How can community dance express, sustain, and negotiate Indigenous identity, memory, knowledge, and belonging, especially in marginalized postcolonial geographies? This British Academy-Leverhulme Small Research Grants-funded project explores the resurgence of Sakela Sili ‘dance’ of the Kirat Rai community in the Eastern Himalayan region of the Darjeeling Hills and Sikkim, examining how indigeneity is articulated, represented, and contested in the contemporary Himalayan region of South Asia.
Over the past decade, Indigenous ‘folk dances’ like Sakela Sili have seen a notable resurgence in the Eastern Himalayan borderlands. Once considered marginal, they are gaining public visibility and extending beyond geopolitical borders of Eastern Nepal into Sikkim and Darjeeling in India. This revival reflects regional politics of indigeneity and is influenced by global Indigenous rights movements.Yet public presentations often frame these dances as colourful cultural heritage, sidelining their knowledge, histories, and political claims. While visibility may bring state recognition, it can also reshape living practices to fit official narratives of identity and belonging. The resurgence reveals dance as a contested site, where community assertions and state power intersect. Community dances like Sakela Sili merit further study, as they are often marginalised within dominant academic and public discourses surrounding indigeneity, identity, and performance in South Asia and globally.
The project approaches Indigenous dance as a way of knowing, remembering, and making claims to identity, place, and belonging, and is distinctive for its creative participatory methodology and collaborative approach. The research involves ‘Storytelling through Dancing’ workshops, which serve as both data-collection and community/public-engagement methods, bringing movement, oral histories, stories, and collective reflection into the research process. The project takes a collaborative approach, with local collaborators playing a key role in co-designing the ‘Storytelling through Dancing’ workshop and its interpretation.
The collaborators include:
- Sikkim Project: The Land and its People, Dumigaon Reading Room Resource and Education Foundation, Sikkim, India.
- Muhaan: Rural Tourism, Conservation and Curated Events, Kalimpong. West Bengal, India.
- Project Chinta: Online archival collective, Darjeeling, West Bengal, India.
The project explores the following key themes:
I. Dance, Knowledge and Belonging:
‘Dancing Indigeneity in the Eastern Himalaya’ investigates how Kirat Rai communities in the Sikkim-Darjeeling Himalaya express and negotiate Indigenous identity through dance. Working closely with community members and grassroots collaborators, the project explores Sakela Sili as a living practice through which relationships with land, ancestry, memory and community are sustained and reworked, and how Indigenous cosmological knowledge and lifeworlds are sustained through embodied practices like Sakela Sili.
II. Recognition and Representation
The research examines not only the role of dance in sustaining Indigenous knowledge and identity, but also how it can serve as a tool of representation in borderland communities' demands for state recognition as ‘Scheduled Tribes’ in India. As such, the research also asks what happens when Indigenous dance enters political discourse, public spaces, cultural and touristic events, and official representations of regional identity. How do community members understand and negotiate these forms of visibility? When does recognition support community priorities, and when might it reshape or appropriate cultural meanings?
III. Storytelling through Dancing
Methodologically, the research combines interviews, observation, and autoethnographic reflection with two collaborative ‘Storytelling through Dancing’ workshops. Bringing together community elders, young people and dance practitioners, and co-designed with grassroots collaborators, these workshops use movement, memory-work, and storytelling to explore the meanings carried by Sakela Sili. They also investigate dance as a form of embodied counter-mapping, exploring ways to express relationships with place through gestures, memories, and verbal narratives that conventional maps may overlook.
IV. Collaboration and Co-Production
The project works closely with the Sikkim Project, Muhaan, and Project Chinta, grounding the research in the region's existing cultural heritage practices. A Community Engagement Team (CET), which is the project's steering group, contributes to the development of research agenda, workshop design and discussion of representation and ethical and cultural protocols. This approach recognises collaborators as contributors to the project’s intellectual direction and interpretation.
Dr Rohini Rai - Dr Rohini Rai is a sociologist of race, ethnicity, indigeneity and migration, and the Lecturer in Sociology of Race at Brunel University of London.
She earned her PhD at the University of Manchester, where her thesis titled, 'Northeastern Delhi: 'Race', Space and Identity in a Postcolonial, Globalising City' examined the racialisation of and everyday racism experienced by internal migrants from India’s Northeastern and Himalayan borderlands in Delhi. After her PhD, Rohini worked at the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE), University of Manchester, on an ESRC-funded project examining ethnic inequalities in UK higher education, focusing on decolonising British History and Geography.
Since joining Brunel in 2022, Rohini has led the British Academy SHAPE Involve and Engage Grant (2023-2024), on a project titled ‘Indigenising the Himalaya: Reimagining its past, present and futures’, in partnership with the Royal Geographical Society, which examined ‘diasporic indigeneity’ through archives, dance and stories. Rohini was also awarded with Brunel Public Engagement Funds (PEF, 2024) to curate a public engagement event– The London Himalayan Short Film Festival (2024) in collaboration with Brunel South Asia Studies Research Group, the Critical Himalayan Collective and Brunel Nepali Student Society. She currently leads a British Academy-Leverhulme Small Research Grants (2026-2028) project titled ‘Dancing Indigeneity in the Eastern Himalaya: Politics of Recognition and State Appropriation through Sakela Sili’, which examines the politics of indigeneity in Sikkim-Darjeeling Himalaya through the lens of Sakela Sili dance.
Rohini's work is interdisciplinary, collaborative, and community-engaged, involving diverse stakeholders such as UK-based Himalayan diasporic Indigenous organisations (including Kirat Rai Yayokkha, Kirat Yakthung Chumlung, and World Newah Organisation UK) and grassroots cultural-heritage groups in Sikkim and Darjeeling. She is the co-editor of European Bulletin of Himalayan Research (EBHR) and an international board member of Ethnic and Racial Studies journal. Outside academia, she has curated public events like the London Himalayan Short Film Festival (2024) and co-founded the Critical Himalayan Collective