Santhal Dance

Understand

Where Santhal Dance comes from

The Santhal (or Santal) are the largest Adivasi (Scheduled Tribe) community in India, with several million people concentrated in Jharkhand, West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Assam. Their dances — most distinctively the Baha dance performed during the Baha parab spring festival — are central to community life and to the Santhal Sarna religious tradition. The Lungi Panchi dance, in particular, is the most-documented Santhal dance style of the Birbhum and Purulia districts of West Bengal, and is performed by both men and women together at weekly haats and at festivals.

How it's practiced

Santhal men and women dance in separate parallel lines facing one another. Female dancers wear the distinctive lungi-panchi — a red-bordered white sari wrapped like a lungi — from which the dance takes its name. Male dancers wear dhoti and adorn themselves with turbans, fresh tree leaves and flowers. The two lines move in coordinated steps to the rhythm of the madal hand-drum, accompanied by flute, dhamsa, jhanj cymbals, kartal and shehnai. The harmony of the parallel movements is the dance's defining feature.