Flaming lanterns in the night sky
The autumn full moon that marks the end of the rainy season monastic retreat is the day for a wonderful Buddhist festival here in Chittagong. This year it fell on 24th October, and I was fortunate to have been invited by Bonośrī Mahāthera, the abbot at Cāndgāũ Sarvajanīno Buddhist Educational Monastery to come for the celebrations.
Cāndgāũ was, several decades ago, a Barua viilage near Chittagong, located just by the Kalughat ferry. This is where the main southbound road to Cox’s Bazaar now crosses the Karnaphuli river and the creeping urbanization of the area around Chittagong has, of course, spread quickly along major arterial roads. Nonetheless, Cāndgāũ still feels very much like a Barua village. There’s a market road lined with shops named for Lumbini or the Three Jewels. Walking along, one passes a few beautiful ponds and several different Buddhist monasteries and meditation centres—it felt to me very much like Boudha or Lalitpur in the Kathmandu Valley. Bonośrī’s student, Priyoboṃśo Bhikkhu, had asked me to arrive relatively early and I made sure to arrive on time. Of course, everyone was napping in the hot afternoon sun—knowing they had a long programme that night!— so I took the chance to walk around the different monasteries and then came back to the main monastery to wait. 
There was quite a bit of activity: chairs being put out, banners being hoisted, and colourful paper lanterns being carefully checked and then neatly stored for later. After a few minutes, Priyoboṃśo bounced downstairs and promptly fetched me back upstairs to the main office.
Bonośrī is a senior monk who is both scholarly and very committed to his community. I sat on a couch in his office and we talked about the history of Buddhism in the wider region. He has written both on history and on the practice of Buddhism, and as various visitors came to ask him for advice, discuss plans for the Kathina celebrations, give him a copy of the Bangladeshi Buddhist newspaper, or simply ask for help, I practiced my dull Bengali skills on one of his books.
His career as a monk spans both the British and Pakistani periods as well as modern independent Bangladesh, and he told me a little bit about his training around the whole region. He had trained for some time in Burma as well as attending university in Bengal; but new borders create new tensions. Before the Raj, as well as during the British period, the several communities that now find themselves polarised by national borders, religious or ethnic identities and regional geopolitics were part of a complex patchwork that did not have to challenge each other’s legitimacy within any particular modern nation-state. Now, ‘Chakma’, ‘Rohingya’, ‘Marma’ or ‘Barua’ are oppositional terms tangled up with low-intensity conflict, new forms of colonization, refugee migrations and a host of other problems that involve Burma, Bangladesh, India, China—and arguably also Thailand, Bhutan, Nepal and other states, as well as substate/parastatal entities like the Shan or Kachin states. I don’t quite subscribe to Scott’s claims for Zomia, but it is certainly true that Chittagong is a nerve centre connected across a rugged region that is difficult to organise as nation-states.
After some time, and after meeting a number of interesting guests who were also here for the Pravarana ceremony, I was taken downstairs and parked in a row of chairs to the side of the main lectern along with a number of other interesting folk. The ceremony got started; and we alternated recitations of Pāli texts with speeches from all of us parked on the ‘interesting guest’ seats. A key local politician, the ward councillor, came and gave, unsurprisingly, a political speech; as with the inauguration of the Indigenous Buddhists’ monastery, this was a chance to win votes before the December 2018 elections.
By now it was thoroughly dark, and after some organisational herding we were all directed towards the main monastery courtyard where an enormous paper lantern was being unfurled. These are called fanoosh ফানূশ and they are the ritual core of the night’s events. They are made from thin paper, in the form of an open-bottomed cylinder braced by a very light bamboo ring. In the middle of the ring is hung a lamp or torch, and when the hot air fills the fanoosh the glimmering orange lantern soars away into the night sky, rising up to meet the full moon. As dozens of them rise up into the sky, well, if you’ve ever seen Tangled you will of course think of the climactic scene there…but it’s much better. In fact, the ward councillor was being fêted with an especially large fanoosh. I’ve uploaded a video here of the fanooosh being lit and lofting- it’s really quite something.
We returned for more chanting and a blessing ceremony, but I was quickly hustled outside to meet some community leaders. Walking out of the monastery I saw a wonderful array of candles and lamps; walking down the street, it was a proper mela with gaudy lights and the occasional lantern sailing away in the night sky.