Festivities.
The Ròngkēr is the annual compulsory village festival, held at the time of the beginning of cultivation (June), or in some villages during the cold season. Goats and fowls are sacrificed. Ārnàm-pārō gets a goat, and so do the local gods of hills and rivers. A small village will sacrifice two or three goats, a large village ten or twelve. The flesh of the victims is eaten, with rice and rice-beer, but only men can partake of the sacrifice. They must sleep on the hòng apart from their wives that night. The gods are invoked in the following terms: “We live in your district: save us and help us! send no tigers or sickness, prosper our crops and keep us in good health, and year by year we will sacrifice like this. We depend wholly upon you!” There is no music or dancing at the Ròngkēr.
At harvest-home there is no sacrifice, but the whole village help mutually in getting the crops in, and feast together on rice and beer, and dried fish and dried flesh saved up against this celebration, or fresh fish if procurable. No animals are killed, except in some houses a fowl, lest the paddy brought home should decrease; this fowl is eaten. On this occasion there is a little dancing on the hòng, but with this exception music and dancing take place only at funerals.
Occasionally there is a Ròngkēr-pī (“great Ròngkēr”) for the whole mauza, as, for instance, to expel man-eating tigers. Each village, headed by its gaoṅbura, brings its contribution to the great sacrifice, and repairs to the mauzadar’s or bor-gaoṅbura’s house, where the feast is celebrated.
Mr. Stack’s notes do not mention the observance by the Mikirs of general tabus, called in Assamese genna, such as are common among the Naga tribes;[10] but personal tabus of various kinds, entailing separate eating of food and abstinence from commerce of the sexes, have already been indicated. Women during menstruation are said to be unclean and unable to touch the cooking-pots.
[1] This name, which means “Jòm or Yama’s town,” is often incorrectly written Chomarong or Chumarong. [↑]
[2] Sentences enclosed in quotation marks were so written by Mr. Stack, and are probably the ipsissima verba of his informants. [↑]
[3] Sir Joseph Hooker (Himalayan Journals, ed. 1855, vol. ii. p. 182) relates that at the Donkia Pass, one of his servants, a Lepcha, being taken ill, “a Lama of our party offered up prayers to Kinchinjhow for his recovery.” Perching a saddle on a stone, and burning incense before it, “he scattered rice to the winds, invoking Kinchin, Donkia, and all the neighbouring peaks.” [↑]
[4] Such worship of objects and places of an impressive character is, of course, common throughout India. Thus, in the Pachmarhi Hills the writer has seen flowers and red lead (sindūr) offered at the brink of a terrible gulf of the kind so common in the plateau. Again, at Balhārpur, in the Chānda district of the Central Provinces, he has seen worship offered to a bastion in a solidly built ruined fort adjoining the village.—(Note by Editor.) [↑]