Navroz Mubarak!

There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and the mountains bare
And grass in the green field.

No joyless forms shall regulate
Our living Calendar:
We from today, my friend, will date
The opening of the year.

Some silent laws our hearts may make,
Which they shall long obey;
We for the year to come may take
Our temper from today.

It was William Wordsworth who made this appeal for shifting the New Year into spring. Little did he know that others before him had acted on this idea, giving us the festival of Navroz (literally, ‘new day’ in Persian). Each year, Navroz falls on 21 March, the day of the Vernal Equinox, when the sun enters Aries, ushering in spring ‘which seems a sense of joy to yield’. It is a joyous time, when bleak vistas of bare trees and snowbound lands turn into the warm, verdant bounty of spring (or at least that’s what’s supposed to happen!).

In 1079 AD, the Saljuk Sultan Malikshah, advised by Persian astronomers, reformed the calendar, accounted for intercalation (leap year days), determined the sun’s passage into various constellations and proclaimed the Vernal Equinox as New Year’s Day, thus formalising a millennia-old pre-Islamic tradition. Today, the festival is most enthusiastically celebrated among the Parsi community, the aatish-parast, as they are known in Iran. In keeping with their national heritage, all Muslims in Iran also celebrate the festival, as do other communities that were once in the Persian sphere of influence (like Tajikistan, Wakhanistan, Badakshan, etc.).

Little known outside the Parsi communities of India and Pakistan, Navroz is a beautiful and organic festival that ought to be publicly celebrated, particularly in these days of environmental degradation. Of course, we have the more popular Basant which, like Navroz, celebrates spring. But Navroz is also a celebration of nature’s powers of rejuvenation and her fecundity.

To most of us today, the Vernal Equinox is a useless bit of information memorised in geography class. Our only landscapes are all tarmac and concrete, which don’t quite register changing seasons. March probably represents no more than the close of the accounting year. It is easy to lose sight of the significance of spring. But this year, let us pause to ‘stand and stare’ at a tree turn green or a flower blossom. Let it remind us of the infinitely bountiful Mother Nature whose benedictions we often take for granted. Let us transform ourselves just as nature is transformed with the advent of spring. Let us resolve that, ‘we for the year to come may take our temper from today’. Navroz Mubarak!