Jhijhiya

On the nights of Navratri/Dashain, groups of girls and women gather by moonlight in the courtyard or maidan, each with her lit pot on her head, and circle round and round — gently at first, then faster — to clapping and the dholak (the madal in Nepal), singing Jhijhiya geet in call-and-response.

The feet keep constantly moving — partly choreography, partly so that a watching witch “cannot count the holes.” In the older village form the troupe danced house to house through the village, not on a fixed stage.

Set within Durga’s nine nights, Jhijhiya is danced expressly to shield children and the village from witches (dain), the evil eye and black magic. The core belief: if a witch can count all the holes in the lit pot on a dancer’s head, that dancer will fall dead — so the women keep dancing fast and turning, the holes never to be counted, while their songs taunt and scold the witches.

Households reinforce it with everyday charms — garlic, lemon and chili at the door, kohl around an infant’s eyes. A Nepal legend traces the dance to King Chitrasen’s witch-queen, who herself instituted Jhijhiya each year to defeat black magic.

Beyond protection, Jhijhiya carries an agrarian layer: arriving after the monsoon at harvest, it is both a thanksgiving for the crop and, in drought years, a plea to the rain-god Indra — women dancing amid the moonlit paddy.

The household ritual declined under urbanization, but it has been revived as staged heritage — school and community competitions, Dashain cultural programs, regular shows at Janakpur’s Cultural Village, and an appearance at Kathmandu’s “Echoes in the Valley.” On stage the old caste restriction has loosened, and Jhijhiya is now embraced as an emblem of Maithil women’s identity.

Jhijhiya is Mithila’s own dance of the goddess’s nights — a women’s rite carried on the head as a perforated earthen pot cradling a lit lamp, light flickering out through countless holes as the dancers circle by moonlight through Navratri. Its name is the flicker of that flame. Three meanings ride on it: devotion to Durga/Bhagwati (and the ancestral Brahm Baba) whose Shakti the lamp embodies; a fierce anti-witchcraft charge — the women dance so fast that no witch can count the holes and strike a dancer dead; and an older harvest-and-rain plea to Indra at the monsoon’s close. Once fading, it has been reclaimed as a proud emblem of Maithil women — from the Tarai courtyards to the stages of Kathmandu.