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विषय के अनुसार देखें

वही सामग्री, दूसरे सिरे से — सभी प्रकाशित क्षेत्रों के हर व्यंजन, नृत्य, शिल्प और जगह एक साथ।

व्यंजन 1210

नाम	क्षेत्र	प्रकार	टिप्पणी
Coconut fish curry	Andaman Islands	मांसाहारी	Snapper, grouper, kingfish or tuna in coconut milk with chilli, turmeric and tamarind or lime. The islands' common dish, arrived at independently by households from three different mainland traditions.
Shorshe maach, Andaman version	Andaman Islands	मांसाहारी	Fish in a ground-mustard and green-chilli paste, cooked in mustard oil. The technique is East Bengal's; the fish is whatever the Junglighat jetty landed that morning, which is a saltwater fish the technique was not written for.
Meen kuzhambu, Andaman version	Andaman Islands	मांसाहारी	The Tamil tamarind fish curry — curry leaf, mustard seed, tamarind, plenty of chilli — cooked in settler households of Tamil and Telugu origin. Set beside the Bengali dish it makes the islands' two-strand kitchen immediately legible.
Crab curry	Andaman Islands	मांसाहारी	Mud crab from the mangrove creeks, cooked either in coconut milk or in a thick chilli-and-tomato masala. The creeks are the crab's habitat and the reason the dish belongs here rather than being borrowed.
Fried fish	Andaman Islands	मांसाहारी	Steaks or whole fish rubbed with turmeric, chilli and salt and shallow-fried. What most households actually eat most nights, and the format in which unfamiliar reef species get used up.
Prawn and squid preparations	Andaman Islands	मांसाहारी	Coconut-milk prawn curries, dry-fried squid with onion and chilli. Squid is a relatively recent commercial catch here and has moved into the home kitchen from the market rather than the other way round.
Shutki — dried fish	Andaman Islands	मांसाहारी	Salted and dried fish pounded with chilli, onion and mustard oil, or cooked with vegetables. A Bengali settler staple, monsoon insurance, and the strongest-smelling thing in any island kitchen.
Pork with bamboo shoot	Andaman Islands	मांसाहारी	Cooked in the Karen villages around Mayabunder and in Chota Nagpur Adivasi settlements — pork slow-cooked with fermented or fresh bamboo shoot and chilli. It is the clearest culinary marker of the islands' Burmese and Adivasi populations.
Rice and leaf-wrapped preparations	Andaman Islands	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Rice-flour dumplings and leaf-wrapped steamed items made in Chota Nagpur Adivasi households, kept up as festival and household food since the community arrived from the Ranchi region a century ago.
Idli, dosa and filter coffee	Andaman Islands	शाकाहारी	The Tamil breakfast, which is what Port Blair actually eats in the morning. It arrived with the colonisation-scheme families and became the town's default breakfast rather than one community's.
Grilled lobster and tandoori fish	Andaman Islands	मांसाहारी	The tourist-era dish, cooked at the beach shacks of Swaraj Dweep and the Port Blair restaurants. Honest to name as such — it is thirty years old, not a hundred and fifty, and it is very good.
Coconut water and tender coconut	Andaman Islands	शाकाहारी	Sold everywhere and drunk constantly. On an island where the water supply is rain-dependent this is a practical drink as much as a pleasant one.
Andaman Karen Musley rice	Andaman Islands	शाकाहारी	A rice landrace grown by the Karen community, registered as a geographical indication in December 2024 — the first formal recognition of anything the islands' settler agriculture produced.
Katarni chura with dahi and gur	Anga & Seemanchal	शाकाहारी	Flattened rice from the aromatic Katarni landrace, eaten with thick curd and jaggery. It holds a geographical indication, and locally it is the standard by which all other chura is dismissed.
Machh-bhaat with mustard	Anga & Seemanchal	मांसाहारी	River and pond fish in a thin turmeric-and-mustard gravy, moving towards a ground-mustard paste as you go east. Rohu, katla, boal and, when the season allows, hilsa.
Makhana kheer and roasted makhana	Anga & Seemanchal	शाकाहारी	Popped foxnut in reduced milk, or dry-roasted with salt — the region's most exported food.
Litti-chokha	Anga & Seemanchal	शाकाहारी	Present, and eaten, but visibly less central than in Magadh and Bhojpur — the western half of the region's claim on the eastern plain's staple.
Ghugni and chura	Anga & Seemanchal	शाकाहारी	Black gram or peas with ginger over flattened rice — the standard morning meal on the Bihar side.
Shutki and fermented fish preparations	Anga & Seemanchal	मांसाहारी	Dried or fermented fish pounded with chilli, garlic and mustard oil, used sparingly as a seasoning in the Surjapuri and Bengali-speaking districts.
Chhena sweets — rasgulla, sandesh, chhena murki	Anga & Seemanchal	शाकाहारी	The Bengal sweet repertoire, made across the eastern districts and increasingly at Bhagalpur — the western limit of split-milk confectionery in India.
Zardalu mango	Anga & Seemanchal	शाकाहारी	A small, intensely aromatic Bhagalpur mango with a geographical indication, in season from late May, and historically sent as a state gift.
Maize roti and makai ka satu	Anga & Seemanchal	शाकाहारी	Maize is the Seemanchal staple crop, eaten as coarse roti and as roasted flour, in a belt that grows more of it than anywhere else in Bihar.
Tilkut and til-gur	Anga & Seemanchal	शाकाहारी	Pounded sesame and jaggery, made from November and eaten heavily at Makar Sankranti.
Handi mutton and Champaran-style meat	Anga & Seemanchal	मांसाहारी	Mutton sealed in an earthen pot with mustard oil and whole spice, now standard across the region's meat kitchens.
Pittha and dal-puri	Anga & Seemanchal	शाकाहारी	Steamed stuffed rice-flour dumplings, and lentil-stuffed fried bread, made at Chhath and at weddings.
Bedmi puri and aloo sabzi	Antarved Doab	शाकाहारी	Urad-stuffed fried bread with a thin, hing-sharp potato curry. Sold from dawn across the region and shading into the Braj version to the west.
Kachori and jalebi	Antarved Doab	शाकाहारी	A gram-stuffed fried pastry eaten with a syrup-heavy jalebi at the same counter. In the cane districts the jalebi is often made with gur rather than refined sugar.
Allahabadi chaat	Antarved Doab	शाकाहारी	The Prayagraj counter tradition — dahi-bade, tamatar chaat, gol gappe with a jaljeera water sharper than elsewhere, and a masala keyed to black salt. Loknath gali is where it is eaten.
Thaggu ke laddu	Antarved Doab	शाकाहारी	A Kanpur institution since the 1930s, sold under a slogan that calls its own maker a swindler and warns that sugar is poison — a shop whose branding is a piece of local satire.
Gajak and rewri	Antarved Doab	शाकाहारी	Sesame and gur beaten and set in brittle sheets, made only in the cold months. Meerut's is the standard against which the rest is measured.
Gur ki kheer and gur ki roti	Antarved Doab	शाकाहारी	Fresh gur folded into rice pudding or into wheat dough during the crushing season, when it is cheap and still soft.
Matar ki ghughri and nimona	Antarved Doab	शाकाहारी	Winter pea dishes — whole peas boiled with ginger and hing, and a coarse ground-pea gravy. Nimona is the region's most quietly loved dish and almost never appears in restaurants.
Arbi ke patte ki kadhi and khatta	Antarved Doab	शाकाहारी	Colocasia leaves rolled with gram-flour paste, steamed, sliced and simmered in a sour yoghurt gravy — the Doab's version of a preparation that runs from Gujarat to Nepal under half a dozen names.
Hapur ka papad and moong badi	Antarved Doab	शाकाहारी	Sun-dried urad and moong preparations from the Upper Doab, made in the summer and eaten all year.
Allahabadi cake	Antarved Doab	शाकाहारी	A dark spiced fruit cake made with petha, marmalade and rum, baked in Prayagraj's old bakeries from Christmas onwards — an Anglo-Indian recipe that became a local one.
Kanpuri kulfi and falooda	Antarved Doab	शाकाहारी	Milk frozen slowly in metal cones set in salted ice, served with vermicelli and rose syrup.
Nihari and biryani of the qasbah towns	Antarved Doab	मांसाहारी	Aligarh, Kanpur and Meerut each have an old Muslim quarter with its own nihari, kebab and biryani trade, closer to Delhi's register than to Lucknow's.
Sattu and gur in the summer	Antarved Doab	शाकाहारी	Roasted gram flour stirred into water with salt or gur — a field worker's meal at the eastern end of the region, thinning out as you move west.
Galouti kebab	Awadh	मांसाहारी	A minced-mutton patty tenderised with raw papaya and a very large spice mix, fried on a shallow tawa so it holds just long enough to reach the plate. The origin story attaches it to an ageing Nawab who had lost his teeth; whether or not that is true, the texture is the whole design.
Kakori kebab	Awadh	मांसाहारी	A seekh kebab of finely minced mutton bound with khoya and worked to a paste so smooth it is barely held on the skewer. Named for the qasbah of Kakori, west of Lucknow.
Lucknawi (pukki) biryani	Awadh	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Meat cooked separately to a pale yoghurt-and-potli gravy, layered with parboiled rice, sealed and finished on dum. Pale, aromatic, and deliberately unlike the Hyderabadi kachchi method in which raw marinated meat and rice cook together.
Nihari–kulcha	Awadh	मांसाहारी	Shank and trotter stewed overnight to a gelatinous gravy and eaten at dawn with a soft kulcha. The Lucknow version is thinner and less fiery than Delhi's, and the pot is traditionally never fully emptied — a base is carried forward to the next day.
Sheermal	Awadh	शाकाहारी	A mildly sweet, saffron-tinted flatbread enriched with milk and ghee and baked against a tandoor wall. Eaten with nihari and korma, and by itself with tea.
Warqi paratha and ulte tawe ka paratha	Awadh	शाकाहारी	Two laminating traditions — one folded into visible leaves, one cooked draped over an inverted tawa so it takes radiant rather than direct heat and stays pliable.
Awadhi korma	Awadh	मांसाहारी	Meat braised in yoghurt with birista, cashew or melon-seed thickening and a potli infusion. Pale gold, no tomato, no visible chilli, and the aroma arrives before the plate does.
Kaliya and pasanda	Awadh	मांसाहारी	Kaliya is the turmeric-yellow braise; pasanda is a cut of leg beaten thin, marinated in yoghurt and cooked slowly. Both belong to the older dastarkhwan and are getting harder to find.
Dum ki arbi and dum aloo Awadhi	Awadh	शाकाहारी	The vegetarian half of the same technique — colocasia or potato hollowed, stuffed, and finished sealed with the identical potli aromatics used for meat.
Bhindi ka salan and lauki musallam	Awadh	शाकाहारी	Household vegetarian cooking from the Kayastha and Brahmin kitchens, using whole spice and mustard oil, and much lighter on aromatics than the professional kitchen.
Sattu and litti at the eastern edge	Awadh	शाकाहारी	Roasted gram flour drunk in summer or stuffed into a baked wheat ball. A Magadh and Bhojpur staple that crosses into eastern Awadh and thins out around Sultanpur.
Malai makhan (nimish)	Awadh	शाकाहारी	A winter-only foam of milk skimmed at dawn after a night under dew, dusted with saffron and pistachio. It collapses within hours, which is why it has never travelled.
Shahi tukda and muzaffar	Awadh	शाकाहारी	Fried bread in reduced milk, and a saffron vermicelli set with dry fruit — the two sweets that close a formal dastarkhwan.
Malai gilori	Awadh	शाकाहारी	A folded milk-solid parcel shaped like a paan, filled with cream and scented with kewra. Ram Asrey in Chowk has been making them since the early nineteenth century.
Bhaat and arhar dal	Bagelkhand	शाकाहारी	Rice and pigeon-pea dal, eaten twice a day where the household can afford it. The dal is thin and soured with tamarind or amchur rather than tomato, and finished with a mustard-seed and garlic tempering poured on at the table.
Baigan bharta	Bagelkhand	शाकाहारी	Brinjal buried in embers until the skin chars, then peeled and mashed with raw mustard oil, onion, garlic and green chilli. Cooked in the ash of a dung or wood fire rather than over a flame — the smoke is the seasoning, and it is the single most-eaten cooked vegetable in the region.
Indrahar	Bagelkhand	शाकाहारी	A festive gram-flour dish of the Bagheli kitchen: the flour is cooked down with water or buttermilk into a thick paste, set, cut into pieces and finished in a spiced gravy. It belongs to the same technique family as Bundeli rikwanch and Rajasthani gatta — three regional answers to making a flour with no gluten behave like a solid.
Bafauri	Bagelkhand	शाकाहारी	Soaked chana dal ground coarse, seasoned with garlic, chilli and coriander, shaped and steamed rather than fried. Steaming rather than frying is what distinguishes it from a pakora, and it keeps for a day.
Chausela	Bagelkhand	शाकाहारी	Rice-flour puris, made by scalding the flour before kneading. Fried for weddings and for the Karma and Diwali seasons, and unknown west of the Bundeli line.
Kodo and kutki bhaat	Bagelkhand	शाकाहारी	Little millet and kodo boiled like rice, eaten with dal, buttermilk or a chutney of chilli and salt. Everyday food across the forest villages of Sidhi, Shahdol and Umaria, and increasingly sold as a premium grain in cities to people who have never eaten it as a staple.
Wild greens and flower buds	Bagelkhand	शाकाहारी	Koilar (Bauhinia) buds, chench, munga leaf, bathua and a long list of seasonal bhaji, boiled and tempered simply. Gathered rather than bought, they carry households through the pre-monsoon weeks when nothing has been harvested and stores are low.
Mahua ki roti and mahua laddu	Bagelkhand	शाकाहारी	Dried mahua boiled back and worked into flour, or ground with til and jaggery into a dense ball. Sweet without sugar, filling, and eaten in the months when a household is buying nothing.
Son and Tamsa river fish	Bagelkhand	मांसाहारी	Rohu, catla, singhi and small local species from the Son and the plateau rivers, cooked plainly with mustard oil, garlic and chilli, or salted and dried. River fish is the region's main non-vegetarian protein; goat appears at weddings and at Adivasi festivals rather than weekly.
Kadhi and rikwanch	Bagelkhand	शाकाहारी	Sour gram-flour kadhi over rice, and the set-and-cut besan rolls of the Bundeli border districts. Both are strongest in the west and thin out towards Sidhi — a clean gradient you can eat your way along.
Sundarja mango	Bagelkhand	शाकाहारी	A Rewa landrace with a distinct scent and a small, firm fruit, grown in a limited belt around Govindgarh. It received a geographical indication in 2023 and has since been exported commercially. Unripe fruit goes to amchur and to pickle; almost nothing is wasted.
Amat and sour vegetable stews	Bagelkhand	शाकाहारी	A thin sour stew of mixed vegetables soured with tamarind or kaith and finished with mustard oil — the eastern counterpart of a kadhi, made without dairy, and standard in the Son valley.
Lapsi and gud ki kheer	Bagelkhand	शाकाहारी	Cracked wheat roasted in ghee and cooked with jaggery, or rice cooked down in milk and jaggery. Made for births, housewarmings and after funerals; sugar-based sweets are town food here and jaggery-based ones are village food.
Khurma and til laddu	Bagelkhand	शाकाहारी	Fried wheat-flour diamonds coated in jaggery syrup, and sesame bound with gud. Both are made in quantity before winter and both keep for weeks without refrigeration, which is the entire design brief.
Shutki bhorta	Barak Valley	मांसाहारी	Dried fish roasted over a flame until it crumbles, then mashed with raw mustard oil, shallot, garlic and roasted chilli. Eaten in small quantities with a large quantity of rice. It is the dish outsiders are warned about and the one the valley is most attached to.
Shutki bhuna	Barak Valley	मांसाहारी	Dried fish rehydrated and slow-fried down with onion, garlic, turmeric and chilli until the oil separates, often with aubergine, radish or bamboo shoot carrying the flavour. Cooked long enough that the fish stops being a piece of fish and becomes a texture in the gravy.
Satkora diye mangsho	Barak Valley	मांसाहारी	Beef or mutton braised with onion and whole spice, with thick slices of satkora rind dropped in near the end. The rind is aromatic and faintly bitter and cuts the fat, and it is the single most identifiable Sylheti–Barak dish anywhere it appears.
Akhni	Barak Valley	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	The Sylheti rice-and-meat dish — rice cooked in the stock and fat of the meat with whole spice, drier and less layered than a biryani and cooked in one pot rather than assembled. Standard at weddings and at Eid.
Hidol shira	Barak Valley	मांसाहारी	Fermented fish paste ground on a stone with dried chilli, coriander leaf and mustard oil, sometimes worked into a fire-roasted aubergine. A pinch is enough for a meal.
Muri ghonto and machher matha diye dal	Barak Valley	मांसाहारी	Fish head cooked down with rice or with lentils. Two versions of the same principle — the head is the valued part of the fish, and it is used to flavour a starch rather than eaten as a portion.
Kachur loti chingri	Barak Valley	मांसाहारी	Taro stolons, which grow along every waterlogged margin here, cooked with small river prawns and mustard. A monsoon dish, and one of the few that treats a weed as a crop.
