Me-Dam-Me-Phi

One of very few ancestor-worship festivals in India with formal state recognition — it is a gazetted state holiday in Assam, and the clearest surviving expression of Tai-Ahom religious tradition.

It is the Tai-Ahom rite of ancestor worship: offerings are made to the spirits of the dead and to the gods, in acknowledgement that the living are sustained by those who came before.

Households make offerings of rice, chicken, eggs, rice beer and coconut to ancestral spirits. Priests recite a set sequence of hymns — one to open, one to welcome the spirits, one accompanying the offerings, one to seek blessing, and one to send the spirits away at the close.

Offerings to named ancestral deities, and a fixed hymn sequence recited by priests.

The living are sustained by the dead, who are fed and then formally sent away at the close of the rite.

The Ahoms brought the practice from the Yunnan region when they migrated into the Brahmaputra valley in the thirteenth century. The household rite is old; the mass public celebration is not — the government fixed 31 January and declared the holiday only towards the end of the twentieth century.