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ON THE first day of Baishakh, the Bengali New Year, the streets of Dhaka transform into a theatre of colour, memory and aspiration. Celebrated by Bengalis across religious lines, in both rural fields and urban neighbourhoods, Nababarsho is more than a calendar event, a declaration of identity. The performances that unfurl on this day offer a glimpse not only into how contemporary Bengalis imagine their Bengaliness, but also into the ways in which that identity remains a site of tension and re-invention.

Pahela Baishakh’s most iconic events take place in the heart of Dhaka, particularly around Ramna Park. Known earlier as Bagh-e-Badshahi during the Mughal period and restructured into a British-style public garden in 1825, this space has been shaped by imperial power and resistance alike. Today, it stands reclaimed by the people — its central banyan tree, batomul, now a quiet witness to one of the country’s most meaningful rituals.

Since 1967, the cultural organisation Chhayanaut has performed an open-air concert under this banyan tree to greet the new year. This tradition began under political duress: the Pakistani regime were trying to ban Rabindranath Tagore’s music, viewing his Bengali lyrics as a threat to national cohesion. In this climate, Chhayanaut’s insistence on singing ‘Esho he Baishakh’—Tagore’s iconic welcome to the new year — was an act of cultural defiance. The dawn performance was not merely a concert; it was a protest disguised as poetry.

To this day, Chhayanaut’s programming adheres to a distinct aesthetic. It opens with classical music — dhrupad, raga-based compositions — rooted in the Bengali soil yet cosmopolitan in reach. As daylight brightens, the songs move from solemn invocations to spirited anthems, culminating in group renditions of Tagore. The concert mimics the rhythm of a village day: quiet and contemplative at dawn, increasingly energetic as the sun rises, tapering off before midday. The symbolism is deliberate — mirroring agrarian life and offering a vision of cultural continuity.

Yet this central performance is far from solitary. Elsewhere in Ramna Park, other groups gather: singers, dancers, actors and self-styled folk troupes who engage in their own expressions of Bengali identity. Not all performers are trained or professional; some are students, others are families or neighbourhood collectives who adopt folk personas for the day. You might find one group dressed as bauls — mystic minstrels known for their itinerant life and rejection of religious orthodoxy — although the performers themselves may never have lived such a life. These enactments are more symbolic than literal, but no less sincere.

Here, performance theorist Richard Schechner’s idea of ‘restored behaviour’ becomes illuminating. When individuals assume roles they’ve never occupied in reality — like the boatman, the village woman, or the baul — they aren’t simply acting; they’re participating in a social ritual that bridges personal and collective memory. The role is not ‘me,’ but it’s also not ‘not me.’ There’s a doubleness in the gesture. This imaginative re-becoming is a key part of Nababarsho’s cultural language — it allows for an elastic kind of identity-making, one that draws power from inherited images while also resisting fixity.

This blending of real and imagined identities continues in the Mongol Shobhajatra, arguably the most visually arresting of all Nababarsho performances. First initiated in 1989 by students of the Institute of Fine Arts (now the Faculty of Fine Art at Dhaka University), the parade has become emblematic of the day itself. It begins within the university compound and moves outward, with participants carrying oversized masks, animal sculptures and hand-painted banners. Though renamed as ‘Barshoboron Ananda Shobhajatra’ this year, the older name still persists among many, evoking the idea of an auspicious procession.

The parade is a riot of symbolism. Papier-mâché tigers, birds, crocodiles and elephants mix with imaginary creatures drawn from folk mythology — many bearing features that resist easy classification. These aren’t literal representations of any known tradition, nor are they sacred objects in a ritual sense. Instead, they exist in a space of imaginative hybridity. They are cultural ‘inventions’ — visual motifs assembled from fragments of memory, art history and political aspiration.

The influence of Kalighat pat painting is unmistakable. These nineteenth-century illustrations, once sold to pilgrims in Kolkata, were collaborative productions: men drew outlines, women filled in the colours and the content ranged from gods and saints to satires of colonial elites. Their aesthetic — flat perspective, bold lines, expressive faces — has deeply informed the Mongol Shobhajatra’s artistic vocabulary. But unlike their religious predecessors, these new images are detached from sectarian meaning. They are visual allegories of a pluralist nationalism, a kind of secular sacredness.

This shift — from sacred to symbolic, from religious to performative — reflects a broader dynamic in post-Partition Bengali identity. In the wake of 1947 and again after the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, the idea of ‘Bengaliness’ underwent significant transformation. In Dhaka, many families who had migrated from West Bengal brought with them a cosmopolitan Bengali culture that prized literature, art and music. These diasporic inheritances found expression in Nababarsho, which gradually evolved into a platform for articulating a non-religious, language-based identity.

But this performance of the ‘imagi-nation’ isn’t confined to official or elite spaces. Across the city, especially in working-class neighbourhoods, one finds informal processions of young people dressed in stylised folk costumes. Their movements often draw from Bollywood choreography, rural dance forms and street theatre. It is not ‘authentic’ folk culture in the anthropological sense — but it is entirely authentic as an expression of youthful desire to belong to something larger than oneself.

These performances often include improvisation. A boy might dress as a village fisherman, holding a plastic net and wearing a lungi over jeans. A girl might don a sari and dance to a mash-up of Lalon songs and Hindi pop. What emerges is a hybrid identity: neither urban nor rural, neither past nor present, but something stitched together from scraps of memory, media and aspiration. The performers, again, are ‘not me, not not me.’ The ambiguity is the point.

Boishakhi melas — seasonal fairs — complete the tableau. Set up in parks, school grounds, or even vacant lots, these melas attract artisans from across the country. They offer wooden toys, painted pots, clay figurines, embroidered fabrics — objects that evoke a romanticised village life. Yet the melas are also commercial, often sponsored by banks or telecom companies. Here, the rustic is commodified, the handmade repackaged as lifestyle. But to dismiss the melas as mere kitsch would be reductive. They function as affective spaces, allowing urbanites to reconnect — however symbolically — with their rural roots.

For many Dhaka residents, the village remains the true homeland, even decades after migration. The mela allows them to ‘return’ through consumption. Buying a terracotta horse or eating pitha becomes a way to rehearse belonging. It is a double performance: the artisan plays the role of the rural craftsman, while the customer plays the role of the village child rediscovering their roots. Both know it is a fiction. Both participate anyway.

This dance between the real and the imagined, the inherited and the invented, is what gives Nababarsho its power. It is a day of collective remembering — not of what was, necessarily, but of what could have been and still might be. Through singing, parading, crafting and pretending, Bengalis re-stage their nation not as a fixed geography or a singular history but as a performance — a work forever in progress.

In a time when political discourse in the region often defaults to rigid identity categories — Hindu versus Muslim, urban versus rural, modern versus traditional — Nababarsho offers a different model. It suggests that identity can be fluid, plural and joyful. It shows how performance — when taken seriously — can be a tool for cultural survival, creative resistance and even healing.

Ultimately, Nababarsho is not just a day on the calendar. It is a rehearsal of possibilities. A script rewritten each year by its performers and watched by a nation still deciding what kind of story it wants to tell.

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Dr Saleque Khan is a New York-based writer.