Monpa & Tawang Belt · Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
Dance
Masked and costumed monastic dance performed in the monastery courtyard to cymbals, long horns and drums. It is liturgy rather than theatre — each figure is a deity or a protector, the sequence is prescribed, and the culminating act is the destruction of an effigy that carries away the year's accumulated harm.
Performed by: Monks of Tawang and the branch monasteries. Occasion: Torgya, and monastery consecrations
A masked pantomime and dance-drama performed outside the monastic sequence, with comic and satirical characters alongside the sacred ones. It is where the village, rather than the monastery, gets to speak.
Performed by: Village performers, masked. Occasion: Festivals and communal gatherings
A yak built over a wooden frame with a cloth body and a carved head, animated by two men, with herders and a comic keeper around it. The narrative attached to it is one of gratitude to the animal the economy rests on, and it is danced where children can see it.
Performed by: Two dancers inside a yak frame, with attendants. Occasion: Losar and village festivals
The snow lion animated by two dancers, performed at new year for good fortune. Shared with Bhutan, Sikkim and the Tibetan world generally.
Performed by: Paired dancers. Occasion: Losar
The dance and procession cycle of the Sherdukpen year-end festival, distinct in music and costume from the Monpa forms above it, and belonging to a different language family entirely.
Performed by: Sherdukpen villagers of Rupa. Occasion: Khiksaba, in November
Music
Deep-register chanting in classical Tibetan with the dungchen long horn, gyaling shawm, cymbals and frame drum. The instruments are liturgical objects, kept and played by the monastery rather than by musicians.
Antiphonal singing between two groups — often men against women, or the host village against the guests — with the verses improvised against a fixed tune, and chhang circulating throughout.
Tsangyang Gyatso, born at Urgelling near Tawang in 1683, wrote short love poems that entered oral circulation across the Tibetan-speaking world and are still sung. They are the belt's best-known literary export, and their author is claimed here as a local.
Long, slow, open-voiced songs of the Brokpa yak camps and of the trade routes, sung unaccompanied because nobody carries an instrument to 4,000 m.
Theatre
The dramatic and narrative form of the belt, with masked characters, a chorus and a story that mixes Buddhist material with village comedy. It fills the role that a proscenium theatre does elsewhere.
A ritual sequence that is also, in effect, a play — a fixed cast of protector deities, skeleton figures and an effigy, watched by the entire valley from the courtyard steps.
Crafts
The paper monasteries wrote and printed scripture on, historically traded to Tibet, Bhutan and beyond. The craft had all but stopped by the late twentieth century as cheap mill paper arrived; a Khadi and Village Industries Commission unit reopened production at Tawang in December 2020 with a handful of trained artisans. Monpa handmade paper was granted a geographical indication in January 2024.
Material: Bark of the shugu sheng shrub. Technique: The bark is stripped, soaked, boiled with ash, beaten to a pulp and poured onto a cloth-covered frame floated in water, then sun-dried on the frame. The shrub coppices, so the plant is cut back rather than killed, and the sheet has no grain and does not tear on a fold.
Painted for monasteries and household shrines, and taught by apprenticeship at the monastery and the government craft centres. A thangka is a ritual object first — it is consecrated, and it is rolled and carried rather than hung permanently.
Material: Cotton cloth, mineral and vegetable pigment, gold. Technique: A grid is laid out first and the iconography drawn to fixed proportional rules before any colour is applied; the finished painting is mounted in a brocade frame with a cover cloth. The proportions are prescribed, so the painter's freedom is in the landscape and the detail, never in the figure.
Masks for Cham and for Ajilamu, made to a fixed iconography for the ritual characters and with considerable licence for the comic ones. Carvers also turn wooden bowls and cups from burl wood, which are exchanged as gifts and were once a serious trade item.
Material: Soft local timber. Technique: Carved from a single block, hollowed at the back, then gessoed and painted.
Produced at the craft centres at Tawang and Bomdila and in households, mostly in the Tibetan motif vocabulary. Carpets are floor and seat coverings in a house with no chairs, so the trade has a domestic market as well as a tourist one.
Material: Sheep wool and yak hair. Technique: Hand-knotted on an upright loom, in the Tibetan cut-loop method where the pile is wrapped over a gauge rod and then cut.
River crossings in a country of gorges. The Chakzam near Tawang is an iron-chain suspension bridge traditionally attributed to the fifteenth-century Tibetan bridge-builder Thangtong Gyalpo, and the attribution, whatever its documentary status, is part of how the belt tells its own history.
Material: Cane, bamboo, and iron chain in the older bridges. Technique: Suspension spans woven from cane and bamboo and retied on a cycle of a few years, plus plaited baskets, mats and the conical carrying baskets used on every slope.
Arunachal Pradesh Yak Churpi was granted a geographical indication in 2023. The National Research Centre on Yak at Dirang works on the herds this depends on, and the Brokpa herding households at the high pastures are where the milk comes from.
Material: Yak milk. Technique: Churning, curd draining, pressing and hard-drying.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Monpa & Tawang Belt, from classical forms to village traditions. (17)