Happy ‘English New Year'

Nepal: At one Zoom meeting on the first of January 2025, I intentionally greeted John Whelpton, a well-known British Nepali historian, with “Happy English New Year!” I expected him to react to this unique collocation and juxtaposition of lexicons. For some reason, the Gregorian New Year is called the English New Year in Nepal.

 

photo: TKP

John was slightly surprised by the greeting, which naturally does not cohere with the actual usage of New Year’s greetings. So, we briefly discussed the possible origin of this nomenclature.

 

The English New Year has become so common in Nepal that it seems people at the government, media and the general public all use it. Given its popularity, I am sure it will become the standard expression of New Year greetings in Nepal—or maybe it has already been established. The Gregorian New Year may sound a little alien and strange to people in Nepal, so they naturally do not want to use it.

 

A New Year is synonymous with festivities traced back to the Babylonians, who celebrated it 4,000 years ago. This continued until 46 BC when Julius Caesar came up with the idea of a reformed calendar and proposed that January be established as the beginning of the year.

 

The Julian calendar has 365 days. Then came the Gregorian calendar, which is also a solar calendar with the same number of days as the Julian calendar. The Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII, was issued in 1582 for what was called all of ‘Catholic Christendom’. The calendar marked a shift from agrarian to civil rotations. However, the different calendars of Nepal are rooted in the agrarian cycles, and we celebrate the New Year according to them.

 

I mentioned the brief history of the calendar to argue that saying ‘English New Year’ or ‘French New Year’, so to speak, is historically and factually wrong. But why do we call it ‘English New Year’ then? What is the history of this nomenclature, if at all? Unfortunately, no clear history exists to show the origin of this English New Year. But engaging in this through a postcolonial lens may be fascinating.

 

The word ‘English’ has a strong impact in South Asia. Anything that had to do with Europe or ‘modern’ was called English or deshi in India or perhaps in other South Asian countries, too. I remember seeing signboards or advertisements of deshi sarab (foreign or English alcohol) at Chandani Chowk in Delhi. We hear news about police raids on deshi sarab in India or the Nepal-India border region. I think this is a ‘postcolonial hangover’ of alcoholic beverages that takes time to fade. It is metaphorical in many ways.

 

I have spent over 50 years teaching English language and literature at Tribhuvan University and chaired the English syllabus committees of the Central Department of English. The experiments introduced in English teaching in schools and colleges have sometimes dismayed me. I am alluding to a regional Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association conference held on November 3, 2017, in Dharan. There, I heard a report from Maya Rai, the former regional educational director and my erstwhile student, which said students who do not speak English are barred from entering the classroom. This English moha that we are advocating distressed me. I quote the following from my article published in this paper on November 12, 2017: “I am also always stressing, if you do not let the students speak in any language they can speak, you are hampering the language learning process, whether the language is English or the students’ own language. I think that creates a sense of alterity, the alienated other, among the students, and they, by the same token, lose the power of using language creatively.”

 

The English New Year is deeply rooted in that very psyche of advocating something that is English. The architect of the Rana regime in Nepal, Jang Bahadur Rana (1817-77), made a state visit to Britain in 1850. Upon returning from his trip, he aimed to carry on the effect of the ‘English’ as such in Nepal. He thought the groundwork for that should start with English language education. Thus, what happened in the neo-Baroque building of the Ranas in Thapathali created the ground for ‘English.’

 

Jang Bahadur brought two Englishmen in 1853 to teach English to the Rana children. Later, at the request of pundits and bhardars, or higher officials, he shifted the school to the Rani Pokhari corner under the name Durbar School in 1867. Among Jang’s successors, Chandra Shumsher Rana (1863-1929) promoted English education under the conditions created by the times.

 

To understand the English New Year, we should look at the lure of English and its association with the British or English Raj in India. For many of us, English metaphorically represents the West or modern education and a means to link us to cosmopolitanism. ‘English New Year’, therefore, represents a hegemony that manifests in education. This usage will be pervasive, we can predict. Every time I hear it, I feel it is wrongly used, but I also understand why the nomenclature is gaining popularity.

 

Nepal observes many New Years. One is of Indigenous origin, unaffected by the English New Year. There is no shift of the agrarian cycles to the civil rotations in the indigenous New Years. For example, in Kirat communities, Udhauli and Ubhauli, which mark the New Year, have agrarian cycles. The Nepal Sambat of the Newa community, deeply rooted in culture and history, also has its agrarian cycles. The concept of New Year in Nepal is poetic, cultural and musical. Dance, ritual worship and musical performances are the features of every New Year in Nepal. Some have regional and ethnic orientations.

 

The English New Year 2024 brought both easy and challenging, pleasant and terrifying moments. Let us hope the English New Year 2025 will bring sanity and establish conditions of love among all sentient beings and nature.