Dahi Handi is celebrated as part of Krishna Janmashtami, and re-enacts the childhood stories of Krishna as the butter thief - the gopis of Gokul are said to have hung their pots of curd and butter out of the child's reach, and Krishna and his companions to have formed human pyramids to reach them. Teams called Govinda pathaks, which include all-women pathaks, train for months to build multi-tier pyramids and send their lightest and youngest climber to the top to break an earthen pot of curd, butter and fruit strung high above a street. Spectators throw water at the pyramid as it rises, which is part of the sport rather than an interruption of it. The festival's scale is largest in Mumbai, Thane, Pune and the surrounding Konkan region.

Catalonia's castells are human towers built by amateur teams as part of town festivities, and were inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List in 2010 at the Committee's session in Nairobi. The structural resemblance to a Govinda pyramid - a wide base of packed bodies narrowing to a small child at the top, built and dismantled in minutes - has produced regular exchange visits between Catalan and Indian teams, and it is that precedent Maharashtra is invoking. The comparison also carries a caution the nomination will have to answer: the castells file was built around community transmission and safety practice, and the safety of child climbers has been the most contested aspect of Dahi Handi in Indian courts.

Nominations to the Representative List are filed by the national government, not by a state, so Maharashtra's announcement is the opening of a process rather than an application: a dossier has to demonstrate community consent, transmission across generations and safeguarding measures, and India files a limited number of nominations in each cycle. The announcement matters for exam purposes mainly as a marker of where the intangible heritage debate now sits in India - after Kumbh Mela, Durga Puja, Garba and Deepavali, states have begun to treat inscription as a cultural-policy goal in its own right, with Maharashtra having earlier floated the Ganesh festival and the Wari pilgrimage as candidates.