Dear reader,

When I was a boy growing up in central Kerala, my first hero was not a footballer or a film star. He was the chootu man—the pyrotechnician or vedikettu-karan—whose name everyone in the parish and beyond recognised with awe and reverence. Vedikkettu stories travelled far and wide, from parents to children, uncles to nephews on the verandah after the Perunnal procession had passed. The chettanmar in my neighbourhood used to talk about Chelapadan (Anthony) from Viyyur, who handled the Thrissur Pooram fireworks in the 1960s. My father’s generation mentioned him in hushed reverence.

Here’s one crazy slice of the ballad. Before he lit the first fuse at the Pooram, Chelapadan drank himself into a soft fog of arrack. He pulled a gunny sack over his head, cut slits for the eyes, and walked down into Vadakkechira, the temple tank. There, in the warm green water, he prayed to Jesus (yes, you heard me right), and stayed under as long as his lungs allowed. Back at the shed a second pot of charayam waited. He drank that too. Someone brought a flame from the lamp in front of the chief elephant. The torch caught. And then Chelapadan ran, half-conscious, alongside the fizzing lines of amittu, kathina, and gundu, lighting them as he went. He worked 16 years for the globally renowned Thiruvambady temple. Every year he came prepared to die. Every year he didn’t, he was lucky.

Mundathikode Satheesan was not that lucky. He worked in a similar shed for 13 years before it killed him this April. Satheesan, like Stibin Stephen from Chalakudy, the present-day virtuoso who handles the Paramekkavu vedikkettu, had become, for a younger generation, what Chelapadan was for my father’s. There are dozens like them across central Kerala, men whose names might not appear in the official Pooram or Perunnal literature and yet without whom none of it would happen.

I watched many vedikkettus from 20 metres away (a big deal, if you know the urban legends), sometimes 10, the heat hitting my face in waves, the smell of burnt sulphur and rope-fuse climbing into the nose, the bangs going straight into the chest cavity. I was frightened and ecstatic at the same time. Even then, even as a child, I knew at some level that the whole thing was absurd. Nobody had to do this. The chemistry was real, the danger was real, the men running between the lines were real. And yet I could not look away. I have not been able to since.

I write this now because, on the afternoon of April 21, Satheesan’s shed at Mundathikode in Thrissur’s suburbs blew up while workers were assembling fireworks for the Thiruvambady Devaswom. Thirteen men were killed at the scene. The death toll later rose to 17. Several others remained in the burns unit at Thrissur Medical College. Many bodies could not be identified by sight; the police are still doing DNA work. Officials had to estimate how many people were in the sheds by counting the lunch packets ordered that morning. Several bodies are still being put back together in a forensic lab. The Kerala High Court has taken suo motu cognisance. A judicial commission under Justice C.N. Ramachandran Nair has been set up.

The cycle is familiar. In 2016, a similar accident at Puttingal in south Kerala killed more than 100. Nileshwar in 2024 killed six and injured 154. Vetlapalem in Andhra Pradesh, two months before Mundathikode, killed 21. At Kattanarpatti in Tamil Nadu’s Virudhunagar district, 25 died on April 19. The numbers change. The shed does not.

It’s not easy to understand fireworks and the frenzy around them. It’s complex. A pyrotechnician in Thrissur once told me, when I asked him why he kept doing it: “Amittu is like life. We mix it with such care, with so much chemistry we ourselves don’t fully understand, and it goes up and breaks open and gives the people a moment of joy, and then in a few seconds it is all gone. If the chemistry holds, you get the happiness. If it doesn’t hold, it bursts in your hand and you are gone too, only without the happiness. The one thing certain is that it bursts and it must.”

That sentence kind of sums up everything I want to say.

The instinct, in newsrooms and on television panels, is to denounce the practice, its aficionados. Ban the things. Punish the contractors. Shut the festivals. There is something in that. But the denunciation arrives from a strange angle, because the people who die are almost never the people who will be punished. They are daily-wage workers from Pazhayannur, Wadakkanchery, Kundannoor, Edappal. Many of them are not even on a register. Their families discover compensation only after a journalist asks, as my friend M.K. Nidheesh, who reported on Mundathikode, told me. This is the first thing that has to be said plainly: the Mundathikode dead are working-class dead. They are the same people—landless or marginally landed, often Dalit or OBC or working-poor Christian, often men past 50 who keep working because no pension exists for them—who light the fireworks at every festival in every State, in Sivakasi and Vetlapalem and Nileshwar. Their labour is invisible until it explodes.

So one has to ask, without sentimentality but without contempt either, what is going on. Why does a society go on organising its biggest emotional events around things that can kill?

Clifford Geertz tried to answer a version of this question in 1972, in his essay on the Balinese cockfight. He borrowed Jeremy Bentham’s phrase “deep play”—in which the stakes are so irrationally high that no sensible person would enter the bet, and yet everyone does. Geertz argued that the cockfight was not really about birds or money. It was the Balinese reading a story to themselves about themselves: kinship, masculinity, hierarchy, rivalry, the village against the village. The blood was the medium. The meaning was the message. You could ban it tomorrow, and you would not have abolished the need that made it.

