Tradition · Angami purification festival · India
Sekrenyi
Ten days in February in which the Angami villages of Kohima's hills cleanse themselves. It opens with the kizie, a few drops from a rice-water gourd put on the leaves at each house, and the men then bathe at the village well at dawn — the Dzüseva, washing away the year's ill. Young men who have come of age are initiated; quarrels are formally settled before the festival ends, because they may not be carried across it. It is a reset rather than a thanksgiving.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 25.670, 94.110
Worth knowing
The well is cleaned and guarded overnight so that no woman touches it before the men bathe, and the bathing is done in cold February water before first light — a purification that is meant to be unpleasant.
Connections (2)
- In the same set asMoatsu Mong
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.
- Shared sacred geographyKhonoma
Khonoma is Angami and keeps Sekrenyi, and the two things the village is known for belong together. It resisted the British through three sieges to 1879 and negotiated its own terms, and it later declared its forest a conservation area and banned hunting in it — decisions taken by the same village institutions that settle the quarrels Sekrenyi requires to be settled. The purification festival is the annual working of a system that also handles war and forest.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Sekrenyi”. Nagaland art and culture department records; J. H. Hutton, The Angami Nagas (1921).
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