Tradition · cattle fair at a confluence · India
Sonepur Mela
Asia's largest cattle fair, held for a month from Kārtika Purnimā where the Gandak meets the Ganga in Saran district. Its ground is Harihar Kshetra, whose temple joins Hari and Hara — Vishnu and Shiva — in one shrine, and the fair is old enough that its origin is given as Vedic and its elephant market was until recently the only one of its size left. The bathing and the buying happen on the same sand within sight of each other.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 25.700, 85.180
Worth knowing
Elephants were traded here in numbers into the 2000s, when wildlife law ended the sale; the elephant enclosure is still laid out each year and elephants still come, but they can now only be displayed.
Connections (4)
- In the same set asPushkar Fair
The two great livestock fairs of northern India are held on the same full moon, thirteen hundred kilometres apart. Pushkar's opens on Kārtika Purnimā beside a Brahmā temple and a lake; Sonepur's on the same day where the Gandak joins the Ganga, at a temple that puts Vishnu and Shiva in one shrine. Both are bathing festivals with a market attached, or markets with a bathing festival attached, and neither has ever needed to decide which.
- River flowMuktināth / Gandakī
Sonepur's ground is a confluence, and the river that makes it comes down from Muktināth. The Gandakī rises in the Nepal Himalaya below the Muktināth shrine, where the śālagrāma ammonites that are worshipped as Vishnu are gathered from its bed, and joins the Ganga at Harihar Kshetra — where the temple holds Hari and Hara together. A river sacred to Vishnu at its source meets the Ganga at a shrine that refuses to choose between him and Shiva.
- AnalogueBāli Jātrā
Kārtika Purnimā is the subcontinent's day for water and boats and buying. In Odisha it is Bāli Jātrā, when paper boats are floated for the merchant mariners who sailed to Bali and a fair covers the Mahanadi sands. In Bihar it is Sonepur, where cattle are sold at the Gandak's mouth. The same full moon ends the sailing and the growing season at once, which is why the fairs and the launchings are on it.
- Site adjacencyPatna Sāhib
Sonepur Mela, the vast cattle and horse fair at Hariharnath on the Gandak confluence, is held across the river from Patna in Saran district; it is part of greater Patna's hinterland and belongs beside the Patna Sāhib takht in the region rather than inside its precincts.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Sonepur” and “Sonepur cattle fair”. Bihar tourism department records; Wildlife Protection Act 1972 provisions on captive elephants.
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