On Kartika Purnima, when the full moon spills itself over the Mahanadi and its sister rivers, Odisha becomes a single long, luminous sigh. The night is at once festival and elegy: lamps drift like small stars, miniature boats glide like secret letters, and the water takes the moon’s light and keeps it as memory. Here the celestial, the domestic, and the maritime fold into one another – the moon a silent witness, the river a courier, the boat a human hope set afloat. The ritual is elemental and precise.

Moonlight picks out the ribs of a boat; the river receives it. For a people once masterful in inter-continental coastal trade, these images are historical as well as symbolic. The Sadhabas – merchant mariners of ancient Kalinga – sailed from these deltas to Java, Sumatra, and Bali. Today, villagers and city folk alike float tiny vessels of banana stem, cork, or paper, each loaded with lamps, rice, betel leaves, and prayers. The gesture is both commemoration and enactment: a remembering of voyages and an offering for safe return. This triad – moon, river, boat – functions like a poem.

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The moon illuminates longing; the river carries it; the boat makes of longing a movement. The objects are modest, but the meanings are vast. Bali Jatra is when Sadhabas set sail on Kartika Purnima on the Mahanadi’s banks in Cuttack. It is more than a fair; it is a living archive where commerce and memory meet. Stalls and performances pulse with life while ritual send-offs hold a hush of solemnity; elders intone the old refrains, children learn the careful choreography of letting go, and families perform a communal elegy for those who sail away. The scene finds a distant cousin in Europe’s maritime pageants – most famously Venice’s Regata........

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