Holidays in Nepal

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Nepal

The Pond That Told Time Before the Clock Did

Before Nepal kept any standardised clock, the residents of Kathmandu told time by watching a small vessel sink in a pond near Hanuman Dhoka. Each container, called a pala, had a tiny hole drilled through it and took exactly twenty-four minutes to fill with water and disappear beneath the surface; an official stationed at the pond would count how many pala had submerged since dawn and announce the hour to anyone who asked. The system worked well enough for a city that had never needed anything more precise, until foreign travellers and, eventually, telegraph lines began arriving with their own fixed expectations of the hour.

Nepal's modern relationship with clock time has been almost as idiosyncratic as the pala pond. Until 1920, the country simply used Kathmandu's own local solar time, 5 hours, 41 minutes and 16 seconds ahead of Greenwich. That year it adopted Indian Standard Time instead, aligning with British India for practical administrative reasons. Then, at midnight on 1 January 1986, Nepal advanced its clocks by a further fifteen minutes, arriving at the now-famous offset of UTC+5:45, one of only a handful of 45-minute time zones anywhere on Earth. The new reference meridian runs through Gaurishankar, a sacred peak roughly 100 kilometres east of Kathmandu, and the change is widely understood in Nepal as a small, deliberate act of distinguishing the country's own clock from that of its much larger southern neighbour.

Three Years for the Price of One

Ask what year it is in Nepal and the honest answer depends on which calendar is asking. The country's official calendar, Bikram Sambat, is used on citizenship documents, government paperwork and most daily transactions, and it runs roughly fifty-six to fifty-seven years ahead of the Gregorian calendar, with its New Year falling in mid-April at the start of the month of Baisakh rather than in January. Because it is lunisolar, its months vary in length from year to year, so unlike the fixed Gregorian calendar, no two Nepali years look quite the same on paper.

Alongside it, the Newar community of the Kathmandu Valley keeps an entirely separate calendar, Nepal Sambat, whose own New Year falls a few months later, right after the festival of Tihar. According to tradition, Nepal Sambat began in 879 CE when a merchant named Sankhadhar Sakhwa paid off the collective debts of the valley's residents, and the era was founded to commemorate the occasion, a calendar whose very starting point marks a moment of financial relief rather than a conquest or a birth. Layered on top of both is the ordinary Gregorian calendar, still used for international business and travel, leaving many Nepalis fluent in switching between three different ways of naming the same day depending on the context.

A Goddess on the Clock

In Kathmandu's Durbar Square stands the Kumari Ghar, home to a living tradition dating to the Malla dynasty of the twelfth through eighteenth centuries: a young girl, selected from the Shakya or Bajracharya families of the Newar community, worshipped as the living embodiment of the goddess Taleju Bhawani. Candidates, typically between four and seven years old, are screened against thirty-two traditional physical attributes and tested for composure, historically including a ritual in which the child is placed in a darkened room surrounded by masks or severed buffalo heads to see whether fear breaks her calm.

What makes the role distinctive as an institution is that its length is fixed not by years but by biology. Once installed, a Kumari lives in the temple-palace, appears publicly mainly during the Indra Jatra festival, and holds her divine status only until her first menstruation or a significant loss of blood from illness or injury, at which point she returns to ordinary life and a new search begins for her successor. The practice, still observed today, has drawn modern criticism over its effect on the girls' education and childhood, even as it remains one of the most visible living traditions in Nepal, a form of religious office whose entire tenure is defined in advance by the arrival of puberty rather than by any calendar date.

Fifteen Minutes on Top of the World

At 11:30 in the morning on 29 May 1953, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa mountaineer, became the first climbers confirmed to reach the summit of Mount Everest, arriving there as part of the ninth British expedition to attempt the mountain, led by Colonel John Hunt. The pair had woken at four that morning, spent two hours thawing Hillary's frozen boots, and set out at 6:30, timing their final push against a monsoon season that expedition planners knew was no more than about a week from closing the mountain's brief annual weather window entirely.

Once at the summit, Hillary and Norgay allowed themselves just fifteen minutes there, limited by their dwindling oxygen supply, before beginning the descent. News of the achievement reached London on 2 June, precisely the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, a timing coincidence the British press seized on as a good omen for the new reign. Both men were later honoured for the climb, Hillary knighted and Norgay awarded the George Medal, and the narrow seasonal window they raced against in 1953 remains, to this day, the same one every Everest expedition still plans its entire ascent around.

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