Karbi Youth Festival - Promoting a Performative Nationalism

The Karbi Youth Festival (KYF) is a five day event celebrated annually from 15th-19th February. It is claimed as one of the largest and oldest ethnic festivals in Northeast India. KYF has a long history tracing its birth and relates with the Karbi peoples struggle with the youth in the forefront in their movement for identity and asserting their ethnicity. The movement for introduction of Roman Script between 1960 and early 1970 for writing in Karbi, standardizing the orthography and designing text-books in mother tongue for educational purposes indicated the growing resolve of the Karbi youth before the inception of KYF in 1974. The socio-economic and political setting prevailing then called for social action, and the KYF provided the youth a perfect stage and an expanding public space for promoting their ideas of nationalism by way of performing of various traditional dance forms, ethnic music, food and fashion while the call for preserving the dying cultural elements acted as fodders for invigorating the national imagination.