Cultural Heritage of Northeast India

Explore ancient traditions, vibrant festivals, folk arts, and sacred monuments across the 8 states

3 Heritage & Festivals

All Festival Dance Exhibition Market Festival Cultural Fair River Festival Tribal Culture Religious Site Handicraft Heritage Site

Dance

Hojagiri Dance

Hojagiri is a folk dance performed exclusively by women of the Reang (Bru) community, one of Tripura's scheduled tribes, and is widely regarded as one of the most technically distinctive folk dances anywhere in India. Originally known as Hodagiri, the dance began as a ritual offering performed specifically during Maikhlungmo Puja, a Reang religious observance, before gradually evolving into the celebrated performance art seen today while retaining its spiritual core. What sets Hojagiri apart is its balancing technique. Dancers perform standing atop earthen pitchers, maintaining balance while simultaneously holding bottles on their heads and earthen lamps in their hands, all without the extensive arm and upper-body gesture typical of most Indian folk and classical dance traditions. Instead, Hojagiri restricts upper-body movement almost entirely, channelling all the dance's expressive energy into the lower body, which moves in a controlled, graceful, wave-like rhythm, a technique demanding exceptional core balance and control given the physical props being balanced throughout the performance. The dance is performed as part of the annual Hojagiri festival, held to invoke prosperity and a bountiful harvest, and its performance is understood by the Reang community as inseparable from its original ritual purpose, a living expression of the tribe's social customs, aesthetic values, and spiritual worldview rather than a purely secular entertainment form. Hojagiri has become one of Tripura's most recognisable cultural exports, frequently performed at state and national cultural festivals as a showcase of the Reang community's distinctive artistic heritage, and its unusual pitcher-balancing technique makes it instantly identifiable even to audiences unfamiliar with Tripura's broader tribal cultural landscape.

📍 Reang (Bru) community areas, TripuraExplore →

Religious Site

Kharchi Puja

Kharchi Puja, held annually at the Chaturdasha Devata temple in Old Agartala, is Tripura's second-largest festival after Durga Puja and one of the most theologically distinctive observances in Northeast India. Its name derives from two Tripuri (Kokborok) words, "khar" meaning sin and "chi" meaning cleaning, and the festival is understood fundamentally as a ritual cleansing of accumulated sin through the collective worship of the Chaturdasha Devata, the fourteen guardian deities of the Tripuri people. The fourteen deities honoured are Shiva, Durga, Vishnu, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kartik, Ganesha, Brahma, Abadhi (the water god), Chandra, Ganga, Agni, Kamdev, and Himadri (the Himalayas), a pantheon that blends major Hindu deities with nature-focused tribal figures, reflecting the layered religious history of the Tripuri royal court, which gradually absorbed Hindu worship while retaining distinct indigenous elements. The temple that houses their images was built in 1761 under King Krishna Manikya specifically to enshrine these fourteen guardian deities. The festival falls on Shukla Ashtami, the eighth day of the lunar month of Ashadha (typically June-July), and its central rite is a riverside procession: the images of the fourteen deities are carried by chanting devotees from the temple to the Saidra river, ceremonially bathed in its waters, and then returned to the temple, an act understood to renew and purify both the deities' images and the community's standing before them. As a former royal state cult that has since become a broadly public festival, Kharchi Puja draws large crowds from across Tripura to Old Agartala each year, and its combination of royal patronage history, indigenous fourteen-deity worship, and a distinctive river-bathing ritual makes it one of the clearest examples in Northeast India of a princely-state religious tradition surviving intact into contemporary public life.

📍 Chaturdasha Devata Temple, Old AgartalaExplore →

Festival

Garia Puja

Garia Puja is one of Tripura's most widely observed indigenous festivals, celebrated by the Tripuri community and other Kokborok-speaking and Halam tribal groups in the month of Baisakh, with the principal observance traditionally falling on the seventh day of Baisakh (mid-to-late April). The festival is dedicated to Baba Garia, the supreme deity in Tripuri tribal religious tradition, worshipped as the guardian of livestock, wealth, welfare, and general prosperity. The festival's central ritual object is strikingly simple: a bamboo pole, decorated and treated as the physical embodiment of Lord Garia himself, around which the community's prayers and offerings are directed. Devotees present flowers and garlands to the pole and perform rituals seeking the deity's blessing for the well-being of both people and livestock in the year ahead, reflecting the close, undivided relationship between agriculture, animal husbandry, and community welfare in traditional Tripuri belief. Music and movement are central to the observance: rhythmic drumming accompanies the traditional Garia dance, performed communally as part of the invocation, alongside singing that carries the festival's prayers for fertility, both of crops and of cattle, and of the land itself. The overall character of Garia Puja reflects a worldview in which human wellbeing is understood as inseparable from the wellbeing of the land and animals that sustain the community, rather than as a separate concern addressed through unrelated ritual. Garia Puja remains one of the clearest surviving expressions of pre-Hindu Tripuri tribal religion still actively practised today, distinct from Tripura's separately observed Hindu festivals like Kharchi Puja, and its bamboo-pole ritual and communal dance continue to anchor Tripuri cultural identity across rural and increasingly urban communities alike.

📍 Statewide, Tripura (Tripuri and Kokborok-speaking tribal communities)Explore →