A lot of the pilgrims also made the journey on foot, walking days and nights to get there, with most of them dragging along little children to the site of arguably the largest animal sacrifice in the world. The huge numbers of visitors this year is also owed to the crowds of pilgrims who found themselves unable to resist a trip to Bariyarpur, the site of the Gadhimai Mela after visiting the Vivaha Panchami festival in Janakpur. Adding to that number were huge crowds of Indian pilgrims from villages in Bihar as well as a considerable number of people from neighboring towns.
At the centre of all this frenzy and coverage from a lot of media houses, is a modest temple set in the middle of nowhere, with a statue that is but a small stone. Legend has it that once a local named Bhagvan Chaudhary was jailed for some reason. In his dreams one night, he saw Goddess Gadhimai, who asked him if he would be able to help her get the statue of hers someplace other than where she presently was. In his dreams, the local told Gadhimai that because he was in a jail, there was no way he could do this for her.
On this, Gadhimai with her power opened the doors of the prison at night when the prison guards were sleeping and helped Chaudhary escape. True to his word, Chaudhary carried the statue of Gadhimai and came back to Bariyarpur, where he was actually from. When he tried to move the statue to someplace else as he was going to, the statue would not budge from its location. Gadhimai had chosen her home. When asked if Chaudhary would be able to make sacrifices to please her every year, Chaudhary, a simple man, said he could only do it once in five years. The practice seems to have stuck, with the number of animal sacrifices, growing exponentially every time.
Most people who visited the area had their own interpretations of this story but the one thing they had in common was their faith in the powers of Gadhimai to grant them their wishes. This faith along with the belief that Gadhimai is most pleased when animal sacrifices are offered to her has seen the number of animal sacrifices go up to a staggering 350,000 animals, birds and rats.
When news of such a huge slaughter being allowed and partly being sponsored by the Government of Nepal got around, it brought in harsh criticisms from animal rights activists from all over the world. Some of these activists were highly placed, such as politician Menaka Gandhi from India as well as the French actress Brigitte Bardot who wrote to PM Madhav Kumar Nepal to immediately stop such cruelty done in the name of religion and tradition.
Also joining the anti-animal-sacrifice bandwagon besides animal rights activists was the popular local Buddha Boy Ram Bahadur Bomjan, who was supposed to make an appearance at the festival site to try and stop the sacrifices from going ahead, as well as Nepali actors Madan Krishna Shrestha and Hari Bamsha Acharya. Bomjan, to the dismay of his many followers, did not turn up at the site, and the animal sacrifices took place for two full days on November 24 and 25, starting with rats and chickens, and ending with a sea of beheaded buffaloes in the stadium behind the temple.
Getting inside the temple is an adventure on its own, as is getting to the temple site, from Birgunj. Despite the pleasant weather at this time of the year, the dusty, overcrowded roads are not exactly a pleasure to walk on, with multiple lines of traffic moving very slowly. Devotees pushed forward as a sea of people moved into the temple, to offer whatever it is they had carried with them, which was more often than not a coconut that they broke at the entrance of the temple, showering other devotees with sweet, sticky coconut juice.
Once through this ordeal, where devotees managed to get beaten by stick-wielding volunteers who were in charge of promoting order, most people made their way to the carnival-like setting behind the temple, complete with Ferris wheels, swings and little sweetshops. It was almost as if the carnival-like environment had been set to try and balance the absolute carnage that was going on right next to it.
Most devotees hung around for more than a day because they had invested so much time and money in getting here, camping around the temple on other people’s fields, making it seem like some kind of a huge, colorful music festival.
Weirdly enough, most stories about the amazing things at the Gadhimai festival seemed true enough. At the moment of sacrifice, the buffaloes seemed defeated, standing still as licensed slaughterers beheaded them in one amazing blow with huge khukuris.
Another story about the strange absence of flies in such a bloody environment seemed true too. The most eerie part of the sacrifices had to be the strange silence that suddenly seemed to engulf the place within the high walled stadium where the carcasses of for more than 20,000 buffaloes were carelessly scattered. Considering the fact that there were huge masses of people outside and speakers blaring out notices about lost people, the silence inside was quite unexplainable. Another speaker in the distance played a religious song to a very poppy beat praising the Gadhimai, saying volumes about the festival and the kind of time it is occurring in. It rounded off the event beautifully.
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