MSNBC: Lathmar Holi

Photo © Manan Vatsyayana / AFP - Getty Images

I featured quite a number of posts on Holi in the past weeks, and I'm not about to stop now especially as a number of photographer friends will soon be on their way to Mathura and Rajasthan to document the festivities.

MSNBC's PhotoBlog just featured a couple of large photos of Lathmar Holi, a festival which took place yesterday, a few of days before the actual Holi celebration. It takes place at Barsana near Mathura, where people flock to celebrate the revelries.

The Lathmar Holi festival begins with a ceremony at the Radha Rani temple. The legend has it that Radha and her friends decided to teach a lesson to Krishna for stealing their clothes at a bathing ghat, and in a sort of re-enactment ceremony, the male villagers in Barsana smear themselves with colors while the women attack them with wooden sticks in response to their efforts to put color on them.

More here with Kevin Frayer's photographs. On one of these photographs, the colored water was clearly splashed on his lens!