Roger Caillois, the French sociologist of playing, gives a related and useful word. In Man, Play and Games he sorts all play into four overlapping types—agôn (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx, which he defines as the deliberate pursuit of vertigo, of a “voluptuous panic” that temporarily destroys the body’s ordinary equilibrium. The vedikkettu, the Jallikattu chase, the Cordà bull-runs of the Spanish Levant, the Yanshui beehive fireworks in Taiwan where revellers stand inside a hailstorm of rockets and call it luck—these are ilinx in its purest form. Caillois’ point was that this hunger is not a deviation. It is one of the four basic languages or registers in which human beings play.

Victor Turner adds another layer that matters here. Writing about ritual in the 1960s and 1970s, he described how festivals temporarily dissolve everyday social hierarchies and generate what he called communitas—a brief, intense egalitarian fellow-feeling in which the landlord and the labourer are, for a few hours, simply two men shoulder to shoulder in a crowd. The Pooram and Perunnal nights are exactly this. Caste and class do not vanish, but they go silent. The man next to you at three in the morning, screaming at the last amittu, may be a contractor, carpenter, or coir-worker; you cannot tell, and for that night it does not matter. Ernest Hemingway, who knew almost nothing about Kerala but a great deal about the corrida, made a related argument in Death in the Afternoon, that the bullfight was a tragic ritual whose integrity depended on the genuine possibility that the matador would die, and that to remove the danger was to leave only a decadent spectacle.

The sociologist Randall Collins, building on Durkheim, gives the lay reader a more recent vocabulary for what the crowd actually undergoes. A gathering in tight bodily focus, under heavy sensory load, generates what Durkheim called collective effervescence—a charge of emotional energy that no individual can produce alone. Fireworks are almost laboratory conditions for this. The synchronised noise, the percussive pressure on the sternum, the flash that overrides vision, the smell of burnt rope and sulphur, the fact that you cannot speak and can barely think—all of it shoves the crowd into the present tense. There is no past in the vedikkettu. There is no future. There is only now, and the body of the person next to you, also vibrating.

None of this excuses what happened at Mundathikode. It only helps explain why bald prohibition does not work and never has. Prohibition assumes that the spectacle is a luxury. For the audience, perhaps, but for the worker, it is wages. For the community, it is the one week of the year when the grounds fill up with people who would not otherwise share a glass of tea.

But here is where the harder argument begins, and where people like me—the watching audience—must take some of the blame. The men in the shed do not light the fuse only because of the money. They light it because they have been told, for generations, that what they do is heroic. The chieftain pyrotechnician is held up as a kind of folk-saint; his courage celebrated, his stories told and retold; he is given garlands and fame.

None of this is bad in itself. Chelapadan deserved his garlands. So does Stibin Stephen. But hero-worship, applied to a hazardous trade staffed almost entirely by poor men, has a specific political function. It lets the people in power off the hook. It converts labour into valour, and encourages the worker to ask few questions about wages, contracts, insurance, and safety. It ensures that the labourer will treat any talk of safety as somehow beneath the dignity of the calling. The British did it with miners and lascars, the mill-owners with bidi workers, firecracker factories with labourers.

The question, then, is not whether to keep fireworks. It is whether we are willing to pay the real cost of keeping them with safety. Today, sheds licensed for two men are run with 10. Mandatory distances of 12 to 18 metres collapse to four. Workers are hired on the morning of, paid in cash, and listed nowhere. Insurance is non-existent. Fireproof gear is missing. The Explosives Act of 1884 and the Explosives Rules of 2008 are almost entirely flouted. 

Fireworks manufacture must be treated as the hazardous industrial labour it is—with registered workers, written contracts, ESI cover, mandatory life and disability insurance. All of it funded by the festival organising committees. Work sheds must be shaded, ventilated, and cooled. Safety auditors must have the power to halt a display. There must be serious investment in safe pyrotechnics. And, perhaps most importantly, allowing worker unions that can demand rights, safety gear, accident insurance, and commensurate pay. 

The amittu will still burst. The chemistry will still do what chemistry does. The crowd will still cry at 3 am. That is not the problem. The problem is that we have allowed the price of the spectacle to be paid almost entirely by the workers and draped that in the language of heroism. Sudarshanan from Vennur left behind a wife, Chandrika, and two sons. Vasudevan from Kumaranellur left a wife and three children. They are the bills we refused to pay.

Wishing you a peaceful week ahead, and welcoming you to read Frontline‘s coverage of the recent Sivakasi tragedy by our senior reporter Ilangovan Rajasekaran, along with this piece by Vidyarthy Chatterjee on Chalam Bennurakar, the documentary maker whose work exposed the dangerous sides of Sivakasi’s firework factories.

As always, write back with your thoughts!

Jinoy Jose P.

Digital Editor, Frontline