Cultural Heritage of Northeast India

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

6 Heritage & Festivals

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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 →

Dance

Cheraw (Bamboo Dance)

Cheraw, widely known outside Mizoram simply as the Bamboo Dance, is the state's most recognisable and technically demanding folk dance, believed to date back as far as the 1st century CE, making it one of the oldest continuously practised dance traditions in Northeast India. Its origins were ritual rather than celebratory: Cheraw was traditionally performed as part of funerary rites intended to bring peace to the departed soul of a mother who had died leaving behind a newborn child, a solemn context very different from how the dance is experienced by most audiences today. The dance's defining technical feature is its use of long bamboo staves, held horizontally in pairs close to the ground by seated or kneeling handlers, who open and close the poles in rhythm to percussion. Dancers, usually women in traditional Mizo costume, step in and out of the narrowing and widening gaps between the moving bamboo poles in time with the beat, a sequence that demands precise timing: a single mistimed step traps the dancer's foot between the closing poles in full view of the audience. That inherent risk is central to Cheraw's cultural meaning. Because handlers and dancers must move in exact coordination for the performance to succeed, the dance is widely read as a living symbol of unity, cooperation, and communal harmony among the Mizo people, values the performance embodies through its mechanics rather than simply depicting them symbolically. Today Cheraw is performed at major festivals, most prominently Chapchar Kut, and has moved well beyond its funerary origins into the realm of celebratory public performance. Its most striking modern milestone came in 2010, when Mizoram organised a mass Cheraw performance involving more than 10,000 participants, setting a Guinness World Record and firmly establishing the dance as the state's signature cultural symbol on a national and international stage.

📍 Statewide, Mizoram (performed prominently during Chapchar Kut)Explore →

Dance

Manipuri Classical Dance (Ras Leela)

Manipuri classical dance, most famously expressed through Ras Leela, is one of India's eight recognised classical dance forms and the signature performing art of Manipur's Meitei community, distinguished by unusually gentle, flowing movement and deeply devotional subject matter. Where several other Indian classical dance forms emphasise sharp rhythmic footwork and dramatic facial expression, Manipuri dance is known for its soft, restrained, wave-like body movements and modest, inward-focused emotional expression, a style shaped directly by the devotional Vaishnava themes it exists to portray. Ras Leela's specific narrative content, drawn from the Bhagavata Purana, portrays the divine love of Krishna and Radha and their playful, symbolic union with the gopis (cowherd maidens) in the forests of Vrindavan, understood in Vaishnava theology as an allegory for the soul's yearning toward union with the divine. This devotional content entered Manipur directly: the Vaishnavite Hindu tradition arrived in the Manipur valley in the 15th century, gradually blending with and reshaping existing Meitei performance traditions over the following centuries. The decisive moment in Ras Leela's formal development came under King Bhagyachandra (reigned 1759-1798), who is credited with integrating Vaishnavite devotional themes into a structured dance-drama form. The inaugural performance of this new Ras Leela took place in 1779 at the Govindaji Temple in Imphal, staged over five days specifically to consecrate the temple's deity, an event that formally anchored Ras Leela within Manipuri religious life and established the performance conventions still followed today. Manipuri dance's costume is instantly recognisable: female dancers wear the potloi, a stiff, cylindrical, heavily embroidered skirt that gives the dance its distinctive silhouette, paired with a veil and elaborate jewellery, while movement stays deliberately gentle and grounded rather than acrobatic. Performed today both in its original temple-ritual context and on formal concert stages across India and internationally, Ras Leela remains Manipur's most globally recognised cultural export.

📍 Govindaji Temple, Imphal, and performance venues statewideExplore →

Dance

Shad Suk Mynsiem

Shad Suk Mynsiem, meaning "Dance of the Happy Hearts," is the principal thanksgiving festival of the Khasi people of Meghalaya, celebrated over three days each April at the close of the sowing season. Also known as the Weiking Dance, the festival gives thanks to Ka Blei Synshar, the presiding deity of governance and providence in Khasi belief, for the blessings and prosperity of the year past. The festival's dance is its centrepiece and its clearest cultural statement. Young unmarried Khasi women, dressed in elaborate traditional silk and jewellery, dance at the centre of the formation, moving with slow, restrained, dignified steps, their arms and posture symbolising the seeds and the fertility of the land. Around them, young men dance in a protective outer ring, symbolising the cultivators who till and defend that land. This arrangement is a deliberate cultural statement: the Khasi are one of the world's few remaining large matrilineal societies, and the dance formation, women at the centre, men protecting the perimeter, directly mirrors the structure of Khasi social organisation itself. Music is provided by a distinct set of traditional instruments: the tangmuri (a wind instrument), besli (flute), nakra (large drum), ksing padiah (small drum), duitara (a stringed instrument), and others, together producing a sound specific to Khasi ceremonial music and found in few other Northeast Indian festival traditions. Shad Suk Mynsiem is celebrated most prominently in Shillong, where it draws large public crowds, but village-level observances take place across the Khasi Hills. For visitors, it offers one of the clearest visible expressions of Khasi matrilineal social structure translated directly into performance, making it as much a statement of cultural identity as a harvest thanksgiving.

📍 Shillong and villages across the Khasi HillsExplore →

Dance

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.

📍 Statewide, Assam (performed during Bohag/Rongali Bihu)Explore →

Dance

Sattriya Dance Performance

Classical dance form of Assam

📍 SualkuchiExplore →