I was ten years old and sitting in my grandparents’ house in Assam when I first heard the word Charak.
My grandmother said it the way you say the name of something very old, quietly, with a little weight behind it. She told me that on the last day of the Bengali year, in the villages not far from where we lived, men let iron hooks be pushed through the skin of their backs. And then they were lifted into the air and made to spin.
I didn’t believe her at first. I thought she was trying to scare me; the way grandparents sometimes do.
She wasn’t.
A few years later my father’s job took us to Mumbai. Assam became a place I visited in memories more than in person. But that one word — Charak — never quite left me. It sat somewhere in the back of my mind like a question that had never been properly answered.
This essay is my attempt to answer it. Not just with facts, but with the story of the people who actually live it.
Haradhan
His name is Haradhan Das. He is a farmer. He grows mustard and paddy on a small piece of land near a village in the Barak Valley of Assam. He is not a famous man. He has never been photographed for a newspaper or written about in any book.
But every year, in the month leading up to Chaitra Sankranti, the last day of the Bengali calendar
Haradhan becomes someone else.
He leaves his home. He stops eating meat and fish. He sleeps on a mat in a small shelter at the edge of the village, away from his wife and children. He wears red. He walks slowly through the village lanes every morning, chanting, and the neighbours who pass him bow their heads a little.
For thirty days, Haradhan is not a farmer. He is a sanyasi, a servant of Shiva.
And on the last day, he will fly.
The Festival With a Wheel at Its Heart
Charak Puja happens once a year, at the very end of Chaitra, which usually falls in April. It is the final festival of the old Bengali year, and the beginning of the new one.
The name itself comes from chakra — the Sanskrit word for wheel. The wheel of the sun. The wheel of time. When a sanyasi hangs from the tall wooden pole and swings in a wide circle, he is not just enduring pain. He is, according to the belief that has shaped this festival for centuries by becoming the sun. Completing the turn of the year with his own body.
The pole is called the Charak tree. It is traditionally a tall Gurjan tree, stripped bare, with a long horizontal arm at the top. From that arm, ropes hang. And from those ropes, men like Haradhan will hang.
The festival has other names too. Nil Puja. Hajra Puja. Chadak Mela. It is part of a bigger celebration called Gajan which means either ‘roar’ (because the devotees chant and cry out) or simply ‘the village people’s festival.’ Both meanings feel right.
It is celebrated across West Bengal, Bangladesh, Tripura, and the Barak Valley. It has been celebrated, in some form, for many centuries.
Older Than Anyone Remembers
Nobody knows exactly when Charak Puja began. That is part of what makes it interesting.
Some historians trace it to a people called the Mandai — an ancient group who became the Barman community, warriors and rulers across what is now Bengal, Assam, Bihar, and parts of Nepal. Charak Puja was their royal festival. When their kingdom faded, the festival passed into the villages and never left.
Others say it began when Buddhism was fading in Bengal around the 10th century. Buddhist monks who had practised extreme forms of self-discipline merged their traditions with the worship of Shiva, and what came out of that blending was Gajan. It was first called Dharmer Gajan which means Dharma’s festival — before slowly becoming Shiber Gajan — Shiva’s festival.
There is also a story. King Bana, a devoted follower of Shiva, was badly wounded in battle against Krishna. On the last day of Chaitra, he offered everything, songs, dances, his own blood to Mahadeva. And the people of his kingdom have been recreating that offering ever since.
The first Europeans to write about Charak were Portuguese traders in the 1540s. A manuscript preserved in Rome called the Codice Casanatense, includes a sketch of the ritual with a caption that begins: “Sacrifice that the gentiles do to their gods, by piercing their loins with iron hooks on such a pole, and cut…” The scribe could not seem to finish the sentence. He had seen something his language had no category for.
Three hundred years later, Lady Nugent, wife of the Commander-in-Chief of British India, watched Charak in Calcutta and wrote about it in her diary with barely concealed horror. By the 1860s, colonial law had banned the hook-swinging. Officials expected the festival to disappear.
