Rain sacrifice in Arunachal Pradesh, India.
The shaman walks down the labrang (raised platform of the Apatani people), and continues through the village. All along, he chants his incantations. All hunched over, he walks through the village with the sacrificed chicks and scatters the entrails after reading them, to tell the fortunes of the village and the likelihood of rainfall.
A 108 year old man (purportedly that old and supposedly a shaman) conducts a rain sacrifice ceremony to bring rainfall to the village of Ziro in Arunachal Pradesh, India. He uses age-old chants to exhort the rain gods to let forth their bounty...
After we had filmed this on Digital Betacam (with a film look) in Arunachal in 1998, we subsequently showed this footage to two fellow village boys from Ziro village, in 2010, and they confirmed that this gentleman was their uncle and that he had died the following year. Needless to say, they were very pleased to see his footage and hear his voice again!
Arunachal Pradesh is a state of India, located in the far northeast. It borders the states of Assam and Nagaland to the south, and shares international borders with Burma in the east, Bhutan in the west, and the People's Republic of China in the north. The majority of the territory is claimed by the People's Republic of China as part of South Tibet. The northern border of Arunachal Pradesh reflects the McMahon Line, a controversial 1914 treaty between the United Kingdom and a Tibetan government, which was never accepted by the Chinese government, and not enforced by the Indian government until 1950. Itanagar is the capital of the state.
This footage is part of the professionally-shot stock footage archive of Wilderness Films India Ltd., the largest collection of imagery from South Asia. The Wilderness Films India collection comprises of thousands of hours of high quality broadcast imagery, mostly shot on HDCAM 1080i High Definition, HDV and Digital Betacam. Write to us for licensing this footage on a broadcast format, for use in your production! We pride ourselves in bringing the best of India and South Asia to the world... wfi @ vsnl.com and admin@wildfilmsindia.com.
