Behdienkhlam

A Pnar festival to drive disease away, with mud fights on waterlogged ground and tall towers floated through the water.

Legend holds that a great plague once swept the Jowai region, and the ancestors were commanded in a dream to drive out the disease with sacred timber - the origin of the ritual.

Young men build tall, colourfully decorated tower-chariots called rots and carry them to Aitnar, the sacred mud pool of Jowai. People splash mud on one another and dance with high leaps to the beat of traditional drums.

On the final day a tall wooden beam - the khnong - is lowered into the Aitnar pool, and everyone rushes to touch it. In the evening the traditional game of Datlawakor is played.

The Pnar firmly believe that dancing in the sacred mud-water of Aitnar drives away disease, and that touching the khnong (sacred timber) brings a bountiful harvest in the coming year.

The festival is a central pillar of Meghalaya's Jaintia (Pnar) tradition, kept alive unbroken for centuries under the tenets of the indigenous Niamtre religion.

At Jowai in July. Rots — decorated wooden towers ten metres and more high — are carried on shoulders into the muddy Aitnar pool and dunked, with several thousand people going into the mud alongside them. It is a Pnar festival about driving out disease, it falls in the middle of the monsoon, and you will be filthy. Wear nothing you care about.