Pola Festival: The Night the Bulls Become Kings

1The Evening a Village Stopped for Its Bulls

I did not plan to spend Pola crouched on an upturned tipni, the feeding trough, in a cattle shed outside Katol, but that is where the evening put me. A farmer named Sudhakar was working turmeric paste into the shoulders of an ox that had ploughed his fields for eleven seasons, and he kept calling the animal Bhaubandh, which means something closer to blood kin than livestock. He never once used the Marathi word for cattle in the hour I sat there. The shed smelled of wet mud, warm dung, and the sharp turmeric being ground on a stone right beside me, and somewhere behind the house a transistor radio was playing an old Marathi film song nobody was really listening to. That single evening, more than anything I read afterward, told me what this festival is actually about. It is not a festival about animals so much as a festival about a debt that farming families feel they owe an animal that has hauled their harvest, their firewood, and sometimes their children, without complaint, for a decade or longer.

I spent my first stretch of days in that Vidarbha belt around Nagpur and Katol, then travelled south into Bastar, Chhattisgarh, where the same festival wears an almost unrecognisable tribal face. Getting to Sudhakar's village was simple enough once I had landed in Nagpur, home to Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar International Airport and one of central India's busiest railway junctions. Katol sits barely fifty kilometres northwest of the city, an hour by shared jeep from the Nagpur bus stand or a cheap taxi ride if you would rather not wait for the jeep to fill up. I based myself at Hotel Shravan, a simple, well kept place a five minute walk from Nagpur railway station, since Katol has almost nowhere formal to stay, and made the short trip out each afternoon, returning after the evening aarti rather than trying to find a bed in the village. Everything below comes from those two very different weeks, from elders, a village priest, a Gond craftsman near Jagdalpur, and more than a few evenings spent scrolling Marathi Facebook groups and old Quora threads trying to understand the pieces nobody had explained to me out loud.

2The Boy Who Killed a Bull Shaped Demon

Every elder I met gave me some version of the same story, though the details shifted a little from house to house, the way oral stories always do. Kansa, the tyrant king of Mathura who feared a prophecy that a child born to his sister would end his rule, sent a stream of demons to kill the infant Krishna in Gokul. One of these, a demon named Polasur, took the disguise of an ordinary bull and slipped into a herd grazing near the village, waiting for a chance to trample the child. Krishna, still a boy, is said to have seen through the disguise, wrestled the demon bull to the ground, and ended the threat before real harm was done.

Because the demon's undoing came through a child facing down an animal, the festival that grew out of the story keeps two threads running together, gratitude toward real bulls for their labour, and a tenderness toward children, who get new clothes, sweets, and a whole separate day of their own in Tanha Pola. A second, softer thread ties the festival to Nandi, the bull who carries Lord Shiva, and a few households told me they think less of the demon story and more of Nandi when they garland their own animals, treating the bullock almost as a small stand in for the divine vehicle itself. An old schoolteacher in Katol, Vasant, put it more bluntly over tea one evening. He said Pitha in Marathi means flour, and Pola falls on Pithori Amavasya, the darkest new moon night of the year, when elders in his childhood used to point at the pitch black sky and tell children it looked as though someone had scattered wheat flour across it, a small piece of folk poetry that gave the night its second name, Kushopatini Amavasya, and that almost nobody writes down anymore.

A bullock that has never once been struck in anger will plough a straight furrow even for a nervous farmer, that is the whole religion of Pola, Sudhakar said, without a trace of irony, tying a fresh garland of aboli flowers around his ox's neck.

3The Night Before, When the Rope Comes Off

Pola does not begin on the morning everyone photographs. It begins the evening before, in a quieter, almost private set of rituals that most visitors never see because they arrive only for the parade. As dusk fell the day before Pola in Sudhakar's house, his son loosened the nose rope, the vesan, from the ox's nostrils in a small ceremony the family called Vesan Todi. Nobody threw the old rope in the household rubbish. Sudhakar's wife walked it out to the edge of the cattle shed and buried it there, quietly, without ceremony, the way you might bury something you were fond of.

Then came the part almost no article mentions, a ritual called khandshekhani, from khand meaning the hump on a bullock's back and shekhani meaning to massage. Sudhakar worked clarified butter into the animal's hump with slow, deliberate strokes while his younger daughter sat nearby grinding turmeric on a flat stone, the yellow paste building up under her fingernails. It was the gentlest, least performed moment I watched all week, nothing like the loud colour and drumming of the following afternoon, just a farmer's hands working ghee into an old friend's back in the fading light. That night the bullocks were fed a light, easily digestible bajra khichadi rather than their usual dry fodder, since a heavy stomach the next morning is considered bad for both temperament and appearance during the parade.

