Vaisakhi is the biggest holiday in the Sikh religion and celebrates the creation of the Khalsa, a group of initiated Sikhs who made a commitment to the Sikh faith.
“Being together with family is the most important thing about Vaisakhi,” Warwickshire Cricket Foundation Community Participation Officer Simran Riat said.
“Different families do different things but generically you go to the gurdwara (Sikh place of worship), there’s fireworks, there’s food. A lot of communities are trying to bring sport into it too, so that there’s a fun element to it.”
And bringing sport into the celebrations is exactly what the Warwickshire Cricket Foundation are doing.
In Birmingham, Vaisakhi also means the Vaisakhi Cricket Cup, a community event that celebrates both faith and cricket and encourages more people, particularly women and children, to get involved with the game.
“This year we had 57 participants play and around 20 spectators” Riat said.
“And this year we also had 28 female participants, a lot more than last year. We played pairs cricket with indoor cricket rules.
“It is a mixed event, but we did a real push for women and girls to come and play. A lot of our female community members and participants don’t like mixed cricket, it’s usually female-only sessions, so that was a brilliant thing for us this year.
“We played games from 1-4pm and then gave out snacks, pastries, pakoras, and Indian food to celebrate and bring everyone together and try to link it as much as we could to Vaisakhi.”
The event was not only attended by members of the local Sikh community, but also staff from Warwickshire Cricket Foundation and media from BBC West Midlands, as well as an award-winning bhangra dancer who performed a routine before the final match of the day.
While the event took place to celebrate Vaisakhi, a big part of it was to get more people from across the county’s Sikh community involved with cricket.
“Yes and no,” Riat replied when asked if there’s a sizable cricket-playing Sikh community across the county.
“Our heritage is from India, so you can imagine cricket is like a religion back home, but it gets tricky.
“It has been difficult to get participants from the Sikh community and this is why we came up with the idea for the Vaisakhi Cup.”
The lack of role models in professional sport is an issue Riat and her colleagues face.
However, there has been an increase in Sikh representation working in cricket across the county and she hopes that will have an impact.
“Working in the foundation and the county, there are more of us,” Riat said.
“So, hopefully that’s a breakthrough for the next few years. Last week we had 100 youngsters under 16 at a gurdwara at a Sikh camp and we played cricket with them and they absolutely loved it.
“About 10 to 15 of them turned up to the Vaisakhi Cup as well, so we’re doing more work with them. And in Handsworth, we’ve got a new gurdwara and they’ve already got 25 people signed up to start playing cricket with us.
“We’re breaking that barrier. Last year we had very few players from the Sikh community and this year we’ve already worked with over 100 in the past two weeks.”