Members of the Shillong Assamese community peel vegetables for the feast at the Assam Club. A Telegraph picture

Shillong, Jan. 15: By the time people in Assam began preparing for their Magh Bihu feast, Assamese families in Shillong were through with theirs.

Over 200 people gathered at the century-old Assam Club in Laban for the traditional community feast on Sunday, two days before their fraternity in the neighbouring state celebrated uruka night.

The advance celebration was necessitated by today being a working day in Meghalaya, unlike in Assam, where it was a holiday.

The more enthusiastic, however, re-assembled early this morning to burn the meji and prayed for prosperity.

The customary visits to houses of friends and relatives started from Monday and continued till tonight.

Even as they celebrated around the meji, the creased brows of the elderly furrowed a little more. “Will the younger generation hold on to these rituals? Drawn as they are to Western culture, will they understand the richness of their own culture?”

The mood at the Assam Club Bihu feast, however, was more carefree.

As the revellers sat together peeling vegetables, they reminisced about the time when their grandmas spent hours make pithas and the fervent prayers around the meji.

The initiative to celebrate Magh Bihu in Meghalaya was, of course, taken by Shillong Assamese Lady’s Club. The Assam Club lent its support.

“It is after a long time that the Assamese celebrated Bhogali Bihu as a community in Shillong,” said Binu Hazarika, secretary of the Assamese Lady’s Club.

The Assam Club building at Laban — established on December 22, 1896 — stands as a testimony to the social and cultural programmes of the community in Shillong.

“We celebrate Rongali Bihu every year in April but not Bhogali Bihu. So that made this event very special,” said the cultural secretary of the Lady’s Club, Gitanjali Borthakur, a lawyer by profession.

The best ingredient at the Sunday feast, the revellers admitted, was the nostalgia. “I remember how my mother and other women used to make pithas the whole night in my hometown Nagaon,” said Binu Hazarika.

Though the feast began with residents of Laban, as the day progressed, people began streaming in from nearby localities of Bishnupur, Laitumkhrahh and other parts of Shillong.

“I, too, took part in the celebration for the first time as I used to go to Dibrugarh, my hometown, for the Bihu feast in the past years,” said the president of the Assam Club, P.K. Borooah.

As did some Assamese doctors from the North East Indira Gandhi Regional Institute of Health and Medical Sciences (Neigrihms).

Among the revellers was physician-writer Mihir Goswami who brought his family from Assam to take part in the Shillong Bihu fest.

“It was a great effort,” said Goswami, who is a senior physician at Neigrihms.

He said the harvest festival is not only for the Assamese community in Shillong, but for all, irrespective of caste, creed and religion.

He goaded the Assamese community in Shillong to preserve the age-old tradition and culture. “As Mahatma Gandhi once said, we have to keep the windows of our mind open to absorb other culture and at the same time, we should not forget our own culture,” he added.