Sorry, not many good pics of a night festival...Our first night in Juphal we were invited to see a men’s festival enacted to get rid of demons and ghosts. We arrived at a spot a little higher on our mountain at a temple--a square building with a courtyard and peristyle like halls on two sides, open rooms on the other two. It has a tall post with Tibetan prayer flags hanging off on one of the corners of the roof, on which we were invited to sit (with most of the women and children in the village, I believe). Others crowded around the open halls and into one of the open rooms. In the other room (which we were facing, luckily) there was a fire and a gathering of men, obviously taking part in some ritual. Every once in a while, men would come out and play drums and blow large trumpets.
While the secret-men ritual was going on, we watched for an hour as other men gathered in the courtyard to form a circle--strike that, two semi-circles facing each other. They would slowly rotate counter clockwise while chanting back and forth. One semi-circle would chant a melody, sometimes gesturing at the other group or pointing at them (the most enthusiastic we nicknamed “Sean Penn”, as he reminds us of the actor), then the second semi-circle would respond with what sounded like the same thing over and over. Men freely came into the circle and left, and much later, women were added. We decided that it could be a very slow, Nepali version of “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better”… “I have seventy mules and a wife with three kids, you don’t!” “Well my wife is cuter than yours and that’s what really matters, so there!”--that type of thing, you know? (In actuality, it’s just a traditional chant, they’re all saying the same thing and only divided by age. I couldn’t tell.)
Eventually three men dressed in white came out of the room with bells and drums and tambours and danced around, hopping on one foot and tying strings around peoples necks. I decided that these people were “chosen ones” who really needed protection from demons… they’re the ones in the community who, by coincidence, always seem to be at the site of trouble, even though they say they have naught to do with it. (This is mostly true, apparently. The strings are to protect the people receiving them from ghosts.) Then the whitemen disappeared back into the fire room. Tarak informed us that the circle bit would go on til the wee hours of the morning.
This same ritual happened the two nights afterwards and climaxed on the last day with a trip to the big temple higher up the hill. Check out the next post!
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