On the evening of Saturday, October 17, 2026, the Grand Maple Ballroom inside the Dudley H. Davis Center at the University of Vermont will fill with the sounds of Nepali music, the smell of steamed momo, and a crowd that has been gathering for this occasion for the better part of a decade. Dashain Night 2026, hosted by the Nepali Student Association (NSA) at UVM, runs from 5:30 to 9 p.m. and is open to students, faculty, staff, and the wider Burlington community. Tickets are $12 for UVM students and $25 for general admission, with registration handled through the event website.
The timing is deliberate. Dashain is a fifteen-day festival, and in 2026 it begins on October 11 with Ghatasthapana and runs through October 25. The event lands on Phulpati, the seventh day — traditionally the day when flowers, jamara, and offerings are carried into Kathmandu in a grand parade, and when families bring the freshly sprouted barley into their homes. It is one of the festival's turning points, the moment the celebration shifts from quiet ritual toward the feasting and gathering that define the days ahead.
For Nepalis, Dashain — also called Bada Dashain, or Vijaya Dashami in Sanskrit — is the biggest and longest festival of the year. It commemorates the victory of good over evil, and it is observed not only in Nepal but by Nepali-speaking communities in India, Bhutan, Myanmar, and across the diaspora. The festival's rituals are deeply familial: elders place red tika on the foreheads of younger relatives and offer jamara, the pale yellow-green barley shoots grown in a dark room from the first day of the festival, as a blessing for health and success. The fifteen days are structured around nine forms of the goddess Durga, and the celebration culminates on Vijaya Dashami, the main day for tika, which in 2026 falls on October 21.
What makes the UVM event distinctive is how deliberately it has been built to translate that intimacy into a public, campus-wide gathering. The NSA describes its mission as a non-profit, non-political, and non-religious one: to promote Nepali culture within UVM and the surrounding Burlington community, to foster friendship between Nepali and other students, to support incoming Nepali and international students as they settle in, and to keep members informed about Nepal. Dashain Night is the association's flagship expression of that mission.
The event's own history stretches back at least to 2018, when the NSA held its first recorded UVM Dashain Night. By 2021, the association was billing the celebration as its "4th Annual," which places the series' origins around 2018. That year's event, held on Sunday, October 10, 2021, opened its gates at 5 p.m. with the cultural program beginning at 5:30 — the same rhythm the 2026 edition follows. Tickets then were $10 for UVM students and $20 for others, and the structure was telling: the cultural program itself was free and open to all, while the ticket covered the buffet of "near authentic Nepali cuisine" that followed. Children twelve and under ate free when accompanied by a ticketed adult, and guests could take food to go or eat indoors. The 2026 edition keeps the same spirit but folds the meal into a single ticketed evening, with the cultural program and dinner together.
The 2019 edition, documented in a UVM Graduate Student Senate write-up by NSA member Biswash Thakuri, drew more than 250 audience members and took music as its theme, showcasing instruments and songs from Nepal's many cultural communities. Thakuri's account captures the philosophy behind the night: Nepal, he wrote, houses more than ninety culturally and ethnically diverse communities, and Nepalis "have found ways to live together in harmony." Dashain Night, he said, is "a great opportunity for us to share this amazing message across UVM and with the greater Burlington community." The 2020 edition, by contrast, was forced into a hybrid format — a few in-person performances supplemented by mostly recorded ones — as the association navigated COVID-19 guidelines, with the full program posted to YouTube.
The 2026 program returns to the in-person model with traditional and contemporary dance performances, live music, and a short video introducing Nepal and the Dashain festival to guests who may be encountering it for the first time. Then comes the dinner: momo, chicken curry, rajma, rice, naan, vegetarian dishes, desserts, and — in a distinctly Vermont touch — Ben & Jerry's ice cream.
That last detail is a small but telling one. The event is explicitly designed as a bridge between two communities that share a city but not always a table. Burlington has been a resettlement site for Bhutanese refugees of Nepali descent — the Lhotshampa — since the early 1990s, when they were stripped of citizenship and expelled from Bhutan and fled to camps in southern Nepal before being resettled abroad. Vermont's Nepali-speaking population is therefore not only a campus phenomenon but a community presence, and the NSA's stated aim of bringing together "UVM students, faculty, staff, and the wider Burlington community" reflects that reality.
The Davis Center, at 590 Main Street, has been the event's home throughout — the Grand Maple Ballroom hosting the 2019, 2021, and now 2026 editions. It is a venue built for exactly this kind of gathering: large enough for a full buffet and a dance program, central enough to draw in off-campus guests.
For anyone who has never attended, the evening is structured to be legible to outsiders without diluting the tradition. The video provides context; the performances carry the culture; the food does the rest. Dashain is, at its core, about coming together — across generations, across castes and communities, across the distances that separate families scattered by migration. In Burlington, on a Saturday in mid-October, that coming-together takes the form of a ballroom full of students and neighbors, plates of momo in hand, watching the seventh day of a fifteen-day festival unfold a few thousand miles from home.
Registration is required, and tickets are available through the event website.