Pohela Boishakh: from harvest-time taxes to halkhata and village fairs

Pohela Boishakh, the first day of the Bengali year, is a national holiday in Bangladesh, observed every year on 14 April. On that day in 2026, Jagonews24 published a column by agriculturist Dr Radheshyam Sarkar, chairman of the DRP Foundation, arguing that the festival is more than a change of calendar: it is a shared expression of a farm-based economy, social ties and Bengali cultural identity. The historical record bears out those farming roots.

According to Banglapedia, land taxes under the Mughals were collected by the Hijri calendar. Because the Hijri year is lunar, it did not line up with the agricultural year, and farmers were hard-pressed to pay taxes out of season, before their crops were in. To streamline collection, Emperor Akbar ordered a reform of the calendar. The astronomer Fatehullah Shirazi combined the lunar Hijri year with the solar calendar already in use. The new Fasli San, or crop year, was introduced on 10 or 11 March 1584 but counted from Akbar's accession in 1556, and it later became known as Bangabda, the Bengali year.

Historians do not all agree on this origin, and some trace the calendar to rulers before Akbar. Whoever introduced it, the calendar served to set land-tax collection after the spring harvest. In Bangladesh, a committee led by Muhammad Shahidullah revised the Bengali calendar in 1966, and the revision was officially adopted in 1987. Since then the new year has always fallen on 14 April in the country.

Banglapedia notes that it was customary to clear all dues on the last day of Chaitra, the final month of the year. On the next day, the first of the new year, landlords treated their tenants to sweets. The main event was the halkhata, the opening of a new book of accounts: traders and shopkeepers in villages, towns and cities closed their old ledgers, opened new ones and invited customers for sweets to renew their dealings. The custom survives, especially among jewellers and grocers. In his column Dr Sarkar describes the same moment as the start of a new economic cycle in a farm-based society, when old debts are settled.

Baishakhi fairs are held across the country. Banglapedia lists what they offer: farm produce, handicrafts, toys, cosmetics, food and sweets, along with jatra theatre, pala gan, kavigan, jarigan, gambhira and gazir gan, puppet shows and merry-go-rounds. Popular village sports included horse races, bullfights, cockfights, pigeon flying and boat races, and some events are regional, such as bali wrestling in Chittagong and gambhira songs in Rajshahi. The column calls the fair a social meeting ground where farmers, labourers, fishermen, blacksmiths, potters and small traders come together.

Though agricultural in origin, Banglapedia says, the festivities are now more marked in cities than in villages. In Dhaka, crowds gather at dawn under the banyan tree in Ramna Park, where Chhayanaut artists open the day with Rabindranath Tagore's song 'Esho he Baishakh'. Chhayanaut was founded in 1961, under Pakistani rule, to nurture Bengali culture and music. When the authorities banned the broadcast and performance of Tagore's songs in East Pakistan in the late 1960s, the organisation kept the music alive in defiance of the ban. The column likewise describes Pohela Boishakh in the 1960s as a form of cultural resistance.

The morning procession of teachers and students of the University of Dhaka's Faculty of Fine Arts began in 1989. In 2016 UNESCO inscribed it, as Mangal Shobhajatra, on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. UNESCO describes masks and floats made over the month before the festival and a procession that unites people irrespective of caste, creed, religion, gender or age. The column also raises a question: if the festival narrows into an urban middle-class event, can it still hold the whole outlook of rural people? Its core strength, the writer argues, is its universality, binding city and village, rich and poor.

Photo: Belayet Hossain (Bellayet) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

Sources: Jagonews24 (column by Dr Radheshyam Sarkar), Banglapedia, UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage lists, Wikipedia (Pohela Boishakh, Chhayanaut)