I’m in Mudrangadi near Mangalore for my cousins wedding. This is my ancestral home, a village to the North of Mangalore, Karnataka.
These past few days have been the most closely and deeply that I’ve experienced village life.
First a fascinating ceremony
The Roce (pronounced “row-se”) is a sort of purification ceremony done before a Mangalorean or Goan wedding. It literally translates to juice, sounding similar to ras, the Hindi word for juice. The family members of the bride/groom take turns to anoint the the bride/groom with coconut milk and bless them. This signifies a purification before beginning married life . A superbly detailed description of the Roce can be found here.
Being away from family, I haven’t attended too many weddings in the past few years. Even for the ones I did attend, I’ve missed out on all the traditional wedding rituals and ceremonies because I’ve ended up going only for the wedding. But I do recall the Roce of my uncle Leslie, occuring when I was about 8 years old. We invited our close relatives to our house and everyone took turns to anoint him. This was followed by a dinner. It was a very small ceremony involving barely 30-40 people. This was in stark contrast to a Roce ceremony of a certain DJ Roshan that I attended a few days back.The family members decked out their whole waado (frontyard) and in attendance were about 150 people. There was an MC, a brass band, a DJ, food and plentiful drinks . After the roce, the MC conducted some games to keep the crowd entertained, this was followed by DJ-led pop music dance.
Interestingly, the Roce began with a simulation of how a roce would be conducted in older (simpler and poorer) times. A group of villagers would assemble together at house of the bride groom. Each group/family would bring something to the roce. Things brought would include fruits, vegetables and also livestock . Together the villagers would use whatever they had gotten to light up a charcoal fire and prepare a dinner.
In the Roce (inside the roce) that I attended, apart from fruits and vegetables, somebody brought carried a live cock. And there was also a pig tie and hung upside down on a stick being carried by two villagers . Every few minutes the pig would get agitated and start trying to break free, the villagers carrying him, who were just about strong enough to handle the agitations, would then struggle to hold the pig up. I should have taken pictures!
Today is the roce of my cousin Neil, we are expecting 870 people!
In stark contrast to the roces of yore, my cousins wedding will have a video DJ and a Disney-theme, taking things to a whole new level of grandeur.
Life
Most people live in huge bungalows with a lawn in front of their houses. Unlike urban areas, houses aren’t that densely clustered with large amount of empty land between places . Road infrastructure is decent and being actively improved.
Though people have decent size land holdings, life is not agricultural. People do have a few trees and plants around their houses but that’s not the primary source of food . Water for cleaning/household use is pumped from a borewell, drinking water from a surface well. Most folks I am encountering are single income homes with the father earning by running a business, working overseas, teaching in a nearby school, etc.
Religion plays a big part in peoples lives. The whole city of Udupi nearby is awash with billboards announcing a grand pooja that will last for two years . The city is also visibly being spruced up for the same.
The community is quite tightly knit. As a flipside, this also a drives worries about one’s local reputation. I constantly hear statements like “people will say bad things”, “we can’t spoil our relations with X”, “people will talk if we make mistakes like that” etc. indicating a more complex web of relationships that dictates who comes to your wedding, MCs for it, etc. The dominant language here is Konkani (and that means I struggle to understand most things people say!)