Pohela Boishakh — History, Date & Significance

The Bengali calendar traces back to the Mughal emperor Akbar, who reformed the calendar in 1584 to align tax collection with the harvest seasons of Bengal. His court astronomer Fathullah Shirazi blended the lunar Hijri calendar with the solar Hindu calendar to create the Bangla Sôn (Bengali era), counted from 1556. Landlords would settle accounts with tenants on the first day of Boishakh, and traders opened fresh ledgers — the halkhata tradition that survives to this day.

The modern public celebration took shape in the twentieth century. In 1967, the cultural organization Chhayanaut began greeting the new year with Tagore songs under the banyan tree at Ramna in Dhaka — a quiet act of cultural resistance during the Pakistan era. The Mangal Shobhajatra procession, started by students of Dhaka University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in 1989, was recognized by UNESCO in 2016 as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Under the Bangla Academy’s reformed calendar, Pohela Boishakh falls on April 14 every year in Bangladesh.