Earthen houses are practiced as a traditional and low-cost housing in many countries around the globe. These houses were exposed to unacceptable earthquake (EQ) risks despite their environmental benefits. Past earthquakes including the recent past 2017 Tripura EQ has evidenced significant damages mostly in earthen/masonry houses which are built in a non-engineered manner. In this context, the current study aims to investigate the seismic behavior and failure patterns of both unreinforced and using proposed retrofitted rammed earth model houses (with and without openings) built using typical Tripura soils having higher silt content using unidirectional shake table experiments on total 26 physical models. Besides, both seismic strength and structural stability are also examined for retrofitted earthen houses. The study indicates that, proposed novel low-cost natural fiber made textile encasing reinforcement technique has exhibited promising seismic performance of such houses from the view point of structural strength and ductile behavior as compared to traditional cementitious additives and fiber blended stabilized retrofitted houses as well untreated houses. The fundamental lateral period of model unreinforced and reinforced houses found within the range of 0.08 to 0.15 s respectively which indicates increased stiffness of walls due to strengthening may decrease the lateral period maximum up to 46.67%. On the other hand, the maximum increase in seismic strength was observed in order of 4.50 to 6.31 times in the case of bitumen treated bamboo fiber textile based encased houses with L-shaped bamboo splint corner reinforcement whereas traditional cementitious stabilized method has offered maximum 1.13 to 1.83 times increment in lateral strength. Further, the effect of different parametric variations such as area of openings (doors and windows), thickness to height ratio, variation in compaction methodologies on seismic performances of unreinforced rammed earthen houses were also studied in detail. Finally, regression based closed form predictive expressions for seismic strength of rammed earthen houses and without retrofitting are proposed herein. The performed cost analysis study will also help to assess the effectiveness of proposed strengthening techniques.