Dree is for the rice still standing.

Dree is the agricultural rite of the Apatani. The rice is in the terraces and not yet safe. Insects, blight, a bad turn in the weather, and illness in the village are what the prayers are aimed at. The month is called, in Tanii, the Dree month. The common day, kept across the valley, is 5 July.

The photograph above is the valley floor, the river and the fields. It is not a photograph of the rite. There is no picture on this page of the altar or the priest, because those were not given to the house to publish.

M.N Homestay is in Mudang Tage, one of the villages on that floor. The family farms and lives inside the same year. They do not organise Dree.

The district’s own account of Dree names five who are addressed. Spellings move from writer to writer. The work each name is given does not.

An Apatani field holds rice and fish in the same water. Danyi’s share of the prayer is the soil, the fish in the paddy, the cattle, and the household. A Danyi altar was not part of the older village rite. It was raised for the first time at the common ground in 1967, when Millo Kacho, a gaon bura of Tajang, gave a mithun for the common feast.

The older rite is a plea, not a harvest party. The grain is still on the stalk. Cucumber is what can be cut and handed out. People call that gift dree taku. The drink is dree o, beer of rice or of millet. The women of the valley brew it for the guests and the common meal.

For a long time each village opened Dree on a day its own elders picked, in June or July, without asking the next village. There was no one ground. Lod Kojee, then a student, had been to other people’s festivals, Mopin among them, and wanted one date the whole valley could share. Myoko and Murung could not be moved without breaking them. Dree, he wrote later, had room to be gathered if the village rite was left standing. In May 1967 he and Gyati Challa went to Shillong and asked the administration for help. P. N. Luthra, then Adviser to the Governor, gave a grant and agreed to come.

On 3 June the villages met at Old Ziro and could not agree a ground. A committee walked the sites. Nenchalya, near the school at Hija, was the one that sat in reach of everyone. Elders in Hija and Dutta were not sure a crowd from every direction belonged on their land. Tage Tade of Mudang Tage, a priest, read a chicken liver and found no sign of the famine they feared. The ground was accepted. Luthra opened the first common Dree there that June. Cucumber was handed out as the first healthy cut of the season, and there was not enough of it. From the next year the common day was 5 July, so the fruit had time. That date has held.

The village rite is still the day before. On 4 July the priests keep Dree in their own villages, in the dress and the short procession the rite already had. On 5 July the valley gathers: a guest is received, a flag is raised, and the day has dances, games, and speeches. Daminda is the dance the valley names. The common gathering has been public for more than fifty years. The prayer under it is older.

When the rite is done, a taboo sits on the work. People stay out of the terraces. They do not go into the forest to cut. The length of that quiet belongs to the village. It is not a cancelled festival, and it is not a number this page should invent. If the bunds are empty on the days after the 5th, the request has been made and the crop is being left alone.

If you are in Mudang Tage on 6 July and the paths between the plots are quiet, that quiet is the rite continuing. It is not a cancelled festival. Do not treat an empty bund as a shortcut into someone’s field for a photograph of the light.

Unlike Myoko, you do not have to ask which village’s turn it is. Dree is the valley’s day. The house will still be a family house: relatives, food, and the hours the rite takes. Rooms in Mudang Tage are few, and this week is one of the weeks that fill.

Book the room and name the dates. If you want to be on the common ground on the 5th, ask the house where that year’s gathering is being held and how to stand at the edge of it without being in it. The answer is local. It will not be printed here as a map of a sacred ground.

Dree is not Myoko. It is not Murung. The music festival in September is a different kind of crowd, on a different kind of invitation.