From the Paddy Field to the Phone Screen: Bihu, Social Media and the Remaking of a Festival in Assam

Bihu is the central festival of Assamese social life. It marks the farming year and gives the people of Assam a shared language of song, dance and food. In recent decades its performance has moved from the village field to the organised stage and then to the phone screen. Most writing on Bihu either describes its origins and forms or laments its commercialisation, and little asks how ordinary people use digital media to take part in the festival. This paper examines how Bihu has moved from agricultural ritual to public spectacle and then to digital expression, who appears to take part in digital Bihu and who is left out, and what this means for ideas of tradition and authenticity. The study is qualitative and desk-based. It combines scholarly literature and published reports with structured observation of publicly available Bohag Bihu content on instagram and youtube during April and May 2026, selected by stated criteria and analysed through a six-step thematic analysis. The analysis suggests that social media has widened participation, especially for Assamese people living outside Assam, and has given young people a way to claim Bihu in their own style. At the same time, platforms appear to reward what is short, bright and shareable, while the quieter ritual parts of the festival and the voices of elders, rural households and smaller communities seem less visible. The paper separates what was observed, what published sources report and what is theoretical interpretation. It concludes that digital Bihu is better understood as a continuation of a festival that has always changed with its times than as a loss of tradition, and that the question of who controls its image deserves continuing attention. Because the study relies on a limited period of observation and includes no interviews, its findings are interpretive, cannot be generalised, and offer a basis for future fieldwork.

Bihu, social media, digital heritage, tradition, cultural identity, Assam

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