1The Tamil New Year festival, celebrated by the cooking of new rice.
泰米尔新年（以煮新米饭庆祝）
Example sentencesExamples
Pongal is a popular harvest festival in South India.
They celebrated Pongal by distributing sugarcane pieces and collectively bringing to boil the quintessential made of rice, milk and jaggery.
1.1mass nounA southern Indian dish of rice cooked with various herbs and spices.
南印药膳
Example sentencesExamples
If the served pongal provided a feast to the taste buds, the dress code of the dazzling girls was too catchy to cool the eyes of the beholders.
And pongal was distributed to the passengers as well.
Over 2,000 people attended as families simultaneously boiled a total of 320 ceremonial pots of sweet rice, called pongal.
There's some discussion about the menu: the consensus is on simple idli and various kinds of rice preparations (lemon rice, pongal, sambar rice, curd rice).
They enjoyed the pongal, but not before offering prayers to the Sun God.
Origin
From Tamil poṅkal, literally 'boiling, swelling' (with reference to the cooking process of rice).