Fagu Festival In Nepal

Siddhi B Ranjitkar

Winter has gone. Spring is on the threshold. People rejoice the advent of the spring season. They need to do something to welcome the advent of the spring. They play with colors in different ways. In ancient time, modern colors were not avail. They played with natural colors and water. Spring for people is just like March for hares. Spring is to display the amorous nature of people. Almost all the songs, and activities are amorous. In the years after the first invention of this festival, it got the name of Holi. Scholars linked this amorous festival with various myths.

People celebrate this romantic festival across South Asia. Each country celebrates in its own way. In India, different states have different ways of celebrating it. The main reason for celebrating it is the same elsewhere to express the romantic nature of humans.

In Nepal, people in the hills and Terai celebrate differently. Nepalis in high Himalayans and non-Hindus don’t celebrate it. People celebrate in Terai for fortnight. In Kathmandu and the hills, they celebrate for a week, and end it one day before the Terai people. Only Hindu Nepalis celebrate it. The festival is not a sectarian. Anybody believing in any faith could join in celebrating this festival.

Terai people start off celebrating it immediately after Shivaratri: the night of Lord Shiva celebrated across the Hindu world. Starting from the next night to the Shivaratri, Terai people play drums with two faces hung from their necks to the belly. Others sing amorous songs to the tune of the drum music. They form a group of youths. They go around the villages singing to the tune of the drums at night.

As the day passes one after another, the celebration of this festival intensified in Terai. More and more people join the youths to play drums and sing romantic songs. Some of them enjoy smoking hashish. Legally, you cannot do it. They eat sweet balls mixed with ‘bhang’. Eating such sweet balls causes tipsy. ‘Bhang’ is a natural light drug. People in Terai go on celebrating the festival in this way for two weeks.

The last day of the festival in Terai is the full moon day. Everybody including women and children celebrate it. They use buckets and buckets of colored water for splashing each other. They splash each other with such colored water at the village center. Tons and tons of colored powder are used to smear each other. Each other smear colored power on both cheeks with love. It is an expression of love and respect: love to juniors and respect to seniors.

At the end of the day, revelers of the festival washed off all colors from their bodies. They wear fresh clothing to celebrate the festival the rest of the night. They feast on delicacies. They eat sweet balls mixed with ‘bhang’. Then, they sing the whole night to the tune of hand drums in Terai.

In Kathmandu, the festival starts off on the eighth day of the bright fortnight of the Fagu month with the installation of a ‘chir’: about 20 ft wooden pole decorated with colored pieces of linen at its top in a two-tiered umbrella-like form at Basantapur. The Manandhar community of Kathmandu sets up this pole. They make offerings to the deity. They smear colored powder on each other’s cheeks. It opens the festival to the public.

About five feet long bush as a symbol of starting off the fagu festival stands at the ancient palace called Hanuman Dhoka. Pieces of colored linen hang from the branches of the bush. One of the state agencies sets up this bush on the eighth day of the Fagu month. The agency makes offering to the deity to start off the festival.

Any woman wishing to have a son goes to make offerings to this deity. The forms of the offerings differ from the community to community. Some women take a ball of white cotton yarn. They spin it around the bush several times. They chant some words not audible to others. It goes on for a week in other words until the fourteenth day of the bright fortnight of the Fagu month.

The Nevah community in the Kathmandu Valley celebrates this festival uniquely. The style of celebration of this festival has gone a sea change during the two millennia. Probably, nothing of its original styles has left. Nobody sings the fagu songs. Use of scented water and color has been lost long ago. Only a few groups play flute and two-faced hand drums to sing the fagu songs. This is the time to make offerings to different deities. Time has been, nobody cares about it.

One of the most popular fagu songs of the Nevah community is ‘jhyale dako tukanma….” means all the ropes of green foliages hanging from the window, I see a woman looking from the window; I need the woman otherwise I won’t eat my regular meal. Another song is “I want to smear you with vermillion my young lady, don’t get angry with me”. Everybody sang these songs celebrating the fagu festival in the past. This tradition also must have gone, too.

Now, the fagu festival has been hurling water-filled balloons at the passerby from the first day of fagu. Most of the young ladies stop going out from the first day of the fagu fearing of getting hit by the colored or plain water-filled balloons. Fagu has been a curse to some of the young ladies.

On the last day of the fagu, some of the old streets in Kathmandu look like battlegrounds. Rival groups hurl water balloons like missiles at each other. Some smear different paints on themselves and on others. The police try to mange such revelers. They take some of them under control. Revelers go on their own ways.

Some overseas visitors join the Nepalese fagu revelers. They also go around the town with the Nepalese youth. The main centers of the old Kathmandu are the areas to play with colors. Anybody can join any group to smear paints. Some young boys act as back-up support to the revelers. They carry balloons filled with color or plain water for their seniors.

Many scholars have produced different myths to connect the fagu festival with one deity or another or with one event or another. The tradition has been to link festivals to different myths for the consumption of the public. Originally such festival carried different meanings. As time passed, such original meanings were distorted.

The fagu festival ends in Kathmandu after the Manandhar community tears down the ‘chir’ installed at Basantapur on the night of one day before the full moon day. They take the ’chir’ down to the Tundikhel, and leave it there. Then, the Marwadi community burned it down. The ashes become the sacred and even the spiritual fertility element. Anybody wearing the ashes on the brow for some time is supposed to have a son. The ash is a kind of spiritual fertility drug.

March 26, 2013