Jhumur Dance

Understand

Where Jhumur Dance comes from

Jhumur (also spelled Jhumair or Jhumar) is a folk dance and song form traditionally associated with the Sadan and other Indo-Aryan agricultural communities of the Chotanagpur plateau, and performed widely by Adivasi communities across Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Assam and the western districts of West Bengal. The tradition is closely tied to the harvest season and to festivals such as Karam and Tusu, and was documented as a 'folk dance of East India' in the Sangeet Natak Akademi's ethnographic literature of the 1970s.

How it's practiced

Jhumur performers stand in a row or circle holding hands, sway their bodies, clap in unison and sing couplets in a call-and-response pattern, occasionally punctuating the rhythm with timed jumps. The accompanying music is loud and percussive — the central instruments are the mandar (a barrel drum), the dhol, the nagara (a large kettle-drum) and the bansuri flute. Jhumur is performed by both men and women in village squares, in fields after the harvest, and at the great open-air melas of western Bengal.