--- title: "Gorehabba, a 300-year-old Diwali festival on the Karnataka border, has villagers throwing cow dung" url: https://badiyaa.com/gorehabba-cow-dung-festival-gumatapura/ published: 2026-11-15T00:00:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-15T00:00:00+00:00 section: Offbeat publisher: Badiyaa --- # Gorehabba, a 300-year-old Diwali festival on the Karnataka border, has villagers throwing cow dung Gorehabba is a cow dung throwing festival held after Diwali in Gumatapura, a village on the Karnataka–Tamil Nadu border, honoring the god Beerappa. Once a year, the people of Gumatapura push each other into a pit full of cow dung, on purpose, as worship. The festival is called Gorehabba, Kannada for “cow dung festival,” and it takes place the day after Bali Padyami, one of the closing days of Diwali. The village sits right on the border between the Indian states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. It once belonged to Karnataka’s Chamarajanagar district and was moved into Tamil Nadu under the States Reorganisation Act, but the festival keeps its Kannada name. Local tradition puts its age at around 300 years. ## Why cow dung Gorehabba honors Beerappa, a god worshipped by the Kuruba community. According to the village legend, Beerappa was born from cow dung, so splattering it on neighbors is a way of honoring his origin. Many villagers also believe that taking part protects them from illness, a belief often given as one reason the custom has lasted for centuries. That is a matter of faith, not a medical claim, and nothing here suggests otherwise. ## How the day unfolds The sequence is surprisingly formal for a dung fight: - **Dawn:** men, women and children gather cow dung from every corner of Gumatapura and pile it behind the Beerappa Temple. - **Morning:** young people go house to house collecting oil and butter for puja, first at the Beerappa Temple and then at the Karappa Temple about one kilometer away. - **The procession:** on the walk back, one man is chosen as the chadikora, or “sneak.” He gets a fake mustache and beard made of herbs and rides to the temple on a donkey. - **The signal:** at the temple, his herbal beard is pulled off and buried in the dung pit. A puja is offered on the heap, and the first handful of dung goes onto the priest. That is the cue for everyone else to start. - **The finale:** villagers are shoved into the pit one by one while thousands of visitors from nearby villages watch. Later an effigy of the chadikora is carried up a hill called Kondigekara Gudda and burned along with a chicken, and everyone washes off in the lake. ## Not the only dung fight in India Gorehabba has a cousin roughly 400 kilometers to the north in Andhra Pradesh. In Kairuppala, near Aspari in Kurnool district, villagers stage the Pidakala War on the day after Ugadi, the Telugu new year. “Pidakalu” means dried cow dung cakes in Telugu, and “samaram” means battle. The two festivals differ in spirit. Gorehabba centers on one god’s birth and ends in a shared cleanup. The Pidakala War splits the village into two sides reenacting a quarrel before the marriage of the goddess Bhadrakali and the god Virabhadra, and it is rougher: a police official reported about 100 injuries in 2021, though nobody filed a complaint. ## How it compares with La Tomatina Western readers usually reach for Spain’s La Tomatina as the reference point, and the comparison is useful mostly for its contrasts: La Tomatina began in Buñol in 1945 as a scuffle among friends, so it is roughly 80 years old. Gorehabba, by local count, is closer to 300, which makes it nearly four times older. Buñol now caps entry at 20,000 paid tickets; Gumatapura charges nothing and its crowd of thousands mostly watches rather than throws. And Buñol’s ammunition is bought by the truckload, about 145,000 kilograms of tomatoes in 2015, while Gumatapura’s is collected from its own cattle that morning. India’s festival calendar has room for more than one animal-centered celebration around Diwali. Neighboring Nepal [honors dogs with garlands on Kukur Tihar](https://badiyaa.com/kukur-tihar-nepal-dogs-festival-november-8-2026/), and our [five-day Diwali 2026 guide](https://badiyaa.com/diwali-2026-november-8-leicester-five-day-guide/) sets out how the main festival unfolds. Karnataka’s quieter traditions include the [12th-century Hoysala temple at Belur](https://badiyaa.com/belur-hoysala-temple-madanika-jewelry/) and its carved stone dancers. For Gumatapura, the next round falls on the day after Bali Padyami in Diwali 2027, when the dung pile will go up behind the Beerappa Temple again at dawn. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Gorehabba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorehabba) - [Wikipedia: Pidakala War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidakala_War) - [Wikipedia: La Tomatina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Tomatina) *Image: Gopal Aggarwal, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*