A Thai Pongal celebration was held at the Calthorpe Community Garden in London last week, bringing together attendees from a broad range of communities for a harvest festival celebration.
Organised collaboratively by Calthorpe Community Garden and the ROT Collective, the event was open to the public and sought to foreground Thai Pongal not only as a cultural celebration, but also as a political practice shaped by histories of land, labour and resistance.
Central to the event was the ritual boiling of milk and rice in a clay pot, a traditional act symbolising prosperity, abundance and renewal for the year ahead. Attendees were served Pongal and took part in kolam making outdoors.
Alongside the celebrations, zines were distributed to inform participants about the cultural and political significance of Pongal among Tamils worldwide. The materials highlighted the festival as a form of resistance against caste hierarchy, cultural erasure and the marginalisation of agrarian labour, situating the festival within ongoing struggles for dignity and self-determination.
The event featured the screening of two short films that brought attention to the struggles of farmers and foregrounding questions of land rights, food sovereignty, grassroots resistance.
The first film documented the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum which took place in Sri Lanka in 2025, where delegates from around the world, such as activists, agricultural workers, Indigenous people and environmentalists, gathered together to discuss the intersectional dynamics disrupting universal food sovereignty.
The second film shifted focus to a Tamil activist working along the border of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, advocating for the preservation of traditional agricultural practices, grounded in conservation, community solidarity and self- reliance in food production, amid the spread of modern farming techniques.
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