Karbi Youth Festival: The largest ethnic festival you've never heard of

While many of us were busy being born, having our nappies changed or trying to shove our fingers into electrical sockets, a small phenomenon called the Karbi Youth Festival was charging up in the oft-forgotten Northeast of India. 

The year was 1974, the place Assam. The state's third-largest tribal community, the Karbis -- occupying the autonomous Karbi Anglong district -- were under political unrest, with its youth in the middle of a violent identity struggle. Jailed leaders of this youth movement came up with the idea of a festival while still in detention, and managed to pull off the first Karbi Youth Festival (KYF) in a small courtyard in the heart of Diphu town. What it lacked in patronage, organization and audience it more than made up for in spirit -- an enthusiasm that has remained unabated for the past 36 years. 

The Karbi Youth Festival has become an annual event now billed as the largest ethnic festival of the Northeast, with some 400,000 people expected to attend its 36th installation this week, February 15-19. 

The festival takes place in Taralangso, once a sleepy village 4 km outside Diphu town. A 300-acre hill blessed with natural vegetation and a stream, Taralangso is the idyllic venue for the KYF whose core values include the preservation, research, documentation and promotion of the Karbis’ rich cultural and natural heritage. It’s no small feat to pull off a festival of this scale. The KYF is organised by the Karbi Cultural Society and runs on donations and honest enthusiasm, 36 years of freedom from corporate sponsorship. 

This year’s festival has media partners though, so publicity and documentation should be much better than in the past.

This year's ambitious programme promises some 3,000 musicians, singers and dancers from local communities, over 500 food vendors (look out for Phak auk Kimung, pork meat steamed in bamboo, and Bara a-am, traditional sticky rice), traditional artisans and craftsmen and plenty of good spirit and fun.

Festival highlights include an opening ceremony with thousands of folk musicians performing together, an ethnic village featuring crafts, hand looms and art from various local communities, cultural exchange programmes and workshops, the Taralangso Art Carnival showcasing folk art and contemporary art, painting, photography and video, and sound and architectural installations using both indigenous and modern materials.

There’s also a film festival featuring the Karbis’ celluloid legacy, a theater jamboree, a fashion fête and the Ha-I-Mu opera that tells the tragic Karbi folk legend of a peasant girl who was unwillingly transformed into the goddess of rain and fertility.

It's a lot to soak in.

But it's the new feature of the KYF this year -- the Taralangso Music Festival -- that got us excited through the music festival's young director Angaraag Papon Mahanta, an Assamese folk musician who often jams with the big city kids in New Delhi and Mumbai. 

With folk, folk-rock fusion and pure rock artists performing on three stages (one amphitheater and two open-air stages) the Taralangso Music Festival, in keeping with the KYF’s values, is all singing in the Karbi language. Karbi songs are typically pagan-agrarian, celebrating harvest, fertility and natural elements. Forbidden in on-stage performances but equally interesting are their 20-hour-long death-lament songs. Typical instruments include the Kum li-eng, a one-stringed violin, and the Muri tung-po, a wind instrument that sounds like a shehnai but uses completely different melodies and scale structures. 

Daniel Engty, convenor of the Taralangso Music Festival, is excited about this new addition to the festival. "This music festival represents our youth’s true position today," he says. "We love our hard rock music and we love our traditional language and values. The condition was that any band that wanted to participate in the festival had to sing in the Karbi language, and fuse elements of traditional and folk music with their modern sound."

Engty is charming, affable and polite, living up to the positive image of Northeastern hospitality. "Most people that attend the festival are from local area communities. For a few years in the middle we had some French and Japanese tourists attend, but due to political unrest following the 26/11 tragedy, few people outside this area come to KYF anymore. Even though it’s absolutely safe now, most people around the country don’t even know about this festival. Are you coming?" he asked me. "Please try. You have my warmest personal invitation." 

The Karbi Youth Festival and Taralangso Music Festival take place this week from February 15-19, 2010, at Taralangso, 4 km outside of Diphu town, Assam, and are free and open to all. The nearest airport is Dimapur (a 1-hour drive from Diphu), and there are guest houses, hotels and "inspection bungalows" around the area to stay. Details of which are at the Karbi Youth Festival blog.

More via Karbi Youth Festival Facebook event page