🥁Music & Dance of Uttarakhand

The night-long ritual that calls the gods

Jagar is the ritual music of the hills, sung through the night to wake a local deity and call it into the body of a chosen medium. It is worship, drama and folk memory at once, and it is one of the oldest living traditions in Uttarakhand.

Chholiya, Jhora, Pandav Nritya and more

Uttarakhand's folk dances run from martial sword play to slow harvest circles to ritual dance-drama. Almost all are communal, danced in a group to the dhol-damau, and tied to a festival, a wedding or a season.

The sword-and-shield dance of Kumaon

Chholiya is Kumaon's martial dance, performed with a sword in one hand and a shield in the other, most often at the head of a wedding procession. It looks like a stylised duel and is said to go back around a thousand years to Rajput battle tradition.

The communal circle dances of the hills

Jhora, Jhumaila and Chanchari are the circle dances of Uttarakhand: large, slow-building rings of men and women who link arms and move together to a single drum and a shared song. They are the sociable heart of a hill fair.

The dhol, damau, hurka and hill horns

The music of Uttarakhand is drum music above all. The paired dhol and damau are the backbone of every ceremony, joined by the hourglass hurka, long brass horns and a struck brass plate. The knowledge of how to play them is a hereditary craft.

Narendra Singh Negi, Bedu Pako and the voices of the hills

Garhwali and Kumaoni song is one of the most alive parts of hill culture, and a handful of singers turned it into a shared identity. From the anthem Bedu Pako to the modern classics of Narendra Singh Negi, these are the voices the hills know by heart.