HYDERABAD: The air is thick with mist and the sky is grey. Birds chirp and go about their day amidst the dried stalks of the shrubs that surround a makeshift hamlet of the Gangireddulavaru community at Nizampet near Kukatpally.
Noise breaks from one of the blue huts, followed by another. At around 5:30 am, a woman in her 60s walks out of a hut and lights up a bonfire. Soon, a discussion on who is to go where begins among members of the community who brush their teeth with charcoal in the warmth of the bonfire. The discussion ends, each of the 20 Gangireddulavaru starts decorating their oxen in a rush with tattered layers of sheets. It is not what a festooned ox would look like, but it’s how it all begins.
“We don’t decorate the oxen as we start. The making of gangireddu (oxen) is a process. People whose doors we visit during the five day-long Sankranti Sambaralu offer us clothes that are hand-woven into a quilt that you see on the gangireddu,” says Bhaskar from the Gangireddulavaru community, who hails from Maddur village in Narsapur town.
Maddur houses one of the largest Gangireddulavaru communities in Telangana. “All the villagers scatter across towns and cities with gangireddus during Sankranti to bless the households with luck,” says Lakshmi, the eldest woman from the community.
It is a common belief that the oxen brought to houses by the community are a sign of good luck to households. “Earlier, people in Hyderabad would welcome us. Now, we have to knock on the doors to seek alms. Many people live in apartments now — near which we are not even allowed to stand. The pandemic has pushed us below abject poverty,” says Srinivas, another member of the community.
The adorned oxen walking in the bylanes of the city as the Gangireddulavaru plays ottu is the most colourful part of Sankranti. But their lives are grey. “Earlier, we could gather enough grain through alms, and this would see us through till Ugadi. There would also be enough to feed our cattle. Now, it’s getting difficult to even feed the oxen from the alms that we collect. We’re just continuing with this because we have nothing else to do for a living. It takes almost a year to train the ox to nod its head to the music and perform certain moves such as standing on two feet,” says 24-year-old Madhu, another member of the community.
The community starts its day early and makes around Rs 1,000- 3,000 a day during the harvest festival. “Some years, we get lucky. In 2019, I remember collecting around Rs 3,500 on a single day from a colony in Madhapur. For the last two years, I have been frequenting the colony with the same hope, but looks like that was just a lucky day,” adds Madhu.