Bisket Jatra

Bisket Jatra (also written Biska Jatra) is the great New Year chariot festival of Bhaktapur, an ancient Newar city in the Kathmandu Valley. Unlike most Nepali festivals, which follow the lunar Bikram Sambat calendar, Bisket Jatra is fixed to the Hindu solar calendar: it culminates on the solar New Year, Mesha Sankranti, around 13–14 April, and the celebrations span roughly nine days bridging the last days of the old year (the month of Chaitra) and the first days of the new (Baisakh). In Newar the festival is sometimes called Chyacha Gunhu, meaning "eight nights and nine days."

The festival began as an observance of the solar New Year, marked by hoisting long banners on a tall wooden pole. Scholars trace the name to the Classical Newar form of the festival, a compound combining bisika (the term for the Solar New Year, derived from the Sanskrit for the equinox) with ketu (Sanskrit for banner), and the name therefore refers to the pair of long banners displayed during the festival. A widely repeated folk etymology instead reads the name as "the serpent is slain," but historians note that the banners are not actually connected to serpents and that the serpent meaning is a later popular interpretation.

Two legends are commonly attached to the festival. The most famous tells of a princess whose successive bridegrooms died on their wedding night. A wandering prince, advised by the goddess Bhadrakali (appearing in disguise as an old woman), stayed awake through the night and saw two venomous serpents emerge from the sleeping princess's nostrils; he killed them with a sword and broke the curse. A second tradition involves a Tantric practitioner who was transformed into a serpent. In the popular imagination the raising of the great pole and the two long banners hung from it recall these slain serpents, fusing the solar-banner origin with the serpent myth.

At the heart of Bisket Jatra stand two deities. Bhairava is the central figure and the guardian of Bhaktapur — a fierce, wrathful (Raudra) manifestation of Shiva associated with both destruction and protection. His shrine and image are linked to the Bhairava temple on Taumadhi Square, the city's ceremonial heart, beside the towering five-storey Nyatapola complex.

Bhadrakali is Bhairava's consort and one of the principal mother-goddesses of Bhaktapur, regarded in local tradition as a protectress of the city. During the festival both deities are installed in massive, towering wooden chariots that are hauled by hand through the streets. The eventual ritual meeting of the Bhairava and Bhadrakali chariots — interpreted as the divine union of god and goddess — is understood as a cosmic act of creation and renewal believed to bless the city for the year to come.

The festival opens a few days before the New Year, in the closing days of the month of Chaitra, with the rite known in Newar as Dya Koha/Kwa Bijyaigu — bringing the god Bhairava out of his shrine and installing him in his great chariot on Taumadhi Square. The signature event then begins: a fierce tug-of-war for the chariot between the upper town (Thane) and the lower town (Kone/Kwone). Hundreds of men strain at the ropes to drag the heavy wooden chariot toward their side of the city, and the winning quarter earns the right to host the deity. The chariot is then drawn down to the Gahiti area, where it rests over the following days and receives offerings.

The festival's most spectacular act is the raising of the lingo or Yosin/Lyasin Dyo — a wooden pole about 25 metres tall, from which two long banners are suspended. It is hoisted upright by teams pulling on guy-ropes at the open ground of Lyasinkhel (Bhelukhel) on the eve of, or day before, the New Year. The pole stands through the New Year transition. On the first day of the New Year (Baisakh 1) the pole is dramatically pulled down, an act read as symbolising the downfall of enemies, formally inaugurating the new year. The toppling of this great pole is one of the most anticipated moments of the entire festival.

Around the New Year the chariots of Bhairava and Bhadrakali are brought face to face at Gahiti and made to collide in a rite read as the symbolic mating of the two deities. In the days that follow, processions of further goddesses — among them Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Brahmayani and Maheshwari — move through the city, with symbolic encounters in the Tachapal/Dattatreya area. The closing days include offerings to the deities installed across the old city, with residents presenting items such as yogurt, fruit and sweets, before Bhairava is finally returned to his shrine (Dya Thaha Bijyaigu) and the festival concludes.

Bisket Jatra is not confined to Bhaktapur proper; the surrounding Newar towns observe their own dramatic versions, traditions that the sources say spread through the kingdom during the Malla period. The best known is the Sindoor Jatra of Thimi, held on the second day of the New Year (around 14 April), in which scores of palanquins bearing local gods and goddesses converge on the Balkumari temple while crowds shower one another with handfuls of bright orange-red sindoor (vermilion powder), turning the whole square into clouds of colour.

On the same morning the nearby village of Bode stages its celebrated tongue-piercing ceremony (Jibro Chedne). A volunteer, after a period of fasting and ritual preparation, has a long iron spike driven through his tongue and then processes through the village carrying flaming torches; completing the ordeal is believed to bring blessings and prosperity to the community and honour to the volunteer's family. These linked observances — Bhaktapur's chariots and pole, Thimi's vermilion, and Bode's tongue-piercing — together make the wider Bisket Jatra one of the most distinctive New Year complexes in the Kathmandu Valley.

Bisket Jatra weaves together several layers of meaning: it is at once a solar New Year celebration, an agrarian rite welcoming spring, a Tantric drama of serpent-slaying and cosmic renewal, and a sacred meeting of the city's guardian deities. The rivalry between Thane and Kone neighbourhoods, expressed through the chariot tug-of-war, ritualizes community competition while binding the whole city to a shared event, and the rise and fall of the great pole dramatizes the passing of the old year and the defeat of misfortune.

Today the festival remains one of the largest and most vigorously observed in Bhaktapur, drawing crowds of residents, Nepalis from across the country and foreign visitors to the medieval squares of the UNESCO-listed old city. Exact dates shift by a day depending on leap-year adjustments to the solar calendar, but the rhythm — the bringing-out of Bhairava, the contested chariot pull, the raising and dramatic toppling of the lingo, the meeting of the deities and the days of goddess processions and offerings — has been preserved with remarkable continuity, making Bisket Jatra a living expression of Bhaktapur's Newar heritage.