MADURAI/TIRUCHY/COIMBATORE: With a strong pro-jallikattu sentiment raging across the State, villagers openly defied the Supreme Court’s ban on the sport during the Mattu Pongal day on Sunday. In several villages across the State, public managed to hoodwink the police and let loose the bulls, either in the agricultural fields or in the common grounds with hundreds of youngsters engaging in the traditional harvest-season sport.
While at most places the event was held as a mere gesture, with bulls being chased around fields, in a few interior villages, the arrangements were detailed with even price money being distributed to youth who won the contest. It is not just a matter of Tamil culture or tradition, the villagers believed not conducting jallikattu would bring bad luck to their village and farming.
“As jallikattu was not conducted for the past three years (due to SC’s ban order), there was no sufficient rainfall and the crops are withering away,” says D Alagupillai, an elderly woman in the Palamedu village in Madurai district. Palamedu is one of the most renowned sites for jallikattu.
As the police had placed barricades blocking the ‘vadi vassal’, (the narrow entry through which the bulls are released), the villagers, under the pretext of taking the animals to the temple, released them close to the ‘vadi vasal’ and youngsters chased them around. “We can’t say it was jallikattu since the bulls were not released through the vadi vassal. We are in the process of identifying who released the bulls,” said the Madurai district Superintendent of Police Vijayendra S Bidari. It was not just jallikattu, in districts like Coimbatore and Erode, other banned events like rekha race and rooster fighting were also organised.