Brahmaputra Valley · Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
Dance
Fast hip and wrist movement to dhol, pepa and gogona, danced originally in open fields at the start of the sowing season. Unambiguously a courtship dance in origin, and still the most joyful public thing in the Assamese year.
Performed by: Young men and women. Occasion: Rongali (Bohag) Bihu, mid-April
Created by Srimanta Sankardev in the 15th–16th century as part of monastic practice in the sattras, and recognised as one of India's classical dance forms by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in 2000. It was a living monastic discipline for 500 years before it ever reached a proscenium stage.
Performed by: Traditionally male monks (bhokots) of the sattras; now performed by women too.
The "butterfly dance" — dancers spread the ends of their dokhona and move in slow wide arcs, to the serja fiddle and sifung flute.
Performed by: Bodo women. Occasion: Bwisagu, in spring
Brought to Assam by labourers taken from Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh to the tea gardens in the 19th century, and now a distinct Assamese form with its own repertoire, danced in a linked line.
Performed by: The tea-garden (Adivasi) communities.
A possession dance performed by a woman said to be inhabited by the deity, ending in trance and prophecy. Old, and not staged for audiences.
Occasion: Manasa worship, Kamakhya and Deodhani festival
Danced along the field bunds at the start of the agricultural cycle, to the gong and drum, in a stepping line.
Performed by: The Mising community. Occasion: February, at the first sowing
Music
Devotional songs composed by Srimanta Sankardev and Madhavdev in Brajavali, a deliberately constructed literary language, set to their own ragas and sung in the sattras. Sankardev composed some 240; a fire destroyed the manuscripts and about 34 were recovered from memory. With Madhavdev's 191, roughly 225 survive.
Assamese-language Sufi devotional songs attributed to Azan Fakir, a 17th-century Sufi from Baghdad who settled at Sivasagar and composed in Assamese using local imagery — a conscious act of making Islam speak in the valley's own voice.
The folk songs of western Assam, carried nationally by Pratima Barua Pandey — including the mahout songs sung by and about elephant handlers, which is a genre no other region has.
Dhol, pepa (a reed pipe made from a buffalo horn), gogona (bamboo jaw harp), toka, xutuli (clay whistle), baanhi flute, khol (the sattra drum), and the Bodo serja and sifung.
Theatre
One-act devotional plays written by Sankardev in Brajavali and performed in the namghar prayer hall, using masks, a sutradhar narrator and a night-long form. Bhaona is the performance; the mask-making tradition at Majuli's Samaguri Sattra exists to serve it.
A narrative form led by an oja singer-dancer with a chorus of palis, telling stories of Manasa or from the epics with gesture, song and comic interjection. Considered an ancestor of Assamese theatre.
A modern institution unique to Assam — full professional theatre companies that tour the state with revolving stages, film-scale sets and star actors, playing to enormous rural audiences through the dry season.
Crafts
A whole town given over to silk handloom, sometimes called the Manchester of the East. Muga and pat mekhela chadors come out of thousands of household looms here.
The bell-metal centre of Assam, making the xorai — a footed offering tray with a cover, given as a mark of honour — along with bati bowls and ban-bati.
Masks of bamboo, clay and cloth made at Samaguri Sattra for Bhaona performances, some large enough for the performer to stand inside and with moving jaws and eyes. GI registered in 2024.
Illustrated sanchipat manuscripts painted on treated aloe-wood bark in the sattras, in an unbroken line from the 16th century. GI registered in 2024.
Terracotta and pottery by the Hira community, best known for the hatima putul — a mother-and-child doll figure.
Japi hats, murah stools, jaakoi fish traps, and the woven partitions of a traditional Assam-type house, which is built to flex rather than resist in an earthquake.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Brahmaputra Valley, from classical forms to village traditions. (19)