Rongali Bihu is, in most popular accounts, a single festival, but in practice it is seven, observed across seven consecutive days that bridge the last week of the Assamese month of Chaitra and the first days of Bohag. The seven are not equally weighted. The cattle-bathing Goru Bihu and the people-bathing Manuh Bihu anchor the whole cycle, while Senehi Bihu and Mela Bihu give it its public face, but it is the week as a whole that is the festival, and to treat any one day as the whole is to misread the rhythm of it, a cycle Praphulladatta Goswami documented through its songs.
A name and a calendar older than the creeds
The word Bihu does not descend from any temple vocabulary. On the reading most folklorists accept, it goes back to a Deori-Boro-Garo word, bisu, meaning joy. The Deori keep that same root alive in their own spring Bisu. So the festival it names is older than any of the religions later layered over the valley. The three Bihus track the agricultural year and nothing else. They are kept by Assamese-speakers of every faith. What they mark is the sowing, the lean wait and the full barn, and all of them share it. The antiquity is not only inferred from the name. The earliest written trace of the festival is a copperplate of the Chutia king Lakshminarayan. It was found at Ghilamara and dated to 1401, and it records a land grant made on the occasion of Bihu. This means the festival was already long established when a fifteenth-century king thought to set it down on copper.
Goru Bihu, the day of cattle
The cycle opens on the last day of Chaitra, in most years around 14 April, with Goru Bihu, the festival of cattle. Cows and bullocks are washed at the village pond or river with a paste of turmeric and mati-mah pulses. Their horns are anointed with mustard oil. They are fed dighloti and makhioti, the long bitter herbs whose names form part of a Bihu song each child learns. The animals are then driven back to the family compound and struck symbolically with the herb stalks. They are addressed in a short formula whose more or less standard form across the valley runs:
Dighloti dighal pat, makhi mariba jat jat, maakar xoru baapor xoru, toi hobi bor bor goru.(Assamese)
“Long-leafed dighloti, long-leafed leaf, swat the flies as you go. Your mother is small, your father is small, but you will be a great cow.”
The address is at once a blessing on the herd and a small piece of domestic theatre. Children learn it before they understand it. The cattle are then released. The household kitchen turns to the evening dishes, which lean on the new harvest of mati mah, urad and matikalai pulses. The village then waits for the following morning.
Manuh Bihu, the day of people
The first day of Bohag, traditionally the first of the Assamese new year and usually around 15 April, is Manuh Bihu. The day opens with a ritual bath, a change into new clothes, and the exchange of gamosas across the household. The form of the gamosa exchange is precise. A younger person presents the gamosa to an elder with the hands held in front of the chest and the gamosa folded long. The elder receives it, lays it across the shoulder, and gives a small blessing. The sequence is repeated through the day in concentric circles outward from the household: parents and grandparents first, then older relatives, then friends, then teachers, then in many cases the local mandir or sattra. By evening, well-conducted households have given and received dozens of gamosas. The gamosa itself is a white cotton cloth, traditionally about a metre long and forty centimetres wide. It is bordered in red, often with a central woven motif in red, and sometimes with the giver's name inscribed near one end.
The five days that follow
After Manuh Bihu the cycle continues across five further days, each with its own name and emphasis. The day labels and their ordering vary somewhat across upper Assam, lower Assam and the Barak valley, but the standard form is preserved most consistently in the upper Brahmaputra districts. The third day is Gosain Bihu, the day of the household deities, on which the family altar is bathed, redressed and reconsecrated, and offerings are made to the household tutelary, to the portraits of parents and grandparents, and to the Bhagavad-Gita or other text held in domestic honour. It is followed by Taator Bihu, the day of the weavers, when the household loom, the taat, is honoured and the year's first weaving is begun, and in sattra communities the same day overlaps with the spring reconsecration of the namghar.
The two most public days come next. Senehi Bihu, the day of beloved persons, is given to the exchange of small gifts between friends and lovers, a gamosa, an ornament, in the modern era sometimes a hand-written card, and among the unmarried young it is the day on which the open Bihu dance of the village field, the Mukoli Bihu, is most likely to be held. Mela Bihu, the day of the fair, brings the organised village or town Bihu mela, where troupes gather from several villages and a Bihu competition often closes the day. In the larger towns Mela Bihu has become the most visible single day of the whole cycle, with public stages, song competitions and televised events built around it.
The week closes with Chera Bihu, on which households return to the ordinary rhythm of the new agricultural year. The old clothes set aside on Manuh Bihu are formally given away to the household help or to those in need, and the dholis, the drummers who have carried the Husori from house to house all week, make their last circuit of the village.
Husori and Mukoli Bihu, the two performance forms
Two performance traditions move alongside the seven days: the door-to-door Husori and the open-field Mukoli Bihu. Both belong to the family of the Bihu dance, where their choreography and music are described in full. What matters to the calendar is how each is woven into the week. The Husori announces itself at the gate of each house, the podulimukh, with a roll of the dhol before the troupe enters the courtyard. It visits every household in the village over the course of the week. In return the family offers betel and areca laid out in a brass xorai, the pedestalled offering tray of the valley. The family also presents the troupe with a gamosa, sometimes adding a little money. Carried in this way from threshold to threshold, the festival is not merely watched. It is drummed through the whole settlement until every house has been sung over. The Mukoli Bihu, by contrast, is the open public Bihu of the village field. It is most likely to be danced on Senehi Bihu, when the young of the village gather under the dhol.
The historical relationship between Husori and Mukoli is sometimes presented as one of sacred and secular, but this is too clean a distinction. Husori troupes carry secular love songs in their repertoire and Mukoli circles frequently begin with a short invocation. The two forms share dancers, drummers, and singers across the same week. The difference is the venue more than the material.
The cycle across communities
Rongali Bihu is observed by Assamese-speaking communities across religion: Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, the Sankarite sattra tradition, and the non-affiliated alike. It is also the moment in the calendar at which the agricultural community of the valley most visibly overlaps the agricultural community of the plains generally. The Bodo Baisagu falls in the same week. Across recent decades, Baisagu and Rongali Bihu mela days have come increasingly to share urban performance spaces in Guwahati and Kokrajhar. The modern public scale of the festival is considerable. On 14 April 2023 a mass performance of 11,000 dancers and drummers at the Indira Gandhi Athletic Stadium in Guwahati was entered in the Guinness World Records as the largest Bihu dance at a single venue. Such spectacles are recent, and they sit atop a festival whose weight has always lain in the courtyard and the field. The festival is, in any honest accounting, an agricultural new year rather than a religious one. That is perhaps the most important single fact about it.