Tradition · spirit-expelling monastic festival · India
Torgya, Tawang
Three days each January at Tawang monastery, the largest in India, in which the Monpa and the monks drive out the year's malevolent spirits. Masked cham is danced in the courtyard, and on the final day an effigy holding the accumulated evil is carried out and burned before the whole valley. The monastery was founded about 1680 under the fifth Dalai Lama's authority, and the festival is the point in the year when its protective function is performed rather than assumed.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 27.586, 91.859
Worth knowing
Every third year the festival is expanded into the Dungyur, and the difference is scale rather than kind — the same rite, done for longer, because the accumulation is reckoned to be greater.
Connections (2)
- Shrine within cityUrgelling Monastery, Tawang
Torgya is Tawang monastery performing its protective function rather than assuming it. Founded about 1680 under the fifth Dalai Lama's authority and the largest monastery in India, it dances masked cham for three days each January and then carries out an effigy holding the year's accumulated evil and burns it in front of the valley. Urgelling, a few kilometres away, is where the sixth Dalai Lama was born in 1683 — the monastery and the birthplace belong to one Monpa Buddhist world.
- Site withinTawang
Torgya, Tawang sits inside Tawang and forms one piece of its layered sacred, royal or civic landscape. The city carries this entry as one of the sites that make its urban fabric legible — a shrine, monument, institution or craft tradition specifically anchored at this location — and the city's broader history reads better when the stop is seen in its context rather than in isolation. The surrounding streets, markets and other heritage ensembles around it belong to the same single city.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Torgya”. Arunachal Pradesh department of cultural affairs records; Tawang Monastery records.
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