Orange Festival: Sounds Of Music

Glimpses of the still pristine world of the ADI And the IDU mishmis during the orange festival At Dambuk.

- Rimli Sengupta

Pankeng Pertin was showing me around his orange grove. A small wiry man, he wore a black tribal vest with an intricate orange trim and had a machete in a fine wicker sheath slung across his back. How old? He’s not sure, but he was about six when the bomb fell on Hiroshima and Japanese jets flew overhead. I was surrounded by perhaps a thousand orange trees, all in fruit. They looked like what a child might draw: improbably skinny trees laden with large orange dots. Having seen at most a hundred oranges at once at my fruit vendor’s, this sight made me giddy. Then I lived the perennial urban fantasy of plucking and eating a perfect fruit—the segments thin-skinned and taut with sublime sweet-tart flesh.

Pankeng’s grove is on a hill above Dambuk, a village in central Arunachal Pradesh that is cut off half the year by the muscular headwaters of the Brahmaputra. Dambuk has over 100 orange farmers whose famed fruit travels all over Assam and into Bangladesh. But orange here is a young crop. It was Pankeng who introduced it 35 years ago, when illness made working his rice paddies impossible.

He needed a crop that didn’t demand annual work and had a winter harvest, when the rivers lift their siege, so the crop could travel to market. He grew his first orchard from seed, using fruits of a tree in his friend Bano Linggi’s backyard. He showed me an old photo of him and Bano with fruiting trees in the backdrop, in the same grove where I stood. Pankeng, an Adi, wore Bano’s Idu Mishmi outfit and Bano wore Pankeng’s. They had done a post-match jersey swap.

What was I doing in this pristine and inaccessible land of the Adi and Idu Mishmis? Dambuk has lately become home to the Orange Festival. Timed with the orange harvest, it is a four-day urban bonanza of high-adrenaline sports and music that attracts over 200 city slickers. I was one of them.