Performing Heritage: The Weight of Hollow Traditions

Poila Boishakh arrives with elaborate preparations I go through mechanically—new clothes, traditional foods, family gatherings that feel more obligatory than celebratory. The rituals survive but their original meaning has evaporated, leaving us performing ceremonies we no longer fully understand.

These seasonal traditions once connected communities to agricultural cycles, marked crucial transitions that determined survival. Now they’re cultural performances, Instagram opportunities, ways to maintain identity without inhabiting the worldview that created them.

The Unanswerable Question

“Keno kori eta?” Arash asks about Chorok Puja rituals. Why do we do this? And I realize I’m transmitting traditions I can’t meaningfully explain, passing down hollow shells of practices that once carried vital cultural DNA.

The honest answer—”because our ancestors did”—feels insufficient. The traditional answer—elaborate explanations of mythological significance—feels disconnected from lived reality. The modern answer—”cultural preservation”—admits we’re maintaining museum pieces rather than living practices.

My grandmother could explain these rituals through direct experience. Harvest festivals celebrated actual harvests her family depended on. Seasonal transitions affected every aspect of daily life—what could be eaten, when travel was possible, how work was organized. The rituals emerged organically from material necessity.

I celebrate harvest festivals while ordering groceries online. The ritual has become pure abstraction.

The Disconnection

The weight isn’t in performing empty traditions—it’s in recognizing their emptiness while feeling responsible for preservation. These seasonal markers once organized entire civilizations around natural rhythms. Now they interrupt modern schedules that operate independently of seasons.

We light lamps during Kali Puja while living in electrically illuminated cities where darkness has been functionally eliminated. The ritual of bringing light into darkness becomes theatrical when darkness itself is optional.

We celebrate harvest festivals while buying food from global supply chains that make every season simultaneously available. Mangoes in winter, apples in summer—the seasonal scarcity that gave festivals their meaning no longer exists.

We mark seasonal transitions while spending most time in climate-controlled environments that maintain perpetual spring. The summer heat and winter cold that our ancestors built entire cultural calendars around barely register in our temperature-regulated lives.

The rituals persist, but the material conditions that gave them urgency have vanished. We’re performing responses to problems we no longer face.

The Authenticity Trap

But abandoning traditions feels like cultural betrayal, while maintaining them feels like aesthetic performance. The seasonal rituals become costume parties rather than spiritual practices, heritage tourism in our own culture.

The guilt operates from both directions. Continue the traditions, and you’re accused of empty performance. Abandon them, and you’re accused of cultural erasure. There’s no position that doesn’t feel like failure.

Arash’s generation will face even sharper disconnect. They’re growing up in climate-controlled, globally-connected world where seasonal rhythms matter even less. Teaching them these traditions feels like teaching dead language—technically possible but fundamentally disconnected from their actual lives.

Yet not teaching them feels like severing thread to cultural identity, leaving them rootless in ways that might matter later even if they don’t matter now.

Rediscovering Function

Maybe the solution isn’t preserving traditional forms but rediscovering their essential function—creating communal acknowledgment of natural cycles, seasonal pauses for reflection, shared recognition that human life remains embedded in larger rhythms despite technological separation.

The specific rituals matter less than their underlying purpose: marking time collectively, creating shared moments of reflection, acknowledging forces larger than individual lives.

We don’t need to believe lamp-lighting literally defeats darkness to appreciate the symbolic value of bringing light together. We don’t need agricultural dependence on harvests to benefit from communal gratitude practices. We don’t need seasonal scarcity to value seasonal awareness.

The forms can evolve while preserving function. Poila Boishakh could become less about specific foods and more about any shared meal acknowledging seasonal transition. Kali Puja could shift from literal darkness-banishing to metaphorical acknowledgment of difficult passages.

But this evolution requires admitting the disconnect rather than pretending continuity. It means openly discussing why we perform these traditions and what meaning they might hold for contemporary lives, rather than mechanically reproducing forms whose original context has disappeared.

The Inheritance Dilemma

Tonight I’ll participate in seasonal traditions not because I understand their original meaning but because the act of communal marking—even hollow marking—maintains threads of connection to wisdom I’ve lost but hope my children might recover.

This is the bargain I’ve made with myself. I don’t fully believe, but I preserve the possibility that future generations might rediscover something authentic within these forms.

Maybe Arash’s children will live through ecological collapse that returns them to direct dependence on seasonal patterns. Maybe they’ll develop new spiritual frameworks that reconnect them to natural cycles. Maybe the traditions I mechanically maintain will provide vocabulary for meanings I can’t currently access.

Or maybe not. Maybe these traditions will continue hollowing out until they disappear entirely, mourned by nobody because everyone has forgotten why they mattered.

But the act of preservation—even uncertain preservation—feels necessary. Not because the specific forms are sacred but because they represent centuries of human wisdom about living in rhythm with natural world. That wisdom may be dormant, not dead.

The seasonal traditions mark time in ways that transcend individual lifespans. They connect me to ancestors who created them and descendants who might need them. Even performed mechanically, they acknowledge something larger than modern individualism’s eternal present.

So I’ll put on new clothes for Poila Boishakh. Cook traditional foods whose significance I’ve forgotten. Participate in rituals I can’t fully explain to my children. Not because I’ve recovered lost meaning but because I’m maintaining space where meaning might someday return.

The traditions are hollow now. But hollowness isn’t the same as worthlessness. Shells contain potential for new life. Forms outlast their original functions, waiting for new contexts that might revive them.

Until then, we perform. And in performing, preserve. And in preserving, hope.