Prime Minister will witness the world’s biggest jhumur dance in history in Guwahati’s Sarusajai Stadium at the Jhumoir Binandini 2025 to mark the 200th anniversary of Assam’s tea industry.
Jhumur is the dance of Assam’s traditional ‘tea-tribes’.
Tea Tribes - The term “tea tribe” 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.
These tea gardens were setup by British.
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.
Socio-economically, however, remain marginalised, and among the poorest in the state.
Jhumur dance - The tea garden community brought a motley collection of cultural practices from their homelands to Assam including 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 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, borrow from Assamese.
These songs tells the history of migration and the exploitative labour relations mar their lives.
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.
