Tradition · Himalayan new year · India
Losar
The Tibetan new year, kept across Ladakh, Spiti, Sikkim, Tawang and the Nepal highlands, and the one festival that shows how far the Tibetan calendar reached. The days before it are for clearing out: houses swept, old food eaten, the guthuk dumplings served with objects baked inside them that tell a person's character, and torches carried out to throw away the year's ill. Ladakh keeps it two months early, by a fourteenth-century king's order before a campaign.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 34.153, 77.577
Worth knowing
The Ladakhi date was moved forward so the king's army could keep the festival before marching, and it has stayed moved for six hundred years — a calendar permanently altered by one military timetable.
Connections (1)
- In the same set asHemis Tsechu
The Tibetan calendar's reach can be read off these two. Losar is kept as the new year in Ladakh, Spiti, Sikkim, Tawang and the Nepal highlands; the Hemis Tsechu falls in the fifth month of the same calendar. Ladakh, though, keeps Losar two months early, by the order of a fourteenth-century Namgyal king who wanted his army to celebrate before marching — so one military timetable permanently moved a new year that the rest of the Tibetan world still keeps on time.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Losar”. Ladakh and Sikkim cultural academy records; Namgyal dynasty chronicles for the Ladakhi date.
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