Makar Sakranti, Pongal and the turning of the sun

One of the most important festivals for the Indian subcontinent took place over the last four days. Makar Sakranti comes in a whole variety of regional names and variants, known as Pongal in Tamil Nadu, Uttarayan in Gujarat, and many variants besides. The importance of the day is that the sun moves into Capricorn, and starts to move northwards in the sky, so while Hindus have mapped their system of deities onto the date, making it a time to honour Surya, the sun god, I can't help thinking it must be a far more ancient moment marked in the calendar - the turn of the year. One of the most curious things about the tropical solar calendar - how the sun moves relative to the earth, measured from equinox to equinox - is that it gradually shifts out of sync with the (also solar) sidereal calendar measured by how the sun moves relative to the stars. So once upon a time, the turn of the year at the solstice and the turn of the sun northwards into Capricorn, coincided - in 272 AD. And in another 9000 years, Makar Sankranti will be in June. What is even more extraordinary is that Hindu astronomers may have worked out that these two calendars slowly slipped past each other some 3000 years ago. But I digress...

This is the time when the immense Kumbh Mela takes place every few years, with temporary cities for millions of people springing up at sacred sites. Locally a whole host of associated rituals come with this pivot point in the solar calendar, from bonfires and trick-or-treating for Bhogi / Lohri, to harvest celebrations in regions where this coincides with harvest time, kite-flying, river bathing and more. It's a four-day festival and lots goes on in the way of food and drink. 

We celebrated with a northern Indian Sakranti dish for the first day of the festival - a fantastic Gujarati baked dish called Undhiyu - and a southern Indian ven pongal for the last day (today). I also tried my hand at making one of the sweets that was most ubiquitous in all the different accounts of this festival that I read - til ladoo, balls of sesame and peanut in caramel, for which I learnt you need to have developed some kind of incredible heat-proof skin as you have to roll the balls in your palms while the mix is still hot and malleable. The kids predictably loved the til ladoo, everyone liked the undhiyu a fair bit (and in particular the fantastic parathas that I roped the house bread-maker, T, into producing) and the pongal was pure comfort food.

I could have cooked for weeks with all the regional recipes I started to discover in association with this ancient astrological tipping point. The turn of the year - tropical, sidereal - in hot regions and freezing ones - has always been marked so clearly. A traveller in ancient times must have known that, no matter where they ended up, there would be celebrations to join in with as the sun turned about. And now we really are out of that festive season and starting to look for other reasons to celebrate. 

Above: Undhiyu and parathas. Undhiyu would traditionally be made in a clay pot, buried, with coals placed on the lid so it would bake with indirect heat only.

Ven Pongal and aubergine gotsu. Pongal is basically another grain porridge and a sweet milk-cooked version is part of Tamil ritual around Pongal, their name for the solar festival. Was the dish named after the festival, or vice versa? Who knows.