Let The Gods Dance

A Documentary Series About Himalayan Music and Dance

This doc series is set primarily in and around the villages and towns in the central Himalayas of Uttarakhand. Uttarakhand is a state in Northern India, also known as "The Land of the Gods" for its many Hindu pilgrimage destinations.

Within Uttarakhand there are two regions: Kumaon and Garhwal. This series takes a closer look at the history, culture, and politics surrounding the lives of the musicians who live and perform in Garhwal -- we'll take a look even more specifically at the hereditary drummers who play as pairs or duos on drums called the dhol and the damaun.

In this series we'll explore the lives of hereditary drummers though tensions of caste, class, gender, age, and labor.  Despite claims that caste prejudice has been widely eliminated, casteism remains alive in synchrony with practices of globalization in both rural and urban Indian communities.

Hereditary drummers of rural Himalayas are all too often thought to belong to a “backward India”, and they face many obstacles to gain admission into a “modern India”. Their social identity, divergent educational, and career opportunities, and political power can, in some ways, be framed in relation to the paradox of “Two Indias”:

A largely rural, “backward” India that continues to fight poverty, illiteracy, and casteism is often contrasted with an urbanized, enlightened, neoliberal India that has embraced global capitalism. Yet, this series seeks to complicate this binary picture of contemporary India. Casteism and poverty are not exclusively rural issues, nor are modernization and neoliberalism exclusively urban issues.

Using a parallel to Michelle Alexander's racial analysis of The New Jim Crow in US cities, casteism remains a powerful yet unofficial form of discrimination as many resources remain out of reach of the rural Indian Himalayan communities.

Young drummers who come from lower-caste families, expected to repeat the cycles of their ancestors, are now turning toward new imaginations of their future -- willingly and unwillingly searching for opportunities outside the village and beyond their hereditary occupations.