The Festival of Colour

Holi was originally a spring festival of fertility and harvest. Now it also marks some hindu legends. Holi is a two-day festival and it is a holiday associated with relaxing some social restrictions normally associated with castle, class, gender and age. The festival bridges social gaps and brings people belonging to all walks of life together. It brings about an atmosphere of togetherness and merriment.
 The central ritual of holi is the throwing and applying of colored water and powder on friends and family, which gives the holiday its common name ‘Festival of colours.’ This ritual is said to be based on the story of Krishsna and Radha as well as on Krishna’s playful habit of spraying water on his friends and household help, but most of all it celebrates the coming of spring with all its beautiful colours and vibrant life.

In the old part of Dhaka, especially at Shskhsri Bazar and the Tanti Bazar area, people enjoy this festival in all its vigour, where age, gender and religion bend in one large bucket of vibrant colour.