Bihu Dance

Bihu dance is Assam's signature folk dance form, inseparably linked to Bohag (Rongali) Bihu, the mid-April festival that marks the Assamese New Year and the arrival of spring. Performed by young men and women together in open fields and community grounds, the dance celebrates both the fertility of the land, welcoming the life-giving spring rains that begin the agricultural year, and, through its energetic, expressive choreography, human vitality and courtship as well. The dance's costume is as distinctive as its movement. Men traditionally wear the dhoti and gamosa, Assam's iconic hand-woven cotton towel-scarf, while women dance in the mekhela sador, frequently woven from Assam's own Muga or Pat silk, with intricate traditional motifs. Music is provided by a set of indigenous instruments: the dhol, a double-headed drum providing the core rhythm; the pepa, a hornpipe fashioned from buffalo horn; the gogona, a bamboo jaw-harp-like instrument with a distinctive twanging tone; the toka, a bamboo clapper; and the baanhi, a bamboo flute, together producing a sound found nowhere else in Indian folk music. Bihu dance's social history has shifted markedly over the past century. Because of the dance's overtly celebratory, physically expressive, and at times explicitly courtship-oriented character, it was viewed with disapproval by colonial-era and conservative Assamese society, whose Victorian-influenced sensibilities clashed with the dance's open display of youthful energy and fertility symbolism. It remained largely a rural, communal practice performed in open Bihu fields rather than a formal stage art until relatively recently: the first staged public performance of Bihu dance took place in Guwahati only in 1962, marking its transition from purely communal ritual to a recognised performing art. Today Bihu dance is performed both in its traditional open-field community form during the festival itself and, increasingly, as a formal stage and competitive performance art at cultural events across India and the Assamese diaspora abroad, making it one of the most widely recognised symbols of Assamese identity outside the state.