Kathmandu, October 26
The first Kapilvastu Heritage Festival, a day-long showcase of Awadhi poetry, folk music, village food and handicrafts, will be held on Saturday, October 31 at Sunshine School in Taulihawa.
The festival will run from 11 AM to 7:30 PM, and entry is free and open to all. It is being organised by Chautal Music Private Limited together with the Awadhi Sanskritik Samaj, Kapilvastu. Organisers expect around 500 guests, more than 40 artists and about 10 stalls.
The organisers said the event aims to give a public platform to the living culture of the district, much of which is fading as young people move away from it. They said Awadhi, spoken in most households in Kapilvastu, is rarely published, and that birth songs, monsoon songs, folk dances, village cooking and handmade crafts are passing out of daily use.
“Everyone comes to Lumbini for the birthplace and leaves. Nobody stays for the place itself. The songs, the food and the crafts here are still alive, and still fading. We wanted to give them one day on a proper stage, in front of the people they belong to,” said Ravi Pandey, festival coordinator at Chautal Music.
The programme opens with ten school students reading their own Awadhi poems. They were selected through a district-level competition on the theme “The sweetness of Awadhi, the identity of Kapilvastu” held at Sunshine Boarding High School, Taulihawa. Students of classes 7 to 10 wrote their entries by hand in Awadhi.
A public panel titled “The Identity of Kapilvastu” will bring together historians, local elders and students. In the evening, more than 40 artists, most of them from villages within the district, will perform Awadhi folk songs and dances. The songs include sohar, sung at births, kajri for the monsoon, chaiti for the month of Chait, nirgun at the end of life, and devi songs at shrines. The dances include Dhobiyuwa, Jhara, Kaharahuwa and Chamrauwa.
About ten stalls will serve food cooked by women from local households rather than caterers. Dishes include fara (a steamed rice-flour dumpling), gulgula, gujhiya, dhushi and puniya, and kheer made from Kalanamak rice, the fragrant variety grown around Kapilvastu. Artisans will work in the open through the day, making goods from sikki and moonj grass and bamboo, such as dhakiya and mauni baskets, bena hand fans and soop winnowing trays, while potters work at the wheel. Visitors can buy directly from the makers.
The organisers said Kapilvastu is where Siddhartha Gautama spent the first 29 years of his life, and that Tilaurakot, Kudan and Niglihawa lie within the district. They noted that the 2025 bid to inscribe Tilaurakot on the UNESCO World Heritage List did not succeed.
Chautal Music records, archives and stages the folk music of the Awadh region. It says it has produced ten editions of Bhajan Sanjh, which drew more than ten thousand people in total, six editions of Shaam-e-Awadh, and Ekam, a Shivaratri special attended by over three thousand guests.
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