A Season of Remembrance: Understanding Autumn’s Festivals of the Dead Through Distant Cultures

In a rapidly homogenising world, understanding global culture is not just an act of curiosity — it is an act of preservation. Each ritual, each festival, each story carries within it the memory of a people and their relationship with life, death, and belonging. When we learn how different communities honour their ancestors — from Odisha’s Bada Badua Daka to Mexico’s Día de los Muertos, from Cambodia’s Pchum Ben to Europe’s All Souls’ Day — we see the threads that connect us all. And in doing so, we protect our own.

Global understanding sharpens local pride. It shows us that our customs are not isolated, quaint traditions lost to modernity, but part of a universal rhythm — a human instinct to pause, to remember, and to speak across the silence of death.

Between October and November, this rhythm echoes across continents. The air turns cooler, harvests end, nights lengthen — and humanity, in its scattered diversity, lights candles, burns jute, builds altars, and sends kites into the sky. This is the Season of Remembrance — a time when the living invite the dead home.

Odisha: The Night of Returning Souls

In Odisha, Diwali carries a more intimate resonance. It is not only a celebration of prosperity but of ancestral return — an observance called Bada Badua Daka. As dusk falls on Kārtika Amāvasyā, families gather at their doorsteps holding bundles of jute sticks (kaunria kāṭhi), their faces bathed in the flickering firelight. One by one, torches are lit, and a chant rises in unison:

“Bada badua ho, andhāra re āsa, alua re jā” “O ancestors, come in the darkness, return by the light.”

The line is both invocation and direction. The fire’s glow becomes a navigational code, guiding unseen footsteps back to familiar courtyards. Smoke curls skyward like whispers. It is a night when villages shimmer not only with fireworks but with the breath of continuity — each household calling forth its lineage.

In the temple town of Puri, this light finds its culmination at the Baisi Pahacha, the twenty-two stone steps leading into Lord Jagannath’s sanctum. On this day, devotees offer pinda (rice balls) upon these steps — a gesture that turns stone into altar. Tradition holds that even the deities themselves perform śrāddha for their own divine ancestors, like King Indradyumna and Queen Gundicha.

Photo by Abhisek Tripathy

The symbolism is profound. The Baisi Pahacha becomes not merely a staircase into the temple but a symbolic bridge between realms — the living ascending with offerings, the departed descending through memory. The city, temple, and home together form a single geography of remembrance. In Odisha, Diwali’s flame is not celebratory alone; it is commemorative, ethical, and sacred — an invitation for the past to walk beside the present.

Europe: The Thin Veil of Samhain and All Souls

Across the Celtic world, October’s end marked Samhain, the turning of the agricultural year and the moment when the veil between the living and dead was said to thin. Fires were lit to protect the living and to guide ancestral spirits. As centuries passed, Christianity subsumed this liminal night into All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, transforming pagan encounter into ecclesiastical remembrance.

Yet the bones of the ritual remained. In Poland and Lithuania, cemeteries still blaze with candles. In Italy and Spain, families hold vigils by graves, their tombs covered in chrysanthemums. In Ireland and Scotland, the echoes of Samhain linger in Halloween bonfires and carved turnips — later pumpkins — that glow at thresholds to ward off wandering souls.

Europe’s autumn of remembrance is a balance between dread and devotion: the fear of the unknown softened by the intimacy of memory. It reveals that remembrance need not be solemn — it can be luminous, communal, even festive.

The message is enduring: death, too, belongs in the calendar of life.

Latin America: Altars, Bread, and Sky

Mexico: Ofrendas of Colour and Scent

In Mexico, Día de los Muertos transforms grief into colour. Families build ofrendas — altars layered with photographs, candles, water, and food. The air is sweet with pan de muerto (bread of the dead), tamales, and incense. Trails of marigold petals (cempasúchil) lead from doors to graves, guiding spirits back home.

Here, remembrance is reunion. The dead are guests, expected and honoured. Children paint skulls on their faces not to mock death but to accept it as kin. The streets hum with music; cemeteries shimmer with candles. On these nights, Mexico becomes a living dialogue between the seen and the unseen.

Guatemala: Kites that Speak to the Dead

Not far away, in Guatemala’s highland towns of Sumpango and Santiago Sacatepéquez, families take remembrance to the skies. The Barriletes Gigantes — colossal paper kites, some stretching twenty meters, rise above cemeteries. Their painted surfaces bear prayers, poetry, portraits, and even political messages. The belief is that these kites, tethered to the earth by thread, carry messages to ancestors in the other world.

Photo by Wido Santos

The sky fills with sound — paper flutter, bamboo creak, wind roar — until dusk falls and the kites descend, their mission complete. The act is communal, artful, and spiritual: grief translated into flight.

