Teej in London for Nepali women was no more different this year than what would have been in Nepal

By Sangita Marahatta-Sharma

Far away from my homeland, I danced a lot during this year’s Teej festival with hundreds of other Nepali women in London on Saturday.

I have been in London for six years now and sometimes I reflect about life and festivals in the foreign land. After seeing hundreds of Nepali sisters in London streets wearing Red Saris, Jewelleries and sindoor on Saturday, I am now convinced that the devotion for your festival is not lost outside the country, rather it becomes stronger. While I would not have felt remorse in not celebrating ‘Teej’ back home, I could not stay at home without going to the temple and the function here in London since I would definitely feel that I missed the opportunity to celebrate my ‘Great Festival.’

London itself is a cosmopolitan city and there are tens of thousands of Hindus who live and work here.’ There are dozens of Hindu temples in different parts of the city. During Teej, Nepali women visit these temples to do ‘Pooja’ and in some temples where there are Nepali priests, they also get chance to ‘sing and dance’. One of these temples is a ‘Hindu’ temple in the south east of London, where women do ‘Group Pooja’ and dance whole day freely.

Last year on the day of Teej, I was in the south-east London but this year decided to go to the west to get a different flavour of this festival. Before I reached Southall temple, I could see many women in red dress in the street who had taken ‘fasting’ praying for long life and good health of their husband. For a while, I forgot that I was in London. I could easily hear women talking in Nepali and expressing their sentiments about fasting in Teej. Inside the temple there were nearly one hundred women listening to the ‘Bhajan’. In the meantime, other women continued to do ‘Pooja’. Throughout the day, Nepali women kept thronging to the temple. Priests in the temples knew well about the festival and hence had made special arrangement for Nepali women to offer prayers to Lord Shiva.

On Saturday, another interesting Teej programme was organised for the purpose of charity. Women did not hesitate to dance wholeheartedly as the London-based Nepali singers performed Teej songs and other popular Nepali songs. For a few minutes, before entering the dance floor myself, I watched those women and I could tell you that ‘none of the touch for Teej’ was different from that of Nepal. Same songs, same dance, same fasting and that same devotion…. I was much impressed when one of the organisers asked the floor if they wanted Hindi songs. The unified reply was ‘NO.’ All they wanted was ‘typical’ Teej songs which they had heard and used to sing back in Nepal.

Women did not hesitate to pay money for the ‘good cause’ as this programme was organised to raise funds for a 17-year- old heart patient in Nepal, Tara Joshi. ‘Young Nepalis in London usually look at the festivals just as another ‘dance party.’ My aim was to give them a right message that our festivals are not merely dance parties.’ Said Parama Subedi, organiser of the programme. ‘If we do something together, we could help the less privileged people in Nepal while enjoying the festivals’, she added.

We, however, did not sing political Teej songs as many women do now in Nepal. They might have been too busy with their day to day work or have not thought of singing those songs outside Nepal. But from my experience here in London, Teej is the most colourful festival as compared to other festivals that Nepalis celebrate.

If I look back to my old days while I was an emerging journalist and trying to do my best to catch people’s attention, nothing was important for me than my job. Even the festivals were not that much important and I knew that this was the journalist’s life. Believe me, the couple of times I went to Pashupatinath temple on the occasion of Teej, it was just for ‘reporting’ for the newspaper and radio I worked with. I did not feel like singing and dancing along with others.

I can never forget June 1999 while I was preparing to come to the UK to attend an international broadcasting course in Cardiff. My well wishers and parents were really worried about me being in Britain on my own, and especially about how I would adjust and what I would eat. Many of them would think Britain as a ‘White country’ and it will be difficult for me to live on ‘Sandwich’ and ‘Pasta’ only while I was so fond of ‘Daal, Bhat and Tarkari.’ I did not dare to ask my civilized foreign- returned friends about the food. So my relatives and even I, on my first visit to overseas thought that Asian food was not common in the UK

Now I keep smiling while I remember those days as I was completely wrong. Britain is not how one feels about it, especially London. You can get everything you want in shops even the vegetables you eat back in Nepal. I did not have a chance to eat ‘Teej ko Dar’ my mummy cooked, but I got every chance to enjoy the festival.

(A Nepali Journalist living in the UK, Sangita currently works for the first ever Nepali satellite channel ‘Nepali Television’ in London. She has also worked with the BBC Nepali service in London and Radio Sagarmatha F. M. in Kathmandu.)

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