Murung is one house, and the whole village.

Murung is the largest rite a single Apatani household undertakes. The month is January, Murung piilo in Tanii. The hope attached to it is plain: health, a household that holds, and a prosperity that has to be asked for rather than assumed. Writers call it the festival of prosperity. Inside the valley it is also described as a healing, a setting-right between people and the spirits who are believed to withhold or to give.

There is no photograph on this page. A Murung belongs to the family that has taken it on. Publishing a picture of their animals, their altar, or their priest, as if it were scenery for a homestay, would be a misuse.

M.N is in Mudang Tage. If a house on this lane, or a clan this family is bound to, is inside a Murung, the week will not look like an ordinary January. The homestay does not stage it and cannot sell you a place at it.

The expectation, stated by Apatani writers, is that a man performs Murung at least once in his life. It is not an annual fair that every village opens on the same morning. One household hosts. The village, and people from villages around it, come. That is why a rite that starts with one family can fill a lane.

There are two scales. The priest, the nyibu, is the one who says which scale the spirits are asking for. He chants over a chicken, and the liver is read. From that reading he tells the household whether the smaller rite or the larger one is the one to keep.

A mithun is the animal the valley counts as wealth. Offering one is not a gesture a household makes for visitors. The meat is later divided and given out. Distribution is the public half of the rite: clan, relatives, and the people who came to work are fed from the same animals that were offered. If you are handed food in that week, you are inside someone’s obligation. Eat what you are given. Do not ask to watch the killing, and do not describe it back to them as an experience you collected.

Murung is spoken of as a month. The last days are the concentrated ones. Before that, relatives and neighbours collect firewood. Bamboo, cane, and leaves are brought in. Rice is pounded. Rice beer is brewed by the clan. Ropes, subu-sa, are twisted from cane so the animals can be led and tied. Young men of the clan do a good part of that rope-work on the lapang, the raised community platform that each clan keeps in the village. Mudang Tage has its own lapangs. They are work-floors and meeting-floors for the rest of the year. In a Murung they become the place the animals are brought to and chanted over.

On the night that matters, the animals are at the lapang and the nyibu chants over them. That chant is subu hinii. The sense he is required to speak is that the animals are going to the spirits, not being taken for the household’s appetite. He tells, in the chant, where they are to go. Ginger is held. The words are specialist words. They are not a script a guest is meant to follow along.

In the morning the animals are still at the lapang. Men mark them with rice paste and bamboo shavings, and rice beer is part of that preparation. They are offered after the night’s chant. Chickens are offered in a number tied to the number of mithuns. The meat is then divided and given out. The days around that morning have their own names in Tanii. This page does not turn that sequence into a timetable. The order belongs to the priest and the clan.

Dree has a common day, 5 July, because the valley decided in 1967 to share one. Myoko has a turn, and you can ask which group of villages is hosting. Murung has a household. You find out by being in the village, or by asking the house, not by checking a festival calendar from another state.

It is also not the music festival. A band on a field in September is a guest event with a ticket and a lineup. Murung has neither. If you came for music and you find a lane full of relatives and a lapang in use, you have walked into someone else’s rite. Step back.

January is cold in Ziro, and it is not automatically a Murung month at this address. It becomes one when a family in the obligation has taken the rite on. Write to the house and ask. If the answer is that a Murung is underway, believe the answer about noise, visitors, food, and whether a room should be offered at all.

Book the room only for a stay the house has confirmed. A confirmation PDF and a payment are for the bed. They are not a pass to a neighbour’s altar.