Bamboo shoot with fish	Barak Valley	मांसाहारी	Fresh or brine-kept bamboo shoot cooked with river fish and green chilli. Comes into the Bengali kitchen from the hill rims of the valley and is now unremarkable in it.
Chunga pitha	Barak Valley	शाकाहारी	Sticky rice packed into a green bamboo tube and roasted at the edge of a fire until the tube chars and the rice takes its scent. Sold at winter fairs and made at home for Bihu and for weddings.
Puli pitha and patishapta	Barak Valley	शाकाहारी	Two of the standard winter pithas — a filled rice-flour roll, and a thin crepe wrapped around coconut and date-palm gur. The gur is the seasonal ingredient and its quality is argued about.
Eromba	Barak Valley	मांसाहारी	The Manipuri dish of the Cachar settlements — boiled vegetables mashed with ngari, chilli and herbs, with no oil at all. Set beside a Bengali bhorta it shows the two communities using the same gesture on different ingredients.
Kangshoi	Barak Valley	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	A clear Manipuri vegetable stew seasoned with ngari and maroi herb, boiled rather than fried. The valley's lightest cooked dish, and the clearest contrast with the mustard-oil register around it.
Khar of the northern edge	Barak Valley	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Alkali extracted from banana-peel ash, cooked with papaya or pulses. It arrives in the valley from the Brahmaputra side and is a minority dish here, where the Assamese plain treats it as the opening of every meal.
Nolen gur payesh	Barak Valley	शाकाहारी	Rice pudding made with the winter's first date-palm gur, which is available for a few weeks only and collapses in flavour if it is stored.
Tea-garden bhat and jhol	Barak Valley	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	The labour-line kitchen of the estates — rice, a thin chilli-and-mustard jhol, foraged greens, and pork or dried fish when there is money. It is a central Indian foodway kept alive in Assam by the communities brought here to pick tea.
Chapda chutney	Bastar	मांसाहारी	Red weaver ants and their brood pounded raw with garlic, salt and green chilli. Sharply sour and faintly citrus, eaten by the fingertip with rice. Sold by the leaf-cup in the weekly haats through the hot months, and dried and ground for the rest of the year.
Amat	Bastar	शाकाहारी	A thin sour stew of seasonal vegetable or wild green, soured with tamarind or fermented bamboo liquor and thickened with a spoon of rice flour. The default midday dish of the plateau, and the one most often cooked in quantity for a feast.
Bans ki sabzi and bamboo pickle	Bastar	शाकाहारी	Monsoon bamboo shoot, shaved and cooked fresh with garlic and chilli, or fermented into a pickle sour enough to season a whole pot of curry. Both belong to the first six weeks of the rains.
Chapda-stuffed leaf roast	Bastar	मांसाहारी	Ant brood, salt and pounded chilli wrapped in sal leaf and buried in hearth embers. The wrapping cooks and seasons at once, and the parcel is opened at the plate.
Pej	Bastar	शाकाहारी	The starchy water drained from boiled rice, drunk fresh as a cooling gruel or left to sour in a clay pot. More Bastar households drink their rice than eat it dry during the working season.
Mahua laddu and mahua roti	Bastar	शाकाहारी	Dried mahua flowers steamed or roasted and worked with sal or chironji kernel into a dense sweet cake, or ground into flour and cooked as a thick roti. Sugar-sweet without any sugar in it — the flower is about half fermentable sugar by dry weight.
Chironji seed preparations	Bastar	शाकाहारी	The kernel of Buchanania lanzan, cracked from a hard stone, eaten raw, roasted into chutney with chilli, or used as the fat and body in a sweet. It is the plateau's highest-value forest product by weight.
Rugra and boda mushrooms	Bastar	शाकाहारी	Wild puffball-type mushrooms that fruit in sal root zones after the first thunderstorms and cannot be cultivated. Cooked plainly with garlic and a little oil, and priced in the haat above meat in a good week.
Kodo and kutki bhaat	Bastar	शाकाहारी	Coarse millet boiled like rice and eaten with amat or chutney. The upland staple where paddy will not grow, and the crop the penda plots of Abujhmarh are actually sown to.
Dubki kadhi and bore baasi	Bastar	शाकाहारी	Gram-flour dumplings in a thin buttermilk gravy, and cooked rice left overnight in water and eaten cold in the morning with onion and chilli. Both come up from the Chhattisgarh plains and are strongest in the market towns rather than the forest villages.
Faraa and muthiya	Bastar	शाकाहारी	Steamed rice-flour rolls and dumplings, tempered with mustard seed and curry leaf. Chhattisgarhi in origin, now standard in every Jagdalpur tea shop.
Chousela and angakar roti	Bastar	शाकाहारी	A fried rice-flour disc and a thick rice cake baked on a leaf over embers — the two breads that stand in for wheat on a plateau that does not grow it.
Kosra and urad bafauri	Bastar	शाकाहारी	A steamed lentil dumpling, boiled rather than fried, eaten with chutney at haats and at fairs.
Forest fowl and pig, hearth-roasted	Bastar	मांसाहारी	Meat at a Bastar meal is occasional and tied to a sacrifice or a fair, not to a weekday. It is cut small, salted, and either boiled thin with turmeric and chilli or roasted in leaf on the embers. Kadaknath — the black-meat fowl kept across this belt — is eaten here, though its geographical indication belongs to Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh, not to Bastar.
Tikhur sharbat	Bastar	शाकाहारी	Starch washed out of the tikhur rhizome, dried into flakes and set with water and jaggery into a cooling summer jelly-drink. A May and June item, sold at bus stands.
Chapra ladoo and khurma	Bastar	शाकाहारी	Fair sweets — jaggery-and-rice-flour discs and fried semolina fingers made in bulk for Madai and Dussehra, sold from the same stalls year after year.
Jolada rotti	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	Soft sorghum bread eaten warm and folded, the base of every meal on the plain. A restaurant serving rotti oota will bring them one at a time off the tawa, and the count is not kept.
Badanekayi yennegai	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	Small brinjals slit and packed with roasted groundnut, copra, sesame and Byadgi chilli, cooked until the masala oil separates. The Bayaluseeme version leans on groundnut and copra and is redder and less fierce than the sesame-forward one made further east.
Shenga chutney pudi	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	Roasted groundnut pounded with garlic, chilli and salt into a coarse red powder, eaten with oil and rotti. The single most requested item in any parcel sent to a relative outside the region.
Agasi and gurellu chutney pudi	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	Flaxseed and niger seed, roasted and pounded — darker, oilier and slightly bitter, and considered the more serious of the powders. Gurellu is grown on marginal land here and almost nowhere else in India in quantity.
Jhunka	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	Gram flour cooked to a crumble with onion, garlic and green chilli. Cheap, fast, and eaten by choice as often as by necessity.
Kalu palya	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	Sprouted field beans, horse gram or moth beans cooked with copra and a little jaggery. Sprouting cuts the cooking time on a dry pulse, which mattered when fuel was gathered rather than bought.
Rotti oota	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	The full plain-country meal, served as a fixed assembly of eight or ten items around a stack of jowar rotti. It is the standard restaurant format across Hubballi, Dharwad, Gadag and Vijayapura, and the item that varies between houses is the chutney powder, not the curry.
Girmit	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	Puffed rice tossed with a wet green masala, onion, coriander, chopped tomato and a squeeze of lime, served in a paper cone with a fried long chilli beside it. Dharwad and Hubballi's own evening food, and distinct from the drier mandakki of the eastern plateau in that the masala here is wet.
Menasinakayi bajji	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	A long green chilli split, deseeded, stuffed with a salt-and-masala mix, dipped in gram batter and fried. Sold with girmit, and the two are effectively a single order.
Dharwad pedha	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	A brown, grainy, faintly caramel milk sweet rolled in sugar. Its colour comes from taking the khova well past the point at which most pedha is stopped. Registered as a geographical indication.
Belagavi kunda	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	Milk, sugar and a little curd cooked down for hours until the mass browns, caramelises and turns slightly granular. Sold by weight in flat trays and eaten warm.
Karadantu	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	A dense slab of jaggery, puffed edible gum, dry copra, dry fruit, dry ginger and edible camphor, cut into squares and sold wrapped. Gokak and Amingad each claim it and each makes it slightly differently — Gokak leans sweeter, Amingad drier and more gum-heavy.
Holige and shenga holige	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	A flatbread rolled thin around a jaggery filling of cooked chana dal, sesame or roasted groundnut, and eaten under a pool of ghee. Festival food, and the standard second-day wedding sweet.
Dharwad phini	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	A ball of fine fried wheat threads layered and dusted with powdered sugar, collapsing when pressed. Made seasonally and rarely found far from where it is fried.
The Vijayapura Dakhni plate	Bayaluseeme	मांसाहारी	In the old town, a Deccani Muslim kitchen of bagara rice, khima, mutton curry with whole spice, and khichda through Ramzan — an Adil Shahi inheritance that shares its vocabulary with Bidar and Hyderabad rather than with the rotti oota served two streets away.
Bilee saaru and mosaru	Bayaluseeme	शाकाहारी	A pale, mild dal saaru finished with curd, served at the end of a heavy rotti meal to close it. The sequence matters — the plain eats hot first and cool last.
Shukto	Bengal Delta	शाकाहारी	A pale, mildly bitter stew of bitter gourd, drumstick, raw banana, aubergine and bori, finished with milk, ghee, ginger and radhuni or a mustard-and-poppy paste. It is served first, before the rice is even properly begun, and its job is to open the palate. A sweet, thick shukto is a Ghoti version; a sharper one is a Bangal version.
Ilish bhape	Bengal Delta	मांसाहारी	Hilsa steaks steamed in a sealed container with ground mustard, green chilli, turmeric and raw mustard oil. No browning, no onion, no garlic, and no attempt to deal with the bones — the fine intramuscular bones are accepted as part of eating it, and the technique of clearing them by tongue is learned in childhood.
Shorshe ilish	Bengal Delta	मांसाहारी	The same fish in a looser mustard gravy cooked briefly on the stove, with nigella and slit green chillies. The mustard is ground with a green chilli and a pinch of salt to stop it turning bitter, which is the single piece of technique the dish stands or falls on.
Machher jhol	Bengal Delta	मांसाहारी	The everyday thin fish curry — rohu, katla or a small local fish, lightly fried and simmered with potato, nigella, ginger and turmeric in a broth clear enough to see the bottom of. It is deliberately not rich; the richness belongs to the kalia beside it on a feast day.
Chingri malaikari	Bengal Delta	मांसाहारी	Large prawns in a coconut-milk gravy with cardamom and a little ghee. Usually served in the shell, and the head is left on because the fat inside it is the point of the dish.
Kosha mangsho	Bengal Delta	मांसाहारी	Mutton cooked down slowly with onion, ginger, garlic and yoghurt until the gravy clings rather than pours. Eaten with luchi or with a plain pulao, and firmly a Sunday and festival dish rather than a daily one.
Luchi with alur dom	Bengal Delta	शाकाहारी	Small maida discs deep-fried until they balloon, with a potato curry made without onion or garlic in the Vaishnava households of Nadia and with both elsewhere. The absence is doctrinal, not culinary.
Bhog khichuri	Bengal Delta	शाकाहारी	Gobindobhog rice and roasted moong dal cooked together to a soft mass with ginger, ghee and whole spices, cooked in quantity for a puja and distributed. It is the standard Durga Puja meal for tens of thousands of people at a time, with labra and beguni beside it.
Doi maach	Bengal Delta	मांसाहारी	Fried carp finished in a yoghurt gravy with ginger and garam masala — a Murshidabad-side dish that shows the Nawabi kitchen's contact with the Bengali one, and one of the few local fish preparations built on dairy rather than mustard.
Chital muithya	Bengal Delta	मांसाहारी	The flesh of the bony clown knifefish is scraped off the frame, worked with spices into balls, fried and then simmered. The whole dish exists because the fish is otherwise almost unmanageable to eat.
Mocha and thor	Bengal Delta	शाकाहारी	Banana flower and banana stem, both fiddly to prepare — the flower needs each floret stripped of its style and calyx — cooked with coconut, ginger and a little sugar. A demonstration of a kitchen that treats the whole plant as edible.
Kolkata biryani	Bengal Delta	मांसाहारी	A pale, lightly spiced biryani carrying a whole potato and often a boiled egg, descended from the Awadhi kitchen that arrived at Metiabruz with the deposed Wajid Ali Shah in 1856. The potato is the single feature by which it is told apart from its Lucknow parent.
Telebhaja	Bengal Delta	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Besan-battered fritters — beguni from aubergine, phuluri from gram batter, mochar chop, and the fish and mutton chops of the Kolkata cabin trade. Sold from late afternoon, and the reason muri is bought at the same counter.
Rosogolla	Bengal Delta	शाकाहारी	Kneaded chhena balls boiled in thin sugar syrup until they are spongy through. Nobin Chandra Das of Bagbazar is generally credited with the modern spongy version in 1868, and his family later put it in a tin. West Bengal registered Banglar Rasogolla as a geographical indication in 2017; Odisha registered Odisha Rasagola, a distinct product with a different texture and colour, in 2019. The Registry protected the two prefixed names rather than deciding who invented the sweet.
Sandesh	Bengal Delta	शाकाहारी	Chhena cooked briefly with sugar and pressed into moulds. Naram pak is soft and barely cooked; kora pak is taken further and keeps longer. Made with nolen gur it becomes a strictly winter sweet, and the moulds — fish, conch, jasmine, a rupee coin — are themselves an inherited craft.
Mishti doi	Bengal Delta	शाकाहारी	Milk reduced with caramelised sugar, set with a starter in an unglazed earthen pot. The pot is the recipe: it wicks water out through its wall as the curd sets, which is why the same mixture set in glass is thinner and paler.
Litti-chokha	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	शाकाहारी	Sattu-stuffed wheat balls baked in embers, drowned in ghee, eaten with a mash of roasted brinjal, tomato and potato dressed with raw mustard oil. In Bhojpur it is as likely to be eaten with mutton as by itself.
Sattu ka sharbat and makuni roti	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	शाकाहारी	Roasted gram flour drunk with black salt and lemon, or stuffed into a paratha with pickle masala. The region's answer to a working summer.
Banarasi kachori-sabzi with jalebi	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	शाकाहारी	A fried, hing-scented kachori with a thin potato curry and a jalebi, eaten before seven in the morning, standing in a lane. The city's most durable institution after the ghats.
Tamatar chaat and chena dahi vada	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	शाकाहारी	Banaras chaat, which is sweeter and softer than Delhi's — crushed tomato cooked down with spice and served in a leaf bowl, and curd-soaked cheese dumplings.
Malaiyo	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	शाकाहारी	Winter milk foam set under dew and skimmed at dawn, sold from head-carried trays in the old city and gone by mid-morning. Made only between November and February.
Champaran-style ahuna mutton	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	मांसाहारी	Mutton sealed in a clay handi with mustard oil, garlic and whole spice, cooked slowly and served from the pot. A north Bihar dish that now defines meat-eating across the whole region.
Ghugni with chura	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	शाकाहारी	Black gram or peas cooked with ginger and served over flattened rice — the standard village morning meal.
Dal-pitha and pua	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	शाकाहारी	Steamed lentil-stuffed rice dumplings, and fried sweet pancakes made at festivals and at Chhath.
Thekua	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	शाकाहारी	Moulded wheat-and-jaggery biscuit fried in ghee — the principal Chhath offering, and the thing the diaspora most often asks visiting relatives to bring.
Launglata and Banarasi sweets	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	शाकाहारी	A khoya-filled pastry sealed with a clove and steeped in syrup, alongside the city's rabri, malai gilori and lal peda.
Machh-bhaat and diara fish	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	मांसाहारी	River fish in a thin mustard gravy, eaten on both banks of the Ganga; the diara villages fish and farm the same land in different seasons.
Bafauri and bari	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	शाकाहारी	Steamed gram-flour dumplings, plain or in a gravy, made when there is nothing else in the house.
Banarasi thandai	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	शाकाहारी	Almond, fennel, pepper and rose ground into cold milk, with a bhang variant sold openly at licensed shops and drunk at Holi and Shivratri.
Khar	Brahmaputra Valley	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Not a dish so much as a category. Water is filtered through the ash of sun-dried banana peel to make an alkaline extract, which is then cooked with raw papaya, pulses or fish. It opens the meal and it exists nowhere else in India.
Masor tenga	Brahmaputra Valley	मांसाहारी	A light sour fish curry soured with tomato, lemon, elephant apple (ou tenga) or thekera. Almost no oil, no chilli powder, and it closes the meal.
Aloo pitika	Brahmaputra Valley	शाकाहारी	Boiled potato mashed by hand with raw mustard oil, chopped onion, green chilli and coriander. The plainest thing on the plate and often the one people miss most when they leave.
Hanhor mangxo (duck with ash gourd)	Brahmaputra Valley	मांसाहारी	Duck slow-cooked with ash gourd or white gourd and whole spices — a festive dish, especially at Magh Bihu and at Kali Puja.
Pork with bamboo shoot	Brahmaputra Valley	मांसाहारी	Pork cooked with fermented bamboo shoot (khorisa) and often bhut jolokia. More associated with the Mising, Bodo and hill communities than with the plains Hindu kitchen.
