Tradition · Mizo spring festival · India
Chapchar Kut
The Mizo festival of the gap in the work: held in March, after the jhum plots have been slashed and left to dry and before they are burned, when there is nothing to do but wait for the cut bamboo to cure. It is the one festival in the year that exists because of a pause in labour rather than a harvest. Its dance is the cheraw, performed between bamboo poles clapped in rhythm by seated men while women step in and out of the closing gaps.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 23.727, 92.717
Worth knowing
The cheraw is danced over moving bamboo that will break an ankle if the rhythm slips, and its origin is given as a rite for a woman who died in childbirth — a mourning dance that became the emblem of the state's most cheerful festival.
Connections (1)
- In the same set asWangala
Two festivals of the shifting-cultivation year, in adjacent hills, marking opposite ends of it. Wangala is the Garo thanksgiving after the harvest, offering the first grain to Misi Saljong and danced to a hundred long drums. Chapchar Kut is Mizo, and falls in the gap: the jhum plots have been slashed and are drying, the burning has not begun, and there is nothing to do. One celebrates the granary full, the other the only week of the year with no work in it.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Chapchar Kut”. Mizoram art and culture department records; B. Lalthangliana, History and Culture of the Mizo.
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