Nine days of flowers, folk songs, and devotion reach their crescendo — and BRS working president K. T. Rama Rao marked the final day of Bathukamma, Saddula Bathukamma, on Sunday, 18 October 2026, with warm wishes for all of Telangana, honouring a festival he called the very 'fragrance of our existence.'

A Festival That Worships the Flower Itself

Most traditions offer flowers in worship. Bathukamma flips that entirely. In his Telugu post, KTR captured the distinction precisely: 'పూలతో పూజించడమే కాదు... పూలనే పూజించే విభిన్న, విశిష్ఠ సంస్కృతి తెలంగాణకు సొంతం' — 'Not just worshipping with flowers... the unique, distinctive culture of worshipping the flowers themselves belongs to Telangana.'

That inversion is the soul of Bathukamma. Women and girls stack seasonal wildflowers — tangedu, gunugu, banthikamma — into towering, conical arrangements, then carry them to water bodies while singing folk songs, before immersing them as an offering. The ritual repeats for nine days, building in colour and community, until the closing ceremony of Saddula Bathukamma brings the cycle to an end.

Saddula Bathukamma and What It Represents

'Saddula' refers to the distribution of flattened rice — saddi annam — among participants, a gesture of collective sharing that anchors the festival's final day in the values of community and abundance. KTR described the nine-day celebration as one filled with 'భక్తి శ్రద్ధలతో, ఆటపాటలతో' — devotion, dedication, play, and song — led by the women of Telangana.

Since Telangana's formation as a separate state in 2014, Bathukamma has carried an added layer of meaning. State governments have organised official large-scale celebrations to foreground the festival as a marker of distinct regional identity — a deliberate cultural counterpoint to the anxieties around identity that accompanied bifurcation from Andhra Pradesh.

BRS, Cultural Identity, and the Telugu Political Calendar

For political leaders rooted in the Telangana movement, festivals like Bathukamma are never merely ceremonial. The Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) built much of its early appeal on asserting Telangana's separate social and cultural fabric, and its leaders — KTR prominent among them — have consistently used regional festivals to keep that narrative alive among voters.

A greeting post on Saddula Bathukamma is, in that context, both a warm seasonal wish and a quiet restatement of identity politics: the flowers of Telangana are not borrowed from anywhere else. They belong here.

As the last garlands of this year's Bathukamma meet the water, the festival carries forward what KTR called the state's 'అస్తిత్వ సౌరభం' — the fragrance of its very existence.