Hemphu

Hemphu and Mukrang

The two who made the world

Hemphu and Mukrang are the creator pair of the Karbi people of Assam. They are invoked together and are properly understood as a dyad rather than as two independent deities: the Karbi creation account, in its better-known form, holds that they made the world and its first inhabitants. Where the account distinguishes their functions, Hemphu is associated with the male and with creation, and Mukrang with the female and with the earth. That division should be described as a tendency in the tradition rather than a rigid assignment, because the pairing is what the sources actually attest.

The Karbi are an Angami-speaking people of the Karbi Anglong region of Assam, closely related to their neighbours across the Nagaland and Meghalaya borderlands — the Karbi live in all three states, and there are also Karbi communities in Manipur. They are a small people and their religious life is closely tied to the jhum cycle and to the forest. This is not incidental: the Karbi's ritual calendar is built around cultivation, and the great observances of the year are festival-plus-agriculture events rather than temple festivals.

Two observances carry most of the religious content.

Rongker, the Karbi New Year, is the principal festival and is celebrated in the preceding weeks of the new year. It is a renewal festival — the community's calendar turns over, the year's work is opened, and the pair is invoked for a productive year. Rongker is celebrated publicly and is one of the occasions on which the community's collective identity is most visible, and it draws visitors from the neighbouring states.

Chojun is the rain festival, held before the sowing, and its subject is water. It invokes Hemphu-Mukrang for the rains on which the crop depends. The pairing of a New Year festival with a rain festival reflects a ritual calendar organised around risk: the two things a hill people of this kind cannot control are when the year turns and when the water comes.

Both are community festivals rather than temple festivals, and the ritual is substantially oral and non-Brahmanical. The Karbi have been substantially Christian — Baptist chiefly, with a long history of conversion through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — so that, as with the Garo, a description of this religion must not be written in the present tense for the population as a whole.

The original body of this entry was a single sentence of six words followed by a duplicated fragment, and its record carried no named source. What follows is a description of the institution, not a shrine-level account, because no shrine has been identified.

Sources and what is still unverified

• No source is named in this entry's record, and the whole content rests on the general ethnographic literature on the Karbi. That literature — including the work of anthropologists writing on the north-east hill peoples — should be cited by author.
• The division of functions between Hemphu and Mukrang is described here as a tendency. The Karbi creation narrative varies between tellings, and a guardian should preserve the variation rather than resolve it.
• The months given for Rongker and Chojun are approximate. The Karbi calendar is lunar and relative; the Gregorian positions drift and should not be fixed.
• The religious composition of the Karbi today is time-sensitive and should carry a date or census reference wherever stated.