What is Bhogi?

Bhogi is the first day of the four-day Sankranti festival, falling on January 13th or 14th, and it opens with fire. Before dawn, households drag out what they no longer want — old wooden furniture, broken baskets, worn-out clothes, cane and coconut fronds, anything that represents the year's accumulated dead weight — and burn it in a street bonfire called the Bhogi mantalu. Neighbors build it together, kids are sent to collect fuel the evening before, and everyone stands around it in the cold half-light while it goes up. The logic is direct: the old is combusted so the new season has room. It doubles as a seasonal marker, because Sankranti tracks the sun's turn north and Bhogi is the last morning of the coldest stretch. Afterward comes an oil bath, new clothes, and a house scrubbed and fronted with a fresh muggu, the rice-flour floor design, often with a lump of cow dung and a pumpkin flower set in the middle.

Then there is the part that children remember. In the evening, families perform Bhogi pallu for kids under about five: the child sits while elders pour a mixture of regi pandu (jujube berries), small coins, flower petals, sugarcane pieces, and rice over their head, a blessing meant to shield them from the evil eye and ensure a good year. The berries are the signature; regi pandu appear in markets in the weeks before, and their arrival is how people know Sankranti is close. The kid is usually confused, occasionally crying, and photographed extensively. Houses also display the Bommala Koluvu, a tiered arrangement of dolls and figurines, and Gobbemma — decorated cow-dung mounds set in the muggu by young girls, who sing around them. Bhogi is also when the year's first harvest is acknowledged, which is why the day belongs as much to farmers and villages as to city households performing a compressed version of the same thing.