Next: about 22 Mar 2027
Dol Jatra and Basanta Utsav
Bengal plays Holi as Dol Jatra, and at Santiniketan students in yellow basanti sarees dance in the spring festival begun by Tagore.
What is worn for Dol Jatra and Basanta Utsav
Dol Jatra is the Bengali spring colour festival, held on the full moon of Phalguna with a swing procession of Krishna and Radha and the throwing of abir, coloured powder. At Santiniketan the same day is Basanta Utsav, the spring festival started by Rabindranath Tagore at his school. Girls and women wear yellow, called basanti, sarees, often cotton or tant, with flowers in their hair, such as palash, and men wear white or yellow panjabi and dhoti. They sing Tagore songs and dance. Yellow is chosen so that the powder of the day shows brightly, and the colours are applied with a tilak of abir. The same full moon is kept as Holi in much of the rest of India.
The sarees
Written by the EveryPallu desk with AI assistance. Background: "Dol Purnima" on Wikipedia. Customs differ from place to place and family to family. If this is your tradition and we have it wrong, tell us.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Tant sari: Billjones94, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Batik: Fpangestuphotographer, CC BY-SA 4.0, source