Ya: Marhi Punhi [9]

Calendrical events are distributed throughout the year in clumps. The first two fortnights of the lunar year has a relatively high density of festivals. Now commencing with Thi(n)lathwa in November/December Bhaktapur has four lunar fortnights with only two very slightly differentiated full-moon days and a minor solar festival—a specially differentiated first day of a solar month. With the third fortnight of this period a month-long vrata , a period of special devotion important to all the Valley women, begins.

Ya: Marhi Punhi [9] is one of the differentiated punhi , or full-moon days. This particular one is related to the agricultural cycle, and is the first of a number of such festivals. Most of the other festivals connected with the agricultural cycle (this one being a significant exception) are tied together in the stories and actions of the "Devi cycle," which we will consider as a unit below. Ya: Marhi Punhi takes place at the end of the rice harvest (whose beginning was signaled in the major autumnal festival of Mohani [67-77]). At this time the rice harvest is usually entirely completed. During this day in most households a mixture of husked and unhusked rice is worshiped in the room used for storing grain. The purpose of the prayer is said to be that as the grain is used up the worshipers hope that the storeroom will be filled up again. The rice mixture is taken to represent Laksmi. A specially kind of sweetcake, ya: marhi , is presented as an offering to the deified rice, and after being left in the store room for four days, is eaten as prasada from Laksmi. Three of the cakes had been formed into images of Ganesa^[*] , Laksmi, and Kubera, a quasi-deity who has little other reference in Bhaktapur and is

never worshiped at any other time, and who has as one of his legends the custodianship of wealth (Mani 1975, 435).^[14] This is the traditional day for the giving by a tenant farmer of a share of the rice harvest to the owner of the land—although the share may now, in fact, be paid before or after this time. In the evening of this festival there is a nakhatya , and married-out women are invited to their natal homes for a feast in which various kinds of food special to the occasion are added to the ordinary feast menu. This is a household centered feast, and the household is reconstructed in the invitation to the married-out daughters. The deities are benign ones. The emphasis here—in contrast to the agricultural meanings of the Devi cycle—is not on the growth of the grain but in its location in the household as part of the household's prosperity. This is a significant illustration of the difference between the relations of the Dangerous Goddess (and her Devi cycle) to fertility and the benign one, Laksmi, to household management and well-being. Ya: Marhi Punhi is considered to be an exclusively Newar festival. (Moderate.)