Like many girls across Assam, 17-year-old Priyakhi Sarma has been performing the Bihu naas (dance) since she was a child. As a teenager, dancing at Bihu functions at different locations in Guwahati was a regular fixture of every Rongali Bihu for her. But as the festival approaches this year, she is gearing up for something far larger in scale: she is one of more than 11,000 artistes from the state who will perform together next week in an attempt to set a world record.
The Bihu naas is a defining feature of Rongali Bihu, or Bohag Bihu, which rings in the Assamese new year. On April 14, the beginning of the festival, the Assam government has planned a spectacle around the folk dance: 11,140 artistes from all districts of the state will perform together at Guwahati’s Sarusajai Stadium in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
According to Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, the aim is to “organise the largest Bihu dance performance at a single venue and make it to the Guinness Book of World Records in the folk-dance category”.
The performance itself will just be around 15 minutes long. But the logistics involved are massive, beginning with the selection of the artistes.
These were the requirements: 70 per cent of the performers would be women and 30 per cent men, which would include singers and those playing traditional instruments such as dhol, taal, gogona, toka, pepa and xutuli. The performers were to be drawn from each of the state’s 31 districts, varying from as many as 1,400 from Dibrugarh to just 20 from South Salmara. Women aged 15-35 and men aged 15-55 were invited to register themselves online for auditions, with district administrations entrusted with the selection.
“While registering, we also had to submit certificates to show that we have experience in performing Bihu. After we registered, we got an email calling us for auditions on March 18 and 19. We were divided into groups and were auditioned by a set of experts,” said Priyakhi’s friend, Ricusmita, 15, who has also been selected. Their district, Kamrup Metro, had a cap of 800 performers and received around 1,500 registrations.
Bihu exponent Ranjit Gogoi has been roped in to choreograph the routine.
“Back in February itself, we made a model video of the choreography which was approved by an expert committee. We brought in ‘masters’ from all the districts and they were trained on the routine in the Guwahati so that they could go back to their districts and teach the artists there with the aid of the video. From March 27 to March 31, workshops were carried out in all the districts by the masters under the supervision of our experts,” said Gogoi.
The planning is meticulous. “To ensure that all of the performers can be accommodated in the venue, we measured how many square feet each dancer will get on the ground. So finally, there will be 7,000 women dancing on the ground and the instrumentalists will be in the galleries,” said Gogoi. Detailed diagrams have been drawn to plot out exactly how many instrumentalists from which district will be accommodated in a given gallery.
But the most crucial part of the process was choreographing a routine that 11,140 dancers from different parts of the state could perform in synchrony.
“Bihu has developed regionally and different regions of the state have some variations. We have integrated all of Assam in the form of our artistes. Our challenge is that all these people will have to dance one form together. If even 10 per cent are not in sync, then it’s not a world-record performance. So the model choreography has been done in such a way that it can be done easily by all, a ‘universal Bihu,’” said Gogoi.
According to historian Ankur Tamuli Phukan, who has done extensive research on Bihu, a standardised Bihu dance is a recent development that began taking shape during the days of the Assam Agitation in the early 1980s.
“My finding is that the ‘urban Bihu’ started during that time when Bihu began being standardised on stage. By the 1990s, there was a ‘universal Bihu’ because of the competitions conducted by different Bihu committees in which you don’t just perform, you compete. So there was standardisation in attire as well — you need kopou phool (orchid) in the hair, a certain kind of bun, a red phut (bindi) of a certain size. Now it has become the ‘mainstream Bihu’, which in turn affects other Bihus. But still, till the 2000s, you can see the differences between the Bihu in, say, Morigaon from Dibrugarh, or Jorhat, or Nagaon,” he said.
Ahead of the big event, most of the performers will arrive at Guwahati on the night of April 10, and dry runs of the performance will be done from the 11th to the 13th. According to Kamrup Metro DC Pallav Gopal Jha, the women will be accommodated at subsidised hotels while the men will be put up in school and college hostels, community halls and institution-based halls. The costs involved are immense: with every performer being given a stipend of Rs 10,500, just the cost of paying the performers amounts to Rs 11.69 crore.
