A child bride killed herself after enduring the cruelties of a marriage and became a goddess. A daughter-in-law was sacrificed to the village goddess as a trade for ‘greater good’ by her father-in-law, later becoming a goddess herself. A goddess wept in separation from her spouse after the rival kingdom stole his idol. The characters in these stories are girls, women, whose lives shaped by grief and their deaths elevated them to feminine divinity through folk songs that are no less than ballads. Their stories are told every year, embellished, softened, emoted, all accentuated by rhythmic clapping. Stories of agony and grief that live on in the songs sung during the nine days of Bathukamma.

The commemoration of this tradition begins on Mahalaya Amavasya, and walks in step with Navaratri. It ends on Saddula Bathukamma, on Durgashtami, two days before Dasara, the festival that closes Navaratri. In 2026, the festival runs from 10th to 18th October. 

Credit: B. Vishweshwar Rao

It arrives in the last breath of the monsoon, when the ponds are brimming and the plains have burst into wildflowers: Celosia, Marigold, Chrysanthemum, and Tanner’s Cassia—more commonly known as Gunugu, Banthi, Chamanthi and Tangedu. These flowers are honored in the very verses women sing: 

Ememi puvvoppune gauramma, Tangedu puvvoppune gauramma (What flowers shall we offer you, O Mother Gauri; We offer you the Tangedu flower, O Mother Gauri)

These flowers are arranged into elaborate tiered formations that resemble a temple gopuram. As the flowers rise in layers, the changing season finds a place in the ritual, bringing the colours of the land into the courtyards and gatherings where women celebrate. From these, a dome-like-stack is built, usually more than 3 rings on a brass plate, rising like a gopuram, crowned with a lotus or a pumpkin flower and a small goddess made of turmeric. Inside the bright floral arrangement, rough pumpkin leaves and snapped mango twigs form an earthy scaffolding. Fingers work these leaves into place, tucking the flower stems in the leaf bed helping the structure hold. The arranging during the day is just as communal as what is in the evening, women sit on doorsteps after lunch with heaps of different flowers between them, passing flowers, leaves, and gossip in equal measure.

At dusk, the Bathukamma is carried out and set down on the ground, and the women gather around it. Someone starts a line, the others catch it, and the place fills with the sound of a rhythmic clapping. The circle begins to turn, twirl and dance. Anklets and bangles add to rhythm while the street light catches the zari on their sarees, their shadows long and swaying, all the while air is filled with the scent of marigolds and chrysanthemums in the cool air.

Credit: Tailor Srinivas

Each evening has a name of its own, for most part, the names tell you what to offer to the deity. Engili Pula Bathukamma opens the festival with sesame and rice; Saddula Bathukamma closes it with five kinds of rice. The sixth day, Aligina Bathukamma, is when she doesn’t want anything, she’s just sulking, as the word means in Telugu. On the last evening the floral arrangements are carried to a lake or pond and immersed in the water. 

Yet for all this elaborate ritual and practice, no one can say with certainty when it began. Different legends offer different explanations of the festival’s origin, but they all point to the one thing: a woman’s place in a patriarchal society, where their voices are often suppressed, their suffering normalised, and their transformation into figures of divinity. Passed down through oral traditions and folk songs, they offer glimpses into the lives and beliefs of the communities that have sustained the festival across generations. 

The girl at the heart of Bathukamma celebrations is both familiar and enigmatic. She is the daughter for whom the mothers pray, a goddess whom the families worship in the form of wildflowers, and a figure whose suffering has been carried through songs long after the circumstances of her life have slipped beyond reach.

Credit: L. Saraswati

Cultural historian from Telangana, Jayadheer Tirumala Rao describes Bathukamma as the spirit of a girl whom every community and every generation could claim as its own daughter. Like the multi-tiered Bathukamma, her story too, is carried by multiple hands, each adding something of its own until no single entity can claim the whole of her. Pondering her origins, “If at all we are tracing the beginning of this festival or her origin, when can we establish the beginning of a woman’s plight in this male-centric society?“, says Rao.

If the answer to Rao’s question does not point to a date and time but reflects the suffering he speaks of is as old as time, the festival a temporary respite for that pain and Cartoonist Sridhar locates it in the circle itself. For married women,  he recalls, these nine days as a rarity to get a chance to own and gather in a public place, away from the restrictions of their households and speak openly of the troubles in their lives. “Some were married young, leaving their parents’ home before they were old enough to comprehend what marriage awaited them,” he says. In the company of other women, a familiar verse could hold what was difficult to say directly. As Sridhar puts it, women could “Scream their agonies as a song.” The spontaneous repetitive rhyme consisting of words like uyyalo uyyala, chandamama and kol songs made vocabulary for feelings that otherwise would have been swallowed. 

Credit: K L Niharika

And Yet Bathukamma was not entirely of sorrow. Sridhar mentions women gathering wildflowers like Pokabanthi, Gunugu, Tangedu, Gulmohar, and Banthi, arranging them into elaborate tiers and taking pride in the beauty of their creations. Grief, pride, respite, and joy, it seems, shared the same space.

