everything.