Happy Belated Dashain

Ok all, as promised, here’s my post about the big festival we just had here in Nepal. But before I can tell you about the festival, I’m going to give you a short lesson in Nepali culture, so pay attention! ;)

According to most censuses and articles about Nepal, Nepal is a primarily Hindu kingdom and most people do things pretty much the same way, but in reality this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Actually, Nepal is a remarkably diverse country made of many many different groups of people. NEFIN (Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities) recognizes somewhere between 57and 61 separate indigenous groups. In addition, among the “Hindu” population, there are numerous different castes, each with their own independent traditions and customs. I might argue they are independent cultures, but that’s a long discussion and I’ll save it for my anthropology buddies. Still, when you add in the Tibetans and other “foreigners” there are easily a hundred separate cultures here. However, the cultures have been in contact for so long that there is a lot of borrowing, re-purposing and imitating. I like to think of Nepal as a patchwork quilt of cultures that has been washed one too many times. You can still see the individual patches, but the colors are bleeding all over the place and the whole blanket has a distinctive “Nepali” hue to it. So why do you need to know this before I can start talking about the festival? You need to know because everyone I know celebrates Dashain differently, if at all, and so I’m going to be describing one of many many ways of celebrating Dashain. Even more interestingly, at least to the anthropologist in me, were the many discussions I had with different people about “traditional” celebrations of Dashain and what that meant to different people and different communities. My family is from the Rai community (an indigenous group) and I was told that the Rai community traditionally did not celebrate Dashain because it’s a Hindu holiday. That said, everyone in all of the Rai families I know celebrated Dashain and many of them were telling me how the celebrations we had were different from their “traditional” Dashain celebrations. (see, it is interesting!) but I suspect you are ready to hear about the party, so I’ll move on.



As you may or may not know, Nepal has a separate calendar then we do back in the states. Today, at least as far as I can tell, is the 26th day of Ashwin. Check out this calendar if you’re curious. It looks remarkably like the calendar hanging on my wall.  Anyway, Dashain officially began on the 20th (Oct 6th). Many people travel back to their villages or some central family home in order to celebrate, and so I headed to my Didi’s house for the holidays. In my family, the first few days of Dashain are more about getting ready than celebrating and so we spent Monday and Tuesday shopping and cleaning. On Wed, we went to Dai’s older sister’s (I call her older sister as well) house for lunch. The first few pictures are from the lunch at her house. Lunch was a lot of fun, especially because Didi and I didn’t have to cook at all. I also spent a lot of time talking with Dai’s older sister’s husband about American politics. I wish I could say that I was very brilliant and convincing, but as the whole conversation was in Nepali, I can only guess at what he thought I was trying to say. In any case, he was pleased and now teases me by calling me “Ms. President” (in Nepali). He’s a funny guy. Lunch was also great, mainly made up of 6 veggie dishes and 2 meat dishes (because it was a special occasion) and I was especially pleased because we had ice cream for dessert.

After lunch, we headed back home and started getting ready for our guests. Thursday is the most important day of Dashain for my family because it’s the tika day. Tika is the Nepali word for the red or white rice blessings that people wear on their foreheads during worship and holidays. That meant that on Wednesday night we had a lot of work to do because we were going to have a house-full on tika day. The nice thing is that Nepalis are really great about mobilizing labor for big events, and we had 3 helpers stay the night on Wednesday and two more show up early the next morning. The helpers are usually youngest siblings (of any age) or teenage cousins. Even though I had been a little concerned about all the people staying with us it ended up making all the work really festive feeling and I enjoyed the hustle and bustle leading up to Thursday’s excitement.

On Thursday morning, Dai said he got up around 4 am to start cooking. I was much lazier and slept late (almost to 7) and crawled out of bed feeling enormously guilty because everyone else was already hard at work. Of course there was plenty still to be done because cooking Nepali food is really time consuming and we needed a lot of food. We also need to make jamara bouquets. I’ve got some pics of the jamara in the slideshow. Jamara is wheat and maize grown specifically as part of the tika blessing. It can easily be purchased in the market, but Didi grew her own this year, and we took special care to keep it in the dark at all times to make sure it grew yellow instead of green. So I spent part of the morning cutting the jamara and arranging it in small bouquets. Once all the work was done, I put on my sari (with significant contribution from several of the girls) and got ready for the guests to arrive.

In all, we had about 23-24 people visit on Thursday to receive tika from Dai. Dai is the most senior male in his family living in Kathmandu right now, so all of his family members who were not in their village had to come to him to receive the blessing. Apparently, there is “supposed to be” a sanskrit blessing given when the tika is applied to the forehead, but Dai made up his own for each person. After tika is applied to the forehead, each person was given a jamara bouquet and an envelope with a little bit of money in it. And after everyone had had their tika, it was finally time to eat. And boy, did we eat. There was soo much food. I took a picture of all the dishes we had sitting in the sink after the evening, and while the picture looks like a lot the truth is that each of those dishes had probably already been washed at least twice during the day.

While Wednesday and Thursday already felt like a lot of holiday for me, we spent Friday and Saturday visiting other relatives house, this time on Didi’s side. In all we went to another 4 homes, and Didi and Dai had guests over twice more. At each house the agenda was pretty much the same. We’d wait for everyone to arrive, the most senior (or otherwise most appropriate person) would give everyone tika, and then we’d eat. Overall it was quite a party and I had a ton of fun and I learned a lot. (oh no, here it comes, more anthropology) I was especially interested in the way family relationships played such a huge part in all the festivities, and it was neat to see the way that people negotiated my position until they found something they were all comfortable with. Of course, it was also great just to be included!

Can you believe this is the short version!?! Anyway, I’m back at my apartment now and I’m gearing up to leave for my field-site in the end of Oct. I’ll try and post again before I go. Sending all my love…Sarah