Sama-Chakeva

Each dusk the sisters lift the changera onto their heads and process through courtyards, lanes and fields — and to the Chhath ghat — singing call-and-response Sama-Chakeva geet. The songs are the women’s alone, passed down orally: one voice leads, the group answers the refrain (“ge māi…”). They retell the legend, name and bless each girl’s own brother, scorn Chugla, and play the bird-catching game-song while “feeding” the figures grass.

On the climactic night the girls take the moustached clay Chugla — the gossip whose lie had Sama cursed — and bring a flame to his mouth, blackening his face to ash as they sing verses scorning backbiting. The act publicly destroys slander so that Sama may be welcomed back to human form; the songs heap mockery on the informer — he rides a donkey while the brother rides an elephant.

On the final morning the sisters plaster the courtyard fresh and feed their brothers dahi-chura (curd and flattened rice) with jaggery and sweets — a rite some call Faarbhari — singing blessings for the brother’s long life and the sister-in-law’s lasting ahibāt (married fortune). The brothers, in return, give gifts or money: the explicit sibling-bond exchange, an echo of Bhai-Dooj in the same Kartik window.

At dusk on Kartik Purnima the clay figures are carried in a last procession to a river or pond and immersed — staged as Sama’s bidai, the daughter sent off to her marital home. The sisters sing parting songs of the boat that will carry her — a golden boat for the brother, a wooden one for Chugla — and vow to remake the figures next Kartik. The unbaked clay dissolves back into the water, returning the season’s blessing to the earth.

The story tells of Sama (Shyama), a daughter of Krishna, whom the gossip Chugla falsely accuses of misconduct with an ascetic; the enraged Krishna curses her into a bird. Her husband Chakeva prays to share her fate and is turned to a bird too (hence the chakravāk pair), and her brother — named Samb/Samba or the collective Satabhaiya, “seven brothers” — wins her restoration through penance on Kartik Purnima. So the festival both celebrates the sister–brother bond and ritually destroys slander, the sisters burning Chugla’s moustache each night.

An honesty note: the popular attribution to the Skanda (or Padma) Purana is weak and uncited — the canonical Puranic “Samba” story is his own leprosy and sun-cure, with no sister turned into a bird. Sama-Chakeva is best understood as a Maithil folk tradition loosely grafted onto the Krishna cycle, with the legend’s details (brother Samb vs Satabhaiya; Chakeva as husband vs brother) varying by village.

Beneath the legend is a clear-eyed ecology. The festival is locked to the autumn arrival of Himalayan and Trans-Himalayan winter migrants on the Gangetic plains — above all the ruddy shelduck (Brahminy duck), Chakwa-Chakwi, the monogamous “lover birds” that give Chakeva his name; the clay flock (partridge, swan, wagtail) is an explicit homage to the returning birds. The unbaked figures, made to dissolve back into the water at immersion, carry a “return the clay to the earth” reading now emphasised in revival writing.

The festival is strongest in Madhubani and Darbhanga and across Madhesh Nepal (kept by Maithils and by the Terai Tharu too). As an oral, women-only, labour-intensive household tradition it has thinned under urbanization and migration — yet it sustains the clay-figure makers, basket-weavers and folk singers, overlaps with the Madhubani-painting economy, and is increasingly championed with a bird-conservation framing.