The Feast of Love, in Krishna: Myths, Rites, and Attitudes

The Feast of Love, McKim Marriott's essay in Krishna, Myths, Rites, and Attitudes, published by the East-West Center Press in 1966, is a scholarly anthropological analysis of Holi as observed in the North Indian village Marriott studied directly, reading the festival's ritualized role reversal and boundary crossing, including the temporary inversion of caste and gender norms, as a structured symbolic statement about social hierarchy rather than simple disorder. Marriott was a pioneering anthropologist of South Asian village society whose fieldwork based method grounds the essay in direct observation. Its strength is that fieldwork specificity, tied to one documented community's actual practice rather than a generalized account of Holi across all of India. Its limit is exactly that specificity, Marriott's interpretation describes the particular village he studied in the 1950s, so a claim treating his reading of that community's Holi as representative of the festival's meaning everywhere in India needs to account for real regional and historical variation the essay does not itself cover.