January
Murung
A family celebration. One household hosts, and the village comes. It isn't the same day for every house.
Read Murung
Lower Subansiri
The valley keeps its own year.
The Apatani, Tanii in their own speech, farm a flat of rice between pine hills. We live in Mudang Tage, one of the villages on that floor. This page is the year they keep, and the people in it. The fields as you meet them from our door are a walk of their own.
The year
Four dates worth knowing.
Myoko, Murung, and Dree belong to the Apatani year. The music festival is a visitor: it arrives in late September and leaves. If you tell us which week you're coming for, we'll help you find your way.
March
Myoko
A festival of friendship. The villages take turns. Ours comes with Hija, Dutta, and Bamin-Michi, so not every March.
Read Myoko5 July
Dree
A prayer for the rice still in the fields. The day is 5 July. Cucumber is shared, and the fields are left quiet afterwards.
Read DreeLate September
The music festival
Ziro Festival of Music, since 2012. Bands in the valley for a few days. A happy visit, and a different kind of week from the festivals above.
Read the music festivalThe fields
Rice and fish in the same water.
An Apatani plot holds paddy and fish together. The bunds are walked, the water is shared, and the same field feeds people twice. This landscape, and the villages that keep it, sits on UNESCO’s tentative list as the Apatani cultural landscape. Hong, Hari, Bulla, Hija, Dutta, Mudang-Tage: each has its own ground, and its own turn.
The women
Marks of a generation, not a costume.
The women in this photograph wear tiipé, the facial tattoos, and yaping hullo, the nose plugs. Those marks belong to older Apatani women. The practice was stopped in the 1970s, and women born after that do not have them. What did not stop is the cloth, the clan, and the year’s work. When the village has something to do in public, the line is still white and red, and heavy with beads.
The old house
The granary stays apart from the fire.
A traditional Apatani house is woven: bamboo, cane, and a floor raised off the damp. The granary is kept apart from the hearth, which is how a fire stays a fire. M.N is a village house in that line: timber posts, woven bamboo, and balconies. The year outside is still this year.
Those weeks fill the house. Book a room before you come, and read the page for the week you have in mind. When you want the fields themselves, the walk starts at the lane.
Photographs. The two landscapes were given for this page. Wedding in Hija, 2006: Doniv79, CC BY 2.5. Bamboo house: Anand Explore, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Myoko and music-festival photographs are on those pages.
