Tusu Festival

A lyrical folk festival celebrated by young girls who craft clay effigies of Goddess Tusu and float them in streams.

Based on a tender local historical legend of Tusu, a beautiful, virtuous peasant girl who chose to ritually sacrifice her life in a roaring river to protect her self-respect from a cruel local ruler. She was deified as a guardian spirit of the crops.

Young girls craft elegant miniature clay icons of the goddess. They build elaborate, highly decorative tower-like structures called Chaudals using bamboo and colored papers. Groups gather in village courtyards every night to sing specific, witty, and emotional Tusu folk songs, sharing traditional rice cakes called Gur Pitha.

For a month, girls worship the clay icons inside their homes with flowers and rice grains. On the dawn of Makar Sankranti, they carry the paper-and-bamboo Chaudal towers in massive singing processions to local rivers. After a holy purificatory bath, the structures and clay icons are ritually immersed in the water.

Nurturing and worshipping the Tusu icon is believed to grant young girls excellent marital prospects, ensure household health, and guarantee that the family's storage granaries will never run empty of paddy grains throughout the year.

A pre-colonial tribal and peasant tradition carried in song from one generation to the next, with nothing ever written down, Tusu still holds a shared folk identity together across state boundaries.

The freezing mist of a January dawn hangs over the quiet riverbank as hundreds of young village girls break into soft, beautiful chorus melodies. They hold aloft towering, multi-colored paper temples decorated with complex geometric designs. As the golden sun cuts through the fog, the structures are gently placed into the running water, leaving a floating trail of color and song that captures the pure, bittersweet soul of rural India.