Gadimai Again

Every five years, the Gadimai Festival puts Nepal in the international spotlight for all the wrong reasons. Tens of thousands of buffalos, goats, fowl and rodents are slaughtered inside a temple enclosure in the village of Bariyapur of Bara district. 

Devotees believe the goddess will fulfil their wishes, and unlike other festivals in Nepal the sacrificial animals are usually not eaten. In 2009 an estimated 400,000 water buffalos, goats, chicken, ducks and even white mice were said to have been killed over a two-day period. The 250-year-old Gadimai Mela has therefore been called ‘Gadimai Massacre’ by animal rights activists.

The killings polarise Nepali society every five years. The Supreme Court in 2015 instructed the Gadimai Temple Committee to phase out the mass sacrifice, and issued a mandamus order directing the Nepal government to set a timeline stop the killings. The temple trust discouraged devotees to bring animals and announced that it would discontinue killings starting with the festival in 2019, but the sacrifices continued unabated.

Because of the intense international media glare, the mass sacrifice has tarnished Nepal’s compassionate image as the birthplace of the Buddha. Celebrities like actresses Brigitte Bardot and Joanna Lumley and India’s Menaka Gandhi have staged demonstrations, and even the European Union (EU) wrote to the Nepal government.

However, here in the Tarai and across the border in India, the sacrifices are driven by a strongly-held belief that it will appease the goddess. Local groups have invoked right to religious freedom and point to the tradition of ritual sacrifices in other religions. 

The Gadimai Mela coincides with the Thanksgiving Festival in the United States in which tens of millions of turkeys are slaughtered, and supporters say that is also a mass killing. Sacrifices on a similar scale are held across the Muslim world during Bakr Id.

Rabi Thapa, in his 2014 column ‘Kalam’ in this newspaper wrote: ‘It is the fact of the slaughter, more than anything else, that attracts or repulses. The imagery employed by those speaking out against the mass sacrifice -- drunken men hacking away at 20,000 hapless young buffalos, a marshland of blood and gore -- betrays a horror of industrial scale barbarism that is anathema to (western) notions of sanitised, civilised progress. At root, the global protests against Gadimai can be applied to all individual sacrifices in the name of religion that are conducted within the premises of the household, the temple, or the street. ’

Pitted against each other are those who are against mass cruelty to animals not primarily killed for eating, and the people of the borderlands who celebrate that very sacrifice. This year, the voices against the sacrifices have been amplified in social media platforms.   

But however strong the voices within Nepal and abroad against Gadimai, faith seems more powerful – that the sacrifices will mollify the gods during trying times. The arguments (and laws) about unnecessary mass killing of innocent animals does not seem to work against a deeply-held belief system.

The ritual killings at Gadimai temple premises are on 8-10 December, and all 16 municipalities in Bara district have declared a three-day holiday. Upendra Prasad Yadav, mayor of Gadimai Municipality heads a coordination committee, and the main priest of the temple Mangal Chaudhary is from the indigenous Tharu community, as is the custom.

Buffalos used to be decapitated in an open ground near the temple, but after animal rights activists started protesting, it is now done inside a barbwire walled enclosure. The goats and chicken are sacrificed in a post-harvest paddy field across the Pasaha River.

Although the Gadimai Festival has earned a dubious reputation, it is also an opportunity for clans from both sides of the India-Nepal border to get together. Even the Muslim community here takes part, and Gadimai is also a celebration of religious harmony. 

In recent years, what used to be a small gathering with a few hundred people has become massive and heavily commercialised. The sheer scale of the event overwhelms local authorities, and traders exploit visitors to maximise profits. 

It has been more than ten years since I have been writing about the lack of regulation, and preparedness for potential emergencies at Bariyarpur. There are no veterinarians on site, no plans for post-festival cleanup of the blood and carcasses, and no oversight of the food for both animals and visitors. Sanitation standards are abysmal, and there is the risk of stampede.

The festival is also an occasion to see how society in the Madhes and in Bihar is changing: tractors have replaced bullock cart caravans. The Chamar community from India and Nepal still retrieve the buffalo carcasses, but rather than consume it themselves, the meat and skin are sold.

Since there are so many people who come together at one time, the festival is an opportunity for the Madhes Province government to use it to spread cultural awareness and information about public health issues. 

Chandrakishore is a Birganj-based commentator who writes this monthly column Borderlines for Nepali Times.