4The Day Itself, From River to Rangoli

By the time the sky had barely begun to lighten, Sudhakar's whole family was already awake and walking the bullocks down a narrow path toward the river. This was, without question, the one morning of the year an ordinary working animal got sustained, unhurried physical attention, and it showed. One of the two oxen simply lay down in the shallow water the way a toddler might in a bathtub, and nobody hurried him back up.

Back home, the real artistry began. Horns were painted, and I noticed the choice of colour was not casual at all. Sudhakar's neighbour argued with his own son for a good ten minutes over whether to paint their bull's horns red, for vigour heading into the next ploughing season, or green, which some families choose after a difficult harvest as a quiet sort of prayer for renewal. Necks were strung with bells and cowrie shells, backs draped in an embroidered cloth called jhul, foreheads fitted with a small decorative plate, and in a couple of the wealthier households I visited, the animal's entire body was dabbed with symmetrical dots and handprints in natural dye, an hour or more of unhurried, genuinely artistic work.

By late afternoon the whole village gathered for the procession, dhol drums going, the metallic jangle of the lezhim instrument cutting through everything, and the women singing powadas, the old heroic folk songs, along with aartis in praise of the bullocks. The lead animal wore a wooden frame called the makhar tied across its horns, and just before the procession entered the village centre, it was made to charge through a toran, a string of mango leaves stretched tight between two bamboo posts, snapping the leaves and, more often than not, the makhar frame itself in the process. Farmers told me quietly, almost embarrassed to say it out loud, that an unbroken makhar is read as a small bad omen for the coming sowing season, which is exactly why the crowd deliberately excites the lead bullock at that point, shouting and clapping until it bucks hard enough to shatter the frame clean through.

Once home, the family performed aarti with a ghee lamp, pressed a fresh kumkum mark onto the animal's forehead, and offered a plate of puran poli before anyone in the household touched their own food. In every home I visited that evening, the bullock ate first. Nobody explained that hierarchy to me. Nobody needed to.

5The Giant Effigies of Nagpur and the Bull Race Nobody Expected to See Again

What I had not expected, staying near Nagpur that week, was to learn Pola has a second, much stranger cousin festival running alongside it in the old city. Locals call it Marbata, a hundred and thirty five year old Vidarbha tradition in which two enormous effigies, a yellow one called Pivli Marbata and a black one called Kali Marbata, are carried through roughly ten kilometres of old Nagpur's lanes on the day after Pola, accompanied by crowds chanting for the effigies to be taken away and destroyed, a symbolic clearing out of the year's evil before the new farming season truly begins. Almost none of the mainstream festival guides connect Marbata to Pola at all, even though in Nagpur the two are treated by locals as two halves of the same week.

The other detail that came up more than once, in conversation and in old Marathi news forum posts, was bull racing. Bullock cart racing had been banned by court order for years before the Supreme Court lifted the ban in 2021, and farmers in the villages around Katol spoke about that reversal the way you might talk about getting back something you thought was gone for good. A decoration competition runs alongside the race in most villages now, judged purely on how well a bullock has been dressed, and Sudhakar's neighbour, the same man who argued over horn colour, walked away that evening with a small cash prize and considerably more pride than the amount actually warranted.

6Bastar Wears Pola Differently

The Maharashtra version of Pola is at least somewhat documented. Nothing prepared me for how differently the festival plays out once you cross into the tribal belts of Chhattisgarh around Bastar and Jagdalpur, roughly seven hundred kilometres southeast of Nagpur, where I travelled after Vidarbha. Getting there took some planning of its own. I flew from Nagpur into Raipur, since Jagdalpur's own small airport has only limited connections, then covered the remaining three hundred kilometres by a shared taxi that took most of a day along National Highway 30, stopping twice for chai at roadside stalls that seemed to exist purely for that stretch of road. A direct overnight bus from Raipur to Jagdalpur exists too, and several travellers I met later wished they had taken it instead, since it saves a hotel night in Raipur altogether. I stayed at Naman Bastar, a quiet, family run property on the edge of Jagdalpur town, within easy auto rickshaw distance of both the main market and the road out toward the villages, since the settlements themselves have no visitor accommodation at all. Here Pola does not stand alone. It sits inside a longer cluster of monsoon festivals that includes Hareli, dedicated to farm tools and the earth itself, and Navakhani, the ceremonial first tasting of the new rice crop offered to the village deity by a ritual healer called the Baiga. Pola in this belt felt less like a single spectacle and more like one beat inside a much longer agricultural rhythm that most outsiders never get to see in full.

