How a tribe in Arunachal is using festivities to preserve its language

A small tribe in Arunachal Pradesh thoroughly enjoys its annual Kro-Cheykor festival. It's a time for praying, eating, drinking, dancing

Visiting Northeast India must feature on most travel bucket-lists. My list is no different. So when an opportunity to travel to Assam and Arunachal Pradesh presented itself, thanks to a friend’s wedding, Google was consulted. Date of travel. Check. Cheapest flight tickets to and from Guwahati. Check.

And then a unique problem of plenty. Where does one go? In confident naiveté, I planned a five-day Guwahati-Mawsynram-Guwahati-Tawang road trip, only to be told that this was not possible in the present or any parallel world. Then a senior colleague suggested Shergaon.

Photos he’d taken of the place helped cement the idea. And then he further facilitated matters by connecting me with Dorjee K Thungon, his friend and a resident of Shergaon. Dorjee, popularly known as DK, told us we were in luck — our visit would coincide with the Kro-Cheykor festival. If we needed icing on our cake, here it was.  

Villagers taking a ceremonial bath after the fight

Shergaon is a small village cradled by the East Himalayan mountain range. The village is about 240 km from Guwahati’s Paltan Bazaar bus stand, from where one can book a seat on a Tata Sumo for Rs 700. After negotiating about 50 hairpin bends on the five-and-a-half hour journey, we arrived.

A tribe of about 3,500 — and diminishing — calls Shergaon home. The residents are called Sherdukpen, after the dialect they speak. In Shergaon, my roof for four days was Ano’s Homestay, located on the bank of a stream that flows through the village. Beaming smiles and a white scarf, given to visitors as a mark of respect, welcome us. As does homemade rice beer, served in small silver goblets, as we sit around a fireplace in the kitchen.

The fireplace and the kitchen, our hostess explains, are the most important parts of any tribal household of the state. It is amply evident. The kitchen, newly renovated, is clearly bigger than other rooms. Ano, a Delhi University graduate, returned to Shergaon to take care of her father and the family property. 

DK was among the first in his tribe to have received formal education, at the Vivekananda Kendra Vidyalaya (VKV) established in 1981. It is thanks to these VKVs that most of Arunachal Pradesh has more than a working knowledge of Hindi and some other mainland languages. DK worked as a software engineer till 2015, when he moved back to Arunachal. 

Other youngsters have followed suit, quitting jobs to return to their home state. Being home also gives them the opportunity to help preserve the culture, traditions, plants, as well as animals and birds in the region, DK explains. The village youngsters, now mostly employed with the state government, started preservation activities nearly a decade ago. The Kro-Cheykor festival also helps. The tightly knit Sherdukpen celebrate Kro-Cheykor during the fourth lunar month every year. While the festival is nearly a month long, the main festivities last four days.

Girls carrying holy books around the village

Continual prayers, community feasting, dancing and a lot of drinking mark the four-day celebrations. Since the tribe’s religion is a mix of Buddhism and animism, all hills, rivers, trees and shrubs are considered holy and invited as guests to the festival.

On the first day, girls carry the holy books around the village, while boys move ahead clearing the path for them. This also includes a mock demonstration of fights using crackers and twigs. The procession, in which nearly all members of the tribe participate, moves around the village blessing all households before ending at the Gompa. Refreshments, which include home-made beer and wine, are served along the way. 

The second day features a trek. Of the seven clans in the Sherdukpen tribe, two climb a small but steep holy hill. Atop this hill is a cave where a Buddhist monk is said to be in continuous meditation. The monk grants all kinds of wishes, and is especially benevolent to couples seeking a child. 

The third night is the most fascinating. This is when a group of village elders vigorously grills youngsters of the tribe. One teenager is standing on the wrong side of a question which demands to know why he did not offer to carry the load of a village elder when they crossed paths. Another young man is accused of fishing in the river during the lunar month, despite rules proscribing it.

All this might seem like grim business. Except it is not. This is an attempt by the Sherdukpen to preserve their scriptless dialect. The rules are simple. The youngsters respond to each allegation in Sherdukpen. For each word spoken in any other language, the interviewee pays a “fine” — say, 100 betel-nuts per word spoken in Hindi or English. “It is all very jolly, while also ensuring that our young boys and girls do not forget their roots and their dialect. We keep ourselves connected to the village and its traditions by such simple games,” DK explains.

For many young Sherdukpen, the festival is the only time they return to Shergaon. At the end of the festival, and the interrogation, the tribe returns home, content that the effort to preserve their language will not end with the night.