PM Modi to attend ‘biggest ever’ jhumur event in Guwahati today: All about the tribal dance

Here’s all you need to know about jhumur, the traditional dance of Assam’s “tea tribes”.

What is the tea garden community?

The term “tea tribe” loosely refers to a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic community of tea garden workers and their descendants. These people came from Central India — mostly from present-day Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and West Bengal — and settled in Assam in the 19th century to work in the tea gardens that the British were setting up.

This migration was often forced, and even when it was not, it occurred in highly exploitative circumstances. Not only did migrants work under abysmal conditions at the tea gardens for very little pay, but they were also not free to leave. Thousands died of diseases during the journey to Assam and at the tea gardens, and hundreds were killed or brutally punished by British planters for trying to flee the estates.

Today, the descendants of these people are primarily concentrated in districts with a large concentration of tea estates, namely Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Sivasagar, Charaideo, Golaghat, Lakhimpur, Sonitpur and Udalguri in Upper Assam, and Cachar and Karimganj in the Barak Valley. They currently have Other Backward Classes (OBC) status in the state, although they have long been fighting for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status. Tribes such as the Munda or the Santhal, a part of the larger tea garden community in Assam, have ST status in the states where they originally came from.

According to the website of Assam’s Directorate of Tea Tribes and Adivasi Welfare, “these people not only constitute a sizable chunk of the population in the state but also play a major role in tea production of the state”. Socio-economically, however, remain marginalised, and among the poorest in the state.

And what is the Jhumur dance?

The tea garden community brought a motley collection of cultural practices from their homelands to Assam. Of particular note in this regard is the jhumur tradition.

Jhumur is the folk dance of the Sadan ethnolinguistic group, who trace their origins to the Chotanagpur region. Today it occupies a central place in what are known as “tea garden festivals” or festivals celebrated by tea garden workers in Assam. The most important ones are the Tushu Puja and Karam Puja, which celebrate the oncoming harvest.

Women are the main dancers and singers, while men play traditional instruments such as madal, dhol, or dhak (drums), cymbals, flutes, and shehnai. The attire worn varies from community to community, although red and white sarees are particularly popular among women.

Dancers stand shoulder-to-shoulder and move in coordinated patterns with precise footwork while singing couplets in their native languages — Nagpuri, Khortha and Kurmali. These have evolved in Assam to borrow heavily from Assamese.

While set to upbeat tunes and lively rhythms, the subject of Jhumur songs in Assam, however, can often be grim. “These songs bring to life, and unravel the fissures in the lives of tea plantation workers… [and] tells us a lot about… [their] history of migration and the exploitative labour relations mar their lives,” Nidhi Gogoi, a research scholar at the Gauhati University, wrote in her paper ‘Jhumur folk tradition: A socio-cultural identity of tea community in Assam’ (2022).

The tradition thus also acts as a means of social cohesion, more so given the history of displacement of the tea garden communities. It aided them in not only retaining aspects of their culture and identity but also in making sense of the world their ancestors found themselves in.