Why Kites Fill the Sky at Makar Sankranti

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On 14 January in most years, the sky over Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Jaipur, Hyderabad and Lucknow fills with paper. Flying starts before the light is properly up and continues after dark, when small paper lanterns called tukkals are strung along the lines. The reason the date is so stable, when Diwali and Holi wander across whole months, is that Makar Sankranti is a solar festival in a calendar dominated by lunar ones, and understanding that single fact clears up most of the confusion around it.

A Solar Date That Is Slowly Drifting

A sankranti is the moment the sun crosses from one sign of the zodiac into the next, and there are twelve in a year. Makar Sankranti is the entry into Makara, the sign corresponding to Capricorn. Because it depends on the sun's position rather than the moon's phase, it stays put in the Gregorian calendar, moving only between 14 and 15 January.

It is very widely said that Makar Sankranti is the winter solstice, or that uttarayan, the sun's northward journey, begins on that day. Astronomically this is no longer true, and the discrepancy is instructive. The solstice falls around 21 or 22 December. Indian calendrical astronomy uses the sidereal zodiac, fixed against the stars, while the seasons follow the tropical year, and the slow wobble of the earth's axis called precession separates the two by about one day every seventy years or so. Centuries ago the two coincided; the festival was the solstice. Today Makar Sankranti trails it by more than three weeks and continues to drift later. Astronomers and calendar reformers in India have argued about this for a long time, and no consensus has emerged to correct it, because the festival has become attached to the date rather than to the astronomy. It is a rare case where a popular explanation is not so much a myth as a fact that expired.

One Sun, A Dozen Names

What the day unquestionably marks is the turn of the season and the end of the coldest, most inauspicious stretch of the year, and almost every region of India keeps it under its own name. Tamil Nadu observes Pongal across four days, with Bhogi for discarding the old, Thai Pongal for boiling the first rice and jaggery in a new pot until it froths over, Mattu Pongal for cattle, and Kaanum Pongal for visiting. Assam holds Magh Bihu or Bhogali Bihu, with communal feasting and the burning of the meji, a temporary structure of bamboo and thatch. Punjab keeps Maghi the day after Lohri, and the Maghi mela at Sri Muktsar Sahib commemorates the forty Sikhs known as the Chalis Mukte. Bengal holds Poush Sankranti with rice flour and date palm jaggery pithe, and the Gangasagar Mela at the mouth of the Hooghly draws enormous bathing crowds. Karnataka exchanges ellu bella, a mixture of sesame, jaggery, groundnut and dry coconut, with a phrase asking the receiver to speak sweetly. Maharashtra says almost the same thing over tilgul sweets. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar call it Khichdi and eat exactly that.

The sesame and jaggery are not decorative. Both are warming foods in the classification used across Indian household medicine, and they appear at the point in the year when the cold is heaviest and, in the old agricultural logic, energy reserves lowest. The bathing at Prayagraj, Haridwar and Gangasagar follows from the day's status as a solar transition considered especially auspicious for donation and ritual immersion.

Paper, Bamboo and Coated Thread

Kite flying is concentrated in Gujarat and Rajasthan, with strong traditions also in Hyderabad, Lucknow, Bareilly and parts of Bihar. Why kites attached themselves to this particular day is not documented with any certainty. The plausible explanations are practical rather than mystical: mid January in western India brings the first mornings mild enough to spend on a terrace after weeks of cold, the fields are between crops, and the wind is reliable. Claims that the practice was introduced by a specific ruler, or that it symbolises the sun's return, are interpretations rather than evidence. Kites reached India through long distance contact with China and Southeast Asia, and courtly kite flying is documented in Mughal and nawabi settings, but that is a general lineage, not a founding date.

The technology is worth knowing because it explains the sport. The Indian fighter kite, the patang, is a small flat rhombus of thin tissue paper on two bamboo pieces: a straight spine and a bowed cross spar under tension, which gives the kite its instability and therefore its speed. It has no tail. Control comes entirely from the line. The line is manjha, cotton thread coated in a paste of rice starch, colour and finely powdered glass, applied by stretching hundreds of metres between poles and running the mixture along it by hand, then drying it. The object of the contest, pech, is to cross lines with a neighbour's kite and cut it, and the shout of kai po che in Gujarati marks a cut. Freed kites drift down over the city and are chased through lanes by children.

The serious modern problem is synthetic manjha. Nylon and other plastic monofilament threads, often sold as Chinese manjha, do not break and do not decompose. They cut the throats of birds and of people riding motorcycles, and they remain wrapped around trees and power lines for years. The National Green Tribunal ordered a nationwide ban on nylon and synthetic manjha, and state governments have followed with their own prohibitions, but enforcement remains patchy and the black market persists. In Ahmedabad, veterinary and animal welfare organisations run bird rescue camps across the festival days specifically to treat injured kites, pigeons and cranes, and the number of birds brought in is the clearest single argument against the synthetic thread.

Since 1989 Gujarat Tourism has run the International Kite Festival at Ahmedabad, now centred on the Sabarmati Riverfront, bringing kite makers and flyers from abroad with large display kites that have nothing to do with cutting anyone's line. It sits alongside, rather than replaces, the terrace flying that remains the real event: households on roofs, loudspeakers, undhiyu and jalebi eaten between rounds, and a city that spends one day looking upward.

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