History and the tribes who dance it

Dhimsa is older than the state border it now straddles. Its origins are usually traced to the Koraput hills of what is today southern Odisha, and it travelled with the hill communities into the Araku Valley and the agency tracts above Visakhapatnam, where it became so much the signature dance that it is now effectively the cultural emblem of the region.

A dance of many tribes

No single community owns Dhimsa. Sources differ on the exact count — some name a handful of tribes, others say nearly eighteen communities of the Paderu agency region dance it — but the names that appear again and again are:

• Porja (Poraja) — with whom the dance is most strongly associated; Porja women's Dhimsa is the version most visitors see,
• Bagata, Valmiki, Khond, Kotia, Gadaba — major communities of the Araku and Paderu hills,
• Kondadora, Mukadora, Jatapu, Konda Savara and other neighbouring communities across the Andhra–Odisha border country.

That shared ownership is unusual and important: Dhimsa functions as a common language between communities that farm the same hills, attend each other's markets and marry across villages. At a big festival, chains from different villages dance side by side.

From village ground to state symbol

Through the twentieth century Dhimsa moved outward from the villages: to district fairs, to state cultural festivals, to Republic Day parades. The tribal welfare administration (the ITDA) began teaching it in its residential schools, which is how tens of thousands of schoolchildren in the agency areas now learn it formally as well as at home. Araku's tourism growth added a further stage: the tribal museum and coffee museum in Araku present Dhimsa to visitors year-round.

The arc reached a peak on 1 August 2026, when the state government assembled around 13,000 schoolgirl dancers at Bhogapuram for a Guinness World Record — a village circle dance performed at airport-inauguration scale, in front of the Prime Minister.

Last updated: 2026-08-04