Kati Bihu (Kongali Bihu)
The austere mid-year Bihu. Granaries empty, the new crop not yet in. Earthen lamps in the paddy fields, prayers for the standing crop.
Kati Bihu, also called Kongali Bihu, the Bihu of want, is the quietest and most inward of the three Bihus. It is kept on the sankranti of Ahin and Kati, the turn of the one month into the other, around the middle of October. It falls at the hardest point of the rice year, when the old store of grain has been used up and the standing paddy is still green and weeks from ripe, and its whole observance is austere to match. There is no feasting and no dancing, none of the drums and Husori singers of the spring festival nor the great fires and communal meals of the winter one. In their place there are small lamps lit against the dark and a murmured prayer over the unripe crop. Where the other two Bihus celebrate an act that is finished, seed in the ground or grain in the barn, Kati keeps watch over one still in suspense. Its mood is hope and apprehension rather than plenty.
The lean-season frame
The character of Kati Bihu is set entirely by its place in the agricultural year. It comes at the leanest turn of the cycle, when the granary is empty, the new harvest is still weeks away, and the household's whole fortune hangs on the ripening paddy. The name Kongali, of poverty, names that precise condition. The spring Rongali Bihu is the joy of sowing, danced in the open to the dhol of the Bihu dance. The winter Magh Bihu is the feast of the full barn, eaten around great fires in the harvested fields. Kati Bihu confronts the empty barn, and it is the middle Bihu in feeling as much as in the calendar. It holds the anxious weeks in between, when nothing can yet be gathered and everything can still be lost to blight, flood or pest. There is no founding legend behind it, no hero, no presiding god and no dated event, only the rice field and its calendar, and that is why its observance is so restrained. The festival is not the Assamese Hindu community's alone. The same lean-season vigil is kept under its own name by other peoples of the valley. The Bodo keep it as Kati Gasa and light their lamp at the foot of the sacred siju plant rather than the tulsi. The Dimasa keep it as Gathi Sainjora. That a Hindu, a Bodo and a Dimasa household should all light a small flame over an unripe field in the same week, each in the name of its own gods, shows that the festival answers to the land before it answers to any creed. The Hindu forms laid over it, the tulsi and the goddess Lakshmi, are a later layer on an older agrarian rite.
The lamps of Kati
The gentlest act of the festival takes place at home, at dusk. The household tulsi, the holy basil on its raised earthen platform, the tulsi bheti, is cleaned and tended, and an earthen lamp, the saki, is lit before it as the family prays for the welfare of the house and for the harvest to come. By tradition the prayer is addressed to Tulsi herself, and in many households also to Lakshmi, the goddess of plenty, in the season when plenty is exactly what is wanting. The choice of plant is not incidental. The month of Kati is the Kartik of the wider Hindu year, the month in which the basil is most honoured across northern India, and the Assamese festival draws that devotion into its own agrarian frame. Nor is the lamp lit at the tulsi alone. Saki are set at the granary, in the kitchen garden, the bari, and out among the paddy, so that the small flames stand through the household's whole world of cultivation on the one evening when there is least to spare for them. At the lamp many households sing a short traditional verse, an image out of the Ramayana carried into the courtyard:
Tuloxir tole tole mrigo pohu sore, take dekhi Ramchandrai xordhonu dhore.(Assamese)
“Under the tulsi the deer grazes. Seeing it, Ramchandra takes up his bow.”
The most striking image of the festival stands in the paddy itself. There the farmer raises the akax-banti, the sky lamp, an earthen lamp fed with mustard oil and hoisted to the top of a tall bamboo pole above the ripening rice, often under a small hood of folded banana leaf. In folk understanding the field-lamp is a guardian. Its flame draws the insects of the night away from the crop and burns them, a living insecticide, and with them it is thought to draw off blight and ill fortune. Alongside the lamp the farmer whirls a piece of split bamboo over the crop and recites the rowa-khowa chants, the spells that turn away pests and the evil eye. An older belief runs through the same flame, that the sky lamp lights the path of the spirits of the dead, who are thought to pass at this season and to be shown their way by the light set high over the fields.
Between the guarding of the living crop and the guiding of the departed, the lamp carries the whole meaning of the festival, a point of light set deliberately against the dark of the lean months. That restraint is not a poverty of the festival but its truest expression, the honest face of a calendar built directly on the rice field. Kati is the pause in the working round of the valley that Praphulladatta Goswami (source: Bihu Songs of Assam) traced through the Bihu songs. It is the held breath between the seed and the harvest, kept over with a lamp and a prayer until the paddy at last comes ripe.