Blogged Pages - 17220151354

18:54

No season for fairs

From the Blog odysseuslahoriThe traditional melas — fairs — in the subcontinent were the place for ordinary folks to let their hair down. Long before they took on a quasi-religious colour in Muslim Pakistan, fairs were secular whose timing was guided by the seasons. Harvests meant food in the larder and cash in the pocket and so we had festivals in April and May, coinciding with the wheat harvest alternating with those to mark the cutting of rice and sugarcane. Things changed and while some many festivals became aligned with the lunar calendar, some despite their attachment to shrines and death anniversaries of the saints interred therein continued to stick to the earlier solar calendar. The managements at these shrines understood that if they were to keep the economy alive, they had to keep to the time wpakistanblogs.blogspot.comRead Full PostComments

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