Siddhi Goma Wrestling Gujarat African Diaspora

The Siddhi community of Gujarat, Karnataka, and Hyderabad are descendants of East African Bantu-speaking peoples brought to the Indian subcontinent as enslaved workers, sailors, soldiers, and court attendants by Arab, Portuguese, and Indian sultans between the 9th and 19th centuries. Estimated at 50,000–55,000 people in India today, the Siddhi maintain a distinct cultural identity that integrates African performance traditions — most prominently the Goma (also called Dhamaal in Hyderabad) ritual drumming and possession dance — with Hindu and Muslim religious practice. Siddhi Goma is a healing and thanksgiving ceremony in which participants enter trance states through sustained drumming on the large barrel drum (santur, or in Gujarat the dohol), singing in Swahili-derived ritual language fragments (called Kali Bhasha, literally 'black language'), and circular communal dancing. The ceremony is held at shrines of Siddhi saints (particularly Bava Gor, venerated at Ratanpur near Bharuch in Gujarat), in response to illness, to fulfil vows, or at seasonal festivals. The Siddhi also maintain a traditional therapeutic wrestling tradition linked to male physical training in the garrison soldier tradition. UNESCO and IGNCA have documented Siddhi Goma as an endangered intangible cultural heritage. Siddhi community land rights in their forest villages in Una taluka, Junagadh, and coastal Gujarat are threatened by infrastructure development and tourism projects, which would displace the communities from the ritual sites central to their cultural practice.