Tradition · Ao Naga sowing festival · India
Moatsu Mong
Three days in the first week of May, when the Ao of Mokokchung have finished clearing, sowing and mending the granaries and the fields are in the ground. The village drinks, sings and rests, and the Sangpangtu is lit — a great fire around which men and women sit together to be given meat and rice beer. Where most agricultural festivals thank a harvest, this one marks the completion of the work that makes one possible, and the anxious months before it begin.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 26.330, 94.520
Worth knowing
Among its observances is the mending of the village gate and the paths, so a festival of rest is also the one week in the year the community's shared infrastructure is guaranteed to be repaired.
Connections (1)
- In the same set asSekrenyi
Nagaland's two best-known festivals belong to different tribes and different halves of the agricultural year. Moatsu Mong is Ao, in May, when the clearing and sowing are done and the village rests around the Sangpangtu fire before the anxious months. Sekrenyi is Angami, in February, and is not about crops at all: it is a purification — the men bathing at the well before dawn, the young initiated, and every quarrel formally settled before it ends.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Moatsu”. Nagaland art and culture department records; J. P. Mills, The Ao Nagas (1926).
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