The first thing we did was have juju dhau. The moment the lady at the shop handed us a pot filled with the locally made yogurt, all of us swooped in. As we dug our spoons into the pot in quick succession to gobble up more than the others, the yogurt was finished in a few seconds. From there, we walked a few paces and turned to a shop that was selling locally made ice cream. The lady and her husband at the shop were too busy dealing with customers. Enjoying the ice cream in our hands, we walked past numerous vendors who were selling beads, souvenirs, local dishes and the shops that lined the street. All seemed to be doing brisk business.[break]
Then we entered the temple complex. There were people everywhere: young, old, men, women, locals, tourists and foreigners. There was a group of old men sitting in a circle on the brick-laid floor and chanting hymns from a very old book. There were young people playing traditional musical instruments and running about carrying deities on palanquins. And there were revelers who cheered them from the distance.
Some of those hyper-excited people where tipsy, no doubt, under the influence of locally made liquor called ‘aila.’ But in that supercharged festive fervor you didn’t need anything to make you feel intoxicated.
Bhaswor Ojha
I never knew that celebrations of the Nepali New Year took on such a boisterous proportion.
The Kathmandu Valley has rich traditions of public festivals, all of which have the potential to become a carnival that could draw millions of tourists from around the world.
Like the Tomato Festival of Spain and Brazil’s Rio Carnival that started in the first quarter of the 18th century as a grassroots event with people throwing water on each other. We need to think what turned an event that started out as our own Holi/Fagu festival into something synonymous to the word carnival and has no match in any part of the world in terms of its size.
We could say that we don’t want to change our age-old customs and preserve the purity of purpose. Now that is definitely a noble thought, except that if we look at the trend, the public festivals of the Valley are losing their charm among the public, particularly, the young generation.
During this year’s Ghode Jatra, the festival of horsemanship, a visitor squatting on the pavement told a reporter from this paper that she and her family might never come again to watch the festival because it has no proper seating arrangement for the public. A street vendor blamed the sharp drop in the number of visitors for his lackluster business this year.
In another instance, the man at the center of Bisket Jatra celebrations said that he agreed to take the role, which involves piercing one’s tongue with a 13-inch metal skewer and carrying a heavy torch through the streets of Bode, because nobody else would do so and that he didn’t want the age-old tradition to die just like that.
Likewise, grievances were heard from the artists who construct the chariots of Rato and Seto Machhindranaths that they don’t get paid enough for their hard labor, one of the reasons, they said, why younger generation did not like to engage in the work.
If you can’t attract new artisans who have newer perspectives, and engage only those who toil just because they have no other choice, you are bound to see a decline in the quality of work. It is not that the people in the past devoted themselves to make these festivals successful solely out of their feeling for community service. Along with piety, there was a deeply ingrained belief that doing things for deities would herald bliss and good fortune in one’s life. So there was this sense of getting something in return. If the generation of today sees that return in terms of money, then this has to be seen as a fair expectation.
It is up to the juju dhau and ice cream sellers, the local authority and the government, who are reaping the benefits from such festivals, to find ways to compensate these artists and youths for their hard work.
They have to think of ways to attract more tourists, for example, by reinventing the attractions at such festivals, improving the quality of goods and services, building public conveniences and parking spaces, etc. As the festivals grow, so would the income of the business community and that of the government as well.
A community’s or a nation’s identity is best reflected through its culture. It is unlikely that some traditions of the Kathmandu Valley that have survived for centuries would become extinct in the coming few years. And we may have to confront the question of whether or not to let them evolve and survive in newer forms or let them rot sooner than later.
The writer is a copy editor at Republica.
amendrapokharel@gmail.com
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