Rishi Panchami enrages many educated Nepali women. It’s not so much the superstition but the legitimacy that the government gives it by providing a holiday that declares women to be dirty and polluting. Why can’t the festival simply celebrate women instead? Privately, female Nepali sanitation activists tell me that their male colleagues—even in NGOs that campaign against menstrual taboo—see no need to object to chaupadi or Rishi Panchami because it is tradition.
