Celebrating the New Year

S S Toshkhani  

The more philosophical among us, particularly those influenced by Shankaracharya’s notion and unreality, New Year is just a number. Which it may be But for most of us ordinary folks who do not venture into the ethereal realms of philosophy, it represents natural change, even as it underlines continuity, and is therefore to be welcomed and celebrated Ancient Kashmiris had a keen sense of historical time as Abhῑnavagupta and Kalhana's works demonstrate And though Hindus generally had a cyclic concept of time, in Kashmir there was a whole school of Shaivism structured on time as progression-the Krama school, which described time as the sequence of actions connecting the "prior" and the "subsequent (poorvapara) Shiva, according to this system. is akrama or trans-sequential reality Kashmiri Hindus also had their own system of keeping the track of time and followed the Saptarishi calendar. It was a luni-sidereal calendar, also known by the name of Laukika Samvat. While Abhῑnavagupta mentions Saptarishi era, while dating some of his works, Kalhana prefers to call it Laukika in his Rajatarangini is named after the Seven Great Sages revered universally by the Hindus or perhaps, astrologically, the Big Dipper lunar mansions. The Seven Great Sages, including Kashyapa, the progenitor extraordinaire who populated Kashmir, are believed to have converged on the summit of the Sharika Mountain as the first rays of the sun fell on it on the first day of the bright fortnight of Chaitra (March-April) 5090 years ago.

The names of the months of the year in the Saptarshi calendar are the same as in other Hindu lunar or solar calendars, with festivals galore for the Kashmir Hindus to celebrate in all these months, which comes to more than a festival a day! As we find mentioned in the Nilamata Purana, the ancient Kashmiris were a "joyous people enjoying continued festivities. These include Navreh, or the New Year Day, celebrated in a unique manner through the beautiful symbolism of Thaal Barun. After the advent of Muslim rule, the Islamic calendar also came into vogue The Dogra rulers, claiming to be Suryavanshis or having descended from the Sun god, introduced the solar Vikrami Samvat, which was the accepted calendar in most parts of North India. With it the use of the Saptarishi system came eventually to an end. Side by side, as a result of the British rule in India, the Gregorian calendar, also known as the Christian calendar, too was adopted. It is a solar dating system, a reform of the earlier Julian system, named after Pope Gregory XIII who introduced it in 1592 .

In 1957, Jawahar Lal Nehru, free India's first Prime Minister, with his penchant for everything modern, officially introduced the "internationally accepted" Gregorian calendar to inculcate the "scientific spirit" in the "backward" and "tradition loving Indians and to bring them on par with the rest of the "modern" world and its mono-centric culture Cultural events in India are now dictated by a concept of globalism that signifies the triumph of Western ways and institutions as the only indexes of scientific and technological progress.

So complete is the triumph of this so-called globalism with its "Memory-Erasing and Mind-Emptying (MEME) viruses'', to use the words of Dr. Lokesh Chandra, that today not alone child living in any urban centre of India can tell you the name of any Indian month or day of the week. The great thing that distinguished the Indian calendar systems was that the festivals listed by them were connected essentially with indigenous ecological and agricultural concepts. Navreh, the Kashmiri New Year's Day, is an example. It is celebrated when the mild spring sun has climbed up its way to north (uttarayana) and the sweet daffodils have started peeping from below the heavy blanket of snow the earth is covered with. The numerous festivals listed in the Nilamata Purana have similar charms. Today, the Kashmiri Pandit has been thrown out of his ecological habitat. He has to celebrate his Shivaratn in the torn heat of the plains where no snow falls, his Navreh where no almond trees bloom. This is not nostalgia; this is an acute condition of cultural loss.

Entering the twenty-sixth year of his exile, he too celebrated the year 2016 of what is known as the Common Era (CE), amidst the high decibel pop music and Bollywood numbers played on TV channels, display of fireworks and illuminations-all that has now become a universal ritual. But somehow his heart was in Kashmir. And instead of cheer, the New Year brought with it the outrage generated by the dastardly terror attack by Pakistani Fidayeen on Pathankot, the gateway to Kashmir, his homeland, lost but still closest to his heart!

S S Toshkhani

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Courtesy:  S S Toshkhani  and  January 2016 Koshur Samachar