My local guide drove me by motorbike into settlements where families earn their living from dokra metal casting and terracotta work, selling their pieces at the weekly tribal market known as the haat. Pola here stretched across three linked days rather than one single climax, folding a full market day of cattle, produce, and handicrafts in alongside the worship itself. Clay idols of Nandi, shaped by hand rather than bought from a shop, were everywhere, and barefoot children raced them along dirt paths the same way Maharashtrian children race their carved wooden ones. There was a medicine man ritual in the village square that stopped me completely, a group of men working themselves into a trance purely through drumming, no substances involved as far as anyone could tell me, until they rose and moved through the crowd touching the sick and promising to cure them.

The Haat Market Itself

The market that runs alongside Pola in these Adivasi villages deserves its own telling. Stray cattle wandered freely between the stalls, and more than once a vendor sent one trotting off with a well aimed clod of earth, the sacred animal treated with far less ceremony here than in a Vidarbha cattle shed. At the edge of the haat, a woman offered me a rice flour pancake, and when I asked what people were eating alongside it, she pointed me toward a chutney made from red weaver ants, tart and sharp at first bite, then turning strangely bitter, and the grimace I made sent the women around her into open laughter. A little further on, palm sap and mahua flower liquor were being poured, not into glasses but into a leaf rolled into a makeshift cone, and I drank a sip or two out of simple curiosity more than thirst. The loudest corner of the market, by some distance, was the cockfighting ring, and I watched exactly one match before deciding I had seen enough and drifting back toward the crowd.

What struck me most, oddly, was how often the camera pointed back at me. I had gone there hoping to photograph women in bright saris against the backdrop of the nearby Chitrakoot Falls, only to find myself pulled into their photographs instead, laughing strangers asking to stand beside me for a picture, as curious about the visitor as I was about the festival.

The Night the DJ Finally Played Music

That evening, word had gone around that something was happening at the village hall, and I wandered over expecting music. Instead I found a stage occupied by a handful of young men talking into a microphone and photographing each other, and within moments of being spotted at the back of the crowd I was pulled bodily up onto the stage, hands reaching out from every side wanting to be shaken, phones and cameras thrust toward me. My guide had, rather unhelpfully, waited until we were walking home to mention that three women from the market had asked him earlier whether I might like to stay the night at their house. I escaped the stage eventually, only to be swarmed again the moment I stepped onto the dance floor once the DJ finally got the music going. Someone pressed a cup of mahua into my hand along the way, and I drank it, though I drew the line at joining the dancing, however gently they tried to pull me in. Away from the market and the hall, the bull races themselves happened in an open field with barely a track marked out, judged entirely by the shouting consensus of the crowd standing along the edges, no stage or microphone anywhere near them. It remains one of the most genuinely unfiltered festival experiences I have had anywhere in India, and one of the hardest to plan a visit around, since nothing about its exact timing or location is written down anywhere official.

7What Gets Cooked, and Why It Differs by State

Food on Pola is not incidental. It is the second half of the ritual, since the bullock eats before the family does, and the family's own feast mirrors, almost exactly, what was offered to the animal a little earlier that morning. In Sudhakar's kitchen the centrepiece was puran poli, a sweet flatbread stuffed with jaggery and split gram, rolled thin and cooked on a heavy tawa until the filling nearly showed through, served alongside karanji, a curved fried pastry stuffed with coconut and jaggery, and a stack of bajra bhakri eaten with a smear of fresh white butter that his wife had churned herself two days earlier.

Cross into Chhattisgarh and the table changes completely. In the Bastar household that fed me that week, nothing resembled puran poli at all. Instead there was thethri and khurmi, deep fried rice flour snacks twisted into rosettes and ribbons, chausela, a slightly sweet fried disc studded with sesame, and a bowl of khirapaat, a dense, almost fudge like sweet of coconut, jaggery, and roasted nuts that the grandmother of the house pressed into my hands twice before I finally stopped protesting that I was full. She told me, half laughing, that nothing gets fried in new oil in her kitchen until the bullocks have had their own share of jaggery and boiled grain first, a small unwritten household rule that shapes the entire order of the morning's cooking and that I have never once seen mentioned in a recipe article.

