Arunachal: Girl group Gilithigrims is turning Arunachal into the next world of pop
Arunachal Pradesh: Arunachal Pradesh is one of the most culturally rich states in the country. It shares borders with China, Bhutan, and Myanmar. It has 26 major tribes and over a hundred dialects. Its people are deeply rooted, its landscapes are unlike anywhere else in India, and its young people are talented in ways that the rest of the country is only beginning to notice. Many of them carry those talents to Delhi, to Bangalore, to Mumbai. Some dream of Seoul. Most find that the world they want to reach does not come looking for them here.
“I used to watch K-pop and gave many online auditions,” she says, “but I was never selected. After that, I thought, why can’t we do something ourselves? If we can’t go there, we can start from our own state.”
That decision, to start from their own state on their own terms, is how Gilithigreams was born. The name is a compression of the phrase “girls with big dreams,” syllables collapsed into a single word that didn’t exist before they made it. Which, it turns out, is exactly how they built everything else, too.
Northeast India exists in the Indian imagination mostly as a postcard: the living root bridges of Meghalaya, the Hornbill Festival of Nagaland, a kind of exotic periphery that gets acknowledged around Republic Day and forgotten the rest of the year. Within that already-peripheral region, Arunachal Pradesh sits furthest from the centre. It is staggeringly beautiful and chronically underfunded. For a young person from the Northeast who wants to perform, the path has almost always run in one direction: outward. The opportunities, the studios, the industry attention, none of it comes here on its own.
Tarh Moyon, Weyo Lumi, Tap Pabe, and Nabam Sasum are all still there. They are also all still students, balancing college with what amounts to a full-time career: separate vocal sessions, separate dance practices, project meetings, live performances, and the logistical nightmare of making music without a label, a studio, or government support of any kind. “Everything. Music, dance studios, performances, we manage ourselves,” Moyon says. “We earn from live performances and use that money to produce music and pay for dance studios.”
Nobody handed them an infrastructure. They built one out of gig money, group chats, and the particular stubbornness that comes from having no other option.
The group started in 2021, not as a pop act but as a dance crew. For two years, they competed in different dance events, and they lost. Repeatedly. Without winning a single title.
Two years of losing does specific things to a group’s ambitions. The easy frame is perseverance, girls who kept going despite failure, and that is partly right. But more precisely, the losses radicalised them. If the existing structures wouldn’t recognise them, they would build a structure that didn’t require recognition.
Moyon had been joking, half-seriously, about forming a pop group. Then she stopped joking. “After some time, she gathered everyone together and finally revealed the real reason behind creating the group,” one member recalls. Her main goal was never simply fame. It was more specific and more lasting: preserving their culture, keeping their mother tongue alive through music, making sure that the languages spoken in their hills, Galo, Apatani, Nyishi and others, would exist somewhere beyond the homes and the hills that produced them.
When she laid it out seriously, the others admitted they had wanted the same thing and hadn’t thought it was actually possible.
In December 2024, Gilithigreams officially debuted as a pop group with “Morom To”, a song Moyon had written before the group even knew what they were doing. She chose the title first, then built the song around it; verse by verse, pre-chorus by chorus. When she brought it to the others, the initial reaction was doubt. Nobody expected it to become a hit. The views crept up slowly, and then kept creeping, and gradually they started believing in themselves more seriously. Two more releases followed: “Naso Soto,” and a Hindi song “Tum Hi Ho”, an unexpected choice that showed the group was not interested in limiting what they could be.
Their choreography is built the same way their decisions are made: collectively, across distance. The four members live in different places. When they need to create, they pick one location and converge. They listen to the beat together and talk through what moves might fit which parts of the song. Everyone contributes. Nobody’s idea is discarded without being heard. It is, structurally, the opposite of how the music industry usually works, where decisions filter down from above. Here, everything runs sideways, through consensus.
What is striking about Gilithigreams, in person, is how little of the usual performance of ambition is present. They do not talk over each other to make their point. They laugh at themselves easily. When asked who is most likely to oversleep and miss soundcheck, every finger in th
