Cultural identities in folk dance: Tharu dance songs and indigenous modernity

This article examines how contemporary Tharu dance songs serve as expressive platforms through which indigenous identity interacts with, negotiates, and influences modern pressures. Utilising a library-based interpretive approach, it draws on Giddens’ theories of modernity and self-identity, Appadurai’s ideas of imagination and global cultural flows, and scholarship on indigenous modernities to analyse selected Tharu performances. The analysis shows how these songs portray the bazaar and the city as spaces of aspiration, convey romance and gendered agency through consumerism, evoke migration and strong bonds to ancestral lands, challenge class structures and legacies of servitude, reflect evolving moral values through religious conversion, and incorporate digital media into daily life. Together, these performances serve as a form of public awareness, combining fascination with modern commodities with a deep sense of land, memory and community ethics. The study provides a performance-centred view on indigenised modernity in Nepal’s Tarai, emphasising how Tharu cultural creators adopt new technologies and genres while preserving historical traditions that reinforce their collective identity.