Tamil Festival 2026

Did you know that January is Tamil Heritage Month in Canada? January is usually the month when the Thai Ponggal festival falls, and is the month when the Tamil New Year begins so it is the designated month to honour the contributions of Tamil Canadians in Canada. In Victoria, the Tamil community (mainly from Sri Lanka, but also from Singapore) are also striving for the honour. The Tamil Festival started as a small gathering in Casey in 2011, and has slowly gained traction and became bigger. This year's celebration is at the Caribbean Gardens, Scoresby. There were many stalls selling Indian traditional clothes, food, sponsor stalls (e.g. blinds, tuition centre for kids, mortgage broker, jeweller). Our favourite was a stall selling mutton briyani for $14 and mango lassi for $6. The mutton briyani was pre-packed (not sure where, but hopefully in a Council approved kitchen) and had lots of pieces of mutton and fluffly basmati rice. We also had chole bhatura (chole = chana masala/chickpea curry + bhatura = fried bread) except the bhatura was with curry chicken $15. The bhatura was crispy and the chicken was tender and salty. I wished there was a washstand where I could have washed my hands and ate with my hands. It would have been easier to tear and dip the bread in the curry than eating with a wooden spoon, which is not so satisfying. 

Ponggal celebrates the harvest of the year, worships the Sun God over 4 days. The second day of the festival is call Mattu Ponggal which celebrates the cow, that performs much of the manual labour of ploughing the fields for the farmers. When driving into the venue, we saw a sign for 'Pongal Drop Off point'. Pongal is actually a claypot where sweet rice porridge are boiled in milk and presented as offering to the gods during the Ponggal festival. In that sense, it is very similar to Chinese culture because during CNY, Chinese people prepare foods with auspicious names like nian gao (a sweet sticky rice cake, to coincide with the saying 'nin nin gou sing' - rise up every year through the ranks at work). 

Almost all the ladies in the festival wore the sari or salwar kameez. They looked so beautiful in the sheen of vibrant and bright colours on the verdant lawn. The men wore dhoti, which is like a sarong around the waist accompanied by a shirt or kurta. These are usually in cream or white in colour and definitely not as colourful as the ladies' outfits. I wore a long sleeveless dress in green to blend in while Gaz longed for a veshti to escape the heat. It was 32 degrees and sunny but luckily it was a reprieve from yesterday, which was 42 degrees!