Not a community feast

Most of us, young or old, associate food with the word "gahambar.” We falsely take a gahambar to be a community feast. Gahambar khaaie aayaa (we’ve eaten at a gahambar) is what we generally hear!

However, it is false to say that any community feast is a gahambar. There are six gahambars, which are a solemn celebration of the different seasons and also commemorative of the six creations of God. Religious ceremonies are performed during that particular period and the food that is prayed upon is then partaken by all.

So, basically, a gahambar is a religious feast where one partakes of the consecrated (prayed upon) food used in religious ceremonies to celebrate the particular season. Community feasts at any other time of the year cannot be termed gahambars and we should stop referring to them as such.

BURJOR DABOO

burkhurdar@yahoo.com

Farrokh Vajifdar, Zoroastrian scholar, explains

Burjor Daboo rightly anguishes over the Parsi obsession with food, so much so that every communal feast is now called a "gahambar.” Sadly, we all seem genetically fixated upon this direction, and there’s simply no help for it.

The consistent failure of our present-day religious leaders to rectify matters must be seen as a continuing refusal to change for the better: not a call for reform, but for restoration along lines of religious truth! Whilst we reject this overdue restitution, it is not we who lose out; it is the younger generations who will remain untaught — good-bye religious learning, hello to "baap-dada” and "age-oldism” under guise of "traditional preservation!”

For a start, the word is gahanbar. The pervasive sloppiness amongst us has mangled it to sound as "ghambar, gahambar, even ghambhar.” Not only has the meaning been lost, but also its true religious function.

Here are the religiously inculcated fixed dates of the six festivals, with the preferred Parsi corruption of names: Maidiozarem: April 30 to May 4; Mai-dioshehem: June 29 to July 3; Paetesh-hem: September 12 to 16; Ayathrem: October 12 to 16; Maidiarem: December 31 to January 4; and Hamaspathmaedem: March 16 to 20 (The leap year 2012 tails these dates back to March 15 to 19, with the awardad or leap day as March 20).

Daboo has correctly seen the six as timely seasonal festivals. We have support from the Indian side which too lists six bimonthly seasons. The Zoroastrian festivals follow the logically derived order of the six periods of Ahura Maz-da’s creations: sky, water, earth, plants, animals and man.

Each period was followed by five rest days: the gahanbars, each of which, bar none, lasted five days. The sixth doubles as five Gatha days.

The full 365-day religious year, accordingly, has this six-fold pattern: (40+5) + (55+5) + (70+5) + (25+5) + (75+5) + (70+5) = 365.

With the strict definitions of the six seasonal feasts are their descriptions given since ancient times by the learned priests who had carefully compiled our religious calendar. Hence, the revered Kangaji in his masterly Gujarati edition(s) of the Khordeh Avasta gives their kholasoh with exactitude, save for the Ayathrima which foxed him — it means "the return of cattle from their summer high pasturing.” All gahanbars had agro-pastoral connections.

The food offering was naturally appropriate to the season. It was duly consecrated and shared by all. (In provincial Iran, to this day, where "consecration” never meant "desecration,” the gahanbar food is distributed even amongst the poor Muslim families, in true keeping with our universalist religion in pious gratitude for and acknowledgement of Mazda’s bounty.)

Full references to the gahanbars and their true placings in our religious calendar are to be found mainly in the Bundahishn, Chapters I and XXV; Shayast ne-shayast, Chapter 21; the several chapters from Fragard 2 of the Nirangistan (meant for the guidance of priestly celebrants, including the stress on sobriety!).

From the above-referenced indications of the timeliness of the gahanbar celebrations with their seasonal food offerings, one concludes by a happy little gist with moral purpose from a religious text, the Hadhokht Nask: after death a new arrival at the celestial regions is greeted by an earlier denizen with a time-wasting enquiry. Mazda curtly interrupts with the priority of greeting not with idle questions, but with a welcoming gift of mid-spring butter (esteemed as a delicacy on earth as it is, supposedly, in heaven!).

An after-thought: had the ancient earthly gahanbars been delayed, as they pointlessly are in our Shahenshahi and Kadmi calendars, that delicious spring-time butter — the richest produce of mid-spring pasturing — would have turned unbearably rancid (utri-gailu) by summer!