Ketti, about 10 kilometers from here witnessed a large gathering of Badagas on Monday. The occasion was the conclusion of the annual Hethai Amman festival of the Badaga community, the largest indigenous social group in the Nilgiris.
With the weather being ideal, thousands of Badagas from various parts of the district clad in their traditional white dress thronged the Hethai temple at Ketti to pay obeisance to their presiding deity, the ancestress Goddess Hethai.
A good number of police personnel had been deployed to regulate the crowd. A community lunch marked the occasion. Police said that the festival had gone off without a hitch
Speaking to The Hindu many of the devotees said that it was a fitting end to the ‘habba' (festival) which had been ushered in with considerable religious fervour a few weeks ago at Kannerimukku near Kotagiri and some other places like Hallu Kerai and Kerbetta.
Pointing out that before ending at Ketti it had also been celebrated in Beragani, the sacred abode of the Goddess and villages like Pethala, Dhavani, Jagathala and Nunthala, they said that the increasing turn out augured well for the community which has of late been in the news for the wrong reasons like differences among its members due to groupism.
