Senapati, Mar 3: Chaonamai (Thingba Khullen) in Manipur’s Senapati district recently celebrated its Tai-Nii (Seed-sowing festival) festival from March 1 to 2. Celebrated every year since time immemorial, the villagers marked the event with great pomp and gaiety, and to ensure that younger generation do not take the festival as a passed-down tradition but to make the year a fruitful and successful one for everyone in the village.
The villagers marked the event with almost all the rituals and traditions, observed in the past by the ancestors.
The villagers in support of the family of those newly-married women, irrespective of those married within or to far-flung villagers and places, marked the event by showering their daughters and sisters with traditional and modern gifts, ranging from paddy rice, hundreds of kitchen items, traditional wears, furniture, and other useful household items.
For the villagers, Tai-Nii is an important festival in a year’s calendar where the villagers take the opportunity to honour, bless and wish good fortune to the newly-wedded daughters and women folks from the village.
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During this year’s Tai-Nii event, four women from the village, who are married to outside neighbouring villages and tribes like Purul, Lakhamai, and Sajouba (Mao) were honoured with the usual tradition.
Among the many other gifts, the family, friends, and relatives from the village showered them with about 170 tins each of rice (average), to-do a traditional tiffin box, and sou-sao a portion of raw meat. The villagers took great pride in carrying out this tradition every year as a sign of respect to their women folks and also to show the world that women and men are equal in every aspect of the society.
The villagers bade them farewell, wishing good luck in all their endeavours in life.
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