The Himalayan pangolin and Macchindranatha Jatra's

The Himalayan pangolin and Macchindranatha Jatra's shared story of drought survival. The festival and the pangolin are unaware of one another. However, they share a location, a climate, and a history of drought and recovery in a valley long dependent on the monsoon. The Rato Machindranath Jatra, which began in the seventh century, attracts tens of thousands of people to Patan's ancient streets every spring. 

The towering chariot is hand-built from bamboo and wood, and is slowly pulled through the city by hundreds of devotees.  Water and flowers are sprayed from rooftops. Let the rain come, the people chant. The jatra is a deeply moving display of faith and tradition for the majority of visitors. The jatra became a symbolic clue for a small group of researchers studying the Himalayan pangolin's DNA to their laboratory findings regarding the species' rapid decline. 

An obscure creature, rarely seen, is the Himalayan pangolin (Manis aurita). It comes out at night.  When threatened, it tightens into a ball and curls up. Keratin-based hard, overlapping scales cover its entire body. It lacks teeth. Ants and termites are what it eats. It probes the soil with a tongue that is longer than its own head and completely relies on smell to identify food. Despite the fact that the animal has been living in the forests around it for more than a million years, most people in the Kathmandu Valley have never seen one. The Himalayan pangolin was previously considered a subspecies of the Chinese pangolin by scientists. In 2026, a significant international study led by researchers from Nepal, China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain demonstrated that it is, in fact, a distinct species. The tale is buried within the genome. 

According to laboratory findings, the Himalayan pangolin is a distinct new species. However, as the scientists dug deeper into the genetic data, they discovered something unexpected. The pangolin's population history was also encoded in its DNA. It talked about how the population changed over different time periods. GONE (Genetic Optimisation for Ne, or Effective population size estimation) is the term for this kind of analysis. It works by reading minute molecular patterns left over from each breeding generation. Between 1,330 and 1,365 years ago (660–695 AD), the population of the Kathmandu Valley experienced a sharp decline, which occurred between 190 and 195 generations ago. 

After that, about 700 years ago, the population fell to its lowest ever recorded level. With increasing levels of inbreeding, the few remaining animals became isolated. Why did pangolins die? We need to know what pangolins eat in order to comprehend what led to such a decline in population. Pangolins eat termites and ants, which are very specific to their diet. The only function of their entire body—the long tongue, powerful claws, and nose—is to find and eat termites and ants whose colonies are hidden beneath wood and soil. Termites, on the other hand, require moisture. During times of drought, their colonies became dehydrated and collapsed.

 Their mounds remained silent. Their numbers fell. Termites were retreating underground or completely disappearing from large areas of forest in the Kathmandu Valley, which was experiencing a prolonged monsoon failure. In the Kathmandu Valley and its environs, a pangolin had nothing to eat. It continued to eat the same diet. To explore new territory, it was unable to traverse mountains. Few pangolins had waited, and many of them perished as a result. During the seventh century, a prolonged drought in the Kathmandu Valley may have caused pangolins to starve because of a lack of resources rather than through hunting or the destruction of their habitat. The GONE analysis uncovered a pattern that was similar: a sudden and severe decline in population that was concentrated in the valley occurred at the same time that climate records from the Himalayan region indicate a prolonged drought. What the climate records show

 The seventh century was a trying time. The world experienced a significant hydroclimatic stress during the Late Antique Little Ice Age. The same conclusion can be drawn from data from glaciers, lake sediment cores, tree ring records from Nepal and western India, and drought records from multiple decades punctuated by irregular monsoon failures. At 1,300 meters, the Kathmandu Valley, which is in a basin the shape of a bowl, is unusually sensitive to such changes. When the Himalayan monsoon weakens, the valley often suffers more than the hills around it. 

Its agriculture, which relied solely on rice fed by the monsoon, would have been devastated. Its forests would have become sparser. It would have slowed down its rivers. The drought's timing, location, and severity are all shared by the climate proxy records and the genome of the pangolin, albeit independently. The god who requested rain. Now consider the Rato Machindranath legend. The chronicles of Lalitpur and the Newa oral tradition claim that the Kathmandu Valley once experienced an agonizing drought that lasted for an entire year.

 Crops failed. The ground broke. People cried, with no relief.  The legend says that the great yogi Gorakhnath, who had gone into deep meditation in the valley, was to blame. He had snagged the Nagas, the serpent gods who carry rain beneath his body, by doing so. Because the monsoon's guardians were captivated, it was unable to arrive. The only option was to call upon the rain god Rato Machindranath, also known as Karunamaya, Gorakhnath's own teacher. In order to bring the god's idol back to Kathmandu, King Narendra Deva sent a delegation all the way to Assam, which has the highest rainfall in South Asia. Gorakhnath arose from meditation to honor his guru when the idol arrived in the valley. The Nagas were allowed to go. The clouds came together. 

The downpour began. The Rato Machindranath Jatra, or chariot festival, was established by the king as a token of gratitude. Over 1,300 years have passed without a single interruption in its performance. Every year, the festival asks for rain. Why this is important now The Himalayan pangolin, Manis aurita, is currently in serious trouble once more. The southern Himalayan foothills of Nepal, South Tibet, and northeastern India comprise its limited range. Pangolin scales, which are used in traditional medicine markets throughout Asia, are the most traded wildlife product on the planet and are heavily targeted by poachers. In addition, the levels of inbreeding among the pangolins that live in the vicinity of the Kathmandu Valley are already dangerously high. This suggests that populations are too small and geographically isolated to thrive on their own. 

The new genomic study provides conservation managers with something they did not have before: a precise genetic baseline that is detailed enough to map the boundaries of isolated populations that require immediate attention and identify the origin of individual confiscated pangolin scales. Manis aurita must now be listed separately and protected under international law as a result of its full species status. It qualifies for its own spot in CITES Appendix I, which forbids international commercial trade because it is a distinct species.

 That is the legal foundation for enforcement, not a bureaucratic formality. The genome and the chariot. The Rato Machindranath Jatra will take place once more the following year, as it has for more than a millennium. The chariot will travel the narrow streets of Patan. The Serpent King's jewel-adorned Bhoto will be displayed in front of the crowd. The sky will be watched by the people. A Himalayan pangolin will emerge at night, nose to the ground, from the valley's forests, following the faint chemical trail left by a termite and ant colony through the leaf litter. The festival and the pangolin are unaware of one another. 

However, they shared a location, climate, and a drought- and drought-recovery history in a valley that has always been subject to the monsoon. The pangolin was able to survive the drought in the 7th century because a few individuals remained in the remaining forest patches, breeding and declining, until the rain returned. However, the actual pangolin population did not reach its lowest point until the 13th and 14th centuries. The Rato Machindranath Jatra is a celebration of survival in the face of severe climate change and serves as evidence of climate change. The pangolin and the festival are, in this sense, telling the same story. They are both able to withstand the effects of climate change.

    

   Writer: Binod Kumar Simkhada 

binodkumarsimkhada315@gmail.com