Xaak bhaji	Brahmaputra Valley	शाकाहारी	A category rather than a dish — dozens of leafy greens, many gathered wild, cooked simply with garlic. Households will name and distinguish greens most Indian markets have never sold.
Poita bhat	Brahmaputra Valley	शाकाहारी	Rice soaked in water overnight so it ferments lightly, eaten the next morning with mustard oil, onion, chilli and pitika. Summer food, and the traditional breakfast on the morning of Bohag Bihu.
Til pitha	Brahmaputra Valley	शाकाहारी	A rolled crepe of bora (sticky) rice flour, cooked on a hot griddle without oil and filled with black sesame and jaggery. Made in quantity for Magh Bihu.
Sunga pitha	Brahmaputra Valley	शाकाहारी	Sticky rice steamed inside a green bamboo tube over a fire, so the rice takes the bamboo's scent. Split open and eaten with cream or jaggery.
Khorisa and kharoli	Brahmaputra Valley	शाकाहारी	Fermented bamboo shoot, and a fermented mustard-seed paste — the two ferments that give Assamese food much of its edge, both served in small quantities as accompaniments.
Assam tea	Brahmaputra Valley	शाकाहारी	Grown from a distinct varietal, Camellia sinensis var. assamica, discovered growing wild here in the 1820s. The malty CTC that goes into most Indian chai comes overwhelmingly from this valley.
Bedmi puri with dubki wale aloo	Braj	शाकाहारी	A puri stuffed with spiced urad dal, fried crisp, served with a thin potato curry sharp with asafoetida and dried mango. Sold from dawn; by ten the shops are switching to something else.
Mathura ke pede	Braj	शाकाहारी	Khoya cooked further until it browns and takes a grainy texture, then shaped into discs and rolled in sugar. Darker and drier than the Dharwad or Kandi peda, and sold by the kilo as prasad more than as confectionery.
Khurchan	Braj	शाकाहारी	Layered scrapings of milk skin, dusted with sugar and pistachio. Delicate, slightly chewy and made in small quantities every morning.
Chhappan bhog	Braj	शाकाहारी	The fifty-six-item offering made at Annakut and other major festivals, covering every category — rice, breads, fried items, vegetables, pickles, milk sweets, drinks — in a fixed arrangement before the deity.
Kadhi and gatte in the Braj household style	Braj	शाकाहारी	Gram flour in two forms — a sour yoghurt kadhi and steamed gram dumplings in gravy — cooked without onion or garlic, and the everyday backbone of the vegetarian kitchen here.
Rabri	Braj	शाकाहारी	Milk reduced slowly with the skin folded back in, so it sets thick and threaded. Eaten by itself, or poured over jalebi and malpua.
Malpua with rabri	Braj	शाकाहारी	A fermented flour-and-milk pancake fried in ghee and steeped in syrup — a temple offering at Janmashtami and Holi before it is a dessert.
Thandai	Braj	शाकाहारी	Almond, melon seed, fennel, peppercorn and rose ground into cold milk. Made in quantity at Holi and Shivratri; the bhang version is traditional at Holi and is sold openly here.
Aloo-tikki and chaat, Mathura style	Braj	शाकाहारी	Fried potato patties with a hing-forward masala and no onion, served with sweet and green chutneys — a chaat family that developed to be temple-compatible.
Lassi and makhan-mishri	Braj	शाकाहारी	Thick sweet lassi in clay tumblers, and hand-churned white butter eaten with rock sugar as prasad. The second is the region's oldest food image and is still offered daily.
Ghevar	Braj	शाकाहारी	A honeycombed disc of batter fried in ghee and soaked in syrup, made for Teej and Raksha Bandhan. Shared with the Rajasthan side of the region, where it is made largest.
Kaman and Bharatpur gulkand	Braj	शाकाहारी	Rose petals layered with sugar and cured in the sun, used in paan, thandai and summer sherbet.
Mahera	Bundelkhand	शाकाहारी	Coarse jowar or broken rice simmered slowly in buttermilk with ginger, green chilli and a tempering of cumin and asafoetida. Sour, thin and salty rather than sweet — the standard Bundeli breakfast, eaten cool, and the dish most often named when people here are asked what their food actually is.
Bafla and bafle	Bundelkhand	शाकाहारी	Wheat-dough balls boiled and then roasted or fried, cracked open, drowned in ghee and eaten with chana dal and a garlic chutney. The Bundelkhand version is plainer than the Malwa one and usually appears at collective meals rather than at home.
Rikwanch	Bundelkhand	शाकाहारी	Gram flour cooked with buttermilk to a thick paste, spread, set, cut into pieces and finished in a spiced gravy or tempered dry. A festival dish, and one of the clearest links between this kitchen and the dry western kitchens.
Dubri	Bundelkhand	शाकाहारी	Rice and moong dal boiled together to a soft mass, finished with ghee and asafoetida. Everyday food, given to the very young and the ill, and the standard offering-meal at household rituals.
Kadhi and bhaat	Bundelkhand	शाकाहारी	Gram-flour and buttermilk kadhi, sour and thin, poured over rice. The Bundeli version is soured harder and spiced with less turmeric than the Malwa one, and pakoras in it are optional rather than assumed.
Kodo and kutki bhaat	Bundelkhand	शाकाहारी	Little millet and kodo boiled like rice and eaten with dal or buttermilk. Standard food in the forest villages of Panna, Damoh and Lalitpur, largely displaced elsewhere by subsidised wheat and rice.
Mahua ki lata and mahua roti	Bundelkhand	शाकाहारी	Dried mahua flowers boiled back to softness and worked into wheat or millet flour, or cooked with til into a dense cake. Sweet without sugar, and eaten in the months when nothing else is sweet.
Bharta	Bundelkhand	शाकाहारी	Brinjal buried in the embers of a dung-cake fire until the skin blackens, peeled and mashed with mustard oil, raw onion and green chilli. Cooked over ash rather than flame, which is a fuel decision before it is a flavour one.
Chana and til laddu, and gulgula	Bundelkhand	शाकाहारी	Roasted gram and sesame bound with jaggery, and jaggery-and-wheat batter dropped into hot oil as small dark fritters. Both are made in quantity for weddings and both keep for weeks.
Raskhir	Bundelkhand	शाकाहारी	Rice cooked in fresh sugarcane juice instead of milk and sugar, made only at the crushing season and only where the crusher is running. It cannot be reproduced out of season because the juice ferments within hours of pressing.
Mawa bati	Bundelkhand	शाकाहारी	Khoya balls, sometimes stuffed with dry fruit, deep-fried and steeped in sugar syrup. The festive sweet of the Sagar–Damoh belt and the one most likely to be boxed and carried to a wedding.
Lapsi	Bundelkhand	शाकाहारी	Cracked wheat roasted in ghee and cooked down with jaggery. Made at births, at housewarmings and after funerals — the least ceremonial sweet in the repertoire and the most frequently made.
Tank fish	Bundelkhand	मांसाहारी	Rohu, catla and small local species netted from the Chandela tanks, which are leased annually to fishing cooperatives. Cooked plainly with mustard oil, turmeric and chilli. It is the region's main non-vegetarian protein and it disappears entirely in a drought year, when the tanks go dry.
Mahoba paan	Bundelkhand	शाकाहारी	Desawari betel leaf grown in Mahoba's barejas — thatched, screened enclosures that hold humidity and keep the vine out of direct sun. A crop that needs constant water in one of the driest districts in the region, which is exactly why it is prized and why it is shrinking.
Kempakki anna and meen saaru	Canara Coast	मांसाहारी	Parboiled red rice with a thin fish curry of ground coconut, byadgi chilli and coriander soured with kokum or uppage, plus a fried slice of mackerel or seer. The rice is unpolished and takes twice as long to cook as white rice, which is why it is eaten where it is grown and rarely outside.
Sungata sukke	Canara Coast	मांसाहारी	Dried prawns cooked almost dry with roasted coconut, chilli and a little tamarind. It is the standard coastal preparation for the monsoon, when the boats are not going out and the year's drying is what remains.
Bhatkal biryani	Canara Coast	मांसाहारी	The Nawayath community's rice-and-meat dish, distinguished by green chilli, coriander and coconut milk instead of the red-chilli and yoghurt base used almost everywhere else in the south. It is cooked layered and sealed, and it is closer to a coastal Arab trade kitchen than to a Deccan one.
Todedevu	Canara Coast	शाकाहारी	A thick jaggery and coconut-milk preparation set with rice flour and served hot with ghee at Havyaka wedding and festival meals. It is ladled onto the leaf rather than plated, is eaten early in the sequence rather than at the end, and is one of the dishes by which a Havyaka feast is recognised.
Menaskai	Canara Coast	शाकाहारी	Pineapple, bitter gourd or ash gourd in a roasted masala of sesame, coconut, chilli and tamarind, sweetened with jaggery. Hot, sour, sweet and faintly bitter at once, and the clearest single statement of what the upland kitchen is trying to do.
Patrode	Canara Coast	शाकाहारी	Colocasia leaves layered with a spiced rice-and-tamarind paste, rolled, steamed and then sliced and fried in coconut oil. The tamarind is not for flavour — without it the leaf's calcium oxalate makes the throat itch.
Kotte kadubu	Canara Coast	शाकाहारी	Idli batter steamed inside a cup pinned together from jackfruit leaves, so the dumpling comes out with the leaf veins printed on it and smelling of jackfruit. The cups are made fresh each morning and thrown away after.
Thambuli	Canara Coast	शाकाहारी	A cold buttermilk preparation with a raw ground leaf in it — curry leaf, pepper vine, doddapatre or brahmi depending on the season and on who in the house is unwell. It is eaten first, with rice, and never heated.
Appemidi uppinakayi	Canara Coast	शाकाहारी	Whole tender wild mangoes brined in a glazed jar, eaten one at a time with rice and curd. The fruit comes from named riverbank trees rather than from orchards, and households will drive two hours to a particular tree.
Halasina kadubu and jackfruit cooking	Canara Coast	शाकाहारी	Jackfruit at every stage — the tender fruit as a vegetable, the ripe pulp steamed in leaves as a sweet, the seeds in curries, the pulp sun-set into sheets and the papad fried through the year. Nothing on the tree is wasted, because the tree fruits enormously and all at once.
Kokum saaru	Canara Coast	शाकाहारी	A thin, hot, pink broth of kokum extract with jaggery, green chilli and a mustard tempering, drunk with rice or on its own after a meal. Its Konkani cousin along this coast is thickened with coconut milk into solkadhi.
Gojjavalakki and avalakki	Canara Coast	शाकाहारी	Beaten rice, in a dozen preparations — soaked with jaggery and coconut, tossed with tamarind and byadgi masala, or simply with curd. It is temple food, travelling food and breakfast, and it needs no cooking.
Rava-fried fish	Canara Coast	मांसाहारी	Mackerel, ladyfish, pomfret or squid rubbed with a red chilli-and-tamarind paste, rolled in semolina and shallow fried until the crust shatters. The paste is the same one used for the curry; the semolina is what the coast added.
Kayi holige	Canara Coast	शाकाहारी	A wheat flatbread stuffed with coconut and jaggery, rolled paper-thin and griddled, then eaten with ghee or warm milk. Made for Ugadi, weddings and jatras in quantities that take a household several days.
Sanna and neer dosa	Canara Coast	शाकाहारी	Toddy-leavened steamed rice cakes, and the thin unleavened rice crepe poured so loose it needs no spreading. Both exist because coconut and rice are the two things always in the house.
Chamba chukh	Chenab Valley & Chamba	शाकाहारी	A thick chilli paste of sun-dried red or fresh green chillies ground with hill citrus juice and cooked down under mustard oil. It is eaten with everything, added to a dish at the plate rather than in the pot, and it is the single item most Chamba households would name first if asked what their food is. It has been produced commercially by women's self-help groups in the district since the 2000s and has been pursued for a geographical indication, which it does not yet hold.
Chana madra	Chenab Valley & Chamba	शाकाहारी	Chickpeas soaked overnight and finished in slowly heated curd with ghee and whole spice, pale and thick and barely seasoned with chilli. The load-bearing dish of the dham and the one a Boti is judged on.
Rajmash madra	Chenab Valley & Chamba	शाकाहारी	The same curd braise made with the region's own small dark kidney beans instead of chickpeas — richer, and more common on the Bharmour and Churah side where rajmash is the local crop.
Khatta	Chenab Valley & Chamba	शाकाहारी	The sour course of the dham, made from black gram or from pumpkin with tamarind, jaggery and anardana, and served to cut the fat of the madra that precedes it. The order matters — the sequence is a designed progression, not a spread.
Bhaderwah rajmash	Chenab Valley & Chamba	शाकाहारी	Small, dark, thin-skinned kidney beans grown on rain-fed terraces around Bhaderwah between about 1,500 and 2,200 m, where the cold nights and short season produce a bean whose skin dissolves on long cooking so the gravy thickens itself. Registered as a geographical indication in 2023, which was granted on the strength of exactly that altitude-and-soil argument.
Gucchi	Chenab Valley & Chamba	शाकाहारी	Wild morels gathered from the forest floor after the snow goes, threaded on string and sun-dried. Kishtwar and Bhaderwah are among the most productive gathering grounds in India. They cannot be farmed at scale, which is why they cost more per kilogram than almost any other food in the country and why a household cooks them perhaps twice a year.
Kalari	Chenab Valley & Chamba	शाकाहारी	Acid-set, hand-kneaded, sun-dried cheese made across the Chenab valley as well as in the Udhampur hills to the south. Fried dry in its own fat until it browns outside and goes stringy inside. On this side of the hills it is as often eaten plain with salt and chukh as in a kulcha.
Patande	Chenab Valley & Chamba	शाकाहारी	A thin wheat-flour pancake cooked on a griddle and eaten with sugar, honey or ghee, and the breakfast most associated with Bhaderwah. It is made from a thin batter rested overnight, which gives it a faintly sour note that plain flour and water would not have.
Ogle ki roti	Chenab Valley & Chamba	शाकाहारी	Buckwheat flatbread, the staple bread above about 2,500 metres where wheat will not ripen. It is dense, dark and slightly bitter, and is eaten with ghee, chukh or curd rather than with a gravy.
Babru	Chenab Valley & Chamba	शाकाहारी	Leavened wheat dough stuffed with a paste of soaked and ground black gram and deep-fried — a festival and fair food across the Chamba and Kangra hills.
Bhaturu	Chenab Valley & Chamba	शाकाहारी	A thick leavened wheat bread risen with a traditional starter and cooked on a tawa or baked in ash. In the hills it is the everyday bread that the dham is eaten with when rice is short.
Auria	Chenab Valley & Chamba	शाकाहारी	Boiled potato or arbi in curd beaten with raw ground mustard, served cool. Shared with the Dogra kitchen across the Ravi and made in the same way.
Dried mutton of the high valleys	Chenab Valley & Chamba	मांसाहारी	Mutton cut into strips, salted and hung in the loft over the winter hearth until it is hard and smoke-dark, then rehydrated and cooked with onion and dried chilli through the closed months. It is a Pangi and Bharmour dish and it exists because the flock is culled in autumn and the road shuts.
Mittha	Chenab Valley & Chamba	शाकाहारी	Sweet rice with ghee, raisins and dry fruit, coloured with saffron or turmeric, served to close the dham. Its arrival tells the row that the meal is over.
Kishtwari and Doda meat cooking	Chenab Valley & Chamba	मांसाहारी	On the Chenab's Kashmiri-facing edge the meat is cooked with dry Kashmiri chilli, fennel and dry ginger rather than with curd — the same gradient the languages follow, appearing on the plate. Kishtwar sits exactly where the two systems meet.
Borey basi	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	Yesterday's rice under its own soured water, salted, with raw onion, green chilli and a pickle or a dried-fish side. Eaten at dawn before the fields, cool and slightly fizzy. It is the single most widely eaten thing in the region and it is a genuine daily practice, not a revival.
Chila	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	A rice-flour pancake, plain or with urad in the batter, cooked on a griddle with a smear of oil and eaten with green chutney. The everyday breakfast when it is not basi season.
Fara	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	Rice dough rolled into short fingers, steamed, then tossed in a mustard and curry-leaf tempering. Sometimes made sweet with jaggery inside, in which case it becomes a festival dish rather than a meal.
Angakar roti	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	Thick rice-flour bread wrapped in a sal or palash leaf and baked in embers. It comes out with the leaf's veins printed on it and a faint smoke in the crumb, and it is made without a drop of oil.
Muthia	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	Rice dough squeezed in the fist and steamed, so every piece keeps the finger grooves of whoever made it. Eaten with chutney or dropped into a thin curry.
Bafauri	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	Soaked chana dal ground coarse with garlic and chilli, shaped and steamed rather than fried. It is the plain's answer to the pakoda, and it exists because oil was expensive and a steamer was not.
Dubki kadhi	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	Raw urad dumplings dropped straight into a simmering curd-and-besan kadhi, where they cook and swell. Nothing is fried at any stage, which is what separates it from the kadhi of every neighbouring region.
Aamat	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	A thin, hot, sour stew of mixed vegetables and often bamboo shoot, soured with amchur or tamarind and built on garlic rather than onion. Strongest towards the southern approach, where the plain meets the Bastar plateau, and thinner as you move north.
