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Muted festival season in Anyar, Myanmar’s central dry zone
လွန်ခဲ့သော ၃ နှစ် က
The central portion of Myanmar, often referred to locally as Anyar, is usually a hotbed of festivals around the month of Thadingyut on the Burmese calendar that falls at the end of the rainy season, on the full moon in October of the Gregorian calendar.
The focus of the festival season, besides just a welcome change to the mundanity of daily life, is on traditional charity concerts and events and paying respects to the elderly and parents.
“People usually hold weddings and charity events during the Thadingyut season. There are set to be five big and 20 small charity festivals after Thadingyut, not to mention about 10 weddings in about a month,” says Daw Mar Yin, 30, who lives in a village area that has about 700 households in Pale Township, Sagaing Region.
Big donation festivals are normally held from Nadaw to Tabaung in the Burmese calendar, roughly December to March and involve theatrical plays, traditional orchestras known as saing waing, and two communal feasts held in front of the home of the person organising the event.
Since it is a big occasion, it is mostly held after harvesting between December and March - Pyartho and Tabaung in the Burmese calendar - so more land is available as a venue and people can volunteer to help prepare the meals three days ahead of the event.
Smaller charitable events don’t include concerts and traditional orchestras like the bigger ones and usually only involve one communal meal so they are prepared for and held at nearby monasteries.
This Thadingyut festival season, people from the village where Daw Mar Yin lives have been busy writing their scripts and rehearsing for skits and presentations they will perform.
The day before the full moon and the day of the full moon itself will see the village bustling about to watch their neighbours’ performances.
It is a time to learn about the surprising talents fellow villagers may have hidden up till now, says Daw Mar Yin.
She says it's also a great opportunity for the children to get on a stage to show off talents, possibly for the first time, and also for many to overcome a fear of speaking or performing in front of a crowd.
It’s a wonderful way to learn about communicating and connecting with people,” she adds.
In 2020, all such festivals came to a screeching halt no thanks to the emergence of Covid-19 in Myanmar. Sadly, the situation did not improve in 2021, when the military seized power.
Thadingyut in the villages around Pale has been mostly quiet this year, and people expect the rest of the festival months to be the same.
No one in the area is willing to organise charity events and villagers are cautious and wary of possible raids by security forces.
However, despite the lack of large-scale festivities, the tradition of paying homage to elders, observing old cultural practices, and fasting still burns strong.
One of those traditions is the observance of Shinpyu, the important celebrations marking the monastic ordination of a boy under the age of 20 in Theravada Buddhism.
In the past, in more peaceful times, the event would involve processions, elaborate traditional costumes and the donning of intricate make-up. These days, circumstances have led to the event being reduced to the youngster receiving a Buddhist novice’s robes.
Wedding ceremonies that used to involve big gatherings and singing broadcasted over powerful loudspeakers have mostly been reduced to handing out tea salad to neighbours.
It's clear that this Thadingyut and the following festival months have become much more muted these past few years, with big gatherings, singing, and orchestras gone for the time being.
“Things have been much quieter for three years now. There are normally a lot of enjoyable festival in the Burmese calendar months of Pyartho and Dabodwei - around February, but nothing happens now because of Ko Vit and Ko Sit (a Burmese play on words for Covid and war,” lamented Daw Aye Ni, a 50-year-old resident of the Pale area.
She added that on the full moon of Thadingyut just a few weeks ago, villagers in her area heard what sounded like an explosion and were wondering whether they should flee for safety.
“On the surface things look the same, but this time we have to be scared - about all kinds of things,” said U Bo Khin, 80, who lives in the same village as Daw Mar Yin.
Still he claims donation events are going strong in his village because it is known for its spirit of generosity.
However, Day Aye Ni says that while the culture of donating is still strong, the amount donated is significantly less.
There are seven monasteries in Daw Aye Ni’s village and alms giving events are held from Thadingyut in September/October up to the Buddhist Lent, a three-month period during the rainy season where monks remain in one monastery instead of travelling to each monastery in the area on each full moon.
Alms-giving during the festivals normally involves providing dry foods for monks. Sometimes donations can include personal-care items such as toothpaste and soap and snacks, Daw Aye Ni explains.
These kinds of yearly festivals have been disrupted since the emergence of Covid-19 in 2020 and are now being disrupted by the political crisis.
Although this cultural practice has been interrupted, villagers are still giving to monasteries.
Daw Aye Ni is a shining example of this as she gets up at 4am every day to cook food that will be sent to the monasteries before dawn.
Almost all the villagers in the area do something like this to send food twice a day - breakfast and lunch - to the monasteries.
For the villagers, sending food is a way to make up for the absence of the alms-giving festivals.
All this has been going against a backdrop of some villages in the area being burned down by the junta’s forces.
The military’s activities have also prevented people in the area from working on their farms normally, even as they have to be prepared to help their neighbours from villages that have been raided. The conditions have meant that crop yields have dropped to some extent this year.
Many of the villagers in the area have experienced having to flee their homes for at least a few days and know that they have to be prepared to flee again in the future.
Given the circumstances, many say they understand why bigger festivals are not being observed and are grateful some smaller events can still be held.
All this is a far cry from Thadingyut season in less turbulent times, when it was common to see people in their finest traditional outfits carrying food to visit elders and crowds of young people volunteering to help at monastery events.
Things have been much quieter this year and even street vendors who are normally out in force on festival days were absent.
Despite everything that has been going on in the area, Daw Aye Ni’s village has been luckier than others nearby due to the absence so far of pro-military militias and supporters nearby.
“There have been no Pyu Saw Htee (pro-military militias) in the area so far, so no homes get burned,” says Daw Aye Ni of her village.
However, this does not mean the military itself has not been active there. Junta troops raided the village two months ago.
Daw Aye Ni says she was prepared to flee during that raid and had even packed food and cooking oil to take with her. In the end, no one from the village had time to take anything with them except the clothes on their backs.
According to independent monitoring group Data for Myanmar, some 20,153 homes have been torched between February 2021 and August of this year. Of the total some 2,300 were from the villages in the Pale Township area of Sagaing Region.
Despite all this, the crop yields for peanut, sesame, and rice have only dropped slightly this year because villagers managed to conduct their harvesting thanks to the absence of pro-military militias.
When Burma Associated Press visited the area, villagers were preparing to grind peanuts and sesame into oil that will be sold.
One villager, Daw Aye Chit, 50, said even though the military raided her village during the harvesting season and she was forced to run, she was lucky nothing happened to her crop of sesame that was left out in her fields.
“Fortunately for me nothing happened to my crop except that the harvested bunches of sesame were slightly wet from rain,” she says.
Thanks to some good fortune, the production of sesame oil in her village has been reasonable this year, she adds.
With Sagaing Region being one of the worst-affected areas in the ongoing conflict in Myanmar, people in the countryside still try to keep themselves informed about other parts of the country, even if it’s through military-controlled media channels such as Myawaddy and MRTV. Cut off from the internet no thanks to internet blackouts, they have little choice in news and entertainment.
“The resistance’s People’s Defence Forces will blast us for watching Myawaddy and MRTV,” Daw Mar Yin says jokingly before adding with a laugh that the channels still show dramas for entertainment.
So with little to occupy them and no festive events to attend people in Daw Mar Yin’s village pass the time by visiting each other to keep their spirits up and to share a laugh if they can.
It’s their own quiet way of opposing the military.
Caption - Old pictures from Anyar, thc Central region of Burma.
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