It did not. In the villages, beyond the reach of city laws, nothing changed. Haradhan’s great-great-grandfather was still flying.
Thirty Days of Becoming
The thing most people miss about Charak Puja is that the festival is not one day. It is thirty.
Haradhan’s preparation begins a full month before the Charak tree goes up. He stops eating fish and meat. He gives up alcohol. He moves into a small shelter called a mandapa built at the edge of the village, away from his family. He will not attend to ordinary business. He spends his nights in prayer and his mornings walking the village, and the village feeds him and honours him.
This is the part of Charak that is hardest to explain to someone who did not grow up near it.
Haradhan, who is a quiet man who grows mustard, for thirty days becomes someone the entire village bows to. The caste lines that define his ordinary life quietly dissolve. He is Shiva’s man. That outranks everything else.
By the time the last day arrives, he has been changed. His body is lighter. His mind is somewhere else. And when the priest comes to push the iron hooks carefully through the skin of his back.
Haradhan does not flinch.
He is ready.
The Day the Sky Receives Him
The sound arrives before anything else — gongs, conch shells, drums. The kind of sound you feel in your chest more than hear with your ears.
The village has gathered around the Charak tree. Children sit on their fathers’ shoulders. Women in bright saris press forward. The air smells like incense and something sweeter, possibly the mustard flowers still open in the fields nearby.
The piercing is done by men who have done it for decades. They know exactly how to avoid the nerves and blood vessels that would cause real harm, how to slide the hook through skin alone so the body holds without breaking. This knowledge is not written down anywhere. It lives in hands, passed from one generation to the next. That is why the hooks draw so little blood. Visitors who see it for the first time cannot understand it. The devotees simply say: Shiva’s grace. Both things can be true.
And there is something else worth knowing. Haradhan has fasted, prayed, and lived apart from the world for thirty days. By the time he lies down for the hooks, his mind is not where it usually is. The month of preparation, the hunger, the community’s belief surrounding him, the chanting — all of it has moved him to a place where pain does not arrive the way it normally would. The body, under extreme faith and discipline, does something unexpected. Haradhan’s face, as he rises, is not the face of a man suffering. It is the face of a man who has reached somewhere. Every witness says so.
He is lifted. The ropes go taut. The arm begins to turn.
He swings out in a wide arc — slowly at first, then faster. The ground blurs. The sky is everywhere. His arms spread. His eyes close. He is the sun completing its turn.
Around him the festival is also a fair. Stalls sell clay toys and fried sweets. Men dressed as Shiva and Parvati perform comedy and devotion in a tradition called Soung of Gajan , turning the sacred into something joyful, because Charak has always understood that those two things are not opposites.
What Nobody Talks About But Everyone Knows
Here is something that most festival descriptions quietly skip over.
Charak Puja has always belonged to the lower castes.
The men who become sanyasis — men like Haradhan — are mostly from the Bagdi, the Namasudra, the Dom, the communities that the upper-caste world historically shut out of its temples and its rites. The grand Pujas of Bengal had Brahmin priests and closed doors. Charak had neither. It belonged to the open village ground and the sky above it.
And for the duration of the festival, everything flips. The farmer who spends the rest of the year at the bottom of the village’s unspoken order becomes — for these thirty days and especially on this last morning — the most important person in the village. People touch his feet. They feed him. They watch him rise into the air and they feel that something of their own is rising with him.
A scholar named Ralph Nicholas, who spent years studying Gajan in Bengal villages, wrote about this carefully — how the festival creates a temporary world where the usual rules are suspended and the people who suffer most in ordinary life become the centre of everything sacred.
But anyone from a Bengali village will tell you the same thing more simply: during Gajan, Haradhan wins. And everyone knows it.
That is not a small thing. That is, perhaps, the deepest reason the festival has survived everything thrown at it.
Charak Today
Haradhan’s son is twenty-three. He moved to Guwahati two years ago for work. He has a phone. He watches cricket. He is not sure he will ever become a sanyasi.
