Goddess Gauri is worshipped by the women during the festival, who is known by the name baatukamma in the region. The word Bathukamma in the local Telegu language literally means "come alive Mother Goddess". The festival is celebrated for a period of 10 days and usually commences two days before Dussehera. The people seek the blessings of the goddess for the coming year and thank the goddess for the gone year. The festivals can be called the festival of colours and the flowers. The women decorate a small wooden platform with colours and then the variety of the flowers as the Gunuka, Tangedi, Lotus, Alli, Katla, Teku, the gourd flower etc are arranged in a circular fashion in layers to make a conical arrangement of the flowers. The conical arrangement of the flowers signifies the mother goddess and is called the Bathukamma.
All the women assemble at a common place and place the conical stacks in the centre and then dance around it singing their traditional songs and clapping in unison. The festival is filled with fun and total excitements for the tourists. For the nine days the goddess is worshipped and on the tenth day of the celebration the goddess is immersed in the local waters with proper rituals and ceremony. There is a grandeur associated with the festival in the pages of the history but in the recent times the festival has lost the greatness but the enthusiasm with which the people celebrate the festival is still the same.
The women are seen clad in the beautiful traditional silk sarees. The young girls from the region also accompany the women and come out clad in the Langa-Oni which is a type of a half saree. The songs usually bear the wonderful stories related to the women, the social conditions, the economic conditions in the region, etc. The women of the region know the songs by heart and are seen to sing simultaneously and without beforehand practice.
The Bathukamma when floated on the tenth day around the evenings offer a beautiful, calming and a peaceful visual treat. The women exchange the traditional sindoors or the long red vertical mark that is applied n the foreheads that denotes the long life of their husbands. The celebration is mentioned in the various Telegu literatures that date it back to the King Dharmangada of Chola Dynasty who celebrated many pujas and finally was blessed with a daughter who was named as Lakshmi. Her life was full of accidents but miraculously she survived all the accidents so her parents named her Bathukamma.