Bolivia and Ecuador: The Bread of Return

In Bolivia, Todos Santos sees families erect altars called mast’aku, heaped with fruit, roasted maize, candles, and bread shaped like infants — the tantawawa. These bread babies, crafted with tender precision, embody the souls of the departed. Eating them is not cannibalism but communion — a symbolic act of love and remembrance.

In Ecuador, the ritual takes culinary form through colada morada, a thick purple drink made of berries, pineapple, and spices, and guaguas de pan, sweet bread babies decorated with icing. Families carry them to cemeteries or share them at home, turning food into a language of continuity.

Across Latin America, these rituals echo the same belief: that the dead are not gone, merely away; and that love — like scent, song, and food — can cross any border.

Asia: Autumn’s Compassionate Memory

China: The Double Ninth’s Ascending Steps

In China, the Double Ninth Festival (Chóngyáng) occurs in October — a mirror to spring’s Qingming. Families climb mountains, drink chrysanthemum wine, and visit graves. Nine being the “yang” number, the double nine marks a day of excess energy — a time to balance life with remembrance. Offerings of fruit, paper clothes, and incense are made to ancestors, acknowledging that the cycle of season mirrors the cycle of life and death.

Cambodia: Pchum Ben and the Hungry Ghosts

In Cambodia, Pchum Ben spans fifteen days at the end of the Buddhist rainy season retreat. Families visit pagodas at dawn, throwing rice balls into courtyards, calling out names of the departed. Monks chant sutras for the restless dead, while communities share food and merit. The belief is tender and practical: if the dead are fed, they will not hunger; if remembered, they will not harm. It is one of the most sustained and emotional acts of filial care in Southeast Asia, where remembering the dead is also a way of feeding the living.

Korea and Japan: Seasonal Gratitude

In Korea, Chuseok unites harvest thanksgiving with ancestral homage. Families prepare charye (food offerings), bow before ancestral tablets, and visit tombs to clean them — acts that entwine labor, lineage, and gratitude. In Japan, the summer Obon festival carries similar meanings: lanterns float on rivers, dances fill courtyards, and families imagine spirits returning home for a brief visit.

Though differing in timing, these Asian rituals share the same pulse: remembrance as duty, gratitude as love, and ceremony as continuity.

Australia and the Pacific: The Living Grief of Community

Among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia, death is honoured through Sorry Business — a communal process. The community gathers, sings, smokes the home, avoids the deceased’s name, and shares collective grief. Mourning is a lived rhythm, reaffirming kinship between the living, the dead, and the land itself.

The Pacific islands, too, host myriad ceremonies — from Polynesian memorial feasts to Melanesian ancestral songs — that keep the dead active within daily life. Here, remembrance is not a moment in the calendar but a perpetual conversation with time.

The ParibhaAsha Perspective: Remembering as Cultural Infrastructure

For ParibhaAsha, the act of tracing these global convergences is not academic indulgence — it is cultural strategy. When we see Odisha’s Bada Badua Daka alongside Mexico’s Día de los Muertos or Cambodia’s Pchum Ben, we see that remembrance is infrastructure: a system that sustains identity, ethics, and emotional literacy.

In Odisha, the kaunria kāṭhi torches are fading from modern practice. Yet, if contextualized within this global mosaic, the ritual gains renewed dignity. It becomes not merely a “local custom” but one node in the vast network of human remembrance — a testimony that Odias, too, have long known how to invite the dead, speak to them, and send them back in light.

ParibhaAsha’s vision — Activating Culture as Infrastructure — finds its essence here. Understanding these cross-cultural rituals helps us reinterpret our own. It shows that cultural continuity is not nostalgia; it is design. By archiving, narrating, and sharing these stories, ParibhaAsha transforms heritage into a living system — one that educates, unites, and inspires.

In every torch lit in a Puri courtyard, in every marigold laid on a Mexican altar, in every kite flown in Guatemala, humanity rehearses the same truth: that love does not end with death. To remember is to resist disappearance.

To light a lamp is to keep history awake.

October and November, in their stillness, hold a secret unity. Across oceans, languages, and faiths, the living turn toward the past with food, light, and prayer. In that turning, they reaffirm their place in the continuum of life.

Understanding this unity does not diminish local tradition; it fortifies it. It reminds us that we, too, belong to a civilisation of remembrance — one that believes the dead never truly leave, but linger as warmth, wind, and whisper.

And when Odisha’s lamps burn this Diwali night — calling softly, “Bada badua ho, andhāra re āsa, alua re jā” — they echo a thousand other voices across the world, all uttering the same ancient, human plea: Come home for a while. Stay till dawn.