Gai Jatra Festival

Well, Nag Panchami was a bust. I did not see one live nag all morning. I did see many people offering milk and buying naga paintings for their houses. However, August 14 was Gai Jatra, a festival that honors people who have died in the last year, and it delivered the excitement. The Lonely Planet guide’s description: “Cows and boys dressed as cows are paraded through the streets. It’s not quite the running of the bulls at Pamplona, but it’s all good fun,” was enough to entice us, but it did not do justice to this festival at all. Since the guide said that the festival is celebarated “with maximum energy in the streets of Bhaktapur,” my friends Joe and Rachel and I headed to Bhaktapur for the weekend. Bhaktapur is one of the three old kingdoms of the Kathmandu valley. Each of the three have a royal palace square, and Bhaktapur is famous for having lots of pottery and wood carving as well. We spent the night there for two reasons: to avoid paying the ridiculous fee of 1100 Rs to enter the city by heading in after dark, and so that we could be there early for the festivities. It’s forty minute taxi ride from Boudha, so it also feels a bit rural. We drove by a lot of rice and corn fields on the way, and we were only stopped once by road work (i.e., a giant pile of dirt in the middle of road and men all shoveling in different directions).

We were kept up most of the night by truck loads of people yelling and playing instruments. At 6:00am, I woke up to a marching band walking through the square. There would be many more marching bands…

The cows are part of the festival because in the Newar (an ethnic/religious group in Nepal) tradition, cows lead the deceased to Yama, the god of the underworld (according to Lonely Planet, for what that’s worth). We didn’t see any boys dressed as cows, but there were tons of kids wearing masks (spiderman, tigers, bears, etc.). More fun (and not mentioned in the lonely planet) are the tributes to the deceased. Around 7:30 am, people began parading under our hotel window with giant (at least ten feet high) statutes made of bamboo, topped with paintings of cow faces, braided wicker horns, and umbrellas. Hanging at the base of the statues were pictures of the person who died. There were also mirrors, crocheted hankerchiefs, garlands, and giant leaves and flowers. Some of them were accompanied by marching bands, and all of them had a procession of family members. We continued to watch from a rooftop restaurant and started to see cows with pictures hanging on them as well. There were also little girls dressed in shiny dresses with lots of eye make-up and pinwheels in their hair. Our waiters explained that some families use the statues, while others use cows or little girls.

After breakfast we started following the processions, which started to include huge groups of kids dancing in two lines and beating sticks together. We stopped and watched ona small side street for a long time. Some of the kids had painted faces, and there were cross-dressing men who were doing a dance with a water vessel (don’t know what that’s about…) We also started to see little boys accompanying the fancy little girls. Some of them were dressed as shiva, with wooden snakes around their necks, foil tridents, and leopard print loin cloths.

I was glad we began our observations from within the city, because when we finally reached the main square, there were hundreds of people. The architecture in these old cities has a lot of high concrete or wooden steps, and people were sitting all over the temples. By afternoon, we were exhausted and headed back to Boudha. The processions were still coming, though.

The whole festival was so joyful, and, I thought, appropriate to a celebration of deceased family members. They still have their mourning rituals and funerals, of course, but this festival is for remembering and celebrating the lives of the dead. The colorful statues reminded me of the Day of the Dead celebrations, and the marching bands were like the funeral parades in New Orleans. Although, with the clarinets, they sounded a bit like klezmer music! I think it’s a great tradition.

P.S. Now that I no longer have access to decent internet at the school, it is very difficult to upload photos to the blog. I tried posting a video, but that freaked out the slow wi-fi network in this restaurant. I will keep trying!

Gai jatra pictures

Pictures of Gai Jatra

A comment on the photos

I kind of went overboard with the pictures of the snake ladies who guard the small shiva temples around the Pashupatinath grounds. (There are many more than what I posted.) I have to say that the snakes' faces remind me of Falkor the luck dragon from The Neverending Story.)

And more Pashupatinath photos

More Pashupatinath pictures!

