The Adivasi Should Not Dance

Assam's grand displays of culture ignore the issues of indigenous communities /Communities

- MANORANJAN PEGU

On the evening of 24 February 2025, more than eight thousand artists, dressed in traditional white and red attire, danced to the tunes and drum beats of Jhumoir—a song and a dance with origins in the Chota Nagpur plateau—at the Sarusajai Stadium in Guwahati. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Himanta Biswa Sarma, Assam’s chief minister, and other dignitaries watched. The event, titled “Jhumoir Binandini”—which can be translated as blissful Jhumoir in Assamese—was presented and marketed as a celebration of 200 years of the tea industry in Assam during the Advantage Assam 2.0 Investment and Infrastructure Summit. The dance was a side show to the state government’s efforts to attract business investments.

It was not the first instance a traditional dance form was performed as a well-choreographed spectacle for dignitaries. This is part of a continuing trend, under Sarma, of transforming vibrant dance forms into orchestrated displays to set “world records.” In April 2023, the government got together 11,298 artists from across the state on the occasion of Bohag Bihu, to perform the largest Bihu dance ever recorded at a single venue. Modi was in attendance then too. A right to information application filed later revealed that the event cost the state exchequer a whopping ₹53 crore.

Soon after the Bihu performance, various outlets reported that the Assam government would get artists to perform the Bagurumba, which is the traditional dance of the Bodo community, another attempt to create another world record. Various Bodo organisations, along with the United People’s Party Liberal, which is in majority in the Bodoland Territorial Council and an ally of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, would plan this mega initiative. The Bodos are the largest tribe in Assam. On 16 March this year, Sarma declared that the event would be held in October, at the Sarusajai Stadium in Guwahati, and that it would involve nearly eight to ten thousand performers.