The story
Sangrai Water Festival in Bandarban
Sangrai is the Marma community's version of the Chittagong Hill Tracts new year, most visible in Bandarban's week-long water festival, when Marma youths douse each other and passersby as a symbolic cleansing of the old year. It runs alongside quieter rites such as Buddha statue-bathing, lamp-lighting and elder worship on the Marma calendar.
Marma youths in Bandarban spend the closing days of Sangrai drenching each other with buckets and hosepipes of water, a ritual explicitly framed as washing away the past year's grief and wrongdoing before the new year begins.