Share
Navratri in Vadodara is as much a program of public life as a calendar of ritual. For nine nights the city remakes itself into a series of concentric circles: dancers move, singers lead, lights are tuned to human rhythms and, just as importantly, a portable food economy unfolds to meet the steady appetite of the dance. The menus change with the mood of the venue. Seen through the city’s principal venues, United Way’s United Garba Mahotsav, the Faculty of Fine Arts baithak at MSU, the Lakshmi Vilas Palace heritage garba, and the old-city “pol” garbas, the festival reveals itself as a festival of careful contrasts. Between those poles the palace gardens and the old-city lanes invent their own seasonal idioms. Across them all, food functions not as mere fuel but as a social grammar: it signals who belongs, how the night will be spent, and what the city believes a proper Navratri should taste like.
United Way: Scale With A Menu For Motion
If any single site defines the contemporary experience of Navratri in Vadodara, it is the United Garba Mahotsav led by the legendary Atul Purohit organized by United Way of Baroda. The event’s scale is not rhetorical. United Way’s own materials and event guides record a formal programme of food courts and vendor regulations tailored to an audience that numbers in the tens of thousands each night; the organisers list more than forty food stalls in recent bulletins and describe an infrastructure built to keep dancers and spectators fed and moving. The sheer attendance, the festival routinely bills itself as drawing over 40,000 participants nightly, turns food from a concession into a logistical problem that has shaped what is served and how.
That arithmetic explains why the United Way food courts favour dishes that meet four demands at once: they must be quick to plate, easily eaten standing, sustaining after repeated rounds of movement, and resilient in a crowded, warm environment. The familiar repertoire is therefore everywhere: breads filled with cheese or spiced vegetables, garlic-buttered naans and quick pizzas, folded sandwiches and chaats that can be eaten in the interval between songs, steaming vadas and the Mumbai-style vada pav that travels well, and cooling mocktails, ice-cream and cold coffees, to cut through the heat and the exertion. Vendors operate under formal vendor agreements; municipal inspections also focus on food safety precisely because of the crowds. In other words, United Way’s garba is a place where the festival’s appetite has been industrialised without losing sight of its pleasures.
Witnesses who have made the United Way nights a ritual of their own speak of the food circuit as part of the choreography. “You time your rounds,” one frequent attendee summarised a night at United Way: the first two hours are for devotion and finding a place in the circle, the next hour is for dancing hard, and the interludes are for food that restores without slowing you down. This pattern, devotion, exertion, refreshment, repeats nightly, and the menu answers it with speed and a certain ingenuity.
Faculty Of Fine Arts: Fidelity To Tradition
The Faculty of Fine Arts garba at the Maharaja Sayajirao University stands as a counterpoint to the scale and theatre of the big grounds. For decades the Fine Arts baithak has been prized for the same reason many traditions survive: it refuses amplification and spectacle. The evening is shaped by acoustic performance, dholak, manjira and voice, and the result is an intimate, human tempo. Alumni and students guard the evening’s format and the baithak’s exclusivity, and the practice of keeping the garba unamplified is not merely nostalgic; it is a deliberate preservation of form. “Our garbas are performed to the melody of traditional musical instruments without the use of loud speakers,” an alumnus who has played dhol at the faculty recalled; the tenor there is one of cultural conservation.
Food here is correspondingly pared down and functional. The offerings are not meant to be an attraction but a courtesy: simple, cooling juices such as mosambi and lemon shikanji, and small fried items like dal vada, items that refill energy and steady the dancer without diverting attention from the ritual. The modesty of the menu is a deliberate aesthetic choice. The baithak treats food as adjunct to devotion rather than its rival; the plates sustain the body, and the ritual itself remains the prime event.
Lakshmi Vilas Palace: Heritage, Curation And Ceremonious Flavour
The palace garba is a different project again: a curated heritage experience that trades on the Gaekwad family’s patrimony and the atmosphere of the palace lawns. Since its formal revival as a public heritage garba the event has been ticketed and staged with deliberate reference to the palace’s museum-like sensibility, a Navratri that chooses restraint, lighted gardens and a sense of lineage over the raw scale of the grounds. The palace organisers frame the event as both devotion and cultural performance; the ballasted ticketing and curated hospitality signal a Garba that is meant to feel like an extension of princely patronage. Recent public reporting quotes palace representatives who speak of an intent to preserve and amplify the palace’s distinctive ambience while expanding the reach of the event in careful, curated ways.
Food at the palace mirrors that curation: the menu is pitched to the atmosphere of the lawns and the expectations of a ticketed audience. Descriptions of the Heritage Garba emphasise “gourmet festive foods and sweets” served alongside traditional counters, an arrangement that aims to balance the comfort of familiar festival dishes with the polish of a heritage setting. The result is Navratri made ceremonial: guests move between prayer, dance and the carefully arranged food courts in a choreography intended to respect both devotion and the site’s history.
The Old City And The Pol Garbas: Vernacular Exchange And Neighbourhood Taste
If the palace and the large grounds are about staging, the sheris and pol garbas of the old city are where Navratri’s everyday economy asserts itself. Narrow lanes in Raopura, Mandvi and adjoining old quarters light up with small community garbas whose music and pace are local; here the food is embedded in social relations. Neighbourhood vendors and long-standing stalls provide handheld snacks, papri-style chaat, piping hot vadas, quick rotis and breads, tender cheeses on naan, and the obligatory cold juices and kulfis, and the exchange is intimate. A plate is served with the knowledge of who is dancing where, whose child needs a sweeter kulfi, and which aunt likes her vada extra crisp. It is a kind of municipal cuisine that resists mapping or commercialising because its value is social and immediate rather than promotional. Municipal drives and inspections have long shown that garba food courts across the city vary in number and formality, but it is in the old city that the festival’s vernacular palate remains most visible.
The festival’s people give language to these different tastes. A veteran United Way attendee described the United Way circuit as “a place to taste everything the city brings to Navratri,” praising the way professional kitchens and street vendors sit side by side in the food courts. An alumnus of the Fine Arts baithak remembers the baithak’s nights as “a place where the music and the dance arrive naturally; the food is small and precise, it steadies you between songs.” And a palace organiser framed the heritage garba as a custodial act: the palace wants Navratri to be “an atmosphere that breathes devotion and the joy of Navratri’s enduring spirit,” words used by those responsible for staging the palace event. These remarks map how the city negotiates devotion, commerce and hospitality across different registers of public life.
