Hikat Dance

Hikat Mikat on the night of Maenzraath, Night of Henna.

Hikat, the Kashmiri folk dance in which two young girls hold each other’s hand in a cross and try to swirl the other girl round in circles. First slowly and then as the beat of the music gets faster and as the laws of physics come into effect, a momentum, their feet come closer and body weight moves to the back , an orbit, now their toes almost touch, for a brief moment, laws of nature completely take over, no need to move, and in that perfect brief moment the two girls swirl around together in pure joy.

8 Replies to “Hikat Dance”

  1. Hi,
    It reminds me of a funny incident which took place at one of my cousin’s wedding where two ladies got up to do this hikat thing. After few seconds one of the ladies lost her grip and much to her embarassment landed on some uncle’s lap who was sitting nearby.If I remember correctly none of the ladies present tried to attempt the stunt after that.

  2. That’s the fun of Hikat… Haha! Thanks for sharing that!
    Reminds me of something that happened at another wedding, I watched it on video recently: An old Dadiji with a recently recovered slip disk got up to do Hikat with her Bahu. They were the grandmother and mother of the to-be-Bride. After half a slow round, somehow Bahu’s hand lost grip of Dadiji’s hand and the grand old lady flew straight down to the ground. It looked brutal. The entire nach-gana had to be stopped and everyone got worried. Mercifully, she wasn’t seriously injured, no more disc damage. But that was the last performance of the night.
    Hikat should be left to really young people, even my old bones can’t handle the kind of torque that it generates some time. But I guess that’s exactly why people get up to do Hikat and almost compete with children. It makes one feel youthful.

  3. I completely agree with u.Sometimes hikat can lead to tricky situations like the one u mentioned above.i’ve also seen girls/ ladies banging into each other in excitement while trying to outdo each other in hikat competitions.i think it wud be much safer if ladies stick to their usual air kicking dance(rouf).Its pretty harmless and you have a bunch of other ladies supporting you on either side in case you doze off while doing the same step again n again:)

  4. Haha…come on, Rouf is not that slow..ok it’s slow…but then it’s rhythm gives it real strength. Remember line dancing, even slow rhythmic line dancing, even in which some of the women participants are asleep, if done right, can breach the critical response frequency of a structure and bring the house down.

  5. Hakit (or Haekit) is the culminating end of the rejoicing Kashmiri female folk dance ROUVE. It is not an identical dance in itself. It is to be noted that most of the people confuse ROUF and ROUVE. Rouf is a singing genre, sung by a male folk-singer after Chhakri – the folk singing genre, while as Rouve is the most popular female dance of the performing arts of Kashmir.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Facebook
YouTube
Instagram
RSS