Zeitgeist is different from the moment Halloween and Diwali overlapped
Texas authorities say they are prepared to offer President-elect Donald Trump thousands of acres of land along the US-Mexico border to build detention facilities for undocumented migrants. The zeitgeist feels very different from that moment at the end of October when Halloween and Diwali coincided. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books on two stories for our times. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/ and get the post and podcast the day it drops
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The Big Story:
Halloween and Diwali coincided, prompting cross-cultural events in some parts of the world and twice the opportunities for commerce everywhere both festivals are celebrated.
…Like Halloween, Diwali is getting attention from big business.
Barbie has got its first ‘Diwali doll’, dressed in traditional Indian attire and makeup…
Some describe the 2024 twinning of Diwali and Halloween with creative mashups such as Diwaloween or Hallowali.
The growing prominence of Diwali in countries with expatriate Hindu communities raises the question: Could it properly take root in faraway soil, just as Halloween did in the United States in the late 19th century?
This Week, Those Books:
- How Halloween, an import from far away, became an all-American feature.
- The Hindu epic Ramayana remains a story for our times.
The Backstory:
- Diwali and Halloween…coincide every few years because Diwali shifts around according to the lunar calendar, while Halloween is always on October 31.
- Halloween rituals became a full-blown American holiday only because Irish immigrants to the US took their customs with them in the 19th century…
This Week’s Books:
Halloween: An American holiday, an American history
By: Lesley Bannatyne
Publisher: Pelican Publishing
Year: 1990
This book, by historian Lesley Bannatyne, is one of five she has written on Halloween. It’s a reminder of the impact new peoples can have on old places. Irish immigrants to the US transported their rituals, which allowed the creation of Halloween as an all-American holiday. It would go on to become a social, cultural and commercial feature of the American way of life. And it is now a huge export…
What’s particularly nice about this book is that it also provides recipes, poems and songs that relate to Halloween through the ages.
Choice quote:
“Wherever the Irish went – Boston, New York, Baltimore, through the Midwest to Chicago and beyond – Halloween followed along. Irish Halloween rituals met with similar rituals practiced by blacks, Germans, English and Scots and gained momentum throughout the second half of the 19th century. By the turn of the century, Halloween became a full-blown American holiday”.
The Ramayana: A shortened modern prose version of the Indian epic
By: R. K. Narayan
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1977; 2006 edition with an introduction by Pankaj Mishra
The Ramayana is a great story – the triumph of good over evil, of light over darkness – and the late R K Narayan’s version remains as compelling as when it was first published nearly a half-century ago.
But this edition is noteworthy because of the nuanced introduction by Pankaj Mishra…
as Mishra makes clear, this is bardic literature and “the story of Rama has proliferated bewilderingly”, existing in all major Indian languages, as well as Thai, Tibetan, Laotian, Malaysian, Chinese, Cambodian, and Javanese. Many versions, he notes, “contradict one another, often self-consciously…” Mishra’s introduction does a brilliant job in pointing out why Narayan’s version is worth reading: “…so instinctively scrupulous and fair-minded is Narayan as a writer that not only Rama but also Ravana emerges as a fully rounded, even somewhat sympathetic, character”…
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Originally published at This Week, Those Books
