The full moon of Shrawan packs at least four festivals into one day. Hindu men renew the janai, the sacred thread worn across the chest. Priests tie a protective yellow thread — the raksha doro — around the wrists of anyone who comes. Sisters in the Terai tie rakhi on their brothers' wrists. And every household, whatever else it observes, cooks kwati, a thick soup of nine sprouted beans. This year Janai Purnima falls on Bhadra 12, which is Friday, August 28. It is a public holiday, and you can confirm it on our holidays calendar.
The janai: a thread renewed yearly
The janai is a cord of three cotton strands. Men of the tagadhari castes receive it at their bratabandha initiation and wear it over the left shoulder for life. The three strands carry their own reading — body, speech and mind, or the three debts owed to teachers, ancestors and gods, depending on which priest you ask. What matters ritually is that the thread must be clean and unbroken. So once a year, on this full moon, it is replaced. Men bathe in a river or pond, and a priest consecrates the new thread with mantras. The old one is retired to running water.
The morning bathing scenes are the festival's most visible face. Riverbanks and temple ponds fill before dawn. The ghats at Pashupatinath and the ponds of the old Newar towns do their busiest business of the year short of Shivaratri.
The raksha doro: protection for everyone else
You do not need a janai to take part. The raksha doro is a yellow or red thread tied around the wrist by a priest, with the mantra of protection recited. It is for everyone: men, women, children, any caste, any age. The thread is worn until Laxmi Puja in Tihar. Tradition says to tie it then to a cow's tail, so the cow can lead you across the Vaitarani river in the afterlife. In practice most wrists keep the doro until it frays. The festival's protective name, Rakshya Bandhan, means exactly what it says: the bond of protection.
Rakhi: the sibling thread
In the Terai, and in families with roots on either side of the border, the day is above all Raksha Bandhan in its sibling form. A sister ties a decorated rakhi on her brother's wrist and puts tika on his forehead. He commits to protect her, a commitment customarily accompanied by a gift. The rakhi custom has spread well beyond its origin communities in the last generation. Kathmandu shops now stock rakhis in the week before the full moon. Plenty of hill families have folded the sibling thread into their janai-and-doro day without ceremony or fuss.
Kwati: the nine-bean soup
The day's food is non-negotiable. Kwati is a soup of nine kinds of sprouted beans — black gram, green gram, chickpea, soybean, field bean, cowpea, rice bean, kidney bean and dried pea, in the standard count. They are soaked for days ahead so the sprouts are just showing. The timing is deliberate. The monsoon's damp is at its heaviest, fieldwork is heavy too, and a protein-dense hot soup marks the turn of the season. Markets sell the ready-mixed kwati blend all week; the sprouting still has to happen at home.
Gosainkunda and Kumbheshwar
Two pilgrimages anchor the day. High in Rasuwa, at 4,380 metres, sits the alpine lake of Gosainkunda. In legend, Shiva created it by striking his trident into the mountain to cool his poisoned throat. Thousands of pilgrims time their trek to bathe there on this full moon. Jhankris — shamans — make the journey in full regalia, and their drumming on the lakeshore is one of the great sights of the Nepali ritual year. Down in Patan, the Kumbheshwar temple's pond is said to be fed by an underground channel from Gosainkunda itself. Bathing there counts, by pious arithmetic, as bathing in the lake. That is a mercy for anyone who cannot manage a four-day trek, and the Kumbheshwar mela is Patan's biggest day of the season.
How to spend the day
If you observe: bathe early, get the new janai or the doro from your family priest or any temple, and put the kwati on the stove by mid-morning — the beans take hours. If you are simply watching, Kumbheshwar in Patan offers the most festival per square metre. Pashupatinath's ghats have the biggest crowds, and any Terai town has the best rakhi bazaars. The day after Janai Purnima belongs to Gai Jatra, when the mood swings from solemn threads to satire and cow processions. The festival season, from here, does not really pause until after Tihar.