Patkai & Tirap Belt · Eastern Himalaya & Brahmaputra Belt
Dance
Line and circle dances performed over the several days of the Nocte harvest festival, with the village moving between the chief's house and the community ground. Costume, sequence and the order in which households join are all fixed by custom.
Performed by: Nocte men and women. Occasion: Chalo Loku, late October to November
Danced through the days of the Wancho spring festival, with men in full ceremonial dress and the log drum sounding. The festival runs about six days and the dancing is the public face of a set of household and chiefly rituals that are not.
Performed by: Wancho men and women. Occasion: Oriah, February to April
Group dances at the Tangsa spring festival, differing between the many Tangsa groups — Tikhak, Mossang, Longchang, Muklom and others each maintain their own version, which is the single most important thing to know about Tangsa performance.
Performed by: Tangsa communities. Occasion: Moh-Mol, April
A processional dance in long serpentine files around a set of tall painted posts, led by ceremonially dressed elders. It is the Kachin manau of northern Myanmar, performed on the Indian side of the same community's range.
Performed by: Singpho. Occasion: Shapawng Yawng Manau Poi, February
Slow, hand-led dance in the Tai idiom, performed at Buddhist festival occasions. It shares its vocabulary with Shan and Thai forms rather than with anything else in the district.
Performed by: Tai Khamti. Occasion: Sangken and temple occasions
Music
A whole tree trunk hollowed out, sometimes carved at the head, kept in or beside the morung and beaten with wooden batons by a team of men. It was a signalling instrument with a range of several kilometres — it announced raid, death, festival and assembly — and hauling a new one up to a village was itself a major communal event. Wancho and Nocte villages kept them; so do the Konyak villages over the Nagaland line.
The Tangsa song tradition associated with the Wihu observance, sung in a poetic register distinct from everyday speech and documented in detail by linguists working on Tangsa over the past two decades. Different Tangsa groups sing recognisably different versions, and the recordings made in the course of that documentation are now a resource the community itself uses.
Responsorial singing that accompanies the dancing at the Nocte and Wancho festivals, with a leader setting lines answered by the group. The texts address harvest, ancestry and the standing of the chief's house.
Theatre
There is no separate theatre tradition because the morung did that work. The bachelors' dormitory was where boys were trained, where oral history was recited, where the log drum was kept and where the village's carved posts stood. It was simultaneously a school, a guardhouse, an archive and a stage, and its decline — under conversion, schooling and the end of raiding — removed several institutions at once.
Crafts
The most accomplished figural carving tradition in Arunachal Pradesh, and the belt's best-known craft. Its subject matter — human heads and figures, morung posts, drums — comes directly from the ritual system of the pre-Christian village, and the carvers now work largely for a collector and tourist market. Wancho Wooden Craft was granted a geographical indication in January 2024.
Material: Hardwood, principally locally identified forest species. Technique: Adze and chisel carving of figures, heads, tobacco pipes, mugs, posts and log drums, finished dark and often inlaid or fitted with bead and hair.
Very few new drums are made. The surviving ones sit at villages such as Wakka and are maintained rather than replaced, which means the craft exists now mainly as repair knowledge held by a handful of men.
Material: A single hardwood trunk. Technique: A felled trunk is hollowed through a longitudinal slot, tuned by wall thickness, carved at the head and hauled to the village by the whole community.
Historically a system of insignia rather than decoration. Reproductions are now made openly for sale; genuine old strands stay in households.
Material: Glass and stone beads, cast brass. Technique: Stringing to fixed patterns; lost-wax casting for the small brass heads and figures.
Woven by women at home, with distinct pattern sets across the many Tangsa groups. Bags and shawls are the products that sell; the full ceremonial pieces mostly do not leave the community.
Material: Cotton and wool, plant dyes. Technique: Body-tensioned loom weaving with supplementary-weft diamond and lozenge patterning.
Introduced by the community settled at Miao from 1975 and run through the settlement's own cooperative alongside farming and a handicraft centre. Arunachal's handmade carpet received a geographical indication in January 2024.
Material: Wool. Technique: Hand-knotted pile on a vertical loom, cut over a rod as the row is worked.
Singpho Phalap holds a geographical indication granted in January 2024 — a household craft with a registered name, made in the same districts as an industrial tea economy that has nothing to do with it.
Material: Tea leaf, bamboo. Technique: Withering, sun-drying, hard-packing into a bamboo internode and smoke-curing over the hearth.
Carrying baskets, fish traps, mats, house walling, hats and the sheaths that daos live in. The unremarkable craft that everything else depends on.
Material: Split cane, bamboo. Technique: Coiled and plaited construction, sized to load and use.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Patkai & Tirap Belt, from classical forms to village traditions. (16)