Thaindian News

By Sudeshna Sarkar
Kathmandu, Oct 18 (IANS) Amidst the celebration of Diwali, the festival of lights in South Asia, and Chhath, the worship of the sun in the Terai plains, Nepal will observe yet another festival Monday when it ushers in a new year, according to an ethnic calendar.

In an amazing leap-back in time, from Monday starts the year 1130, according to the Nepal Sambat, the calendar followed by the Newars. The Newars were the first inhabitants of Kathmandu valley, a clan remarkable for its trading acumen and skill in architecture, painting and sculpture.

The calendar is believed to have been started by Sankhadhar Sakhwa, a Newar merchant, who turned sand into gold by alchemy and paid off the accumulated debts the entire Kathmandu valley owed to the then king Raghav Dev. The Nepal Sambat year is, therefore, regarded as the start of an era of liberation under a common man hero.

Nepal has several other ethnic calendars as well. There is also a Kirati calendar followed by the Kirats, the Maithil calendar followed in the Terai, and the Lhosar calendar followed by the Buddhist Tamang community.

Nepal’s official calendar, however, is still the Bikram Sambat calendar said to have been started by Indian king Vikramaditya and introduced in Nepal by then prime minister Chandra Shumsher Rana. According to it, Nepal is now in the last phase of the year 2066.

The powerful Newar community has long since been campaigning to replace the Bikram Sambat with the Newar calendar.

Senior Maoist leader and former tourism minister Hisila Yami, who belongs to the Newar community, says the Nepal Sambat calendar should be used by Nepal since it was introduced by a common man and is named after the country instead of a religion, community or individual.

“The Nepal Sambat calendar will help boost the feeling of nationalism by discarding a foreign country-based Vikram Sambat, which even its country of origin has discarded for day-to-day activities,” she said.

Yami, a graduate from the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, says that the contribution of Shakwa was ignored by Nepal’s rulers.

“It took the first people’s movement in 1990 for the government to officially recognise Shankhadar Shakwa as a national hero,” she wrote in the Kathmandu Post daily Sunday.

“It took a people’s war (by the Maoists) and a second people’s movement in 2006 to get Nepal Sambat to be officially recognised as a national calendar.”

Yami rues the fact that despite the government’s pledge to replace the Bikram Sambat, it is yet to be implemented.

“Are we then waiting for another people’s war and movement to implement the Nepal Sambat?” the Maoist lawmaker asks.