At first sight you would not suspect the black and brawny Koli of much gaiety, but there is deep down in him a spring of mirth and humour which, “when wine and free companions kindle him,” can break out into the most boisterous hilarity and jocundity and even buffoonery, throwing aside all trammels of convention and decorum.  His women folk, too, though they do not go out of their proper place in the social system, assert themselves vigorously within it, and are gay and vivacious and well aware of their personal attractions.  So the Koli village looks forward to the Holi and makes timely preparation for it.

The night before the poornima, or full moon, of the month Phalgoon arrives, each trim fishing boat is stored with flowers and leafy branches, all the flags that can be mustered and a drum; then the whole village goes a-fishing.  Next morning each housewife gets up early to decorate her house and trick out herself and her children.  For though the Koli is the most naked of men, his whole workaday costume consisting of one rag about equal in amplitude to half a good pocket-handkerchief, his wife is the most dressy of women.  She is always well-dressed even on common days.  The bareness of her limbs may perhaps shock our notions of propriety at first, for, being a mud-wader of necessity, like the stork and the heron, she girds her garments about her very tightly indeed; but this only sets off her wonderfully erect and athletic figure, while her well-set head looks all the nicer that it has no covering except her own neatly-bound hair.  She never draws her saree coyly over her head, like other native women, when she meets a man.  On this day there is no change in the fashion of her costume (that never changes), but she puts on her brightest dress, blue, or red, or lemon yellow, with all her private jewellery, and decks her hair with a small chaplet of bright flowers.

Her children are tricked out with more fancy.  The little brown girl, who yesterday had not one square inch of cloth on the whole of her tiny person, comes out a petite miss in a crimson bodice and a white skirt, with her shining black hair oiled and combed and plaited and decked with flowers, and her neck and arms and feet twinkling with ornaments.  Her brother of six or seven looks as if he were going to a fancy-dress ball in the character of His Highness the Holkar.  His small head is set in a great three-cornered Maratha turban, and his body, a stranger to the feel of clothes, is masked in a resplendent purple jacket.  The young men of the village, such of them as are not gone a-fishing, have donned clean white jackets.  Beyond that they will not go, contemning effeminacy.