Badi and bijori ki sabzi	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	Sun-dried urad or ash-gourd dumplings fried and simmered in a light gravy. The monsoon staple, made possible entirely by work done three months earlier on a roof.
Bhaji	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	The plate of the fortnight's green — charota, koliyari, chench, bohar, munga, amari, lakhdi — boiled, squeezed and finished with garlic. Most are foraged rather than grown, and each has a season a household can name to the week.
Chousela	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	A deep-fried rice-flour puri made for feasts and commonly eaten with meat. Rice flour fries into something crisper and more brittle than wheat, and the dish is built around that difference.
Sohari	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	Ghee-fried wheat bread served on a sal-leaf plate at weddings and ritual meals. Wheat is not grown here, so serving it is the announcement — the bread signals the occasion by being the wrong grain.
Jeeraphool bhaat	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	Plain boiled rice of the short-grained, intensely aromatic Jeeraphool landrace of the northern districts, which holds a geographical indication. Served with almost nothing, because the point of a scented landrace is that it does not need anything.
Pidiya	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	Rice flour and jaggery steamed in a leaf parcel at Hareli. Made in quantity, distributed, and not sold in shops.
Dehrori	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	Fermented ground-rice batter shaped, deep-fried and soaked in jaggery or sugar syrup. The souring of the batter is deliberate and is what keeps it from cloying; it is the region's signature sweet and travels badly.
Thethri and khurmi	Chhattisgarh Plains	शाकाहारी	The Diwali and Hareli pair — khurmi is a hard wheat-and-jaggery biscuit fried and sometimes rolled in sesame; thethri is its savoury opposite, a twisted gram-flour crisp. Made at home in large batches and exchanged between households.
Puliyodarai	Chola Nadu	शाकाहारी	Rice folded through a tamarind-and-gingelly paste with roasted gram, sesame and dried chilli. It is the standard prasadam of the Vaishnava temples of the delta and improves for several hours after it is made, which is precisely what it was built to do.
Kumbakonam kadappa	Chola Nadu	शाकाहारी	A pale, loose gravy of moong dal and boiled potato ground with coconut, fennel and green chilli, served with idli or dosai. It exists almost nowhere else in Tamil Nadu and is the single most reliable way to tell a Kumbakonam breakfast from a Thanjavur one.
Paruppu urundai kuzhambu	Chola Nadu	शाकाहारी	Steamed lentil dumplings dropped into a tamarind gravy at the last moment so they hold their shape and absorb it. A dish from the era before refrigeration, when the day's ground dal had to be used up.
Vathal kuzhambu	Chola Nadu	शाकाहारी	Sun-dried sundakkai or manathakkali fried in gingelly oil and simmered in thick tamarind with roasted spice powder. Almost no water and a great deal of oil, so it keeps for two days without a fridge and tastes better on the second.
Mor kuzhambu	Chola Nadu	शाकाहारी	Sour buttermilk thickened with a ground paste of soaked rice, coconut, cumin and green chilli, warmed but never boiled so it does not split. The hot-weather counterweight to vathal kuzhambu.
Ennai kathirikkai kuzhambu	Chola Nadu	शाकाहारी	Small brinjals slit, stuffed with a roasted spice-and-gram paste, and cooked in tamarind until the gingelly oil separates and glosses them. The oil is not a garnish; the dish is named for it.
Medhu vadai	Chola Nadu	शाकाहारी	Black gram ground thick on a stone with no water to spare, beaten to aerate it, shaped by hand with a hole and deep-fried. The hole is functional — it equalises cooking between rim and centre. Temple versions are threaded on a string as garland offerings.
Akkaravadisal	Chola Nadu	शाकाहारी	Rice and moong dal cooked to collapse in milk with jaggery and an unapologetic quantity of ghee, reduced in one vessel. The Srirangam temple version is the reference, and it is served at Koodaravalli in Margazhi.
Sakkarai pongal	Chola Nadu	शाकाहारी	New-harvest rice boiled with jaggery, ghee, cashew and cardamom, cooked outdoors in a clay pot at Pongal and allowed to boil over deliberately. The overflow is the ritual, not an accident.
Ashoka halwa	Chola Nadu	शाकाहारी	Moong dal cooked to a paste with ghee, sugar and a little wheat flour until it pulls cleanly off the pan. It is specifically a Thiruvaiyaru sweet, sold by the kilo to people arriving for the January aradhana.
Kumbakonam degree coffee	Chola Nadu	शाकाहारी	A dark decoction dripped through a two-chamber steel filter and cut with hot, undiluted cow's milk, poured between tumbler and davara until it foams. Why "degree" is genuinely disputed — the commonest account is that it referred to milk certified pure by a lactometer reading, others say the first, strongest run of the decoction. The milk is the constant in every account.
Delta meen kuzhambu	Chola Nadu	मांसाहारी	Seer, sardine or catfish in a thin, fiercely sour tamarind gravy with fenugreek, curry leaf and no coconut at all — the coastal kitchen's clearest separation from Kerala, a few hours west.
Nandu masala	Chola Nadu	मांसाहारी	Backwater crab cracked and cooked down with shallot, pepper and a little ground coconut until the masala clings inside the shell. Eaten with hands and a great deal of time.
Kalyana rasam	Chola Nadu	शाकाहारी	The wedding-feast rasam — tamarind, tomato, crushed pepper and cumin, tempered in ghee and taken off the heat the moment it froths rather than boils. Boiling it is the standard local criticism of a bad cook.
Nei appam and ellu urundai	Chola Nadu	शाकाहारी	Rice-and-jaggery batter fried in ghee in a dimpled pan, and sesame balls bound with jaggery, both made for Karthigai Deepam in November. The sesame is the delta's own crop, which is why the festival sweet here is seed-based rather than milk-based.
Dhuska	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Ground rice and chana dal batter deep-fried into a thick, soft-centred disc, eaten with a thin black-gram or potato curry and a coarse mint-and-chilli chutney. The plateau's most recognisable breakfast and the one item every roadside stall from Ranchi to Dumka makes.
Chilka roti	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शाकाहारी	A thin, lace-edged pancake of wet-ground rice batter cooked on a tawa without fermentation, eaten with chutney or with a spoonful of ghee. Distinct from a dosa in having no lentil and no souring.
Rugra and putka	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शाकाहारी	Wild puffball mushrooms from sal root zones, cooked plainly with garlic, onion and a little mustard oil. They appear for a few days after the first monsoon storms, cannot be farmed, and are the most expensive thing in the market when they do.
Marua roti and marua mudde	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शाकाहारी	Finger-millet flour as a dark, dense roti or as a stiff hand-rolled ball eaten with a thin curry. The upland staple, and the crop that survives a failed monsoon.
Koinar and wild saag	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शाकाहारी	Bauhinia leaves, sanai flower, gandhari, chakor and a long list of others, boiled and tempered in mustard oil. Bitterness is the point. Different greens are in season in different weeks, so the same dish is a different plant every fortnight.
Bamboo shoot curry and pickle	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शाकाहारी	Monsoon shoot cooked fresh, or salted and fermented into a sour pickle used to season a whole pot. Common in the Singhbhum and Odisha-facing villages, thinner on the northern plateau.
Handia	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शाकाहारी	Rice beer fermented with a ranu herbal starter in an earthen pot, strained through cloth and drunk cloudy. Offered to the ancestors before anyone drinks, served to guests, and supplied to every work party. Brewed by women, and sold by women at village markets.
Pittha	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Steamed rice-flour dumplings, filled sweet with jaggery and coconut or savoury with dal or crushed pulses. Made in bulk at Sohrai, Karam and weddings — a festival food that has become a daily one.
Arsa roti	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शाकाहारी	Rice flour worked with jaggery syrup, rested, and fried into a chewy disc. It keeps for days, which is why it travels to fairs and is what a household sends with a departing guest.
Malpua and thekua	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शाकाहारी	Fried batter discs in syrup, and a stamped wheat-and-jaggery biscuit. Both come from the plains to the north with the Chhath and Karam calendars and are strongest on the plateau's northern rim.
Chhilka meat and country chicken	Chota Nagpur Plateau	मांसाहारी	Meat here is occasional and tied to a sacrifice, a festival or a guest. It is cut small, boiled with turmeric, garlic and dry chilli in mustard oil, and served thin rather than thick. Kadaknath, the black-meat fowl, is kept in this belt, but its geographical indication belongs to Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh.
River fish and crab, ember-roasted	Chota Nagpur Plateau	मांसाहारी	Small fish and monsoon crabs from the plateau streams, wrapped in sal leaf with salt and pounded chilli and cooked in the hearth ash. The catch is small and the method is built for a small catch.
Bhuja and sattu at the northern rim	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शाकाहारी	Roasted grain mixtures and roasted gram flour. These belong properly to Magadh and the Bhojpur plains and thin out as you climb the plateau. Litti, the baked sattu-stuffed wheat ball, is a Magadh dish and is not a plateau one, whatever the restaurant menus in Ranchi now say.
Mahua laddu and mahua roti	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शाकाहारी	Dried mahua flowers steamed or roasted and bound with millet flour or sal kernel. Sweet without sugar, and the standard March and April food of a forest household.
Deoghar peda	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शाकाहारी	A dense, slightly grainy khoya sweet made in quantity around the Baidyanath temple and carried away by pilgrims. It belongs to the pilgrimage economy rather than to the plateau's own kitchen.
Jamshedpur and Dhanbad street plate	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Bengali-style chop and cutlet, Bihari litti-chokha, Odia dalma and Marwari kachori sold within a hundred metres of one another. The industrial towns did not develop a cuisine so much as accumulate one.
Jowar bhakri	Desh	शाकाहारी	A hand-patted unleavened sorghum round, thicker and more brittle than a roti, eaten hot because it turns leathery within the hour. It carries no fat, which is why it pairs with something oily or fiercely seasoned — pithla, thecha, or a rassa.
Pithla	Desh	शाकाहारी	Gram flour whisked into buttermilk or water with garlic, green chilli and a tempering of mustard and asafoetida, cooked loose (patal) or thick (ghatt). Five minutes from an empty kitchen to a full plate.
Thecha	Desh	शाकाहारी	Green chilli, garlic, salt and roasted groundnut pounded coarse in a stone mortar. Served in a spoonful beside the bhakri; the groundnut is there to carry the capsaicin, not to soften it.
Zunka	Desh	शाकाहारी	Pithla's dry sibling — gram flour cooked down with onion and garlic until it crumbles rather than pours. Zunka-bhakar became a political shorthand in Maharashtra in the 1990s when subsidised stalls were opened under that name.
Misal	Desh	शाकाहारी	Sprouted matki usal under a fiery thin gravy, topped with farsan, raw onion, coriander and lime, eaten with pav. The Kolhapuri version floats a separate layer of red kat or tarri that is poured on at the table and refilled free; the Puneri version is built on kande pohe rather than sprouts alone and runs sweeter and tangier. The two are argued about seriously.
Tambda rassa	Desh	मांसाहारी	Kolhapur's red mutton broth — stock cooked out with kanda-lasun masala and Sankeshwari chilli, thin enough to drink from the bowl and hot enough that the oil slick on top is the point.
Pandhra rassa	Desh	मांसाहारी	The same pot's white counterpart — mutton stock with coconut milk, cashew or poppy seed and white pepper, served alongside the red so the meal alternates between them. The pairing exists to make a very hot meal survivable.
Mutton sukka	Desh	मांसाहारी	Mutton cooked dry with roasted dry coconut and kanda-lasun masala until the gravy clings. The third plate of the Kolhapuri thali, after the two rassas.
Varan and amti	Desh	शाकाहारी	The same tur dal in two moods — varan is plain, with ghee and salt, eaten first with rice; amti is soured with tamarind, sweetened with jaggery and finished with goda masala. The sweet-sour-hot balance of amti is the clearest signature of the Pune household kitchen.
Bharli vangi	Desh	शाकाहारी	Small brinjals slit and stuffed with a paste of roasted groundnut, dry coconut, goda masala and jaggery, then cooked in their own stuffing. Groundnut where the Konkan would use fresh coconut.
Sabudana khichdi	Desh	शाकाहारी	Soaked sago pearls tossed with crushed roasted groundnut, green chilli, cumin and potato. It is upvas food — eaten on Ekadashi, which is observed twice a month across the Varkari countryside, so a fasting dish here is ordinary weekday cooking rather than an exception.
Puran poli	Desh	शाकाहारी	A flatbread stuffed with a cooked paste of chana dal and jaggery, scented with cardamom and nutmeg, rolled thin and eaten with ghee or with hot milk. Made at Holi and Gudi Padwa, and the standard test of a household cook.
Kande pohe	Desh	शाकाहारी	Flattened rice softened with water and tossed with onion, turmeric, mustard and green chilli, finished with lime, coconut and coriander. The default Maharashtrian breakfast, and by long custom what is served when families meet to discuss a marriage.
Kharvas	Desh	शाकाहारी	A soft set custard made from the colostrum of a newly calved cow or buffalo, steamed with jaggery or sugar and cardamom. It can only be made in the days after a calving, which ties it to the dairy belt and to a window nobody controls.
Bakarwadi	Desh	शाकाहारी	A spiral of spiced dough rolled around a dry filling of coconut, sesame, poppy seed and masala, deep-fried to keep for weeks. Pune's contribution to the Indian tin of snacks.
Mastani	Desh	शाकाहारी	A Pune invention — a thick milkshake with ice cream, dry fruit and often jelly, served so dense that it is eaten with a spoon. Named after Bajirao I's second wife; the name is local branding of the Peshwa past, not an eighteenth-century recipe.
Ghewar	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	A disc of honeycombed batter fried in ghee and soaked in syrup, made plain, or topped with mawa, or with a sheet of set cream as malai ghewar. It belongs to Sawan and Bhadrapada — Teej and Raksha Bandhan — and the Jaipur halwais build their year around those six weeks even though they now sell it beyond them.
Pyaaz kachori	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	A fried pastry filled with spiced onion. Jaipur's is flatter and crisper than the Jodhpur version and is served broken open with a spoon of tamarind and mint chutney over it; it is a mid-morning food here rather than a breakfast one.
Kadhi kachori	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	A dal kachori crushed into a bowl and flooded with hot besan kadhi. It is a Jaipur breakfast and almost unknown as a dish thirty kilometres outside the basin, which is a good measure of how local a street food can stay.
Dal baati churma	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	The Dhundhari version leans sweet: the churma is finer, worked with boora sugar and cardamom rather than jaggery, and the baati is often baked in an oven in town. In Shekhawati it is still done over cow-dung cakes and the dal is thinner.
Missi roti	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	Gram flour mixed with wheat, worked with ajwain, coriander and chopped chilli, and cooked thick on a tawa or in embers. Eaten with white butter and a garlic-and-red-chilli chutney where that is allowed, and with curd where it is not. It carries more protein than a wheat roti, which is the point in a pulse-growing belt.
Govind gatte	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	Gram-flour dumplings stuffed with dry fruit and paneer before being steamed and simmered in gravy, as against the plain sliced gatte of the everyday kitchen. A festival and wedding version of a subsistence dish.
Pitod ki sabzi	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	Gram flour cooked into buttermilk until it sets, spread to cool, cut into squares and then simmered in a spiced curd gravy. It is gatte's flatter cousin and needs no frying, which made it the summer version.
Bajre ki khichdi and raab	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	Pearl millet and moong cooked to a soft mass and eaten with ghee, buttermilk and jaggery in winter; raab is the thinner drinkable form, coarse millet flour cooked into buttermilk. This is the actual daily food of Shekhawati, as opposed to the food Shekhawati is famous for.
Papad ki sabzi	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	Broken papad simmered in a gram-flour and curd gravy — a fifteen-minute curry for a house with nothing fresh in it, and a standard item on a Shekhawati thali rather than an emergency measure.
Gulab jamun ki sabzi	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	Unsweetened fried khoya balls in a spiced gravy, served at weddings. It is the merchant kitchen's answer to the problem of feasting without meat: extravagance supplied by dairy and ghee instead.
Dal ki poori	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	A poori stuffed with spiced ground urad and fried flat, eaten with a dry potato sabzi. The Shekhawati travelling version keeps for a day, which is why it went with people on journeys.
Ker sangri	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	Sun-dried ker berries and sangri pods rehydrated and cooked in oil with chilli and amchur. In Shekhawati the khejri still grows in the fields, so this is a gathered dish here, and the further east into the basin you go the more it becomes a bought one.
Gulgule	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	Jaggery-and-wheat batter fritters fried in ghee, made at Holi across Shekhawati. Simple enough that they are still made at home in towns where nothing else is.
Ajmeri kalakand	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	A moist, grainy milk sweet set in a tray, made by cooking down milk with a little acid so it curdles slightly and holds a coarse crumb. It belongs to Ajmer at the region's western limit and reaches Jaipur's shops from there; the smooth pressed version sold elsewhere in India is a different sweet under the same name.
Feeni	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	Very fine fried strands of dough eaten crushed into warm milk on winter mornings, and associated with Ajmer and Beawar to the west. It is a seasonal item and disappears from the counters by March.
