In the mountain villages of Saloor-Dungra in Chamoli, hereditary Dalit drummers carry rhythms that shape the heartbeat of the community. Their dhol and damau guide weddings, funerals, festivals, and the shifting seasons of village life, preserving an oral tradition passed down over generations. Yet the beauty of these rhythms masks the weight of the labor behind them. Drumming is essential to the village, but it rarely pays enough to live on, and the same drummers who are called to lead rituals must also take on dangerous road-building and construction work along unstable Himalayan slopes to survive.

At the center of DUNGRA are these cultural workers and the worlds they sustain. Their position in the caste hierarchy forces them to navigate conditions of coercion and precarity, where ritual obligations can be demanded without fair compensation and refusal can carry real consequences. At the same time, their music becomes a form of dignity and endurance, carrying memory, identity, and a quiet defiance. Their struggles echo those of other marginalized groups in the region, including women whose agricultural labor holds the village together, and Muslim families who face rising communal hostility. Though their experiences differ, they share a landscape of vulnerability shaped by caste, gender, class, and majoritarian politics.

The series unfolds in a Himalayan region undergoing rapid transformation. Youth leave the village for cities in search of work. Agriculture becomes increasingly untenable. Neoliberal development and unchecked construction destabilize the land, displacing the poorest communities first. State-backed religious nationalism intensifies existing hierarchies, deepening the fault lines that divide the hills. Against this backdrop, everyday life becomes a record of both survival and erosion, where labor is constant, migration is inevitable, and the future of cultural knowledge hangs in the balance.

DUNGRA is a portrait of work, sound, and resilience in the Himalayas. It follows drummers, women, children, and elders as they navigate a world shaped by beauty and inequality in equal measure. The series reimagines Himalayan music not as timeless folklore but as the living labor of people confronting caste oppression, economic precarity, and political upheaval. Through their rhythms and their stories, DUNGRA reveals a quieter but enduring truth: in the struggle for dignity, culture itself becomes a form of resistance.