Amardeep has a rundown of this harvest festival and Sikh New Year. Lohri is another favorite festival of mine: baking like the planet Mercury, searing bonfire on one side, frigid night on the other and bhangra all around the fire.
Here’s a snapshot I took at the 2003 Sikh Day parade in NYC. It’s the Madison Square Park tower in a playground mirror. This year’s parade will be held on Sat., Apr. 30.
Vaisakhi de Mubarak to all the crew at sepia mutiny and all the readers too.
It just struck me that the word for the Sikh/Punjabi spring/harvest/renewal festival — Vaisakhi/Baisakhi, is really similar to the word for the spring/renewal festivals in some other religions: Pesach (passover in judaism), Pascha (Easter in eastern-orthodox-speak), Pesacha/Pesaha (easter-week in kerala). And relatedly, orthodox churches consider Pascha to be their new year — like Vaisakhi. Surely it’s no coincidence ?
Very interesting. And Pascua = Easter in Spanish.
I think Vaisakhi is the new year day for bengalis, telugus and tamils and a holy day for quite a few places in India.
All I can say is, Hooray for Indo-European languages!
Still tracking down some more tangible evidence, but if the words are all related, they most likely owe it to their Proto-Indo-European origins.
Love, your resident linguist-in-training,
Dot.
wow… very interesting… Passover and Pascha have the same linguistic AND cultural roots, but I can’t imagine that the Sikh New Year would quite share the cultural roots…. even if the names are similar.
And then there’s always Easter, whose name is derived from a pagan fertility goddess, which in turn sounds an awful lot like “estrogen.” I like watching people squirm when I bring out that etymology 🙂 Hooray for the Celts going and messing with Indo-European languages 😉
wow… very interesting… Passover and Pascha have the same linguistic AND cultural roots, but I can’t imagine that the Sikh New Year would quite share the cultural roots…. even if the names are similar.
Vaisakhi has double relevance for Sikhs because it is not only a cultural spring festival of the Punjab (which is a fertile and green land) it is a religious one. Vaisakhi was celebrated by Sikhs/Hindus/Muslims in Punjab as the spring festival, bringing in the harvest, celebrating with singing and dancing (bhangra is closely related to this….many of the dance moves and music are performed at fairs to celebrate the bringing in the spring harvest….)
Anyway, it became a Sikh religious and spiritual date in 1699. You can read about this here . But the point is, Vaisakhi was chosen because it was already a significant date for Punjabi people, it was the spring festival of rejoicing, and so represented the renewal of life, just as the Khalsa is symbolically about baptism and rebirth and renewal. They are intelinked.
So there.