With God On Our Side!

Chants from the Chandi floating from temples and devotional music on loud speakers in mid-October told Delhi and its peripheral zones that it was the season of fasting, feasting and frolicking with family and friends. From the sixth day of Navratra, the glittering canopies at Chittaranjan Park and other localities that Delhi’s Bengali-speaking denizens inhabit, came alive too with the staccato beat of dhaks and gongs. 

Through it all, swarms of revellers were thick around street food vendors and sellers of balloons, diyas (earthern lamps) and artifacts. The malls glittered with their special offerings for the festive season and the friendly neighbourhood grocer laid out platforms outside his store for the “gift packs” of confectionary, chocolates, dry fruits, fruit juices, cutlery, pottery and trinkets, especially stocked for the season that lasts till the dawn of another year. Like every year ‘Home Buddy – The Grocery Store’ in the arcade of a building block in Vaishali in the National Capital Region (NCR), put out its list of special Navratra fare ‒ puja accessories, joss sticks, coconut kernels, dry fruits, palm candy, mango wood and even bottled water from the river Ganga.  

Home Buddy is among the 25,000 mom-and-pop stores around Delhi and the NCR that do brisk business around the festive season, when the festive gift packs and special fare sometimes account for a third of the stocks and sales. In November 2022 some of these stores had sales in the region of Rs 30 lakhs and above, of which seasonal gift packs alone were worth anywhere between Rs 8 lakh to Rs 10 lakh that month. For the retail trade in north India, the festive season actually begins around Rakhi and Ravi Singhal at Home Buddy was still stuck with stocks since then. Festive gift packs would traditionally sell out in a fortnight, Singhal recalls, but this year, even rakhis did not sell.  

“The buying capacity of people have decreased,” muses Singhal. He draws his inference from the fact that essentials like grain, pulses and cooking oil were selling as usual, but fruit juices, frozen snacks, or expensive cosmetics were stuck on the shelves. “People are not buying extra,” concludes Singhal. Online purchases, he laments, had pushed stores like his to a corner. The trend, of course, had aggravated during 2020 when movements were restricted, but has persisted since. Were the Big Baskets, Amazon and Groffers solely responsible for the pile of unsold gift packs left over from Rakhi at grocers?  

Announcing its monetary policy on 6 October, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) identified high inflation as a “major risk to macroeconomic stability and sustainable growth”. The Central Bank has projected a 6.5 per cent growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) with inflation reigning at 5.4 per cent during the ongoing fiscal. “Preventing food and fuel price shocks are non-negotiable necessities,” said RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das. Another war, this time in West Asia, does not guarantee stability of prices of energy. The Monsoons have played poker with the Indian subcontinent in 2023, being excess in west Rajasthan, Gujarat and Saurashtra and deficient in the paddy growing Gangetic plains across East Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Gangetic West Bengal. (Please see map). 

Union agriculture ministry data in September though, assured of higher rice sowing this year at 411.52 lakh hectares, compared to 400.72 lakh hectares in the sowing season of 2022. Sowing of pulses was slightly lower at 122.57 lakh hectares, compared to 128.49 lakh hectares in 2022. These crops, sowed during the rains, are harvested at the end of October or early November, enabling the farming community around India to celebrate the defeat of the evil king Ravana by the noble prince of Ayodhya Raja Ram, or the conquest of evil Asuras by Ma Durga.  

Sociologists describe the spring and autumn Navratras as agrarian India’s harvest festivals. Nilabja Ghosh, Professor at the Agriculture Research Unit of the Institute of Economic Growth (IEG) says harvesting was going on and was expected to be good, adding wryly that she was not aware of any study or empirical evidence linking a good harvest with good festive sales.  At his village near the banks of the Ajoy river in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, farmer Mohan Hemram says, “People talk of poverty all the time, but when Durga Puja celebrations begin, even the poorest man in the village buys a new attire for his children.”  

Hemram supplements the income from his family farm by working at farm houses of city dwellers. Everyone in the village makes money during festivals, he emphasises, from the potters (who make the clay deities), the tent-wallahs, decorators, electricians to the priests, who conduct the prayer ceremonies. “Then people eat well during festivals, so fish and meat vendors also sell more. Then there are egg roll and roasted peanut stalls around the mandaps (canopies for the deity),” he recounts, which too earn that little bit extra during a festival. 

In the state capital of Kolkata, Achin Chakraborty, Professor of Economics and former Director, Institute of Development Studies, does not share Hemram’s enthusiasm. “While a section of the middle and upper middle class surely spends more during festivals, for the poorer classes the current pattern of inflation may be a dampener,” he cautions. “The most recent CPI, which is close to seven per cent, is triggered by food prices, vegetables, cereal and pulses in particular. That may force the poorer classes to cut down on these and spend on non-food items such as clothing,” he points out. “Festival times may be good for the economy provided the people have the money to spend,” concludes Chakraborty. 

Yet, history records that even in the worst of times, Christmas, Eid, Navratra and Diwali celebrations have defied logical estimates. A year after a deadly virus and almost a year-long restrictions on movement, brought the Indian economy to a standstill in 2020, the Retail Association of India did a survey. The RAI 2021 Festive Shopping Index showed that 94 per cent of the respondents were looking forward to shopping during the festive season and 63 per cent intended to purchase clothing and fashion wear. (Please see survey). 

During that nearly year-long spell of restricted movement, most “experiential” services like restaurants, bars, theatres and beauty salons had to simply shut down. Some in the “red zones” where the Covid restrictions were the most severe, went out of business. Bibi Sarkar, who ran the popular Bibi of Taaja’s restaurant in south Kolkata was in the midst of relocating the restaurant when Covid struck. She quickly turned her business into a cloud kitchen.  

That year the Durga puja celebrations in a city engulfed in a raging pandemic, were at best mute, yet Ms Sarkar admits to having done good business all through it, thanks to the delivery services and the innovative fare she offered like ‘Thakur barir ranna’ (from the Tagore family kitchen). The pandemic though claimed a family member and Ms Sarkar could not reopen her restaurant as planned. “Lockdown sales were great,” she admits, adding wistfully, “but post lockdown, with a new restaurant opening daily, competition is tough.”  Bibi of Taaja’s is excited about the festive season and banking on higher sales this year. 

The inter-war years and the Great Depression that gripped the United States and most of Europe were probably the worst crisis in recorded history. In Arthur Miller’s classic play The Death of a Salesman (written in 1948, but strongly influenced by the Great Depression), the salesman kills himself. Yet newspaper archives today reveal that Christmas shoppers in 1935 had gone quite overboard in the US. I quote a report from a section of The New York Times archives of 21 December 1935:  

“With the Christmas shopping season at its peak, reports from most districts of the country this week revealed the largest retail sales figures for any comparative period since 1930, while a few approached the 1929 totals, according to the survey of Dun Bradstreet, Inc.”  

As unlettered Hemram taught this writer, opulence was for the wealthy, but festivals were for all and brought home returns for everyone ‒ from the temple priest to the peanut vendor.