Mawa kachori	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शाकाहारी	A kachori shell filled with khoya and nuts, fried and dipped in syrup. Jodhpur's invention, thoroughly adopted by Jaipur's halwais, and a good example of how quickly the sweet trade moves a product across the Aravallis while the savoury kitchen stays put.
Pelka	Dooars & Terai	शाकाहारी	Mixed leafy greens or taro leaf boiled soft with khar and a little rice, mashed to a coarse purée and eaten with rice. The alkali is the dish — it breaks down the fibre and removes the itch from taro, and no other seasoning is wanted.
Sidol bhorta and sidol er tarkari	Dooars & Terai	मांसाहारी	Fermented fish paste roasted over the fire, then pounded with green chilli, raw onion, garlic and mustard oil into a bhorta, or cooked into a thin vegetable curry. Extremely pungent, eaten in very small quantities, and the single most recognisable Rajbanshi flavour.
Shutki maach er jhol	Dooars & Terai	मांसाहारी	Sun-dried fish rehydrated and simmered with potato, brinjal and plenty of green chilli. Winter food, and the standard protein in villages far from a market.
Kochu and kochur loti	Dooars & Terai	शाकाहारी	Taro corm and the taro runner, cooked with khar or with a sour agent so the calcium-oxalate itch is neutralised. Taro grows anywhere wet without being planted, which is why it is everywhere in a landscape that floods.
Onla	Dooars & Terai	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	A Bodo-Kachari dish of rice powder cooked into a thick gravy with khar, chilli and either pork, chicken or only vegetables. Made in Mech households at the forest edge, and one of the clearest links between this belt and the Brahmaputra valley.
Bamboo shoot with pork	Dooars & Terai	मांसाहारी	Fermented or fresh bamboo shoot stewed with fatty pork over a long, slow fire. Common to Mech, Rabha, Toto and Adivasi kitchens, and cooked with almost no spice beyond chilli and garlic.
Saag-bhaat of the garden lines	Dooars & Terai	शाकाहारी	Rice with a boiled green — often a wild or self-seeded leaf gathered on the way back from plucking — and salt and chilli. It is the everyday meal of most of the region's working population and is almost never written about.
Kalonunia bhat and payesh	Dooars & Terai	शाकाहारी	A short-grain aromatic rice grown in these districts, which perfumes an entire kitchen when the pot is opened. Registered as a geographical indication in 2024. It is cooked plain to be smelled, or made into payesh with milk and gur.
Dheki shak and forest greens	Dooars & Terai	शाकाहारी	Fiddlehead fern and the seasonal wild greens of the forest edge, stir-fried with garlic and dried chilli. The gathering calendar is detailed and unwritten, and it is women who hold it.
Handia-day pork or chicken	Dooars & Terai	मांसाहारी	At Karam and Sarhul the household kills a bird or a pig, cooks it simply with turmeric and chilli, and serves it with rice and the year's handia. The meal is the festival's centre, and the food is deliberately plain.
Panta bhat with chilli and onion	Dooars & Terai	शाकाहारी	Rice left overnight in water, lightly soured by fermentation, eaten in the morning with raw onion, green chilli and salt. It is cooling, it is free, and in a belt where the working day starts before the sun it is the standard first meal.
Momo, thukpa and chowmein of the Terai towns	Dooars & Terai	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Siliguri and the Terai market towns eat the hill kitchen and the Chinese-influenced plains kitchen at the same stalls. The momo here is usually chicken rather than pork, and the achar is thinner than on the ridge.
Chalta and tamarind sours	Dooars & Terai	शाकाहारी	Elephant-apple and tamarind cooked into a thin sour dish or a chutney at the end of the meal, the plains counterpart of the fermented sours used in the hills.
Mandua ki roti	Garhwal	शाकाहारी	Finger-millet flour worked with boiling water — it has no gluten, so it must be patted out by hand rather than rolled — and cooked on a griddle or in the ash. Dark, dense, faintly bitter and very high in calcium and iron. Eaten with ghee, or with gahat dal in winter.
Chainsoo	Garhwal	शाकाहारी	Black gram dry-roasted whole, ground coarse and then simmered slowly in an iron kadhai until it is thick, dark and smoky. It is famously heavy and famously slow, and it is eaten in winter and at altitude for exactly that reason.
Phaanu	Garhwal	शाकाहारी	Gahat or a mix of pulses soaked overnight, coarsely ground and cooked to a loose, soupy dal, often with a little jakhiya and garlic. Thinner than chainsoo and made from soaked rather than roasted pulse — the same raw material handled two opposite ways.
Kafuli	Garhwal	शाकाहारी	Spinach, fenugreek or wild greens boiled, chopped and set with a slurry of ground rice, then tempered. Served over rice in an iron dish, and generally described locally as the Garhwali dish, ahead of anything more elaborate.
Jholi (jhoi)	Garhwal	शाकाहारी	Buttermilk thickened with a little gram or millet flour, turned with turmeric and finished with jakhiya and garlic. The everyday sauce of the hills, made from what is left after the butter is taken out.
Thechwani	Garhwal	शाकाहारी	Radish or potato crushed rather than cut — thecha means to pound — so the broken surfaces take up the spice. Usually cooked with gahat. Texture is the entire point of the dish and a knife destroys it.
Aloo ke gutke	Garhwal	शाकाहारी	Boiled potato cut into thumb-sized pieces and tossed in mustard oil with jakhiya, red chilli and coriander. The standard travel food, the standard breakfast and the standard thing put in front of a guest. Eaten with bhang ki chutney.
Bhang ki chutney	Garhwal	शाकाहारी	Hemp seed roasted and ground on a stone with lemon, green chilli, cumin and salt into a grey, oily, slightly bitter paste. The seed is culinary and carries no intoxicant; the plant grows as a weed on field margins across the hills and the seed is gathered rather than sown.
Kandali ka saag	Garhwal	शाकाहारी	Stinging nettle, cut young with a sickle, boiled to disarm it and then cooked as a green or a thin soup. A hunger food that turned into a valued one, harvested from the same field edges that people avoid touching.
Gahat ki dal and gahat ke paranthe	Garhwal	शाकाहारी	Horse gram, cooked as a dark thin dal or ground and stuffed into a paratha. It is the winter pulse of the hills, credited in household practice with heating the body and with breaking kidney stones — a belief old enough that the crop is grown partly for it.
Ras or ras-bhat	Garhwal	शाकाहारी	Several pulses cooked together long and hard, and only the strained liquor eaten, poured over rice. Strong in the Tons and Jaunsar country and in the upper Tehri valleys, and served at scale at village feasts.
Jhangore ki kheer	Garhwal	शाकाहारी	Barnyard millet simmered in milk with jaggery or sugar. The grain holds its bite instead of dissolving, which is why it is used here where the plains would use rice or vermicelli.
Arsa	Garhwal	शाकाहारी	Rice soaked, dried, ground and worked with hot jaggery syrup, then deep-fried into a dark, dense, slightly chewy round. It is a wedding sweet before it is a shop sweet — the bride's family sends arsa with her, and the quantity is counted.
Swala and roat	Garhwal	शाकाहारी	Swala are fried wheat breads made for ceremonies; roat is a thick wheat-and-jaggery bread enriched with ghee and offered at temples, then broken and distributed. Both mark an occasion by using wheat, ghee and sugar at once.
Festival meat	Garhwal	मांसाहारी	Goat, at deity festivals, weddings and the winter Pandav Lila, cooked plainly in an iron kadhai with jakhiya, salt, turmeric and local chilli, and often distributed by household share. In the Bhotiya valleys meat is also dried in the cold air and kept through the winter.
Wak kappa	Garo Hills	मांसाहारी	Pork simmered with kalchi, greens and chilli until the fat has emulsified into the liquid and the greens have collapsed. No oil goes in; the dish thickens itself. The general form, kappa, names any preparation built on the alkali.
Do'o kappa	Garo Hills	मांसाहारी	The chicken version — bird, kalchi, ginger, green chilli and coriander, simmered down and eaten with rice. The most commonly cooked kappa, and the usual introduction to Garo food.
Nakham bitchi	Garo Hills	मांसाहारी	A thin, dark, aggressively pungent broth made by boiling smoke-dried fish with chilli, sometimes with kalchi and a few greens. Served in a bowl and drunk with the meal rather than poured over the rice. It is the dish visitors are warned about and the one Garos abroad miss most.
Wak brenga	Garo Hills	मांसाहारी	Pork sealed into a green bamboo tube with water, ginger, green chilli, salt and the herb sam-sweng, and cooked over an open fire. Field food, feast food, and the cleanest possible demonstration of what bamboo does to a broth.
Wak tangsek pura	Garo Hills	मांसाहारी	Pork cooked with green vegetables, thickened with roasted rice powder and finished with kalchi — the fullest expression of the two techniques working together.
Minil	Garo Hills	शाकाहारी	Sticky rice steamed in banana or wild leaf, eaten alongside meat or carried to the field. It keeps for a day without spoiling, which is why it is the travelling and festival rice.
Sobok or mekin	Garo Hills	शाकाहारी	A pounded relish of banana flower, sometimes with dried fish and chilli, set beside the rice. The banana plant supplies the flower for this, the leaf for steaming and the stem for the ash that makes kalchi — very little of it is wasted.
Bamboo shoot with pork	Garo Hills	मांसाहारी	Fresh or fermented bamboo shoot simmered with pork. The fresh version is bitter and clean, the fermented one is sour and strong, and the two are treated as different dishes rather than as variants.
Do'o bitchi	Garo Hills	मांसाहारी	Light chicken broth with ginger and local greens, the everyday alternative to nakham bitchi.
Kalchi na·kam	Garo Hills	मांसाहारी	Dried fish cooked with kalchi and greens — the two preserved-and-processed elements of the kitchen used together, and a common dish in the months when fresh meat is scarce.
Ta·bolchu and jhum tubers	Garo Hills	शाकाहारी	Colocasia, yam and other tubers from the jhum plot, boiled with kalchi to break down the calcium oxalate that would otherwise make them scratch the throat. This is not a flavour choice — it is the step that makes the food edible.
Smoked pork stew	Garo Hills	मांसाहारी	Hard smoke-cured pork taken off the hearth rack, soaked, and simmered with greens and chilli. The dry-season dish of the interior villages.
Jhum-plot chilli relish	Garo Hills	शाकाहारी	Green or dried chilli pounded with salt, ginger and sometimes dried fish. It sits on the plate rather than in the pot, which is how the heat is regulated per eater rather than per dish.
Minil with wild honey	Garo Hills	शाकाहारी	Sticky rice with forest honey — close to the whole of the traditional sweet repertoire, in a cuisine that does not really run to desserts.
Xitt kodi	Goa & Gomantak	मांसाहारी	Rice and curry, and the phrase Goans use for the meal itself rather than for a dish. Parboiled red rice with a thin coconut-and-chilli fish curry soured with kokum or tamarind, a fried mackerel or kingfish slice, and a dry vegetable. Eaten at midday, every day, in both communities.
Hooman	Goa & Gomantak	मांसाहारी	The Saraswat fish curry — ground coconut, red chilli, coriander seed and a little turmeric, soured with kokum and finished with teppal, cooked only until the fish sets. It is deliberately thin, because it is designed to be poured over rice rather than eaten alone, and it is never made with vinegar.
Khatkhate	Goa & Gomantak	शाकाहारी	A stew of eight or more vegetables and legumes cooked with coconut, tur dal and teppal, made for temple feasts, Ganesh Chaturthi and weddings. The rule is an odd number of vegetables and no onion or garlic, which is what marks it as temple food rather than household food.
Sol kadhi	Goa & Gomantak	शाकाहारी	Kokum extract with coconut milk, green chilli and garlic, drunk pink and cold at the end of a meal. It works as a digestive because the kokum is astringent and the coconut fat is not — a coastal answer to a heavy fried lunch, and shared with Malvan and Canara.
Kismur	Goa & Gomantak	मांसाहारी	Dried prawn or dried mackerel crumbled, roasted and tossed raw with grated coconut, onion and chilli. It is the monsoon dish par excellence, because it is made entirely from what was preserved before the fishing ban began.
Tonak and olmi	Goa & Gomantak	शाकाहारी	A thick coconut-and-spice gravy of dried peas, cashew or black-eyed beans. In the first weeks of the monsoon it is made with olmi — wild termite-mound mushrooms that fruit for a few days a year, cannot be cultivated and reach prices that make national news.
Vindalho	Goa & Gomantak	मांसाहारी	Pork cured in palm vinegar, garlic and dry red chilli with cinnamon, clove and cumin, then cooked down until the fat is glazed. The name is carne de vinha d'alhos — meat in wine and garlic — and there are no potatoes in it. It improves for two or three days, which was the original purpose.
Sorpotel	Goa & Gomantak	मांसाहारी	Pork, liver and heart diced small, cooked in vinegar and a dark chilli masala and traditionally bound with the animal's blood. It is reheated once a day for several days before it is considered ready, which is both a flavour method and a preservation one in a kitchen without refrigeration.
Xacuti	Goa & Gomantak	मांसाहारी	Chicken or mutton in a masala of dry-roasted coconut, poppy seed, nutmeg, mace, star anise and a dozen more spices ground to a near-black paste. It is the one Goan curry where the roasting is dry and the colour comes from scorched coconut rather than chilli.
Cafreal	Goa & Gomantak	मांसाहारी	Chicken marinated in a green paste of coriander, green chilli, garlic, ginger, pepper and vinegar, then shallow-fried or grilled almost dry. The name and the method travelled with Portuguese soldiers and servants from Mozambique, which is why it is the only green masala in an otherwise red kitchen.
Balchão	Goa & Gomantak	मांसाहारी	Prawns or small fish cooked into a thick vinegar-and-red-chilli paste and bottled. Related to the balichão shrimp pastes of Macau and Malacca and carried along the same Portuguese route, it keeps for months and is eaten a spoon at a time.
Ambot tik	Goa & Gomantak	मांसाहारी	Sour and hot, and named for exactly that — shark, catfish or ray in a vinegar and Kashmiri-chilli gravy with no coconut at all. The absence of coconut is unusual here and is what makes it keep.
Recheado mackerel	Goa & Gomantak	मांसाहारी	A whole mackerel slit along the spine, packed with a wet vinegar-chilli masala, dusted in rava and shallow fried. Recheado means stuffed; the masala is bottled in most Goan households and used through the year.
Sanna	Goa & Gomantak	शाकाहारी	Steamed rice cakes leavened with toddy, spongy and faintly alcoholic, eaten with sorpotel by Catholics and with coconut curry by Saraswats. The same object in two kitchens, which makes it the clearest evidence that the split is religious rather than culinary.
Patoleo	Goa & Gomantak	शाकाहारी	Rice batter and a jaggery-coconut filling steamed inside a folded turmeric leaf, made in August for the Assumption and for the Hindu harvest observances in the same weeks. Two calendars, one leaf.
Bebinca	Goa & Gomantak	शाकाहारी	A layered pudding of coconut milk, egg yolk, sugar, flour and ghee, each layer grilled from above before the next is poured, traditionally seven to sixteen layers deep. It takes hours of attention and no shortcut has ever caught on, which is why it stayed a Christmas sweet rather than a daily one.
Dal bafla	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	The regional dish. Wheat dough balls boiled and then roasted, cracked open into a bowl, drowned in ghee and eaten with a thick tuvar-and-chana dal. The boil is what separates it from Marwar's baati, and the texture difference is obvious the moment the ghee goes in.
Churma	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	Roasted baati or bafla crushed with jaggery or sugar and a great deal of ghee. Served alongside the dal rather than after it, so a Hadoti thali carries its sweet in the middle of the meal.
Kota kachori	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	A fist-sized kachori fried slowly so the case sets into a hollow, rigid shell around a spiced onion, potato or moong filling, then flooded with tamarind and green chutney and eaten from a leaf plate. It is a heavier, wetter thing than the Jaipur pyaaz kachori and is eaten at breakfast.
Gatte ki sabzi	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	Steamed gram-flour rolls sliced and simmered in a yoghurt gravy. Common to all Rajasthan; the Hadoti version is thicker with ground coriander and gets fresh green chilli that the desert version usually does not.
Mangodi ki sabzi	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	Sun-dried moong nuggets fried and cooked into a tomato-and-yoghurt gravy. A dry-stores dish kept in a region that no longer needs one, because the texture has no substitute.
Chakki ki sabzi	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	Steamed wheat-dough cakes cut into diamonds and finished in gravy — a way of making a substantial dish out of nothing but the year's wheat.
Kadhi and chawal	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	Buttermilk and besan simmered with fenugreek and asafoetida and eaten over rice — a combination that is routine here and rare west of the Chambal, because rice is.
Bhutte ki kees and makki roti	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	Grated maize cooked down in milk, and maize bread — the upland monsoon food of the Jhalawar and Baran plateau, shared with Malwa across the state line.
Soola	Hadoti	मांसाहारी	Meat marinated in yoghurt, red chilli and smoked ghee and grilled over coals. It comes out of the Rajput hunting kitchen the Kota painters spent two centuries illustrating; hunting has been illegal since 1972, so it is now made with goat.
Sahariya mahua preparations	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	Dried mahua flowers cooked with maize flour or eaten as a sweet — a forest staple of the Sahariya households in Shahabad and Kishanganj, and a food the plateau towns never adopted.
