In the city a festival is a holiday. In a village it is a date the whole year has been working towards. The difference is not sentiment; it is agriculture. Most rural festivals sit at a join in the crop cycle — sowing, first harvest, the end of threshing, the turn of the sun — and the rituals are about the things that made the harvest possible: the field, the rain, the cattle, the ancestors, the village deity. What follows is a guide to the main ones, region by region, and to what changes when a festival is kept in a village rather than a flat.

The mid-January harvest cluster

Around the middle of January, when the sun begins its northward course, a band of festivals runs across the country under different names. In Tamil Nadu it is Pongal, four days long, beginning with the discarding of old things and centred on rice boiled fresh in a new pot until it spills over, which is taken as the sign of plenty. In Punjab it is Lohri, with a bonfire fed with sesame, jaggery and popped grain. Elsewhere in the north and west it is Makar Sankranti. In Assam it is Magh Bihu, and there the village builds a meji, a tall cone of bamboo, hay and leaves, and a bhelaghar, a temporary hut where the young men cook and eat through the night before the meji is burnt at dawn.

Cattle at the centre

A city festival rarely has a bullock in it. Village festivals often have nothing else. On the day after Pongal comes Mattu Pongal, when cattle are washed, their horns painted and tipped, garlands hung on them and their own portion of the feast set before them. In Maharashtra and parts of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, Bail Pola falls at the end of Shravan: bulls are rested from work for the day, oiled, painted and led in procession behind an elder bullock that breaks a string of mango leaves at the village boundary. In Jharkhand, Sohrai comes with the harvest around the new moon of Kartik, and the women of the house repaint the mud walls in earth colours before the cattle are welcomed in.

Holi in a village

Holi in a village is two events, not one. The night before belongs to the bonfire, lit at a fixed spot the village has always used, with the year's dry stalks and cow-dung cakes and the new grain held to the flame. The colour comes the next day, and it comes with singing — phag and hori songs sung by groups moving from house to house — and with a licence to tease across the usual lines of age and status that lasts exactly one morning. Villages in some regions keep local variants that are older and rougher than anything a city celebrates.

Baisakhi and the spring harvest

In Punjab and Haryana, Baisakhi in mid-April marks the cutting of the rabi crop, and it is a festival with grain money in it — the fields are down, the year's main income is arriving. It is kept with bhangra and giddha, gatherings at the gurdwara and large village fairs. It carries a second, religious weight for Sikhs as the day associated with the founding of the Khalsa. Similar spring new-year days fall around the same date in Assam, Bengal, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Onam in the Malayalam villages

Onam runs for ten days in the month of Chingam, from the star day of Atham to Thiruvonam. In the villages the daily work of the festival is the pookalam, the floral carpet laid in the courtyard, which grows by a ring a day and which children are sent out to gather flowers for. It ends with the sadya, a vegetarian feast eaten off a banana leaf with everyone seated on the floor. Onam is kept across communities in Kerala, and the village version has a strong element of collective work — boat crews, tug-of-war teams, village games — that the urban version reduces to a meal.

Nuakhai in western Odisha

Nuakhai is the eating of the new rice. It falls the day after Ganesh Chaturthi, in the month of Bhadraba, and it is the most important social occasion of the year across western Odisha and adjoining parts of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. The new grain is offered first to the village or family deity, then eaten by the household in order of age, and the day ends with juhar — going to elders and relatives to greet them, settle small quarrels and be blessed. It is a festival of reconciliation as much as of food.

Chhath on the riverbank

Chhath, kept in Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and by their families everywhere, is unusual among Indian festivals in having no temple and no priest at its centre. Over four days the observer fasts with great strictness, and on the third evening the whole village walks to the river, pond or canal with baskets of fruit, sugarcane and thekua to offer water to the setting sun, returning before dawn to offer it again to the rising sun. In a village the ghat is prepared communally in the days before, and the walk to it, at dusk, with singing, is the festival's real image.

The village jatra

Between January and May, when the fields are quiet, villages across Maharashtra, Karnataka and much of the Deccan hold the annual jatra or jaatre — the fair of the village deity. The image is taken in procession, there are stalls, sweets, toys, a wrestling bout or a bullock-cart race, and often a night of tamasha or folk theatre. In many places the equivalent for a local Sufi shrine is the urs, and the crowd is mixed. The jatra is when relatives come home, when married daughters visit, and when the village settles its collective accounts of hospitality for the year.

The harvest festivals of the North East

In the Garo Hills, Wangala marks the end of the harvest with thanksgiving to the sun deity of fertility, drumming and dance, the first rituals performed in the house of the village headman. Across the North East nearly every community keeps its own agricultural festival on its own calendar, and these are village institutions in the fullest sense: the unit that celebrates is the village, the ground is village land, and participation is expected rather than optional.

Durga Puja, Navratri and Diwali

The big pan-Indian autumn festivals are kept in villages too, but their shape changes. A village Durga Puja is usually one pandal for the whole settlement, funded by subscription, rather than a competition between neighbourhoods. Navratri in Gujarat and Rajasthan is danced in an open ground everyone can reach. Diwali in a farming household is tied to the account book and to the cattle, and in much of north and west India the day after is Govardhan or Annakut, when cattle and the food they made possible are honoured directly.

The common thread is that a village festival is difficult to attend alone. It needs a bonfire someone built, a ghat someone cleaned, a pandal someone collected for. That is what makes it a different thing from the same festival kept in a city — not more devout, simply more collective.