Bonalu is a folk festival dedicated to the Mother Goddess, celebrated with particular fervour across Telangana, especially in Hyderabad, Secunderabad, and the surrounding Telangana region. It is one of the two official state festivals of Telangana (alongside Bathukamma) and has been included in the list of India’s intangible cultural heritage.

“Bonalu” comes from “Bonam,” meaning a meal or offering. The core ritual involves women carrying pots of cooked rice, milk, and jaggery, decorated with neem leaves, turmeric, and vermilion, often topped with a small lamp, on their heads to the temple of the Goddess (referred to locally as Mahankali, Ellamma, Pochamma, or Peddamma, depending on the temple and region). The offering is presented to the deity as thanksgiving and a plea for protection and prosperity, particularly the well-being of the family and the wider community.

Accompanying the procession are Potharajus — men dressed as guardians of the Goddess, painted and adorned with anklets of bells, dancing energetically ahead of the Bonam-bearers to the beat of drums.

Bonalu falls in the Hindu month of Ashada Masam and moves through Hyderabad’s major Goddess temples across four consecutive weeks:

• Golconda Bonalu — inaugurates the festival at the Jagadamba Temple within Golconda Fort
• Secunderabad Bonalu — at the Ujjaini Mahakali Temple, one of the largest celebrations of the festival
• Lal Darwaza Bonalu — at the Simhavahini Mahakali Temple in the Old City, marking the concluding and grandest procession
• Ashada Jathara — smaller neighbourhood celebrations continue at local Pochamma and Ellamma temples throughout the month

The festival concludes with Rangam, held the morning after each major Bonalu, where a woman believed to be possessed by the Goddess’s spirit delivers oracular predictions for the coming year — a ritual taken with deep seriousness by devotees.

Bonalu is understood as a festival of gratitude to the Goddess for protection from disease and calamity, historically linked to the end of a plague outbreak in the Old City over a century ago, after which the Ujjaini Mahakali temple procession became an annual observance. Today it stands as one of Telangana’s most visible expressions of folk Shaktism — goddess worship rooted in village and community tradition rather than Vedic ritual, alive in its original form in the heart of a modern city.