All that you need to know about Meghalaya’s Behdienkhlam Festival

TRAVEL NEWS, MEGHALAYA/ Created : Jun 19, 2019, 15:44 IST

All that you need to know about Meghalaya’s Behdienkhlam Festival

Synopsis

It is also celebrated for seeking blessings of the gods for prosperity and good harvest once the sowing job is done by the farming community.

All that you need to know about Meghalaya’s Behdienkhlam Festival


It is that time of the year when Meghalaya gears up to celebrate its much-awaited annual festival– Bedinkhalam. The festival celebrations are usually held in Jowai in Jaintia Hills for the purpose of preventing natural calamities like pestilence, cholera and plague among others. It is also celebrated for seeking blessings of the gods for prosperity and good harvest once the sowing job is done by the farming community.
However, since a few years, the organisers have been using this festival as a medium of spreading awareness about the destructive effects of social evils like drug abuse etc.

Bedinkhalam festival celebrations feature rituals to be performed by the local folks for a period of three consecutive days. On the last day of the fest, people assemble at a marked place, called Aitnar, and dance to the beats of new as well as old pipes and drums. It is a day when the natives dress in the best of their traditional attire. A match of a game, called dad-lawakor, involving a wooden ball, is played between the northern and southern natives. It is believed that the team winning the match is guaranteed that the farmers living in that area would get a bumper crop in the coming year. In the evening, the local people engage in fun and frolic.
All that you need to know about Meghalaya’s Behdienkhlam Festival



It is to be noted that the women folk do not participate in dancing activities—they usually busy themselves in preparing food for offering to the spirits of their deceased family ancestors.

On the last day of the fest, the decorative tower-like pillars, known as Raths, are dismantled and immersed at a lake in Aitnar at Longpiah Lumpur, a locality, to signify the victory of good over dark forces.

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