Poha and jalebi	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	The Malwa breakfast, standard in Jhalawar and Baran and thinning out as you move north-west towards Bundi. Where you stop being offered it is a fair marker of where Hadoti stops facing Madhya Pradesh.
Boondi laddu	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	Fried gram-flour droplets bound with syrup. The name has nothing to do with the town of Bundi — boondi means a droplet — but the coincidence is repeated locally often enough to have become a fact people believe.
Malpua and rabri	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	Fried batter discs soaked in syrup, served with reduced milk. The fair sweet — sold in quantity at Chandrabhaga and at Kota's Dussehra ground.
Rabdi	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	Not the milk sweet of the same name — this is coarse bajra or maize flour soured overnight in buttermilk and drunk cold through summer. Field food, and the cheapest way to make salt and grain palatable in the heat.
Jhalawar oranges	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	The Jhalawar and Bhawanimandi belt is the largest citrus tract in Rajasthan, planted on the black basalt soil, and the fruit reaches the markets from December.
Kota namkeen and sev	Hadoti	शाकाहारी	Gram-flour fried savouries, coriander-heavy and made in the same shops as the kachori. The Hadoti mix uses less of the sharp Ratlami spicing that begins one plateau east.
Bajra khichdi	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	शाकाहारी	Pearl millet and moong dal boiled soft and served in a bowl with a well of ghee melted into the centre, a spoon of gur on the side and a glass of chaach. It is the winter dinner of the Bangar, and the dish most often named when a Haryanvi household is asked what it actually eats.
Hara cholia	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	शाकाहारी	Fresh green chickpeas, still in the pod, roasted whole over a field fire of dry stalks and rubbed out of their husks by hand. Eaten standing in the field in February and March, and also cooked into a dry sabzi with onion and a little ghee. It is a crop-calendar dish — available for about six weeks a year and not at all otherwise.
Haryanvi kadhi	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	शाकाहारी	Sour buttermilk thickened with gram flour and simmered long enough to lose its raw edge, tempered with hing, methi seed and dried red chilli. The local version is thinner and sourer than the Punjabi, and the pakodas are often left out entirely — the point is the buttermilk, not the fritter.
Singri ki sabzi	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	शाकाहारी	Dried khejri pods, soaked overnight, boiled and finished in mustard oil with kachri, amchur and chilli, often with dried ker berries alongside. A Bagar dish that comes out of a tree nobody planted, in a tract where the khejri is the only thing reliably standing between the field and the sand.
Kachri ki chutney	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	शाकाहारी	Dried wild cucumber ground with garlic, green chilli and salt into a coarse, sharply sour paste. Eaten with bajra roti; also the region's tenderiser, its pickle base and its answer to a summer with no fresh vegetable.
Bajra roti with white butter and gur	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	शाकाहारी	The plain's signature plate and its simplest: a thick millet roti straight off the coals, a fist of unsalted churned butter on top and a piece of jaggery beside it. In winter the same roti is eaten with sarson saag.
Sarson ka saag with makki or bajra roti	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	शाकाहारी	Mustard greens with bathua and spinach, boiled for hours, mashed with a wooden ghotna, thickened with maize flour and finished with ghee. Shared with Punjab and cooked identically; the difference here is that it is as often eaten with bajra roti as with makki, because bajra is what the western districts grow.
Bathua raita	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	शाकाहारी	Boiled and mashed chenopod greens whisked into thick dahi with roasted cumin and black salt. Bathua grows as a weed in the winter wheat, so this is a dish made from something nobody sowed.
Besan masala roti	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	शाकाहारी	Gram flour, wheat flour, onion, coriander and ajwain kneaded together and cooked thick on a tawa, then loaded with ghee. Winter breakfast food, and one of the few dishes the region genuinely spices.
Alsi ki pinni	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	शाकाहारी	Roasted flaxseed ground with wheat flour, gur, ghee and dry fruit and rolled into dense balls, made in the first cold week and eaten one a morning through the winter. It is understood locally as a heating food for the joints of people who work outdoors.
Churma	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	शाकाहारी	Thick bajra or wheat rotis baked hard, broken and crushed coarse, then worked with ghee and gur or shakkar until the mixture holds. A wedding and festival dish, and the clearest illustration of how much ghee a household is willing to show it can spare.
Malpua	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	शाकाहारी	A thick pancake of flour, milk and fennel fried in ghee and either soaked in syrup or eaten straight with rabri. Made at Holi and Teej, and sold at every mela in the region.
Rabri and kheer	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	शाकाहारी	Milk reduced slowly to layers of skin, or rice cooked in milk overnight on a smouldering dung fire until it turns pink-brown of its own accord. Both are ordinary weekly food here rather than restaurant sweets.
Mewati mutton and khichda	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	मांसाहारी	The southern tract's meat tradition — mutton braised long with onion and whole spice, and a wheat-and-meat porridge cooked overnight for Eid and for weddings. It is a genuinely different kitchen from the Bangar's, and it uses mustard oil where the north uses ghee.
Alwar milk cake	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	शाकाहारी	Khoya cooked past the point of setting until the centre caramelises to a dark grainy core inside a pale outside — a controlled scorch, not a defect. It is the Mewat tract's contribution to the region's dairy repertoire and travels north along the Delhi road.
Eromba	Imphal Valley	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Vegetables — potato, beans, colocasia, yongchak, whatever the season gives — boiled and then mashed with roasted ngari and a great deal of roasted chilli, finished with chopped chives. Coarse, fiery and eaten by the spoonful with rice. If one dish stands for the valley, it is this one.
Chamthong / kangshoi	Imphal Valley	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	The everyday stew: seasonal vegetables simmered in water with ngari, chilli, chive and often a piece of dried fish. Nothing is fried first, and the liquid is drunk as part of the dish.
Singju	Imphal Valley	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	A raw salad of shredded banana flower, lotus stem, cabbage or wild greens tossed with roasted chilli powder, ngari, toasted gram flour and perilla. Sold as street food in the afternoon and eaten as a course at home. The gram flour is a binder, not a batter.
Morok metpa	Imphal Valley	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Umorok chilli pounded with roasted ngari and steamed or roasted into a thick paste. Half a teaspoon beside the rice; it is the heat control for the whole meal.
Nga thongba	Imphal Valley	मांसाहारी	Fish curry, most often with Loktak or river fish, cooked in a thin gravy with tomato, chive and chilli. The one preparation in the repertoire that uses oil with any confidence.
Chagem pomba	Imphal Valley	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Rice cooked down with hawaijar, ngari, vegetables and often a leaf-wrapped bundle until it becomes a thick, strongly savoury porridge. A winter dish, and the most intensely fermented thing in the kitchen.
Yongchak iromba	Imphal Valley	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Eromba made with the tree bean, Parkia — pungent, sulphurous, and completely non-negotiable in season. The pods are sold in bundles at Ima Keithel and the smell reaches the customer before the stall does.
Ooti	Imphal Valley	शाकाहारी	Dried peas cooked with an alkali until they collapse, with bamboo shoot, chives and sometimes tender pea shoots. Alkaline rather than acidic, which makes it unlike anything on the plate beside it.
Alu kangmet	Imphal Valley	शाकाहारी	Boiled potato mashed with raw mustard oil, roasted chilli and chives. A three-ingredient dish that depends entirely on the oil being unheated.
Paknam	Imphal Valley	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	A thick cake of gram flour, herbs, chilli, ngari and sometimes fish, wrapped in turmeric leaf and steamed or baked in embers until firm. Made for feasts and for festivals.
Kangsoi with soidon	Imphal Valley	शाकाहारी	The water-fermented bamboo shoot version of the everyday stew — sharper, cleaner and the most common vegetarian main in the valley.
Nganam	Imphal Valley	मांसाहारी	Fish with herbs and chilli wrapped in banana leaf and cooked over coals, so it steams in its own liquid. Field-fish cooking, from the season when paddy water is drained.
Chak-hao kheer	Imphal Valley	शाकाहारी	Black rice simmered slowly in milk until the grain gives up its colour and the pudding turns deep purple. Chak-hao holds a geographical indication; the colour is anthocyanin in the bran, and because the bran is left on, the grain takes far longer to cook than white rice.
Kelli chana	Imphal Valley	शाकाहारी	Boiled chickpeas dressed with chilli, herbs and a sour agent, sold from stalls and bowls around the markets of Imphal. The valley's most-eaten snack.
Utti and bora	Imphal Valley	शाकाहारी	Fritters of banana flower, pea or gram flour, made in quantity for Yaoshang and festival days — the exception that proves how little else here is fried.
Rajma of Bhaderwah and the Jammu plate	Jammu Duggar	शाकाहारी	Small, dark, thin-skinned kidney beans grown on rain-fed terraces in the Chenab valley, cooked long enough that the skins dissolve into the gravy and no thickener is needed. Bhaderwah Rajmash holds a geographical indication granted in 2023. The bean travels down the highway to Jammu, where rajma with rice is the default midday meal, and the hill origin is the whole reason the dish has a reputation.
Khatta meat	Jammu Duggar	मांसाहारी	Mutton on the bone cooked with anardana, Kashmiri chilli and whole spice, with no onion, no garlic and no tomato. The sourness is the dish and the meat is boiled down in it until the gravy is thin, dark and clings to the bone. It is the ceremonial meat dish of Dogra households and the one most often misidentified as a Kashmiri preparation, which it is not — the Valley sours with nothing.
Kalari kulcha	Jammu Duggar	शाकाहारी	A slice of kalari fried dry until it browns and goes stringy inside, pressed into a split kulcha with chutney and onion. The cheese comes down from Ramnagar and Udhampur, where it has been made for generations; the kulcha sandwich is a recent Jammu street invention that made a hill dairy product urban.
Ambal	Jammu Duggar	शाकाहारी	Pumpkin cooked to collapse with tamarind and jaggery and tempered with fenugreek seed. Served as a distinct course of the dham, eaten with rice, not as a relish beside it.
Auria	Jammu Duggar	शाकाहारी	Boiled potato or colocasia dressed in curd beaten with raw ground mustard seed, served at room temperature. Pungent, uncooked after the mustard is added, and traditionally made in quantity for summer.
Madra	Jammu Duggar	शाकाहारी	Soaked chickpeas or rajma finished in slowly heated curd with ghee and whole spices. Shared with the Himachali dham across the Ravi, and cooked here in the same way for the same kind of meal.
Kulthein di dal	Jammu Duggar	शाकाहारी	Horse gram, split and cooked long with ajwain and a mustard-oil tempering. A drought pulse from the kandi belt with a distinctly smoky, almost meaty finish, and the pulse most associated with Dogra village cooking.
Dal patt	Jammu Duggar	शाकाहारी	Whole black gram cooked down slowly to a thick, almost dry state and finished with ghee — a household dish of the Kandi belt rather than a restaurant one.
Maani and makki roti	Jammu Duggar	शाकाहारी	The maize register of the region. Maani is a thin gruel or porridge of maize flour eaten with buttermilk through winter; makki roti is patted by hand and eaten with saag or with ghee and jaggery.
Rajma-gucchi	Jammu Duggar	शाकाहारी	Dried morels rehydrated and cooked with rajma or with rice. Gucchi are wild-gathered from the hill forests above the region after snowmelt, cannot be cultivated commercially at scale, and are the most expensive thing in any Duggar kitchen by a very wide margin.
Babru and khameera	Jammu Duggar	शाकाहारी	Babru is a deep-fried leavened bread stuffed with soaked black gram paste; khameera is the naturally fermented breakfast bread of the foothill towns, sour from an overnight starter.
Meetha bhaat	Jammu Duggar	शाकाहारी	Rice cooked with ghee, sugar and saffron with raisin and nut, served to close the leaf-plate meal. The colour is from saffron and turmeric, not from any added dye.
Sund and panjeeri	Jammu Duggar	शाकाहारी	Dry ginger, edible tree gum, wheat flour, ghee and nuts cooked down and pressed. Made in December, eaten through the cold months and given to new mothers — a winter food defined by the ingredients that keep, not by taste.
Patisa of Kud	Jammu Duggar	शाकाहारी	A flaky gram-flour and ghee sweet sold at the roadside stalls of Kud on the climb to Patnitop. The layering needs to be pulled and folded while hot, and the mountain town's cool dry air is the standard local explanation for why the version made there sets crisper than the same recipe made in Jammu.
Jolada khaddi rotti	Kalyana Karnataka	शाकाहारी	Unleavened sorghum bread patted out by hand to the thickness of paper and dried on the fire until it snaps. Eaten broken into pieces with chutney pudi and raw onion, or softened under a hot curry. Shops sell it by weight in stacks, wrapped in newspaper, and it is the region's most exported food.
Sajje rotti and hurna	Kalyana Karnataka	शाकाहारी	Pearl-millet bread, thicker, darker and eaten soft off the tawa in winter with white butter and jaggery. Sajje is warming in the Ayurvedic sense and in the practical one, and disappears from the plate entirely by March.
Badanekayi ennegayi	Kalyana Karnataka	शाकाहारी	Stuffed small brinjal cooked in its own masala oil. The version here leans on sesame and a hotter chilli than the plain country to the west, and is eaten with khaddi rotti rather than with the soft jolada rotti of Dharwad.
Jhunka (zunka)	Kalyana Karnataka	शाकाहारी	Gram flour cooked with water, onion, garlic and green chilli into a crumbly mass — twenty minutes and no vegetable required. It is the dish a house makes when there is nothing in the house, and it is eaten as often by choice.
Togari bele saaru	Kalyana Karnataka	शाकाहारी	Red-gram dal boiled soft, soured with tamarind, seasoned with garlic and curry leaf and poured hot over rotti or rice. The dal is the district's own crop and the reason the saaru here is thicker and sweeter than the same dish made elsewhere with bought tur.
Shenga and agasi chutney pudi	Kalyana Karnataka	शाकाहारी	Two dry powders that define the plate — groundnut (shenga), red and oily, and flaxseed (agasi), darker, nuttier and slightly bitter. Both are mixed with a spoon of oil at the table. A North Karnataka meal without at least one of them is considered unfinished.
Kalu palya	Kalyana Karnataka	शाकाहारी	Sprouted field beans, horse gram or moth beans cooked down with copra and jaggery. The sprouting is not a health fashion here — it is how a dry pulse is made to cook fast on scarce fuel.
Nati koli saaru	Kalyana Karnataka	मांसाहारी	Country chicken in a thin fiery gravy built on roasted copra, poppy seed and chilli, eaten with rotti and with the drumstick pulled out and gnawed separately. Sunday food, and cooked outdoors as often as in.
Bidar and Kalaburagi biryani	Kalyana Karnataka	मांसाहारी	The local Dakhni rice — mutton cooked down first in stock, then layered and sealed with rice. Redder, simpler and less perfumed than Hyderabad's, and served with a thin dahi ki chutney rather than a salan.
Khichda	Kalyana Karnataka	मांसाहारी	Wheat, lentil and meat pounded down over hours into a single mass, cooked in Bidar and Kalaburagi through Ramzan. It is the older, coarser ancestor of the machine-smoothed haleem that Hyderabad turned into an industry; here it stays grainy and is given away as much as sold.
Ambali	Kalyana Karnataka	शाकाहारी	Soured millet gruel let down with buttermilk, salted, and drunk cold before the day gets hot. Served in a steel tumbler with a green chilli on the side.
The doab rice plate	Kalyana Karnataka	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Where the Tungabhadra canals reach — Sindhanur, Gangavati, Sirguppa — the plate flips from rotti to rice within a single generation, with sona masuri, a thinner saaru and more curd. The clearest example in the region of irrigation rewriting a foodway.
Holige (obbattu)	Kalyana Karnataka	शाकाहारी	A flatbread stuffed with jaggery and either cooked chana dal (hurna holige) or roasted sesame (ellu holige), rolled thin, cooked on a tawa and drowned in ghee. Made for every festival and for the second day of a wedding.
Shenga unde and ellundi	Kalyana Karnataka	शाकाहारी	Jaggery balls of pounded groundnut and of sesame, made in the cold months and eaten by the handful. Sesame is a Sankranti obligation across the plateau.
Mandakki and mirchi	Kalyana Karnataka	शाकाहारी	Puffed rice tossed with oil, onion, coriander and a chutney powder, sold with a fried long green chilli alongside. Evening food outside every bus stand from Bidar to Ballari.
Chana madra	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शाकाहारी	Soaked chickpeas cooked in ghee with whole spices and finished in yoghurt held just below a simmer until it thickens to a pale, faintly sweet gravy that never breaks. Cardamom and cinnamon stay whole in the dish. Rajma madra is the same method on kidney beans. If a Himachali kitchen has one signature, this is it.
Sepu badi	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शाकाहारी	Urad dal is ground, spiced, shaped into thick patties and deep-fried, then simmered in a spinach and yoghurt gravy until the badi has drunk enough of it to go soft in the middle and stay firm at the edge. The badi can be made and dried weeks ahead, which is precisely why it exists in a feast repertoire.
Kaale channe ka khatta	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शाकाहारी	Black chickpeas in a thin tamarind and jaggery gravy, dark, sour and deliberately loose so it can be poured over rice by a server walking a row. It is the palate-reset course in the middle of a dham, and it is the dish that proves the plains trade route, because nothing in it grows here except the chickpea.
