Go to Barpeta in Assam during Holi and you will not hear a single Bollywood song. No DJ. No one is throwing buckets of water on strangers. Just the sound of drums, cymbals and hundreds of people singing devotional songs that are five hundred years old. That is Holi in the Northeast. And it has almost nothing to do with the version they show in the movies.
Each state here has built its own relationship with the festival. Some go deeper into devotion. Some turn it into a five day event with bonfires and folk dance. Some use colours made from jungle flowers. Some barely celebrate it at all. But every single one of them does something the mainstream version of Holi does not — they make it their own.
Assam – Holi here is called Doul and it runs for six days
Go to Barpeta during this time and the first thing you notice is the sound before you even see anything. The khol drum. The cymbals. The Borgeet, devotional songs written by the saint Srimanta Sankardeva centuries ago, being sung by groups of men and women who have been doing this their whole lives.
This is the Barpeta Sattra. One of the oldest and most respected Vaishnav monasteries in Assam. And here the festival is not called Holi. It is called Doul Utsav. It starts six days before the actual date and each day has its own rhythm.
The idol of Krishna is brought out on a beautifully decorated swing. People come and offer flowers and colour to the deity first before they play with each other. The colours used in the traditional celebration are made from flowers and natural things, not chemical packets from the market. The whole atmosphere is calm and devotional in a way that is hard to describe if you have only ever seen north Indian Holi.
Outside the monasteries, regular Assamese families celebrate what they call Phakuwa. Dry colour called abir is used. People visit each other, eat together, and the whole thing feels more like a warm neighbourhood gathering than a full-blown festival. Bihu is the bigger deal in Assam. But Phakuwa has its own quiet place in Assamese life.
Manipur – Five days, a bonfire, and dancing under the moon
Manipur does not celebrate Holi. It celebrates Yaosang. And if you have never heard of it, that is honestly a shame because it is one of the most interesting festival traditions anywhere in India.
It begins on the full moon night with a small thatched hut being built in the open and then set on fire. Families and neighbours gather around this bonfire. It is called Yaosang Mei Thaba and it marks the start of five days of celebration.
The thing that makes Yaosang genuinely special is the Thabal Chongba. This is a folk dance where young men and women hold hands and dance together in large circles on open grounds at night, under the moon. In a society where this kind of mixing between young men and women was traditionally not very common, Thabal Chongba was always the one occasion where it was not just allowed but celebrated. Even now when things have changed, the dance still carries that same feeling of something joyful and a little bit free.
Children go from house to house on the first morning, collecting small amounts of money or rice from each home. The colour playing happens over the following days. By the time it is all over, five days have passed and you feel like you have actually been somewhere.
Sikkim – Playing Holi with the Himalayas watching
Sikkim is a small mountain state where Hindus, Buddhists and local indigenous communities have lived together for generations. That mix shows up in how everything here feels a little layered and a little different from anywhere else.
Holi in Sikkim is genuinely fun and energetic, especially in Gangtok and the valleys below where the Nepali-speaking communities celebrate it with real enthusiasm. Colour, water, music, food, the whole thing.
But the setting is something else entirely. You are standing in a valley throwing colour at your friends and if you look up there are Himalayan peaks sitting above the clouds. Prayer flags are fluttering on every ridge. A monastery is perched on a hillside half a kilometre away. And the rhododendrons, which bloom across Sikkim exactly at this time of year, are giving the hillsides a natural red that people have been using as colour here for as long as anyone can remember.
It is the same festival but it does not feel the same. The mountains do something to it.
Arunachal Pradesh – Holi meets the tribes
Arunachal has more than twenty six major tribes and each one has its own calendar, its own festivals, its own way of marking the seasons. Holi as a formal festival is mainly celebrated by the Hindu communities in the towns, Itanagar, Naharlagun, the plains areas.
But what is interesting is that several tribal spring festivals fall around the same time as Holi. The Nyokum festival of the Nyishi tribe is one of them, community gatherings, offerings, celebration of new season. Different in every way from Holi but carrying a similar energy underneath. The idea of coming out of winter and marking something new is not unique to any one community.
In the towns, Holi is a mixed affair in the most literal sense. You have people from Assam, Bengal, Bihar and Arunachal’s own plains communities and hill tribes all living together. The music playing at a Holi gathering in Itanagar might switch between Bihu, Bollywood and something local within twenty minutes. Nobody finds this strange.
Meghalaya – Shillong does Holi its own way
The main communities of Meghalaya — the Khasi, Garo and Jaintia people, have their own festivals and Holi is not traditionally part of their calendar. The Hindu communities in Shillong celebrate it and it is a lively celebration in those neighbourhoods.
But Shillong is a city that runs on music. Live bands, guitars, rock concerts, this city has had a music culture for decades. So Holi in Shillong often ends up with live music happening somewhere, people gathering in open grounds, and a crowd that is carrying pichkaris in one hand and possibly a camera in the other.
It is a younger, more mixed, more urban celebration. Not traditional exactly. But very Shillong.
Tripura – Two communities, one festival
Tripura has a large Bengali Hindu population and a significant indigenous tribal population and somehow both have found a way to be part of the same Holi.
The Bengali tradition here is called Dol Purnima. Idols of Radha and Krishna are placed on decorated swings, flowers are offered, devotional songs are sung. This happens first. The colour playing comes after. It is the same pattern as in West Bengal and it is taken seriously.
The tribal communities of Tripura have their own spring traditions and while they are completely different in form, the overlap in timing and in spirit means that in many villages the two things happen side by side, neighbours from different traditions celebrating in their own ways on the same day.
Agartala sees a proper full Holi and the warmth of it comes partly from two different communities finding common ground in the same season.
Nagaland and Mizoram – Joining in because why not
These two states are mainly Christian and have their own strong festival traditions. Holi is not something that grew here from the ground up.
But in the bigger towns like Kohima, Dimapur and Aizawl you will find Holi being celebrated by mixed communities, by people who moved here from other parts of India, and increasingly by local young people who want to join in something that the rest of the country is doing.
It is Holi as a shared moment rather than Holi as a deep cultural tradition. And honestly, that is a perfectly good reason to celebrate something.
The Northeast does not Need Mathura to tell it how to celebrate
Every year the same pictures go viral. Vrindavan, Barsana and Mathura colour clouds so thick you cannot see the person standing next to you. Those places are extraordinary and they deserve everything they get.
But somewhere in Barpeta, a group of devotees is singing a five-hundred-year-old song in front of a flower-covered idol. In Manipur, young people are holding hands and dancing in circles under a full moon. In Sikkim, a child is throwing colour in a mountain valley while rhododendrons bloom on the ridge above.
Same festival. Completely different feeling. That is the Northeast. It never needed anyone’s permission to do things its own way.
