Yesterday, was Thai Pongal, one of the leading festivals of the Tamil people, giving thanks for the harvest and wishing for prosperity in the year to come.
The high point of the festival is the making of Pongal itself, a sweet rice dish which is cooked in a traditional way using a clay pot. Pongal itself means to boil over and an overflowing pot is the most frequent depiction of the festival.
Crawley has a substantial Tamil community, recently released census data reveals that Tamils make up a higher percentage of Crawley’s population than that of any other local authority in the country outside of London and, as with past years, I was privileged to be invited to share in the celebration with the town’s Tamil Learning Centre.
Tamil Learning Centres provide accredited training in the Tamil language and cultural practices for school-aged children, ensuring that they understand their cultural background even if–as I’m told by slightly begrudgingly by parents–children still insist on using English at home.
The centre in Crawley has been operating since 2006, run on Saturdays by a team of volunteers and catering to Tamil children across the wider region. It’s a remarkable example of how a persecuted community can through hard-work and determination maintain their own ancestral identity while at the same time integrating into Britain’s cultural melting-pot. For Crawley, it’s another example of how the town’s wide-ranging religious and cultural facilities enables the town to maintain a much larger social footprint than would typically be the case for a town of our size.
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Peter Lamb for Crawley 