Why the Turning of the Sun Still Matters: Shakespeare, Lupercalia, and India's Living Tradition of Makar Sankranti
✍️ Written by Saket Suman
One of the most overlooked features of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is that he does not begin the tragedy with conspiracy or bloodshed but with a festival. Rome is in motion, gathered in public ritual at the Feast of Lupercal, an ancient observance tied to fertility, purification, and the turning of the season.
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| Representational; Via: Shukri Hamk |
That instinct, the urge to pause when the sun turns and to read meaning into that movement, is not uniquely Roman. It is civilisational. And it survives, intact and visible, in India through Makar Sankranti, a festival that has outlived empires precisely because it never separated the cosmic from the everyday. Celebrated each year in mid-January, most often on January 14, Makar Sankranti marks the sun’s transition from Sagittarius to Capricorn and the start of its northward journey, Uttarayana.
In India’s cultural memory, Makar Sankranti has never been a single event confined to ritual alone. It is a threshold. It arrives at the edge of winter, when the harshest cold begins to loosen its grip and the promise of warmth returns. It coincides with the early stages of the Rabi agricultural cycle, a period when sowing is complete and the most punishing labour has passed. This timing matters. A civilisation shaped by agriculture learned early that gratitude must be collective and that rest, however brief, must be shared. Makar Sankranti became the moment when effort could be acknowledged, abundance anticipated, and life briefly rearranged around togetherness rather than survival.
The festival’s many regional names tell the story of this continuity better than any single definition could. Pongal in Tamil Nadu, Magh Bihu in Assam, Sankranthi or Pedda Panduga in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Uttarayan in Gujarat, Maghi in Punjab, Khichdi Sankranti in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Poush Sankranti in West Bengal, Uttarayani in Uttarakhand, Maghe Sankranti in Nepal. The rituals differ, the foods change, the landscapes shift, but the grammar remains the same that the sun has changed direction and it is time to begin again.
What is striking about Makar Sankranti is how seamlessly it binds the moral and the material. Across regions, people prepare and exchange sweets made from sesame seeds and jaggery. These are winter foods, warming and sustaining but they are also symbolic.
Sesame and jaggery are sticky; they bind. The act of sharing them carries an unspoken ethic: stay together, speak gently, remain connected despite difference. In this small, repeated gesture, a social philosophy is rehearsed year after year. Harmony is not declared but it is practiced in homes across the country.
This emphasis on shared life extends to the festival’s spiritual dimension. Makar Sankranti is regarded as auspicious for ritual bathing, and millions take a holy dip in rivers such as the Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Krishna, and Kaveri. They offer thanks to the sun for prosperity and well-being.
The belief is in stepping briefly outside the ordinary flow of time to realign oneself with something larger. Every twelve years, this impulse culminates in the Kumbh Mela, where tens of millions gather at sacred confluences in one of the largest peaceful assemblies in human history.
The annual Magha Mela at Prayagraj and the Gangasagar Mela in West Bengal are part of the same Sankranti universe. These are reminders that renewal, in India, is never a private affair.
The centrality of the sun in Makar Sankranti can be traced back to the Vedic imagination, where solar energy is associated with knowledge, order, and life itself. Hymns such as the Gayatri Mantra locate illumination in this understanding.
Over time, the festival absorbed layers of meaning and became associated with Vishnu and Lakshmi, and in later belief, with the coming of Kalki, the final avatar who restores balance at the end of a moral cycle. But the core idea remained stable. Renewal is a rhythm.
Seen from this perspective, the contrast with Lupercalia is instructive and worth pointing out. The Roman festival, physical and exuberant, eventually disappeared, suppressed as pagan excess and preserved largely through literature and drama, with Shakespeare's Julius Caesar being the most noted example.
Makar Sankranti endured because Indian civilisation never demanded that the sacred be separated from labour, food, or the body. Agriculture and astronomy, ritual bathing and kite flying, prayer and feasting were allowed to coexist. Continuity, even in times of flux, was achieved through adaptation.
Shakespeare’s use of Lupercalia in Julius Caesar works as a warning from history. Rome is celebrating, confident in its rituals, even as its political order drifts toward rupture. The festival becomes a backdrop against which ambition and anxiety quietly surface.
Makar Sankranti offers a different lesson. It shows what happens when a society repeatedly returns to alignment rather than assuming it. Each January, when kites rise, pots boil over, bonfires are lit, and sweets are exchanged, India performs an old act of recognition that reminds us, again and again, that the sun has turned and that our life must turn with it.
There is nothing sentimental about this understanding. It is practical, shaped by centuries of dependence on seasons and shared effort. A civilisation that has lived close to scarcity does not romanticise renewal. It prepares for it. Makar Sankranti is therefore a moment when gratitude, labour, faith, and community briefly converge.
By opening his tragedy with a seasonal festival, Shakespeare reminded us that power forgets its limits when it forgets nature. In sustaining Makar Sankranti across millennia, India offers a quieter counterpoint that simply states that renewal is not enforced by decree or remembered only in texts, it is instead lived, repeated, and shared.
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