Teeyanਤੀਆਂ

Teeyan is the festival Punjab's women keep for themselves. When the monsoon breaks the summer heat and the month of Sawan turns the fields green, daughters come home to their parents, sisters gather, and swings go up on the big branches at the edge of the village. Around those swings a whole season is sung: old Boliyan about rain, husbands, mothers in law and longing, danced out in Giddha circles by women who, for these days, set the work down and take the village green over.

What is Teeyan?

Teeyan, whose full name is Teeyan Da Teohar, the festival of women, is the Punjabi form of the festival called Teej in much of northern India. It is a seasonal, monsoon festival, and its focus is on daughters, sisters and mothers. In Punjab it is kept less as a temple observance and more as a women's gathering: married women return to their maternal home to take part, and in the past it was traditional for a woman to spend the whole month of Sawan with her parents. Girls, newly married women and their mothers and grandmothers all belong to it, which is why Teeyan is often described as the festival that brings Punjab's daughters home.

When is Teeyan celebrated?

Teeyan is celebrated in the monsoon season, from the third day of the bright half of the lunar month of Sawan up to the full moon of Sawan, a span of about thirteen days, falling in July and August. Sawan is the fifth month in the traditional count and the heart of the rains in Punjab: the paddy is standing in flooded fields, the heat has broken, and the countryside is at its greenest. In the older village calendar the festival could stretch as long as the girls wished, from a few days to four weeks of daily gathering, and it closed on the full moon. That timing, at the peak of the rains, is the whole point of the festival: Teeyan welcomes the monsoon itself.

Swings, Giddha and Boliyan

The centre of Teeyan is the peengh, the swing. Swings are tied to the branches of large trees on the village green or by the pond, and women take turns swinging high while the others sing. The songs are Boliyan, the short, sharp verses of Giddha, Punjab's women's dance, performed in a circle with clapping and teasing call and response. The folk songs of Sawan sung at Teeyan were collected by Devendra Satyarthi and first published in his book Giddha in 1936; one Boliyan asks for the swing to be hung from a high branch, where it will swing by itself. Pairs of girls also dance Kikli, spinning hand in hand in crossed arms, and the festival traditionally closed with Bhallho, a closing dance performed by women standing in two rows.

The sandhara: gifts for daughters and sisters

Teeyan has its own gift, the sandhara. Whether or not a married woman is able to travel to her parents' home, her brothers take or send her a sandhara set for the festival. A sandhara traditionally includes a Punjabi suit or sari to wear for the celebrations, boondi laddoo, bangles, mehndi, the henna with which hands and feet are decorated at Teeyan, and even a swing. Parents and in laws also give to the newly married woman in her first Sawan. The gift is the family's way of saying that a married daughter is still claimed and celebrated by her own home, and its arrival, carried by a brother, is one of the small ceremonies of the Punjabi summer.

What foods belong to Teeyan?

The foods of Teeyan are the sweet, fried foods of the rainy season, made at home and shared at the gathering. Kheer, the rice pudding, is served with poorhi, fried bread, in the combination Punjabis call kheer poorhe, eaten sitting together as the rain falls. Gulgule, balls of wheat flour in jaggery syrup, fried until dark and sweet, are the festival's signature snack, alongside malpura, halwa, and mandey, the thin breads stretched by hand rather than rolled. At Teej fairs, called Teelan in some accounts, stalls sell bangles, juttis and clothes, and the mehndi stalls are the main attraction. The menu is part of the meaning: Sawan is a month of relative rest in the fields, and its foods are celebration foods, not harvest foods.

How is Teeyan kept today?

The old daily village gathering has faded in many places, as Devendra Satyarthi's Punjab of a century ago has changed, but Teeyan has not disappeared: it has moved. Schools and colleges in Punjab hold Teeyan programmes with mehndi, rangoli, singing and Giddha competitions, and titles such as Miss Teej. Villages and cities hold Teeyan melas in halls and on open ground, with singers and DJs where the Boliyan once stood alone. In the diaspora, in Canada, Britain, Australia and the United States, women organise Teeyan gatherings each Sawan, and for many families they have become a deliberate way of handing Punjabi culture to daughters born abroad. The swing is now sometimes a photograph backdrop rather than a branch over the pond, but the gathering itself, women and girls together, singing the rains in, is recognisably the same festival that Punjab has kept for centuries, and it sits in the year between Lohri in the cold and the harvest at Vaisakhi as Sawan's own celebration.