From what I know, the Mughal Emperor Akbar started the Bengali calendar to synchronize tax collection with the harvest season. It's a solar calendar which comprises 12 months that neatly coincide with our six seasons. Quite an ingenious design. and it's really cool how each of the natural phenomena follow the calendar like clockwork. for example within a week of pohela boishakh (14 apr) we are to expect a massive seasonal storm called the Kal Boishakhi which provides great relief from the heat. It's my favourite part of boishakh.
Actually Pohela Boishakh is celebrated both in the Indian state of West Bengal as well as BD, though in BD it was relatively small scale. But it was just prior to the liberation war that the celebration became so pronounced and widely celebrated in BD. It was a protest against the pakistani regime to proclaim that to us our culture is more important than our religion. We're Bengali first and then we're muslims. Not the other way round. :)
3 comments:
oh, it looks like a nice festival. so many colorful birds!...
It's actually the largest and most celebrated festival that we have. :)
The tradition is to dress in white and red (women wear white saris with red borders and men wear panjabis) and welcome the first day of the year (pohela boishakh) through joyous singing. Hence you attend musical soirées at the break of dawn. and then you have the traditional breakfast of panta bhat (boiled rice soaked in water) with fried hilsa fish which is very refreshing in the heat and you can also have a spicy drink of green mango juice with green chilies (yum!). Although there are musical programs in every venue and in many households, but the main program is held at the foot of a giant banyan tree(botomul) in a park called Ramna situated in DU campus. Around 9 am, the art college at DU which is just opposite Ramna, brings out their colourful annual parade of brightly coloured papier mache figurines, puppets and masks, with different themes every year, accompanied by dhols (percussion instruments) and musicians which proceeds from DU campus to half way across the city. The pictures that you see are mostly of that parade. It's usually the highlight of the festival. Other fun things include kite flying, face painting (like the pic) with traditional motifs (alpona), the nagordola (the wood and rope contraption that you can see in one of the pics) - it's a hand-made ferris-wheel which is run completely manually and is one of the greatest adrenaline rushes because you feel that any minute the whole thing is going to fall apart and you will be flung into oblivion (but no such incident has happened so far :)). The musical programs, poetry recitations, dance programs and other festivities continue throughout the day and this is also a day when families and friends get together over lunch, tea or dinner to have traditional Bengali food and exchange gifts. Pohela Boishakh is also marked by the colourful fares and carnivals (boishakhi mela) that run throughout the month of Boishakh, where people from all over BD come to do their annual shopping.
From what I know, the Mughal Emperor Akbar started the Bengali calendar to synchronize tax collection with the harvest season. It's a solar calendar which comprises 12 months that neatly coincide with our six seasons. Quite an ingenious design. and it's really cool how each of the natural phenomena follow the calendar like clockwork. for example within a week of pohela boishakh (14 apr) we are to expect a massive seasonal storm called the Kal Boishakhi which provides great relief from the heat. It's my favourite part of boishakh.
Actually Pohela Boishakh is celebrated both in the Indian state of West Bengal as well as BD, though in BD it was relatively small scale. But it was just prior to the liberation war that the celebration became so pronounced and widely celebrated in BD. It was a protest against the pakistani regime to proclaim that to us our culture is more important than our religion. We're Bengali first and then we're muslims. Not the other way round. :)
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