Pawl Kut

The closing thanksgiving of the Mizo farming year, and described by Mizoram Tourism as the greatest of the state's festivals.

Thanksgiving for a completed harvest. Mizo oral tradition traces it to a community recovering from two years of famine that was then given a bumper crop.

Household feasting is the core of it, with meat and eggs as the principal dishes, and around that communal singing, folk dance, traditional games and neighbourhood gatherings.

The chhawnghnawt: a mother and her children sit together on a platform built for the festival and feed one another portions of meat and egg.

The completed harvest is understood as something given rather than simply earned.

A harvest-close festival remembered as beginning after a famine, and kept as the year's final community feast.