Costumes, Customs and Cuisine of Haryana: Exam Notes

The way a Haryanvi village dresses, marries and eats is asked in HSSC, HPSC and CET papers as plainly as its rivers and canals, because these are the facts that mark the state apart from its neighbours. The dress is built for field work and for heat, the ornaments have names that belong to this tract alone, the marriage customs are governed by the gotra and the village rather than by the family alone, and the kitchen rests on bajra, milk and ghee. This chapter sets out the costumes, the ornaments part by part, the customs of birth, marriage and death, and the dishes with the occasions on which they are cooked.

Dress of women and men

The traditional dress of a Haryanvi woman has three pieces: the daaman, a long gathered skirt; the kurti or angi, a short upper garment; and the chunder or odhni, a long veil drawn over the head and across the shoulder. A ghagri is worn in place of the daaman in some districts, and the colours of the chunder, red and yellow for a bride, black with a bright border for an older woman, carry their own meaning. The man wears a dhoti with a kurta and a pagri, the turban tied in the local style, with a jutti on the feet and an angocha, a thin cotton cloth, over the shoulder; in winter a khes or a loi is wrapped over the kurta and a mirjai, a short jacket, is worn above it. The khes, a thick double woven cotton wrap, is the best known handloom product of the state and is associated above all with Panipat, the textile town of Haryana, which also weaves the panja durrie.

Ornaments part by part

Most of these were made in silver rather than gold, because silver was within the reach of a farming household, and the heavy hansli at the neck and the pachheli at the wrist are still the marks of a Haryanvi bride in folk songs and in the Saang theatre.

Customs of birth, marriage and death

At a birth the household observes the chhathi on the sixth day, when the mother and child are bathed and the family sings, and in many villages a kuan pujan, the worship of the well, follows. The marriage customs are the heart of the chapter. Rural Haryana follows a strict rule of exogamy: a marriage is avoided within the gotra of the father and of the mother, and also within the village, since all families of a village are treated as a brotherhood; this is why a bride almost always comes from outside the village. The khap, a council of villages of the same clan or group of clans, is the old social body that enforced such rules and settled disputes, and the chaupal, the platform at the centre of the village, is where it met.

The ceremonies run from the roka and sagai to the ban and mehndi, the bhaat, the phera and the vidai. The bhaat is the gift brought by the mother's brother at the marriage of her son or daughter, and the ceremony of bringing it, bhaat bharna, is an occasion in itself, with the maternal uncle's family honoured by the household. A widow's remarriage to the younger brother of her dead husband is the custom known as karewa, also called chadar dalna or chadar andazi from the sheet placed over the woman as a token of the new marriage; it kept land and children within the family and is recorded in colonial settlement reports of the region. A death is followed by the kriya and the thirteenth day gathering, the terahvin.

Festive customs

Teej, the Hariyali Teej of the month of Sawan, is the women's festival of the state, with swings hung from trees, new clothes sent by the parents to a married daughter and ghevar eaten. Gugga Naumi, in Bhadrapad, honours Gugga Pir, the snake deity, and his chhari is carried from house to house. During Navratri the girls make Sanjhi, an image of the goddess shaped in clay and cow dung on the courtyard wall and decorated for the nine nights. Raksha Bandhan is called Salono here, Holi is played as Dulhandi, and the fairs of Gugga, Devi and the Surajkund crafts mela fill the rest of the calendar.

The Haryanvi kitchen

The food of the state rests on bajra, wheat, gram, milk and ghee, and the saying that Haryana is the land of milk and curd, dudh dahi ka khana, is the state's own description of itself. The everyday meal is a bajra or wheat roti with a vegetable, white butter and a glass of lassi. Among the named dishes are bajra khichdi, bajra aloo roti, besan masala roti, hara cholia, kachri ki chutney, methi gajar, bathua raita and the thick Haryanvi kadhi with pakoras. The sweets are tied to seasons and festivals: ghevar at Teej, malpua and gulgule at fairs, churma, meethe chawal, kheer and, in the cold months, alsi ki pinni made of flaxseed and gond ke laddu, both eaten for warmth. A candidate should be able to name the occasion for each dish, because that is how the question is set.

What the paper asks

Three kinds of question come from this chapter: the ornament with the part of the body, daaman and chunder with the woman and khes and pagri with the man; the custom with its name, karewa for the widow's remarriage and bhaat for the maternal uncle's gift; and the dish with its occasion, ghevar with Teej and alsi ki pinni with winter. The names are local, so learning the meaning of each word matters more than reading the chapter through.