Mash daal	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शाकाहारी	Whole black urad cooked long and slow with ginger and asafoetida and finished with ghee, thick enough to hold its shape on the leaf. The heavily ghee-loaded version is called teliya mah.
Meetha bhaat	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शाकाहारी	Rice cooked with sugar, saffron, raisins and slivered almonds, served last and understood to close the meal — nobody is served after the mittha comes down the row. Badana, small sweetened gram-flour pearls, sometimes goes with it.
Bhaturu	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शाकाहारी	A thick wheat bread raised overnight with a kept-back starter, cooked on a tawa or steamed, and eaten torn into dal or with ghee and rajma. The everyday bread of the valley floor, and a completely different object from the Punjabi bhatura it shares a name-root with.
Babru	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शाकाहारी	Leavened wheat dough wrapped around a paste of soaked, ground black gram and deep-fried flat — the hill answer to a kachori, usually eaten with tamarind chutney at fairs and on festival mornings.
Auriya kaddu	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शाकाहारी	Pumpkin cooked down with ground mustard seed and amchur until it is soft and sharp at once. Mustard is used here as a souring aromatic rather than as a frying medium, which is unusual this far from Bengal.
Patrode	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शाकाहारी	Colocasia leaves layered with spiced gram-flour paste, rolled, steamed and sliced, then either tempered with mustard seed or shallow-fried crisp. Monsoon food, because that is when the leaves are large and tender.
Bhey	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शाकाहारी	Lotus stem sliced into thin discs, tossed in gram flour and spices and slow-fried until the rings darken and the fibres crisp. It comes from wetland lakes rather than from anywhere on the slope, and it is the clearest example in the cuisine of an ingredient that arrives by trade and gets treated as local.
Chha gosht	Kangra & Dhauladhar	मांसाहारी	Mutton marinated in yoghurt and gram flour and cooked in a spiced yoghurt gravy — the madra technique applied to meat, and therefore never part of a dham. The gram flour is doing stabiliser duty, holding the yoghurt together over a longer cook than a vegetable dish would need.
Khatta meat	Kangra & Dhauladhar	मांसाहारी	Mutton finished sour with anardana or amchur rather than with tomato, cooked dry so the sourness sits on the meat instead of in a gravy. Common to the whole Kangra–Chamba belt.
Gucchi pulao	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शाकाहारी	Morels gathered wild on the Dhauladhar after the snow melts, dried, then soaked and cooked with rice and ghee. Nobody cultivates them; collection is a household income in the upper villages and the price they fetch in the plains is why almost none are eaten here.
Lingri	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शाकाहारी	Fiddlehead fern picked young in the monsoon from stream banks, either pickled in mustard oil or cooked briefly with potato. A four-to-six-week ingredient with no substitute and no season outside the rain.
Thukpa, thenthuk and momo	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	The Tibetan layer, arrived after 1960 and now completely normal food in Dharamshala and McLeodganj — hand-pulled noodle soup, pinched dough soup and steamed dumplings, sold by Tibetan, Kangri and Nepali cooks alike. Sixty years is long enough for a cuisine to stop being foreign.
Rogan josh	Kashmir Valley	मांसाहारी	Lamb braised in a thin, glossy red gravy whose colour is mawal and ratanjot and whose aroma is fennel, dry ginger and asafoetida. The Pandit version has no onion or garlic at all; the Muslim version uses praan and garlic and often a little curd. The name describes the method — cooking in fat until the oil separates and rises — not the redness.
Rista	Kashmir Valley	मांसाहारी	Pounded lamb balls, light enough to be springy, dropped into a red gravy coloured with mawal and finished with fennel and dry ginger. Judged on texture: a rista that crumbles has been ground rather than pounded.
Gushtaba	Kashmir Valley	मांसाहारी	The same pounded paste, made larger and richer with fat, simmered in a white yoghurt gravy held together by continuous stirring. It closes the wazwan, and leaving before it is served is read as a judgement on the host.
Tabak maaz	Kashmir Valley	मांसाहारी	Flat squares of lamb ribs simmered in milk with spices until tender, then fried in ghee until the edges crisp. It is eaten with the fingers off the bone and is usually the first thing on the trami.
Marchhwangan korma	Kashmir Valley	मांसाहारी	The one deliberately hot dish of the banquet — lamb in a dark red chilli gravy, placed in the sequence as a contrast so that the yoghurt courses that follow read as relief.
Yakhni	Kashmir Valley	मांसाहारी	Lamb in a white, uncoloured curd gravy scented with fennel, dry ginger, cardamom and a bay leaf, with no chilli and no turmeric. The household benchmark dish, and the one most often cooked with lotus stem or bottle gourd instead of meat.
Methi maaz	Kashmir Valley	मांसाहारी	Strips of tripe and intestine cooked long with fenugreek greens until the fat renders and the offal turns dark and sweet. A wazwan dish that uses the parts the rest of the banquet does not.
Harissa	Kashmir Valley	मांसाहारी	Mutton cooked overnight with pounded rice in a sealed copper pot buried in embers, then beaten to a smooth paste and served at dawn under a spoonful of hot mustard oil with fried onion, eaten with girda. Sold only from about October to March, only in the morning, and only by a handful of downtown Srinagar houses that make nothing else. It is the same idea as the harees of the Gulf and the haleem of the Deccan, arrived by a different road.
Nadru yakhni and nadir monji	Kashmir Valley	शाकाहारी	Lotus rhizome from the Dal and Wular beds, either sliced into a curd gravy or battered in rice flour and fried as a street snack. Rhizome pulled in the cold months is denser and less fibrous, which is why the good nadru season is winter.
Haakh	Kashmir Valley	शाकाहारी	A leafy Brassica grown almost year-round and cooked in water with mustard oil, green chilli and asafoetida and nothing else — no onion, no tomato, no thickening. Eaten with rice at both meals by most households, and the closest thing the valley has to a national dish. Monj haakh, the knol-khol leaf and bulb, is its winter form.
Chaman and veth chaman	Kashmir Valley	शाकाहारी	Cubes of firm paneer fried and simmered — in a pale turmeric-and-fennel gravy as chaman, or in a thinner red one as veth chaman. Fried first so the cubes hold their shape in the gravy rather than melting.
Kashmiri dum aloo	Kashmir Valley	शाकाहारी	Small potatoes pricked all over, deep fried until the skin blisters, then finished in a curd-and-fennel gravy without onion or garlic. The pricking is functional — it lets the gravy into the potato, which is otherwise sealed by frying.
Muji gaad	Kashmir Valley	मांसाहारी	Fish cooked with long white radish, made in almost every household around the winter solstice and at Herath. Lake fish and radish are the two things reliably available in deep winter, which is exactly why the combination became a calendar dish.
Modur pulav	Kashmir Valley	शाकाहारी	Rice cooked in milk with saffron, cinnamon, ghee, sugar and dried fruit and served in the middle of a meal rather than at its end — the sweet course that arrives while the savoury ones are still on the platter.
Shufta	Kashmir Valley	शाकाहारी	Fried paneer cubes, almonds, walnuts, raisins and dates in a saffron-and-cardamom sugar syrup, made for weddings and for Eid. Dry rather than milky, and built entirely from things the valley stores.
Vangyache bharit	Khandesh	शाकाहारी	Fire-roasted brinjal, peeled and mashed by hand, dressed raw with groundnut oil, crushed garlic, green chilli and coriander, and eaten cold or warm rather than hot. It is made in bulk for gatherings, and a Khandeshi bharit party — a bharit-bhakri jevan cooked outdoors over cotton stalks in winter — is a recognised social occasion, not just a menu.
Shev bhaji	Khandesh	शाकाहारी	Thick gram-flour sev dropped into a fiery kala-masala gravy just before serving, so it softens without dissolving. It is the region's most-copied dish and the one that appears on menus as "Khandeshi" outside the region.
Kalanyachi bhakri	Khandesh	शाकाहारी	A bhakri of kalna — jowar and split black gram ground together — which is darker, denser and more filling than a plain jowar bhakri and holds its shape longer in the field. Eaten with lasun chutney and raw onion. Usage of the word varies from village to village, and the same flour is also cooked into a thick preparation eaten as a vegetable.
Shengdana chutney	Khandesh	शाकाहारी	Roasted groundnut pounded dry with garlic, dried chilli and salt. Not a dip — it is eaten by the spoonful with bhakri and supplies most of the meal's fat and protein.
Lasun chutney	Khandesh	शाकाहारी	Dry garlic and dried red chilli pounded with a little groundnut and salt into a coarse brick-red powder. Fiercer than any chutney on the plateau to the south, and kept in a jar for weeks.
Khandeshi mutton rassa	Khandesh	मांसाहारी	Mutton cooked with the dark kala masala, fried onion and dry garlic, with a thin fiery gravy and a separate layer of red fat served alongside. Unlike Kolhapur's version it has no coconut milk counterpart to cool it, and no jaggery anywhere.
Khandeshi dal and kadhi	Khandesh	शाकाहारी	Tur dal soured with tamarind and finished with kala masala rather than goda masala, and a buttermilk kadhi thickened with gram flour and hit hard with garlic. The absence of sweetness is what marks both as Khandeshi.
Mande	Khandesh	शाकाहारी	A paper-thin wheat sheet stretched over the knuckles and baked over an inverted pot, folded around ghee and jaggery or eaten with puran. Made for weddings and for Akhaji, and increasingly by a shrinking number of households who still have the technique.
Ambadi and tandalja bhaji	Khandesh	शाकाहारी	Ambadi (roselle) leaves cooked with gram flour or lentil for their own sourness, and tandalja (amaranth) cooked with groundnut. Both are dryland greens that come up as field weeds after the first rain and cost nothing.
Kelfulachi bhaji	Khandesh	शाकाहारी	Banana flower cleaned bract by bract, chopped fine and cooked with lentil, groundnut and garlic. Slow to prepare and free to obtain in a banana district, which is exactly the kind of dish a cash-crop region develops.
Kacchya kelyachi bhaji	Khandesh	शाकाहारी	Unripe banana sliced and fried with kala masala, or boiled and mashed into kofta. The rejected grade of a crop that mostly leaves on a train.
Bhakri, thecha and raw onion	Khandesh	शाकाहारी	The field meal — jowar bread, pounded green chilli and garlic, an onion crushed by hand, carried out wrapped in cloth. It is the same plate as on the plateau, but the thecha is drier and hotter and the groundnut share is higher.
Khandeshi tarri poha and misal	Khandesh	शाकाहारी	Flattened rice or sprouted usal flooded with a thin red kala-masala tarri and topped with thick sev. The Khandeshi version is drier and hotter than the Puneri and carries sev rather than farsan.
Mahua and maize on the Satpura slope	Khandesh	शाकाहारी	Bhil and Pawra households on the hill slopes eat maize bread, forest greens and pulses, and use the dried mahua flower as a sweetener, a food in scarcity months and the base of a distilled liquor that carries ritual as well as social use. It is a different foodway from the valley below it, in the same region.
Puran poli and gulpoli	Khandesh	शाकाहारी	Made here as across Marathi-speaking India, but at Akhaji it is served with aamras and cold water from a new earthen pot, in a meal offered first to the household's dead.
Jadoh	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	मांसाहारी	Rice cooked in pork blood with chopped pork, fat, ginger, onion, bay and black pepper until every grain has taken the colour. Served as a plate on its own with a broth and a chilli beside it. It is the dish the region is identified by, and the version made with the blood left out is a different and much plainer thing.
Doh khlieh	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	मांसाहारी	Boiled pork, classically from the head, chopped fine and tossed while still warm with raw onion, ginger, green chilli and lime. It is served cool, has no cooking fat added, and works as the sharp counterweight to everything else on the plate.
Dohneiiong	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	मांसाहारी	Pork simmered with onion, ginger and a coarse paste of toasted black sesame until the gravy is black and thick. No ground spice mix, no tomato, and no chilli heat to speak of — the flavour is sesame oil released by roasting.
Tungrymbai	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	मांसाहारी	Fermented soybean pounded with ginger, garlic, black sesame and chilli and cooked down with pork fat and often pork belly. Assertive, and the single dish most likely to divide a table of visitors.
Ja stem	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	मांसाहारी	Rice cooked together with meat, turmeric and aromatics but without blood — the yellow counterpart to jadoh, and the usual choice at feasts where blood is not being used.
Pumaloi	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	शाकाहारी	Powdered soaked rice steamed in a conical earthen pot to a soft warm crumb, eaten in place of boiled rice alongside meat. It is the ceremonial rice form as well as an everyday one.
Putharo	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	शाकाहारी	A soft, pale, slightly sour pancake of fermented ground rice, cooked on a griddle. Eaten with pork gravy, or with sweetened cream as a snack.
Pukhlein	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	शाकाहारी	Rice flour and jaggery worked to a batter and deep-fried into a dark, chewy disc. The standard tea-time and market sweet, and the one a Khasi household is most likely to make at home.
Sohphlang	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	शाकाहारी	The tuber of Flemingia vestita, scraped clean, sliced and eaten raw with a dressing of mustard paste and sometimes dried fish. Crisp, faintly sweet, and sold by the basket in winter markets.
Tungtap	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	मांसाहारी	Small fish salted and fermented to a dark paste, then pounded with chilli, onion and mustard oil. Used a teaspoon at a time; it carries a whole meal.
Ki syrwa	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	मांसाहारी	The thin clear broths that accompany a rice plate — syrwa doh from meat bones, and lighter versions from vegetables. They are served in a separate bowl and drunk rather than poured over the rice.
Doh syiar nei iong	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	मांसाहारी	Chicken cooked in the same black sesame gravy as pork, and the usual substitute where pork is not eaten.
Jhur and tyrso	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	शाकाहारी	Local greens — jamyrdoh, mustard leaf and wild ferns — quickly boiled or lightly fried with sesame. The vegetable side of the plate is deliberately plain, and there is a lot of it.
Wild pig and hearth-smoked meat stews	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	मांसाहारी	Smoke-cured meat taken off the rack above the fire, soaked, and simmered with local greens. Increasingly rare as fresh meat became reliable, but still the winter cooking of the higher villages.
Lakadong turmeric preparations	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	In the Jaintia hills the local turmeric is used fresh and in quantity, in broths and with meat. Its curcumin content is unusually high, which is what earned it a geographical indication in 2024.
Thukpa	Kinnaur & Spiti	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Hand-pulled or hand-cut wheat or barley noodles in a bone or vegetable broth with whatever is stored — dried greens, turnip, a little meat. One pot, one fire, and enough liquid to matter at altitude.
Momo	Kinnaur & Spiti	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Steamed dumplings of wheat dough filled with minced meat, or with cheese and greens in the fasting months. In Spiti they are boiled in soup as often as they are steamed dry, and the accompanying chilli sauce is a recent import from the plains.
Siddu	Kinnaur & Spiti	शाकाहारी	A leavened wheat dough ball stuffed with a paste of ground walnut and poppy seed, left to rise for hours and then steamed. Eaten torn open with ghee or a lentil broth. It belongs to the wider Himachali hills and comes up the Sutlej into lower Kinnaur; it does not travel much past the treeline, because it needs a long warm rise the high villages cannot easily give it.
Tudkiya bhath	Kinnaur & Spiti	शाकाहारी	Rice cooked down with lentils, yoghurt, potato and whole spice into something between a pulao and a khichdi. It belongs to the Chamba and middle-Himachal feast repertoire and appears in lower Kinnaur wherever the Pahari dham tradition of a seated communal meal reaches.
Chha gosht and the dham repertoire	Kinnaur & Spiti	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Mutton cooked in yoghurt and gram flour, served as part of a dham — the seated Himachali feast cooked by hereditary botis and eaten in rows off leaf plates. It reaches the Sutlej villages of lower Kinnaur and stops well short of Spiti.
Chilta and buckwheat pancake	Kinnaur & Spiti	शाकाहारी	A thin unleavened pancake of buckwheat flour cooked on a griddle and eaten with ghee, curd or a dried-greens relish. Buckwheat cannot be made into a raised bread, and this is the form it takes instead.
Tsampa with butter tea	Kinnaur & Spiti	शाकाहारी	Roasted barley flour kneaded into the tea in the bowl itself, by hand, until it forms a stiff dough. It is the default working meal of Spiti and needs no cooking at the point of eating, only hot liquid.
Skyu and thenthuk	Kinnaur & Spiti	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Thumb-pressed dough shells or torn dough sheets simmered with root vegetables into a thick stew. The dough is pressed hollow so it cooks quickly and holds broth — a shape designed around fuel, not around presentation.
Black pea and rajma stews	Kinnaur & Spiti	शाकाहारी	Cold-hardy pulses soaked overnight and cooked long. The black pea of the high villages is denser and slower to cook than plains gram, and is one of the few sources of protein that stores for a whole winter.
Chilgoza	Kinnaur & Spiti	शाकाहारी	The seed of the chilgoza pine, knocked out of the cone, roasted and cracked. It is a wild-collected forest crop, harvested from village-held stands under long-standing rights of use, and in a good year it is worth more per kilogram than anything else the household sells.
Dried apricot and its kernel	Kinnaur & Spiti	शाकाहारी	The fruit is dried whole on rooftops; the stone is then cracked and the sweet kernel eaten or pressed for oil. Nothing is discarded, which is the operating rule of the entire high-altitude larder.