Pashupati pictures from a visit earlier this summer

Lately

I haven’t written anything lately because I’ve been going to class, hanging out with white people, and sleeping a lot. I lived through a fever that made my cheekbones hurt, and now I am on the mend. I’ve been sitting out some of the shedra trips to spots around the Kathmandu valley for two reasons. The first, and most relevant, is that I have reached my tolerance limit for group trips. The second, and perhaps more reasonable, is that there are landslides everywhere during monsoon. I don’t want to die swallowing fecally contaminated mud, and, more importantly, I don’t want to hike across landslides during the hottest part of the day, when the clouds invariably part and allow the sun to swelter and cook the inhabitants below. So, I stay in Boudha and wait for the (relatively) cooler and drier month of September to do my wandering.

There are too many calendars to keep tracl off here, so I’m in a constant state of confusion regarding the festival schedules. We just started a new Tibetan month, there are two more weeks left in the current Nepali month, and I have no idea how the Newaris reckon time. Newari Buddhism is a type of religion here, but also a language and ethnic group. So, there’s a lot going on. Apparently I missed huge (well-endowed) straw effigies at the stupa last Friday. A classmates has promised to share pictures. I saw pictures of similar effigies in the paper, but they were in another part of the city, fairly far away from my little neighborhood.

During this Nepali month, Shravan is taking place, which means people collect water to offer to Shiva. The largest shiva temple is close to my neighborhood, so I have seen many worshipers carrying their water to offer. (I know nothing about Nepali culture, so my descriptions here should not be confused with fact.) There seem to be two types of participants in this activity. One consists of a long, single file line of people, separated by gender (ladies first) who carry brass pots of water on their heads, preceded by a marching band. The other, and my personal favorite, are groups of men and boys dressed in orange t-shirts (often bearing an image of Shiva, or Om), orange shorts, orange scarves, and orange headbands borded with sparkly cold tinsle, and carrying tiny orange backpacks filled with plastic water jars. They either walk barefoot, or ride around in pick-up trucks or the tops of buses, pumping their fists and yelling happily. I like to yell at them. They’re very enthusiastic. I will try to get photos. but they are usually moving too quickly, and I get wrapped up in shouting with them.

I went with a group of friends to Pashupatinath (a huge shiva temple) on Sunday to see the light offering ceremony, which happens everyday at sunrise and sunset. There are three Brahmin men who make the offerings of incense, candles, and whisks of hair and peacock feathers, while musicians sing praises to Shiva and play music (on flutes, harmonium and tablas). There are huge christmas tree-shaped metal candle holders, and, later in the ritual, small bowls of fire attached to handles with brass snakes rising over them. (It was dark, and my camera can’t see very far…so the pictures aren’t great. I will try to go back in the morning to get better pictures.)

The whole ritual was very pleasant in and of itself, but there was some unexpected excitement as well. At one point, many of the attendees stood up and ran over to one of the small (7x7 feet) temples – or ran away all together. Someone told us there were snakes “over there.” I thought they were kidding, so I kept watching and listening and enjoying the music. But people kept acting strangely, so I walked over to the crowd. I assumed if there were snakes, a saddhu would be holding them. Everyone was pushing and jumping around. Young guys were making hissing noises, and periodically everyone would run back away from the temple. When I got close enough to the front of the crowd to see, I saw a snake come around the corner of the temple on the ground. It was about as big as a good-sized rat snake, but of course when everyone freaked out, it would back away from the crowd. I wondered if its presence was a good sign, since Nagpanchami is coming up on Thursday.

On the festival day of Nagpanchami, Nepalis offer bowls of rice to the nagas (snake gods) and they change the pictures of the snake gods above their doors. My land lord says that there are usually holy men walking around with snakes in the neighborhood. But he also started yelling about how some association in Nepal is trying to takethe snakes away because they are not being treated well….and he wasn’t very specific about it. He went on lnoger about how this has been the culture for years and years and people shouldn’t meddle. I asked if there would be guys with snakes at Pashupatinath that day, and he of course. People around here tend to respond in the affirmative, whether they know the answer to your question or not, so I’ll see. Hopefully there will be some interesting snake activity.

Aarti (light offering) at the Pashupatinath Temple