Chapchar Kut: the bamboo dance festival of Mizoram

Chapchar Kut began as a thanksgiving to the gods for keeping people safe while they cut the forest for their jhum fields at the start of the year. It falls at winter’s end, when the felled trees and bamboo are left to dry in the sun before burning, and the villages have their one real respite of the farming year.

Mizo oral tradition places its first celebration in a large village called Suaipui (also written Seipui), in what is now Myanmar, sometime between about 1450 and 1700. The story, as the Mizoram government tells it, is of a hunt that failed: the chief’s men came home empty-handed to a village waiting for meat and rice beer. To cover the disappointment the young chief offered his own pig, each hunter brought a fowl, and the feast turned into a night of singing and circle dancing. The village repeated it every year, other villages followed, and the Chai dance is said to have been born with it.

The festival was revived in Aizawl in 1962 but was then discouraged, because rice beer and pre-Christian rites seemed to clash with Christian values. It returned on a mass scale in 1973 as a festival of shared culture, without the animist rites, and the church later stopped objecting.

The main day is at Lammual, Aizawl’s central ground, from the morning into the afternoon. Community troupes from across the state dance in mass formations: Cheraw, where men clap long bamboo poles together on the ground in a quickening rhythm and women step in and out between them before they close, as well as Khuallam, Chheihlam and Sarlamkai. The Chief Minister presides as Kut Pa, the father of the festival. Entry to the ground is free.

Dancers wear the puanchei and the feathered bamboo headdress vakiria, and in festival week many people wear traditional dress to work. Through the week, Lammual Tlang and Vanapa Hall hold handloom, craft and food stalls (over a hundred of them), art and photo exhibitions and performances. Part of the fun is chhawnghnawh, when people playfully push boiled eggs into each other’s mouths. District towns such as Lunglei, Champhai and Serchhip hold their own celebrations on nearby days.

Visitors from outside Mizoram need a permit to enter the state, and it is the first thing to arrange.

Mizoram has a few rules that catch visitors out.