Mim Kut

One of the three principal kuts of the Mizo year alongside Chapchar Kut and Pawl Kut — and the only one that faces the dead rather than the living.

It does two things at once: it thanks the ancestors for the maize, Job's tears and millet harvest, and it is a memorial for members of the household who died during the year.

Traditionally four days. The first carries the rituals, the offerings and the drinking of zu, the rice beer brewed for the occasion. The three that follow were days of mourning in which no work, no play and no quarrelling were permitted.

The Thlaichhiah — a symbolic bundle of the season's first produce placed in honour of the household's dead — and three days in which ordinary activity stops.

The dead of the household are remembered with the first of the harvest they helped to sow.

A pre-Christian Mizo agricultural and ancestral rite, kept through the maize harvest and reshaped over the past century as Christianity became near-universal in the state.