Shelly said to the skylark: Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. The heartrending wails and the rhythm of the group dance of women and children in Bela that Saturday evening showed the eternal significance of the Romantic English poet’s immortal line. What indeed would be the worth of pleasure if there were no pain? Would parting hurt as much if the heart did not know the joy of union? Life, after all, is nothing but the gap between arrival and departure; human beings transform the interval into a process of living through rites of passage discovered over the ages. During grief and joy, however, differences of gender, age, religion, region, caste, creed, community and even country disappear. In the true nature of any festival the word ‘class’ has little or no meaning.
Muharram festivities in Mithila join Hindus and Muslims together as they celebrate the martyrdom of soldiers of truth. In the cold of December night, the Daha structures soaring into the sky seemed to testify that the human will to fight against injustice remains alive, and that no force in the world can defeat that spirit. The very next day, towering structures of bamboo and paper looked forlorn in barren rice fields of Mahottari and Dhanusha villages.
Smaller Daha structures would be ceremoniously buried. Bigger ones will fall prey to the elements. Next year, new towers will be once again constructed to affirm the faith all over again. Impermanence is the only permanent thing in this world, and uncertainty the only certainty. Yet, promises are made to meet whenever we part. A Muslim lady once admonished a Hindu boy back in the eighties, “Never say I’m going. You should always say that I would go and be back soon.”
Unlike the vast expanses of the Tarai-Madhesh and instable landscape of the Pahad, the Kathmandu Valley is a cold store of sorts; up above the dusty plains and well below the snowline, it has been a protected fortress of nature. Structures in the valley are built to last. Statues are carved out of stone and timber or molded from molten metal. They last for generations. Unlike Durga idols made from straw and mud, timber deities need not be consigned to the elements of nature by submerging them into the river once festivities are over. Structures of Rathjatras in Kathmandu Valley are disassembled and stored for reuse. Daha bamboos have to be reborn to be a component of symbol of divinity once again.
Prosperity, too, perhaps plays a role in creating the lure of eternity. Until quite recently, traditional village deities in Tarai-Madhesh lived as protective spirits in peepal and banyan trees. The place of family prayer used to be an earthen mound in the corner of a room. Temples were monuments built by the rich for the glory of their families. Not that memorials are not being erected in the name of gods, but even private prayer rooms these days display garish figurines of Lord Ganesh and Goddess Laxmi produced somewhere in the People’s Republic of China.
Floors of village mosques are being paved with marbles imported from India or gaudy Chinese tiles. At burial grounds, people no longer plant trees in memory of the dead. Whether in Pahad or Madhesh, tombstones have become status symbols. Graveyards appear more or less like unplanned settlements where the dead and departed may have lived the later part of their lives.
Changes in the quality of statues and styles of structures often signify that a new way of living, if not a different culture altogether, is on the anvil. Will Dahas of the future be assembled from steel pipes, and Durga Pooja celebrated with plastic statues made somewhere in Korea? The tune of laments and steps of group dance will also not remain the same: Chants of ‘Ha Hussain! Ho Hussain!’ or ‘Jai Ambe!’ will then be contracted out to wage earners, and the rich would watch the spectacles on television screens of their fortress-like mansions inside gated communities.
If the conversion of Christmas from a commemoration of the spirit of sacrifice to the celebration of conspicuous consumption is anything to go by, it would not be long before the essence of other festivals, too, are transformed beyond recognition as commerce becomes the only true religion of the world. Shopping malls will then be our new temples, churches, mosques and prayer rooms.
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