This is the quiet challenge that Charak Puja faces now — not laws, not empires, but distance. Young men leaving for cities. The agricultural rhythms that gave the festival its meaning growing thinner every decade.
And yet.
The Charak tree still goes up every April in thousands of villages across West Bengal, Assam, Tripura, and Bangladesh — in Moulvibazar, in Galachipa, deep in the Barak Valley. In Mayong, Assam, already famous as the historical heart of Indian folk magic. Charak draws visitors from far away who come to witness something they cannot explain.
On social media, videos of the hook-swinging go viral every year. Watched without context, they generate shock more than understanding. The devotees have mixed feelings. Some are glad the tradition is being seen. Others feel that something sacred is lost when it becomes content for strangers.
In literature, Charak appears in regional Bengali fiction and folk-literature anthologies, particularly in writing about rural life before and after Partition. It has never had a major film made about it, which is part of why it remains so unknown outside eastern India. It has the substance of something that deserves one. It does not yet have one.
Things People Frequently Ask
Why don’t the devotees seem to feel pain?
Several things work together. The thirty days of fasting, prayer, and separation from ordinary life move the devotee into a mental state that is genuinely different from everyday consciousness. The community belief surrounding him, hundreds of people who fully expect him to transcend pain which becomes part of his experience. The chanting, the drums, the physical exhaustion of the preparation all play a role. Experienced practitioners have noted that under such extreme conditions of faith and discipline, the body’s responses shift in ways that ordinary life never produces. The devotees call it Shiva’s grace. Scientists who have studied similar rituals elsewhere call it the power of sustained belief and preparation acting on the body. Both are describing the same thing from different sides of a door.
Why is Charak so unknown outside eastern India?
It is a festival of the rural lower castes, communities whose stories have historically been underrepresented in national media and literature. It falls at the same time as more publicised festivals. And its visual intensity makes many people uncomfortable before they understand its meaning. Charak has never been made easy to consume. That, in a way, is also its dignity.
How old is it really?
Old enough that Portuguese traders were sketching it in the 1540s and had clearly already heard of it. Old enough that the Koch Kingdom, which rose to power in the 15th century, was already celebrating it when it came to rule the region. Old enough that the medieval Bengali poetry called the Dharma Mangal — oral epics passed down through generations — described the Gajan tradition as something ancient even then. The roots go back at least a thousand years, and probably further.
Do women participate?
The role of sanyasi has traditionally been held by men. Women participate as worshippers, as the families who sustain the sanyasis through the month of preparation, and in some communities as performers in the Soung theatrical tradition. In certain regions, female participation in the gentler Nila Puja ritual, offering a fish to water has been documented.
Is it practised outside India?
Yes. Bengali communities in Bangladesh continue the tradition with great vitality particularly in Sylhet, Rajshahi, and the coastal villages of Patuakhali. Wherever Bengali communities have settled and kept their roots close, some form of Gajan has followed.
Back to Assam
I never saw Charak Puja with my own eyes. I left Assam too young, and the festival was always in villages a little beyond where I was. My grandmother described it. My imagination did the rest.
But writing this essay, I kept thinking about Haradhan. Not a real man I know — a man I built from everything I read and heard and imagined. A quiet farmer who, once a year, becomes something extraordinary. Who earns the village’s deepest respect not by being born into it, but by being willing to give himself over to something larger.
I think about my grandmother saying the word Charak with that particular weight, the weight of someone describing something she had seen with her own eyes and never fully stopped thinking about.
I think she was not trying to scare me. I think she was trying to give me something. A sense that the world she came from contained things that could not be easily explained or dismissed like things that had survived empires, bans, and the slow pull of modernity without losing their essential shape.
Every April, the Charak tree goes up. The red-robed men walk through the village at dawn. And somewhere in a city, a young man opens his phone and sees a blurry video of someone suspended from iron hooks and does not quite understand what he is looking at.
His father, back in the village, does not need a video.
He was there. He was the one flying.
By: TRISA PAUL
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