April 14 of the Gregorian calendar was the first day, the first of the month of Boishakh, of the year 1423 in the Bangla calendar (Bangabda). The night before, around 11pm, when I was returning home, I found police barricades blocking many streets leading up to the holy seat of Ma Kali of Kalighat in Kolkata.
I live in the neighbourhood, and I know what was up. Like every year, many business-people, traders, and those who have to maintain accounts, were bringing a brand new fat accounts book (called Haalkhata or Jabdakhata) to be blessed by the holy mother.
The whole area, especially the approach to the Ma Kali temple at Kalighat was very busy. The thick crowds would continue till the late hours of the night, for the daybreak would usher in a new year and with that, a new financial year. A new financial year means a time for renewal, of recalculating starting inventory for traders.
Thus, in Choitro, the last month of the previous year, there are steep discounts and selling activity in order to clear inventories as much as possible, so as to start the new financial year with minimal carry-overs in inventory. Thus, in Bengal (West and East), Odisha, Tripura, Assam, Manipur, Mithila, Nepal and other areas of eastern South Asia, which have a mid-April New Year, this is the season of sales and price-cuts.
This goes by the contemporary name of Choitro Sale. The mid-April New Year is also shared by several other peoples in this part of the world -- most notably in Cambodia, Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Kerala, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Myanmar. These are all homelands of rice-growing people with cultural and civilisational links going back many centuries.
Crop styles and harvest cycles similarities among people represent real civilisational continuities. They are quite different from the “ancient and continuous civilisation” type of myths that are invented by nation-states and then projected back into the past -- the shape and size of these types of civilisational contintuity claims are typically dictated by contemporary political needs, imaginations, yearnings, and anxieties.
The government financial year in the Indian Union starts on April 1 and ends on March 31. Canada, Hong Kong, Myanmar, New Zealand, and South Africa use the April 1 to March 31 financial years system for various purposes. Clearly, it is not crop patterns or anything tied to the citizen’s practises within these widely geographically separated entities that unites them.
The root of the unity is the British crown -- which created these political entities and ruled them, in the past and in some cases, at present too. What is also common is that in all these entities, the present administrative system has continuity with British rule in terms of governance -- all these entities have undergone transfer of power to natives and not capture of power by natives.
Unsurprisingly, the government financial year of the UK runs from April 1 to March 31. None of the UK’s two close neighbours -- Ireland (succcessor of the Irish free state formed after violent anti-colonial struggle against English rule) and France -- has a similar financial calendar.
In fact, worldwide, a plurality of nation-states uses the Gregorian calendar year as the financial year for most purposes, but even then there is huge heterogeneity, including major financial powers that do not follow the Gregorian calendar year as the financial year.
In short, financial years vary widely across the world, and this has not created any trouble in trade, commerce and international transactions. In the USA, which has many states, some individual states have a different financial year system than the federal government.
That the Indian Union does not acknowledge the financial year that started on the first of Boishakh is a democratic deficit and not any deficit in a calendar system. The lack of acknowledgement is related to classifying whole classes of citizens as lesser people
Thus, even when a stupendous majority speaks the same language, professes some form of Christianity as religion and are of White-Caucasian ethnic origin, there is space for diversity. Own needs take precedence over over-arching structures of uniformity. That is a sign of democratic deepening, of people’s convenience mattering before any other reason.
Global uniformity or homogeneity are not positive values unto themselves. If anything, they are inimical to the development of the full potential of those who are different from the dominant. That colonisation and standardisation or homogenisation based on the coloniser’s preferred practise is something we live with after decades of decolonisation tells us that transfer of power is one thing, liberation is quite another.
A majority of the people among most ethno-linguistic nationalities in the Indian Union are associated with agriculture. Add to that the class of small traders, and you have a huge proportion indeed. An entity like India, put together by the British, continues to follow an alien financial year, divorced from the needs and convenience of the people.
People never were and never are consulted about such fundamental decisions. Of course, there is “acknowledgement” of the “traditional,” which is the respectable way of saying something is out-dated.
But when a tiny minority gets to decide on the datedness of the practise and lifestyle of the stupendous majority, it is a symptom of democratic deficit. The hope is that, through years of coercion, the majority will come around to reason. Such systems treat citizens as infants and not as human beings equal to the elite set.
Many things which are standard in the Indian Union are also “traditional,” just that it is someone else’s, typically the coloniser’s or the Hindi belt’s tradition.
Scotch is the traditional local brew of Scotland with a lot of money and government support put in to its filtration and standardisation process to make it the aspirational drink that it is today. Still, Scotch is Scotch and Mahua (local brew from Mahua flowers in large areas of Bengal, Odisha, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh) is “traditional.”
Governments are supposed to support people’s already existing skills and practices, so as to help them fulfil their aspirations and potentials, not create conflicts between people’s practises and government’s ideology. When such conflicts happen, and government fiat takes precedence, it means most people are discounted as full citizens.
That the Indian Union does not acknowledge the financial year that started on the first of Boishakh is a democratic deficit and not any deficit in a calendar system.
The lack of acknowledgement is related to classifying whole classes of citizens as lesser people -- those who use their own month systems, those who are literate in their mother tongues only (funnily, that is the case for most white English speakers who are considered greater if not the greatest people).
Just like if English became the language of all people of the world it would cause unprecedented shrinkage in the world of past, present and future knowledge, similarly, suppressing people’s own practises only destroys creative forces, sucks energy out of life and business, inhibits the economic, cultural, and political swaraj that all sovereign political entities claim to have achieved.
While sovereign political entities like the Indian Union may celebrate decolonisation by putting 15 vernacular languages on their banknote, their order is determined by the English alphabet order. A for Assamese. B for Bangla. That is the deep structure. Hence, in Bengal, Boishakh 1 is not just Boishakh 1.
It is increasingly a cultural marker day that “falls” in the middle of April.
