Chapchur Kut: How north east India celebrates Spring!

20-Feb-2019

Chapchar Kut is the way how north east India bids its goodbye to winter and welcomes the spring season. Spring a season in March, when the nature begins playing with colors is the time for Chapchar Kut Festival, where Mizos get together to play & appreciate their talents. Chapchar Kut i.e. a celebration of joy, is thought to be the most critical customary celebration of Mizoram and is commended with incredible pageantry and magnificence. People wear colorful traditional clothes and hats made from beads and parrots feathers. What is interesting and noteworthy is that in this festival you won’t see anyone wearing shoes. There is a traditional bamboo dance that is performed in which only women participates, whilst men sit on the ground and beat the bamboos against each other giving women the beat.

Story behind the festival’s name:

Apart from dancing and other cultural activities that happen at this festival, it is also on this occasion that the farmers cut bamboo forests for making some place for Jhum. Jhum is the colloquial word in Mizoram for seasonal farming. Spring is the season in which they wait for the already chopped bamboo heaps to dry out under sunlight before being burnt. The festival gets its first word from this process name i.e. Chapchar. The second word, Kut means festival! For the farmers, who have nothing else to do during the season this is a festival!

Celebration:

•  The celebration starts with Kut Puipate or the introduction service taken over by the then Katna, where the move bunches orchestrate themselves on the stadium. Hnihna is followed after that in which, the elderly individuals from the general public come wearing their customary ensembles, speaking to the individual clans of the area and participate in an awesome parade called the Kut rore.

 

• Young men and women are out at night dressed in their fineries - necklaces of amber, ear-rings of ivory and beautiful headgears, (Mizos do not value nor possess gold ornaments) - Boys and girls for­m circles in the village yard, through their hands over each other, swaying to the left and to the right rhyth­mically to the beat and tune of the drummer and the singer in the middle who kept the time of his song with the clanking of mithun horns.

 

• While the young men and girls were dancing it becomes the duty of the small boys and girls to ply them with rice-beer to quench their thirst while they were dancing. They sing and dance far into the night to the next morning. It isn’t compulsory for the ones celebrating in the night to join the morning team for celebrations because of the obvious weariness!

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