There could be a day when two lovers make up their minds to call each other husband and wife. It could be any day, but it must be a beautiful day. A day when summer had its longest day. The time could be during morning or evening, but it must be auspicious. A time when a firestorm could start on the Sun, but it must be when the Moon grows or Venus retreats. It could be a moment for the couple to run away, but only after they have said their goodbyes to a crowd of approving family and friends. A moment that could be marked in the calendar after the event, but even better if marked in advance, in anticipation of a wedding. If planned, that day and moment must harmonize to the place, season, day, and a web of a disproportionate number of other people’s lives. The date would be neatly circled or colored as a wedding anniversary on a Gregorian calendar page sitting on a coffee table with glossy pictures of cityscapes or inside the phone in all its digital dullness. However, inside the regional premodern almanac’s pages – those softbound calendar books with deckle-edged pages printed in damp ink that unfailingly rub off on the fingers every time, the same celebratory anniversary date would be fraught with controversy. Couples marrying across provinces and communities would fail to avoid the controversy that sometimes arises, not from family’s disapproval of the marriage altogether, but from the mere mismatch of calendrical calculations around wedding dates and times, around the auspicious and the ominous.
While the wedding anniversary thus escapes the dispute over the calendrical accuracy by sticking with the relatively straightforward and universal Gregorian, the quandary continues over birthdays but eventually ends well for the party lovers. Two birthdays! one that celebrates the date of birth marked in the calendar with English numbers (Gregorian) and the other that gets picked from the pages of the vernacular calendar, full of celestial charts and images of antiquity, celebrating the moment of birth. The first one includes a steady stream of (sometimes automated) wishes and cakes and birthday songs and parties. For the birthday from the almanac, there is no ceremonial wishing other than blessings, no birthday songs other than prayers, no cakes other than kheer, and as for gifts, they are obviously given once. While the Gregorian assigns one the sign of an unstoppable bull, for the same individual, the local calendar might find the celestial match with the Gemini more (unambiguously) accurate. With an everyday sequenced in these astronomical numbers, it is a matter of fascinating leaps one takes across the varieties of calendars in India to come up with an excuse to celebrate every day from any calendar that suits right.
The calendars don’t just fail to align with their reference to the locations and meridians; they differ in their zero points. Exploring the history of their start dates, corresponding to the years when some savvy individuals decided to observe the celestial bodies and their movements in the sky and present humanity with a calendrical device that binds them to the universe and design a new civilization around it, is tantamount to getting lost in space. But the failure to adjust a common origin date has resulted, much to the delight of a vibrant population, in multiple new years to celebrate. In the land of endless occasions to celebrate, there are unlimited opportunities to charm the modern consumers. However, socially constructing the daily customs and rituals according to the calendrical practices has been so organic and somewhat sophisticated that it practically dismisses the need for any artificially devised consumerism. During the wintry winds and smoky chills as the streets light up to the upcoming global new year, the spring in April marks the beginning of new regional calendar years across north and south. There are places where you light a bonfire to celebrate the new calendar year, and somewhere else, it is the chandeliers of golden yellow Indian laburnum flowers that mark a new beginning. Like matryoshka dolls, one emerges from inside a tiny little world into a larger one and then an even larger one and transcends the walls and boundaries and joins in the celebration on the streets; it doesn’t matter whose land it is as long as one enjoys every moment of it.
The calendars don’t just fail to align with their reference to the locations and meridians; they differ in their zero points. Exploring the history of their start dates, corresponding to the years when some savvy individuals decided to observe the celestial bodies and their movements in the sky and present humanity with a calendrical device that binds them to the universe and design a new civilization around it, is tantamount to getting lost in space. But the failure to adjust a common origin date has resulted, much to the delight of a vibrant population, in multiple new years to celebrate. In the land of endless occasions to celebrate, there are unlimited opportunities to charm the modern consumers. However, socially constructing the daily customs and rituals according to the calendrical practices has been so organic and somewhat sophisticated that it practically dismisses the need for any artificially devised consumerism. During the wintry winds and smoky chills as the streets light up to the upcoming global new year, the spring in April marks the beginning of new regional calendar years across north and south. There are places where you light a bonfire to celebrate the new calendar year, and somewhere else, it is the chandeliers of golden yellow Indian laburnum flowers that mark a new beginning. Like matryoshka dolls, one emerges from inside a tiny little world into a larger one and then an even larger one and transcends the walls and boundaries and joins in the celebration on the streets; it doesn’t matter whose land it is as long as one enjoys every moment of it.
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Author: Staff Contributor
Illustration/Photograhy: TDLM Design Team
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