8Tanha Pola, the Day That Belongs to Children

The morning after the main festival, the whole tone of the village softens into something gentler called Tanha Pola, or Motha Pola in parts of Vidarbha. Every child, whether or not the family owns real cattle, is handed a wooden or clay bull to decorate with beads, tiny bells, and scraps of coloured cloth. Groups of them then pull these toy bulls on strings from house to house, and neighbours press coins or sweets into their palms, a custom that felt, watching it unfold on a dusty lane in Katol, uncannily close to a harvest season version of trick or treat.

Local memory in Nagpur traces the wooden bull tradition back to Raghuji Bhonsale the Second, a Maratha ruler remembered for commissioning bulls hand carved from jamun, neem, and mahua wood so that landless, cattle less families in his kingdom would never have to sit out the festival's spirit. Nobody I asked could point me to a written record of this, and I suspect the story has softened a little with each generation that retells it, but the impulse behind it, that no child should be excluded from Pola for want of an animal, still visibly shapes how the day is organised in these villages today.

9Pola in the Age of the Tractor

Every farmer I spoke with in Vidarbha owned or had regular access to a tractor. Bullocks are no longer the backbone of most farms there the way they were even twenty years ago, and Sudhakar admitted, almost sheepishly, that his own ox mostly pulls a small cart to the weekly market now rather than a plough. Yet Pola shows no sign of fading. If anything, watching it up close, the ritual felt more deliberate precisely because it is no longer economically necessary, a conscious choice to keep a relationship alive rather than a chore performed out of dependence.

In the cities, the festival has simply moved indoors. Scrolling through Marathi Facebook groups one evening in my hotel room in Nagpur, I found dozens of photographs from Pune and Mumbai families who no longer own cattle at all but still buy a small clay bull, set it beside the household tulsi plant, garland it, and finish the whole puja in a few quiet minutes rather than the daylong affair I had just spent a week inside. It is a smaller gesture by every measure, yet the underlying grammar of the festival, gratitude offered to a symbol of labour, survives the move from field to flat without losing its shape.

10If You Want to Witness Pola Yourself

Pola in 2026 falls in early September, tied to the new moon of the Shravana month, so the exact date shifts slightly by region and is worth checking against a local Hindu calendar closer to the time. The festival is celebrated widely across Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh, with smaller pockets of observance in Telangana and Karnataka under other names, so a visitor has several genuinely different versions of the same day to choose between.

Vidarbha, Maharashtra, for the fullest village experience

This is where I would send a first time visitor. Nagpur is the natural base, reachable by direct flights from every major Indian city into Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar International Airport, and by train on nearly every route running through central India, since Nagpur sits at the junction of the Delhi to Chennai and Mumbai to Kolkata lines. From there, villages around Katol, Wardha, and Amravati, all within one to three hours by road, offer the most accessible and least commercialised version of the procession, with the ritual usually building through the late afternoon. I stayed at Hotel Shravan near the railway station, one of several straightforward budget options in the same stretch, and hired a car or shared jeep out to a village for the day rather than expecting to find a room closer to the action. If your dates allow it, stay one extra evening in the city for the Marbata effigy procession, which winds through the old Mahal and Itwari neighbourhoods of Nagpur the day after Pola.

Bastar, Chhattisgarh, for the tribal market version

This route takes more patience and rewards it. Fly into Raipur's Swami Vivekananda Airport, well connected to Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and other major cities, then continue to Jagdalpur either by the roughly seven hour road journey along National Highway 30, by overnight sleeper bus, or by one of the limited daily flights when they are running. I based myself at Naman Bastar on the edge of Jagdalpur town, which made a sensible base from which to hire a car or motorbike out to the surrounding Adivasi villages and their weekly haat markets, since the villages themselves offer nowhere for an outside visitor to stay overnight. Build in at least three or four days here rather than one, since the festival unfolds gradually across linked days rather than a single scheduled event with a fixed start time.

Madhya Pradesh and beyond

Balaghat district in Madhya Pradesh, close to the Maharashtra border, celebrates its own well organised version of Pola with wooden bull worship and chariot processions, and is an easy add on if you are already travelling between Nagpur and central India. Parts of the Konkan coast of Maharashtra mark a related festival called Bendur on the same lunar date, worth knowing about if your trip is coastal rather than inland.

Arrive a day early wherever you choose. The quiet khandshekhani ritual on the eve of Pola, the one almost no visitor ever sees, told me more about the emotional centre of this festival than the louder, more photographed procession that followed it the next afternoon.

Written from firsthand travel across village Maharashtra and Bastar, Chhattisgarh, alongside conversations with farming families, a village priest, and Gond craftspeople. Dates are approximate and should be verified against a current Hindu calendar before travel.