The Calendar

Bhaktapur, typically of South Asia, has both a solar annual calendar and a lunar one.^[4] While the great majority of festivals are determined by the lunar calendar, there is one major festival sequence (Biska:, the solar New Year sequence) and one other annual event which are determined by the solar cycle. The lunar year is normally divided into twelve lunar months. The lunar month begins on the day following the new or dark moon, which ends the previous month.^[5] The Newar lunar month is divided into a first "bright" half, corresponding to the waxing of the moon, and ending with the full moon; and a second "dark" half, corresponding to the waning phase of the moon and ending with the new moon. The bright fortnight is called tumla ; the dark fortnight, khimla .^[6] To designate individual lunar fortnights, terms for the dark half and light half of the lunar month—ga and thwa , respectively—are added to the name for the particular month. The name of the month is itself a compound including the morpheme la , meaning lunar month. Thus the

first lunar fortnight of the lunar year, Kachalathwa, means the bright or waxing fortnight (thwa ) of the lunar month (la ) of Kacha, which is followed by Kachalalaga, the dark fortnight (ga ) of the month of Kacha. Table 2 lists Bhaktapur's lunar fortnights, the Sanskritic equivalent months, and the approximate correspondences of the fortnights to the Western year. The table does not include the intercalary period, which has to be added every third year to adjust the lunar to the solar year, and which does not usually affect the ritual calendar.

The full-moon day, which ends the bright lunar fortnight (the first half of the month), is called punhi , and the dark or new-moon day, which ends the dark fortnight is called amai^[7] The other days of each lunar fortnight are given ordinal numeric Sanskritic names, with the

exception of the fourteenth day of the dark fortnight, whose Sanskrit name, caturdasi , is usually replaced by the Newari term "ca:re ". The lunar days are called tithi . Although they vary in length (from about 21.5 to 26 hours), they are, for most purposes, made to correspond to ordinary solar days.

The solar year, which is of very much lesser importance for the ritual cycle, contains twelve months. The names of these months are the same as for the Lunar months,^[8] although there is, perhaps, a tendency to use the Sanskritic forms more for them. The days of the solar year, gate , begin at sunrise. They are arranged in a seven-day week deriving, as the solar calendar in general does, from the same sources thus sharing some of the same astral references as the Western days of the week. The occasional necessity of relating the solar and lunar years requires a complicated set of rectifying conventions that are not relevant here.