Hola Mohalla

Guru Gobind Singh held the first mohalla at Anandpur in the spring of 1701, on the day after Holi. The placement was not incidental and the tradition has never presented it as such.

Holi is a festival of coloured powder, licensed disorder and reversal. What the Guru instituted the following day was a mock battle: two forces, an objective, a column advancing on it to drums, and a review afterwards. The name is built the same way, hola, a masculine form made from Holi, joined to mohalla, an organised march.

The programme is the same one that produced the Khalsa at Anandpur two years earlier: a community given its own forms, its own initiation, its own dress, its own discipline, in place of forms shared with its neighbours. A festival of play was answered with a festival of preparation.

That reading is the tradition's own and is stated openly in Sikh sources, which is worth saying because the parallel case of Bandi Chhor Divas is often disputed. Here there is no dispute about intent. What is sometimes lost is that Hola Mohalla is not Sikh Holi any more than Bandi Chhor Divas is Sikh Diwali; it was constructed as an alternative, by someone who said so.

The Nihang orders, who lead the modern gathering at Anandpur with horsemanship and weapons demonstrations, maintain the martial content the festival was created to house. The crowd is now in the hundreds of thousands.

What began as a martial exercise for a small early Khalsa community has grown into one of the largest annual gatherings in Sikh religious life, with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims converging on Anandpur Sahib each year for several days of processions, mock combat displays, poetry recitation and community meals served from enormous langar kitchens, a scale of crowd management that requires coordinated planning by Punjab state authorities and the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee well beyond anything the original seventeenth century muster would have needed.

The Nihang orders who lead the martial displays use genuine traditional weapons, including swords and spears, in choreographed demonstrations of horsemanship and swordsmanship, and the combination of large crowds, edged weapons and horses has occasionally raised safety concerns that organisers address through designated display areas and marshalling, a modern safety layer sitting on top of a festival whose core content, drilled martial readiness performed in public, has changed remarkably little in substance since Guru Gobind Singh first instituted it, even as the audience for it has grown by many orders of magnitude.

The martial displays performed by the Nihang orders centre on gatka, the traditional Sikh martial art combining swordsmanship, stick-fighting and mounted combat that the Khalsa developed for real battlefield use in the eighteenth century, and Hola Mohalla remains the single largest annual public stage on which gatka is performed, giving a martial art that might otherwise have faded into ceremonial memory a living annual occasion at the very site where the Khalsa itself was founded.