Kite Flying and the Joy of Open Skies

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On 14 January most years, the sky above Ahmedabad fills with tens of thousands of small paper kites and stays full from before sunrise until well after dark. The occasion is Makar Sankranti, the point in the solar calendar when the sun is held to begin its northward movement, known in Gujarat as Uttarayan. Unlike almost every other Indian festival, it is fixed to the solar rather than the lunar cycle, which is why it falls on roughly the same date each year while Diwali and Holi wander. Families move onto flat rooftops at dawn with bundles of kites, spools of string, sesame and jaggery sweets, and loudspeakers, and they stay there. Businesses close. The Gujarat government has run an international kite festival in Ahmedabad since the late 1980s, drawing fliers from Japan, Malaysia, Italy, Brazil and elsewhere, but the tourist event is a small formal frame around something that is overwhelmingly domestic and unorganised.

The Indian fighter kite is a specific object with a specific job. It is a small diamond of thin paper, often no wider than the span of two hands, built on a flexible bamboo spine with a curved bamboo bow across it. It has no tail. Removing the tail removes the stabiliser, which is the point: an untailed kite is unstable and will spin or dive, and a skilled flier turns that instability into steering by alternately pulling the line taut and releasing it. Tension makes the kite climb and track; slack lets it fall away sideways. With practice a flier can send a kite across a rooftop line, drop it below an opponent and bring it up underneath, all without seeing the string clearly against a bright sky. The bamboo for the best spines is traditionally sourced from Assam and the north east, and the kite making trade is concentrated in a handful of places, among them the Jamalpur quarter of Ahmedabad, the town of Khambhat in Gujarat, and Rampur and Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, where entire households cut, paste and dry kites for months before the season.

The contest, and the string that makes it possible

What is being played is a duel. Two fliers manoeuvre until their lines cross, then saw against each other until one line parts and the loser's kite drifts free. In Gujarat the shout that goes up when a line is cut is kai po che, meaning roughly that it is cut, and a chorus of it rolls across a neighbourhood all day. Loose kites are chased through streets by children, and a cut kite belongs to whoever catches it. The cutting is done not by the kite but by the string. Ordinary cotton thread is coated at home or by specialists with a paste of boiled rice or glue mixed with finely powdered glass, then dried on frames stretched between poles, producing manja: a line abrasive enough to sever another line under friction. Preparing it is skilled and unpleasant work.

That abrasiveness has become the festival's central public safety problem. Cotton manja breaks and degrades. From the 2000s it was widely displaced by cheaper synthetic line, usually nylon or plastic coated with metallic or glass compounds and often called Chinese manja regardless of where it was made. Synthetic line does not snap, does not rot and does not release. Strung invisibly across a road at throat height, it has killed and severely injured motorcyclists and pedestrians, and it maims very large numbers of birds, particularly kites, pigeons and other urban raptors, whose wings are cut when they collide with drifting line. India's National Green Tribunal issued a nationwide prohibition on nylon and synthetic manja in 2016, and several states have their own bans, but enforcement against a cheap, easily smuggled consumer product has been partial at best. In Ahmedabad, animal welfare organisations now run large temporary bird rescue camps through the festival period, treating thousands of injured birds in a few days, and municipal authorities publicise safe flying hours and clear the streets of fallen line.

Where the practice came from, and where it has gone

The kite itself is almost certainly a Chinese invention, developed there well over two thousand years ago and carried outward along trade and pilgrimage routes. It appears in Indian courtly painting and poetry from the medieval period onward, and became firmly attached to north Indian urban culture under Mughal and later regional patronage, with Lucknow, Delhi, Jaipur, Hyderabad and Rampur developing distinctive styles, string preparations and etiquette. Kite flying in India is therefore not one tradition but several with different calendars. In Gujarat and parts of Rajasthan and Maharashtra it belongs to mid January. In Punjab, on both sides of the border, it belonged to Basant Panchami in late winter, a season marked by yellow clothing and mustard fields; Pakistan's Punjab province banned the practice in the mid 2000s after a series of manja deaths, and its partial and contested restoration has been an argument there ever since. In Delhi, kites are flown on Independence Day on 15 August, filling the sky around the old city and the Red Fort.

Around the daytime contest sits a second layer of practice. In the evening in Gujarat, fliers send up tukkal, illuminated paper lanterns attached in a chain to the kite line, so that the sky after dusk carries slow lines of light instead of paper. Food is specific to the day: sesame seed and jaggery sweets, and in Gujarat a mixed winter vegetable dish eaten on rooftops. In the Tamil country the same solar festival is Pongal, a harvest observance built around boiling the first rice with milk and honouring cattle, with no kites at all. In Assam it is Magh Bihu, and in Punjab Lohri on the preceding evening, with bonfires.

The practice has travelled with migration. Wherever Gujarati and Punjabi communities have settled in numbers, in Britain, North America, East Africa, the Gulf, Singapore and Australia, mid January brings community kite events, usually in a hired park rather than on a rooftop, usually with plain line rather than manja, and usually combined with a meal and a temple gathering. These diaspora versions lose the two things that define the original, the density of a city flying at once and the competitive cutting, and they keep the third, which is a day when a whole community is outdoors looking up.

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