The Nallur Festival: Twenty-Five Days of Devotion at Sri Lanka's Most Important Hindu Temple

The Nallur Kandaswamy festival runs for twenty-five consecutive days in July and August at the most important Hindu temple in Sri Lanka, and it builds from modest daily puja rituals at the start into something of extraordinary scale and intensity at its conclusion. The final days of the festival bring hundreds of thousands of Tamil Hindu devotees from across Sri Lanka, from India, and from the Tamil diaspora worldwide to witness and participate in a celebration that has been performed at this site for centuries.

The kavadi ritual is the element most associated with the Nallur festival. Devotees who have made vows to the deity Skanda fulfil those vows publicly by carrying kavadi, elaborate wooden frames decorated with peacock feathers and attached to their bodies through flesh hooks and skewers, while dancing to the sound of drums and horns. The pain of the hooks is said to be transcended through the devotion that carries the devotee through the procession. Witnessing this act of devoted will, performed freely and publicly, is one of the most confronting and most humbling experiences available in Sri Lanka.

The evening processions throughout the festival involve an elaborately decorated chariot, pulled by ropes held by thousands of devotees moving through the streets of Jaffna. The sound of the drums and the smell of camphor and incense and the press of the crowd and the visible devotion on every face around you: this is what collective religious experience at scale actually feels like and it is available to respectful visitors who approach it with the right frame of mind. Go to Nallur during the festival if you can.