In the village of Saloor-Dungra in Garhwal, the Ramman festival unfolds each year — a ten-day ritual theatre of masked performance, song, and drumming in honor of the local deity, Bhumiyal Devta. At the center are hereditary drummers whose dhol and damau rhythms call the gods to dance, sustaining a tradition encoded in Dhol Sagar, an oral text of rhythms passed down through generations.

But behind the performances lives an ongoing struggle. The drummers belong to marginalized castes, celebrated during ritual yet constrained by caste boundaries the rest of the year. Many resist not only social exclusion but also the pressures of orthodox Hinduism, transforming the very power of percussion into a tool of survival, dignity, and defiance.

The story unfolds against a shifting backdrop: young people leaving the mountains for cities, agriculture giving way to wage labor and migration, villages depopulating, and the Ramman festival itself struggling for survival. As masks are carved and rhythms rehearsed, the film traces how the drummers negotiate reverence and stigma, holding on to their inheritance while reimagining music as resistance in a changing Uttarakhand.

DUNGRA is a portrait of music, caste, and struggle in the Himalayas — the lives of drummers who keep invoking the gods even as they push back against the hierarchies that bind them.