However, folklore and songs are one way of tracing its history. Artist M.V. Ramana Reddy’s interpretation of Bathukamma’s beginning begins with the practice and flowers beyond the folk narratives and woeful ballads. “The festival was initially a celebration of cultivation of monsoon crops,” explaining the use of seasonal flowers, and the rituals, as an interpretation of Bathukamma being an ecological tradition. The creator of Telangana Martyrs Memorial further explains, Gunugu and Tangedu, the wildflowers associated with medicinal properties bloom across Telangana during season, as an integral part of the celebration. In his interpretation, this festival is a symbol of harmony between the land, water, and people, whose name brings together bathuku (life) and amma (mother), to ‘live, O Mother!’, “The environment, the planet itself, is considered the mother,” he says. 

The ecological interpretation does not establish a definitive origin for the festival either. Rao cautions against assigning Bathukamma a precise antiquity without contextual historical evidence. He explains that the many narratives of the vibrant festival survived through oral traditions, which are susceptible to change according to the narrator, their social background and status etc. “The folk songs are narratives, and narratives related to Bathukamma are many,” he says. Sridhar adds who had access to the pen matters: “Had it been a male-centric festival, maybe it would have had documented evidence of its origins and literature.”

In the absence of documented histories and literature, oral traditions like Bathukamma survive in individual memory. For Vijaya Lakshmi, a housewife from Khammam who lived through multiple phases of Bathukamma in her sixty years, Bathukamma began as a ritual within the compound walls of her family home in a small village called Patharlapadu, where the floral mound was worshipped as a form of goddess Gauri. It was after marriage, when she moved to Nelakondapalli, a mandal zone that shares close borders with neighboring state Andhra Pradesh both geographically and culturally, she encountered community celebrations in which women gathered beyond the peripheries of their compound walls.

Credit: Kurella Srinivas

Speaking to FII, “It is a daughter’s festival. for these nine days, the goddess is considered a daughter“, she says as she describes the festival. She explains that, in some families, the celebration within the household ends when the daughter of the house marries and leaves home, although the family may still join the community gatherings if they wish to. The songs too, are passed down from mothers to daughters, as she calls them “life lessons”, carrying advice about the situations a girl may encounter after marriage. The occasional patriarchal undertones of a song are perceived as advice to pass down to the daughters. The affection in passing down this inheritance is genuine, but, the state of affairs that caused the need, not so much. 

The memory wheel winds different things for different people. For Hyndavi, a thirty-year old surgeon, who grew up celebrating Bathukamma in Warangal in the 2010s, during the rise of Telangana movement and the formation of Telangana state. The festival carries the memories of Dasara holiday: cousins gathering at one place, to the slow peaceful Bathukamma gathering with old folksongs being sung by the elders, a memory she keeps going back to every year is, the farewell song sung after the flowers were immersed, “After the women immersed their Bathukamma, it floats away in the water and the women would sing a farewell song as they walk back to their respective homes”, she says.

Recalling her childhood experience of celebrating the festivities, she shares an observation with FII, “The dowry exchange songs in a marriage setting were in a playful tone.”

Sharing about her participation in the recent years, she says “I don’t find many people of my age group, so the excitement vanishes as soon as I reach the venue. Sometimes it feels like a formality with all the urban-commercial elements we have integrated into the festivities.”

Credit: Akshay Anand

The commercial elements Hyndavi describes have a history. It was imbibed in the culture through years of political mobilization. Through the Telangana movement, Bathukamma, along with Bonalu and Sammakka Sarakka Jatara, regional festivals of Telangana, grew into a marker of the region’s cultural identity. ‘Bathukamma’ as an idea never carried one political identity, but it has been used as a political device again and again. In the years of the Telangana movement, a region that felt overshadowed within united Andhra Pradesh amplified its voice via Bathukamma, under the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, now Bharat Rashtra Samithi, women took it to the streets, singing, dancing, and celebrating, as part of a peaceful protest for separate statehood. The mother they sang to in those streets was the state itself. 

When the long fight for statehood was won in June 2014, Telangana, a new state was carved out of combined Andhra Pradesh and the new government soon named Bathukamma and Bonalu state festivals. The political agenda took a ‘women’s ritual’ and made it an essential day on the state calendar.

The form of a Bathukamma song has been borrowed multiple times for political ends by both Telangana native political parties and Hindu religious extremist bodies. The 2024 Telugu film Razakar featured a song composed in elegy style of a traditional Bathukamma with the recurring rhythm uyyalo uyyala, promoting islamophobic ideas in reference to the atrocities committed by the Nizam of Hyderabad on the people of this region. 

Across centuries of mythological and domestic narratives, political agendas, cinematic re-contextualisation, Bathukamma has played many roles. Sometimes a role of a woman who attains divine status after being wronged by the society, other times she shines as the mother figure, as the environment, as the land. Yet under every narrative embraced and borrowed, lies Rao’s question unanswered: When can we establish the beginning of a woman’s plight in this society?