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!
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