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| English: Devotees of the Festival Chhath Parva in Janakpur, Nepal (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Durga Pooja In Gorigama
By Paramendra Bhagat (www.paramendra.com)
Gorigama is a neighboring village to my homevillage Gonarpura in Nepal. Gonarpura is not that far from Janakpur. What I most remember about Gorigama is the DurgaPooja there. Chhath was the top festival in the culture I grew up in. Jitiya dashe Dashain, Dashain solhe sukrati, Sukrati chhabe Chhaith. 10 days after the festival of Jitiya we start celebrating Dashain, 16 days after Dashain is over, we celebrate Diwali. Sukrati is another name for Diwali. Six days after Diwali is Chhath. So goes the saying.
In the culture of the hill Nepalis Dashain is the top festival, Chhath is not even celebrated, although Chhath is also a Hindu thing. But maybe it is a Mithila thing, because even Muslims in Bihar are known to celebrate Chhath. In my culture we don’t do tika in Dashain. That is a hill thing. But many Teraiwasis have learned to do the tika thing.
I would be home for vacation from the school I attended in Kathmandu. Most years my Dashain vacation, which incorporated Diwali (one year it didn’t), would end just a day before Chhath. That was the Panchayat era cultural insensitivity.
On the days of Durga Pooja late in the afternoon streams of people would walk from my village to Gorigama. The sight I most remember is all these people who would carry their flip-flops in their hands for most of the walk, and when they were almost there, they would go to the nearest pond, and wash their feet, and put on their flip-flops. They wore the flip-flops only on special occasions. Otherwise they walked around bare feet. It is called being a Third World country.
Local artisans created the most beautiful mud statues of Durga Mata. And then when the festival was over, half the village would go lay the statue down in some pond or river. Such was the custom.
The festival grounds, usually the public school, would have stalls of food and stages of entertainment. The local drama companies got to perform. This was Bollywood to most people in my homevillage for whom Bollywood was not yet a reality. To most people in my village at the time both Nepali and Hindi sounded like English: foreign. There were high school students who would sit themselves in the mango groves reading up cheap Ved Prakash Sharma novels who would would tell their parents they were “studying.”
The festival season would start after the flood and monsoon season ended. You cleaned up and decorated your homes for Diwali because the rains are gone until they are back next year. But after Chhath there was no major festival for months.
Before I moved to New York I was in Indiana. There I went to a local county festival once with my then wife and her family. I was the only non white person at the fair. The festival reminded me of the Durga Pooja festival in Gorigama.
Rumor had it the biggest Durga Pooja festival celebration happened in Calcutta. I have never been. And the biggest Chhath celebration was in Patna, along the banks of the Ganga river. I have been to Patna but not for Chhath. Some day.
In the mid 80s my father was a dealer for the Santosh radio that was manufactured in Calcutta, probably the first one in eastern Terai. My brother is named Santosh.
Gorigama was part of the same local village unit as my homevillage. There was Gorigama, and the adjacent Hari, and Hriduwa not far away. I had relatives in Hari. My grandfather’s sister lived there with her two sons, one of whom was a teacher. My grandfather had no expressed desire to become mukhiya. But then one day a committee in the neighboring village decided he was the appropriate person, and they came and lifted him up while he was sitting for dinner. I witnessed the scene. They took him away. When he came back, he was garlanded and had abeer – red powder – all over his face. He had just become Pradhan Panch. I guess he acquired a taste for it. Then they started holding elections, and he contested and won several times. He remained Pradhan Panch until the system got toppled, and there were still people urging him to run. He didn’t. A few years later one morning he headed out to the holy cities of India to spend the rest of his days as a sadhu, never to return. The family performed his cremation rites in absentia a few months back.
His father, my greatgrandfather, was a local rags to riches story. He started with very little, and his other branches of the family were proof, and went on to own more land than anyone else in the village. A key element of his success was the strong urge to save. My greatgrandmother knew how to save. She would get the last drop out of every mango, every time. My grandfather’s other sister was married to the Pradhan Panch of the neighboring Badiya. A granddaughter of hers, my cousin, recently moved to Minnesota from Nepal after getting married. Small world.
At the Durga Pooja festival in Gorigama I would often get to meet my relatives from Hari and Badiya, and also Banchauri nearby. My grandfather’s brother’s daughter was married in Banchauri. Her daughter’s son now lives in New Jersey. Hello Suneel.
