Arts & Letters, April 2018

Bangla New Year
Pahela Baishakh through the years
•Binoy Dutta
(Translated by Mir Arif )
For Bangalis, Pahela Baishakh is one of the oldest
and most celebrated festivals. The first day of the
Bangla New Year in a Bangla calendar is known
as Pahela Baishakh. Dating back to an early period
in history, Pahela Baishakh has become a festival emanating
from the heart of the whole Bangla-speaking world,
irrespective of caste, creed and religious beliefs.
The history of celebrating Pahela Baishakh is very old.
Dividing a year into 12 months is an old practice according
to the Hindu calendar. But during Mughal rule in India,
Emperor Akbar ordered that the Bangla year be counted
combining the Arabic calendar from March 10 or March
11 in 1584. Though originally called a Fosholi Shon (crop
year), it later gained currency as the Bangla year.
In Akbar’s days, the economy of undivided Bengal was
solely based on agriculture, with most people making
their living through agricultural work of one kind or the
other. Some people did enter other professions, but they,
too, worked in the fields for a brief period of time. Farmers
did not have any cash till the crops were harvested;
so they had to buy daily necessaries all the year round on
credit from shopkeepers. Since all the dues were cleared
up toward the end of the year, shopkeepers tracked the
sales on credit in a ledger book known as the “halkhata.”
After previous dues were cleared up, a new ledger book
opened and each farmer had a fresh entry on the book for
the new year, and the whole process would then start all
over again. So, creditors arranged a celebration honoring
the farmers who lived up to their promises of paying the
dues after the harvest, a custom observed in many parts
of Bangladesh to this day. This celebration diversified over
the centuries and became widely popular among all sections
of society. In Bangladesh, Chhayanaut took an initiative
to popularize this festival, turning it into a celebration
of greeting the new Bangla year. It was also a time when
Pakistani military rulers were contemptuous toward any
manifestation of our secular culture.
Pahela Baishakh now is a universal phenomenon
among Bangalis. The first day of the Bangla calendar is
celebrated in big cities with much fanfare, music and a
feast of various local cuisines, and with high hopes that
the Bangla New Year will bring prosperity and happiness
for all.
Pahela Baishakh is celebrated all over the country at
city, district, union and upazila levels. With the crack of
dawn, a tinge of festivity spreads in every nook and cranny
of the country. In the capital city, Chhayanaut opens
the festivity at the Batamul (under the banyan tree) in
Ramna Park with a number of impeccable musical renditions
composed by five of the best poets and lyricists in
the Bangla language (Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nazrul
Islam, Dwijendralal Roy, Rajanikanta Sen and Atul Prasad
Sen). Large numbers of crowds throng the park to greet
the new year with Chhayanaut. The celebration of the
Bangla New Year and Chhayanaut’s programs are now inseparably
connected.
4
Chhayanaut first celebrated the Bangla New Year in
The festival, in its current
form, indeed fosters a
non-communal spirit and a
cultural openness ingrained
in our culture
1967 (1374 in the Bangla calendar) under the ashwatha
tree in Ramna Park. Except in 1971, the year that saw the
Liberation War, Chhayanaut has been celebrating the day
religiously with musical renditions and poetic recitations.
Besides Chhayanaut’s program, a colorful, ceremonious
procession welcoming the new year is brought out from
the Institute of Fine Arts (Charukola Institute), University
of Dhaka. Known as the “Mangal Shobhajatra,” it was first
brought out in 1989 in the hope of ousting despotic forces
from the country’s politics, seeking peace and justice for
all. Charupith, a regional cultural organization, had earlier
brought out a similar procession in 1986. Inspired by
this, one of its initiators, Jamal Shamim, who enrolled in a
master’s degree course at Dhaka University, started this at
Charukala with replicas of horse, elephant, etc.
Since 1991, Charukola Institute has been bringing out
the procession with massive replicas of elephants, tigers
that have added new hues to this carnival, enriching it
each year with more and more replicas, handicrafts and
masks of birds, owls, crocodiles, earthen dolls, oxcarts,
palanquins, boats, hand fans -- everything crafted in sync
with the tenets of local, indigenous cultures. UNESCO has
incorporated this procession in its “Representative List of
Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” in 2016.
Apart from these, the entire city buzzes with programs
and arrangements marking the day. In the old part of the
city, businessmen and traders remain busy all day with
PHOTO: MEHEDI HASAN
halkhata festivities. The Baishakh fair in the field of Dhupkhola
demonstrates how much passionate Bangalis are
about festivals. The TSC area of Dhaka University vibrates
with music and thousands of men and women, mostly
young, hanging around in groups wearing colorful dresses.
Women prefer green saris with red lining, and men
green and red Punjabis, reflecting the colors of Bangladesh’s
national flag. Now each area in the city has its own
set of programs. Among others, the cultural programs at
Rabindra Sarobar in Dhanmondi have gained some prominence
in recent times.
Pahela Baishakh is not celebrated only in Dhaka; it is
celebrated with equal pomp and fanfare in other parts
of the country as well. People from the Chittagong Hill
Tracts also celebrate the day with various indigenous programs
of their own. Boishukh by the Tripura, Sangrain by
the Marma and Biju by the Chakma are three such programs
to mark this day. In recent years, the three communities
have celebrated this day together, which is called
“Boishabi.” One of the main aspects of Boishabi is a water
festival by the Marmas, which sees young boys and girls
splashing water on each other, signifying their coming of
age. The communal pressure that the Pakistani military
rulers put on our culture and language rather stoked the
spirit of this festival into a big national event.
The festival, in its current form, indeed fosters a
non-communal spirit and a cultural openness ingrained
in our culture. Communal forces, however, have been at
work to foil the festivities of this day. A bomb attack was
also carried out on Chhayanaut’s program in Ramna in
2001, leaving 10 people killed and over 50 injured. But the
irony is, the following years saw the biggest congregation
of cultural activists and common people who gathered
there defying all threats of violence. •
Binoy Dutta is a journalist and littérateur.
ARTS & LETTERS SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2018 | DHAKA TRIBUNE