Yaoshang

Yaoshang is Manipur's version of Holi, celebrated by the Meitei community over five days around the full moon of the Manipuri month of Lamta, typically falling in February-March, coinciding with Holi elsewhere in India. While the festival shares Holi's core association with colour, Yaoshang has developed its own distinct character over generations, built as much around music, dance, and youth culture as around the throwing of coloured powder and water. The festival's most distinctive feature is Thabal Chongba, literally "moonlight dance," performed nightly by young people through the Yaoshang period. Participants, boys and girls, form concentric circles under the open night sky and dance together to traditional songs, holding hands and moving through a shared sequence of steps, with the circle expanding to welcome any newcomer who wishes to join. The dance carries particular social significance in Meitei society, which traditionally observes strict gender segregation in public life: Thabal Chongba is one of the few sanctioned occasions where young men and women can hold hands and dance together in public, in full view of family and community, making it as much a socially permitted space for youthful interaction as a dance performance. Beyond Thabal Chongba, Yaoshang involves the traditional burning of a small hut (a practice paralleling Holika Dahan elsewhere in India), communal singing, sporting contests, and days of colour-throwing that draw entire neighbourhoods and towns into the streets. Children going door to door collecting small contributions, a custom known as Yaoshang Thaba, is also part of the festival's traditional texture in many localities. Yaoshang functions as Manipur's most youth-centred major festival, and Thabal Chongba in particular has become one of the most recognisable cultural symbols associated with the state, performed and referenced widely in Manipuri popular culture, film, and music well beyond the festival period itself.