Sea-buckthorn juice	Kinnaur & Spiti	शाकाहारी	The berry is stripped from thorny riverbank scrub, pressed and diluted heavily. Sharply sour and high in vitamin C, it was the local antiscorbutic long before anyone put it in a bottle, and Spiti now processes it commercially at a small scale.
पुट्टु और कडला करी	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	शाकाहारी	मोटे चावल के आटे के भाप में पके बेलनाकार टुकड़े, जिनमें कसे नारियल की परतें होती हैं, और साथ में गहरे रंग की काले चने की करी। केरल का सामान्य नाश्ता, जो बाँस या एल्युमिनियम की पुट्टु कुट्टि में पकाया जाता है।
अप्पम और स्टू	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	चावल और नारियल के खमीरी घोल से बना जालीदार पैनकेक, किनारों पर पतला और कुरकुरा, बीच में स्पंजी, जिसे चिकन, मटन या सब्ज़ियों के हल्के सफ़ेद नारियल-दूध वाले स्टू के साथ परोसा जाता है।
सद्या	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	शाकाहारी	पूरी तरह शाकाहारी भोज जिसमें 24 से 28 व्यंजन केले के पत्ते पर एक निश्चित क्रम और निश्चित स्थान पर परोसे जाते हैं, और अंत दो या तीन पायसम से होता है। ओणम की सद्या साल की सबसे बड़ी होती है।
करिमीन पॊल्लिच्चतु	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	मांसाहारी	पर्ल स्पॉट मछली पर चीरे लगाकर उसे मिर्च-छोटे प्याज़-इमली के मसाले में लपेटा जाता है, फिर केले के पत्ते में बाँधकर तवे पर तब तक भूना जाता है जब तक पत्ता झुलसकर मछली को अपनी महक न दे दे।
तलश्शेरी बिरयानी	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	मांसाहारी	मलाबार की बिरयानी, जो बासमती के बजाय छोटे दाने वाले सुगंधित कैमा/जीरकशाला चावल से बनती है, तली हुई प्याज़, काजू और किशमिश की परतों के साथ, और दम के लिए सील कर दी जाती है। दक्कनी बिरयानियों से अधिक मीठी और हल्की।
कप्पा और मीन करी	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	मांसाहारी	उबला और मसला हुआ टैपिओका, साथ में मिट्टी के बर्तन में कुडमपुली (मलाबार इमली) के साथ पकी तीखी लाल मछली करी। किसानों का भोजन जो पूरे राज्य का प्रिय बन गया।
अवियल	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	शाकाहारी	एक दर्जन सब्ज़ियाँ लंबी पतली कतरनों में काटकर बस पकने तक उबाली जाती हैं, फिर पिसे नारियल, हरी मिर्च, जीरे और कच्चे नारियल तेल से बाँधी जाती हैं और करी पत्ते से पूरी होती हैं। सद्या का केंद्रीय व्यंजन।
एरिशेरी	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	शाकाहारी	कद्दू और लोबिया नारियल के साथ पकाए जाते हैं और ऊपर घी में गहरा भूरा भुना नारियल डाला जाता है — यही भुना नारियल पूरी बात है।
बीफ़ फ्राई और पोरोट्टा	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	मांसाहारी	गोमांस को नारियल की फाँकों, काली मिर्च और करी पत्ते के साथ धीमी आँच पर तब तक पकाया जाता है जब तक वह सूखा और गहरा न हो जाए, और परतदार मलाबार पोरोट्टा के साथ खाया जाता है। अँधेरा होने के बाद केरल में सबसे अधिक मँगाई जाने वाली थाली।
पालड पायसम	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	शाकाहारी	चावल के अडा को दूध और चीनी में तब तक पकाया जाता है जब तक वह हल्का गुलाबी न हो जाए। सद्या का अंतिम व्यंजन, जिसे पत्ते पर उड़ेलकर उसी से पिया जाता है।
कोझिकोड हलवा	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	शाकाहारी	गेहूँ या नारियल का घना, पारभासी, चमकदार हलवा, जिसे स्लैब में काटकर पूरी सड़क पर रंग-बिरंगे ढेरों में सजाया जाता है।
मीन मोली	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	मांसाहारी	मछली को हल्दी, हरी मिर्च और छोटे प्याज़ के साथ नारियल के दूध में धीरे-धीरे पकाया जाता है — मिर्च पाउडर बिल्कुल नहीं। पुर्तगाली काल का व्यंजन, केरल के पूरे भंडार में सबसे हल्का।
Kari virundhu	Kongu Nadu	मांसाहारी	The whole-goat feast served as a sequence — blood fry, offal pepper fry, stuffed intestine, bone kuzhambu, head and trotter stew, marrow. It marks weddings, temple festivals and the settlement of family business, and it is cooked outdoors by men in pots that would not fit a kitchen.
Arisi paruppu sadam	Kongu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Rice and toor dal cooked together with pepper, cumin, garlic and small onion, finished with a great deal of sesame oil or ghee and eaten with curd and a fried appalam. The Kongu one-pot meal — plain, hot, peppery, and unrelated to the tomato-and-vegetable khichdi it is sometimes mistaken for.
Kambu koozh	Kongu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Pearl-millet gruel soured overnight in an earthen pot and broken up with buttermilk, drunk cool with raw small onion, green chilli and a sun-dried vegetable. It is a working drink for hot wind, not a dish for a table, and it is served in the same pot it soured in.
Ulundhu kali	Kongu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Roasted urad flour beaten into jaggery syrup and finished with sesame oil until it forms a dense dark mass, eaten warm in the morning. Given to girls at puberty and to women after childbirth, for reasons the household will state plainly and a nutritionist would broadly agree with.
Kezhvaragu kali	Kongu Nadu	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Finger millet cooked to a stiff mass and eaten in pinched pieces with a thin peppery mutton or country chicken kuzhambu. The same object as the plateau's ragi mudde and eaten the same way, with a much hotter dip.
Kongu kozhi kuzhambu	Kongu Nadu	मांसाहारी	Country chicken in a thin gravy built on a wet masala of pepper, fennel, small onion, garlic and a little roasted coconut, ground the same morning. There is no cream, no cashew and no coconut milk, and the heat comes from pepper rather than from chilli powder.
Aatu kal paya	Kongu Nadu	मांसाहारी	Goat trotters simmered overnight to a thin gelatinous soup with pepper and fennel, eaten at dawn with idli or idiyappam. The regional counterpart of nihari, arrived at independently and by the same logic — cheap collagen-rich cuts and a long fire.
Santhakai	Kongu Nadu	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Fine steamed rice noodles pressed hot from a dough, eaten with coconut milk and jaggery in the sweet version or with a mutton kuzhambu in the savoury one. Kerala's idiyappam through the gap is the same technique with a different accompaniment.
Vellai paniyaram	Kongu Nadu	शाकाहारी	A fermented rice-and-urad batter dropped into hot oil and fried without browning, so it puffs white and stays soft — the trick is oil hot enough to puff and not hot enough to colour. Eaten with a coarse coconut chutney, and specific to this region.
Thengai paal kanji	Kongu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Rice cooked loose and finished with first-press coconut milk, made in the western taluks near the gap for Aadi and for temple offerings. Sweetened with jaggery in some households and salted with a pepper tempering in others, and the argument between the two is a family matter.
Kambu and kezhvaragu dosai	Kongu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Millet flours worked into the ordinary dosa batter, giving a heavier, darker, faster-cooking dosa that does not crisp the way a rice dosa does. Sold in the town tiffin houses as a health item and eaten in the villages because that is what was in the house.
Kovai tiffin	Kongu Nadu	शाकाहारी	The town breakfast as a fixed sequence — idli, ven pongal heavy with ghee, cashew and whole pepper, a medu vada, a set dosa, chutney and a sambar sweeter than the delta's. The convention is that a good house is judged on its pongal and its coffee, not on its dosa.
Paruppu urundai kuzhambu	Kongu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Steamed lentil balls dropped into a tamarind gravy, the vegetarian household's answer to a meat kuzhambu and made for the days on which meat is not cooked.
Salem's Malgova mango	Kongu Nadu	शाकाहारी	A thick-skinned, fibreless, intensely perfumed mango from the Salem and Krishnagiri belt, eaten cut rather than sucked. The region is one of the largest mango tracts in the south, and the crop moves through the Salem markets in May and June.
Javvarisi	Kongu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Sago pearls made from tapioca starch, which the Salem belt processes on a scale nothing else in India approaches. It appears here as vadagam wafers, as kheer and as thickener, and it holds a geographical indication.
Mandia jau	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शाकाहारी	Ragi porridge, boiled thin and drunk cold, usually soured with torani and taken with nothing more than salt and a raw onion or a green chilli. It is the highland's calorie base and the reason the region's diet is far higher in calcium and iron than a rice-eating plain.
Pakhala	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शाकाहारी	Cooked rice left overnight under water and eaten the next day with its sour liquor, badi, a fried green and whatever the day offers. In the uplands it is a summer necessity rather than the ritual observance it is on the coast.
Suan bhata	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शाकाहारी	Little millet cooked and served exactly as rice would be, with dal or a green. It cooks faster than rice, keeps badly once cooled, and is grown on plots too dry and too steep for paddy.
Kai chutney	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	मांसाहारी	Red weaver ants and their eggs, taken from leaf nests in the canopy with a long pole in the hot months, cleaned, and ground on stone with garlic, salt and dried chilli. It is intensely sour and faintly metallic; the sourness is formic acid, not tamarind. Eaten as a chutney and taken as a remedy for fever and cough.
Chhatu tarkari	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शाकाहारी	Wild mushroom curry. A dozen or more named kinds appear in sequence after the first rains — sal-forest, termite-mound and bamboo-clump types among them — each with its own price and its own short window. The first flush is the one cash crop a household can gather without owning land.
Karadi (bamboo shoot) curry	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Fermented bamboo shoot cooked with dried fish or with pumpkin and potato. The ferment carries the dish; the spicing is only garlic, chilli and turmeric.
Desia mangsa	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	मांसाहारी	Goat cooked slowly in an earthen pot with pounded garlic, dried chilli and fresh turmeric, and nothing else — no onion paste, no whole garam masala, no thickener. The gravy is thin and stains red from the chilli rather than from tomato.
Chuna machha bhaja	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	मांसाहारी	Very small reservoir and stream fish fried whole and crushed with salt and chilli, or dried and stored. The Balimela and Kolab reservoirs made a fishery where there had been only stream catch.
Kandula dali with ambula	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शाकाहारी	Pigeon pea cooked with sun-dried mango slices for sourness and finished with garlic burnt in niger oil. The pigeon pea is not a field crop here but a hedge and bund plant, harvested from between other crops.
Saga bhaja	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शाकाहारी	Fried greens, but the list is long and mostly wild — koshala, madaranga, poi, drumstick leaf, tamarind shoot, kalama from the tank edges. Households name and use thirty or more leafy plants, most of which have no market and no English name.
Ambila	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शाकाहारी	A sour stew of mixed vegetables — pumpkin, brinjal, drumstick, colocasia — soured with tamarind or dried mango and thickened with a little rice flour. The lowland's everyday dish and a marker of Kosli cooking.
Kalajeera anna and kheeri	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शाकाहारी	The plateau's short black aromatic rice, cooked plain for offerings or simmered with milk and jaggery. It yields poorly and is grown for its scent, which is why it survived as a ceremonial grain when the higher yielding varieties took the good land.
Mandia pitha	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शाकाहारी	Ragi flour worked with a little jaggery or dried mahua, pressed flat on a leaf and cooked on the hearthstone or steamed. The commonest way of eating millet as something other than gruel.
Pita kanda and forest tubers	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शाकाहारी	Wild yams and tubers dug in the lean months, some of them requiring repeated boiling and a change of water before they are safe to eat — knowledge held by particular households and taught rather than assumed.
Mahua ladu	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शाकाहारी	Dried mahua flowers pounded with millet or rice flour and pressed into cakes. Mahua flower is a sugar source before it is anything else, and this is what that means at the hearth.
Ghuguni and chop	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शाकाहारी	Dried peas boiled down with spices and served with an onion-and-lime scatter, alongside deep-fried potato and brinjal chops. The market-town food of Jeypore, Bhawanipatna and Balangir, and the thing the whole region eats on a bus journey.
Avakaya	Kosta Andhra	शाकाहारी	Raw mango cut through the stone into pieces that retain the inner kernel, packed with mustard powder, chilli, salt and fenugreek and sealed under oil. Named for the mustard — ava — and made once a year in May or June. The kernel-bearing piece, the muna, is the one people fight over.
Gongura pachadi and gongura mamsam	Kosta Andhra	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Roselle leaf cooked down and pounded with garlic and chilli, kept under oil; and the same leaf cooked with mutton, where its acid does the work tamarind would do elsewhere. It is the dish outsiders associate with this coast and the association is deserved.
Pandu mirapakaya pachadi	Kosta Andhra	शाकाहारी	Ripe red fresh chillies pickled whole in oil and salt. Fruity, extremely hot, and eaten a fraction of a chilli at a time with curd rice, which is the standard method for putting out a fire with the fire.
Pulasa pulusu	Kosta Andhra	मांसाहारी	Hilsa taken in the Godavari during the first monsoon flood, cooked slowly in a tamarind gravy in a clay pot and eaten the next day. The fish is in the river for a few weeks a year and single specimens have sold for tens of thousands of rupees; the local saying about pawning the wedding chain to buy one is quoted seriously as often as not.
Chepala pulusu	Kosta Andhra	मांसाहारी	Fish in a thick tamarind gravy, cooked without stirring and improved by a night's rest. The delta version is sourer and thicker than the coastal Uttarandhra one and is usually made in an earthen pot.
Royyala vepudu and Kolleru fish	Kosta Andhra	मांसाहारी	Prawn fried dry with ground chilli, and lake fish — murrel, catla, rohu — cooked in pulusu form. Aquaculture has made both cheap and constant, which has changed what an ordinary weekday plate looks like in two generations.
Ulava charu	Kosta Andhra	शाकाहारी	Horse gram boiled for hours and the dark broth decanted and reduced. A Godavari speciality, thick enough to coat rice, and by local convention finished with a spoon of fresh cream — a combination that sounds wrong and is the point.
Pappu, in its many forms	Kosta Andhra	शाकाहारी	Pigeon pea cooked with whatever supplies the acid — raw mango, gongura, sorrel, tomato, dosakaya cucumber — and tempered with mustard, cumin, garlic and dried chilli. Which pappu is made tells you the week of the year.
Kobbari-based Konaseema cooking	Kosta Andhra	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Fresh coconut ground into curries, coconut oil in the tempering, coconut in the sweets. It stops abruptly at the edge of the coconut belt, which makes Konaseema the one part of the Telugu coast that cooks anything like the western seaboard does.
Natu kodi pulusu	Kosta Andhra	मांसाहारी	Country chicken cooked long in a thin tamarind and chilli gravy. The bird is lean and tough by design and the cooking time is the whole recipe; the broth is what people actually want.
Pesarattu upma	Kosta Andhra	शाकाहारी	A green-gram crepe with a layer of semolina upma folded inside, eaten with ginger chutney and allam pachadi. Associated with Kakinada, where it acquired an incongruous political nickname decades ago and kept it.
Pootharekulu	Kosta Andhra	शाकाहारी	Translucent sheets of rice starch lifted off an inverted heated pot, layered with powdered sugar or jaggery and ghee, and folded into a roll that shatters when bitten. The Atreyapuram version carries a geographical indication, granted in 2023 after a long application; the sheets are still made by hand in village households.
Bandar laddu	Kosta Andhra	शाकाहारी	A coarse gram-flour laddu from Machilipatnam — bandar being the Persian word for port that gave the town its everyday name — with a loose, crumbly texture and a heavy hand of ghee. It carries a geographical indication registered in 2013.
Kakinada kaja and Tapeswaram madatha kaja	Kosta Andhra	शाकाहारी	Two versions of one idea. The Kakinada kaja is soft, syrup-soaked and collapses in the hand; the Tapeswaram madatha kaja is folded into leaves and stays crisp. Neither holds a geographical indication and both would be plausible candidates.
Ariselu and bobbatlu	Kosta Andhra	शाकाहारी	Rice flour and jaggery fried into a dense disc, and a gram-and-jaggery filling sealed in thin dough and griddled. The Sankranti sweets, made in bulk in January and given away in quantity.
Perugu annam with nilava pachadi	Kosta Andhra	शाकाहारी	Curd rice with a year-kept pickle. It is not an afterthought; the meal is structured to end here, and the pickle chosen for it is a statement about the household's jar.
Siddu	Kullu & Mandi	शाकाहारी	Leavened wheat dough stuffed with ground walnut and poppy seed, or with spiced urad paste, and steamed. Served hot with ghee poured over it, or with mutton gravy or a green chutney. Winter food, and the one dish that people from this valley miss most reliably when they leave it.
Rajma madra	Kullu & Mandi	शाकाहारी	Kidney beans cooked in ghee with whole spices and finished in yoghurt held below a simmer until it thickens without breaking. Kullu-grown rajma is small, dark and thin-skinned, and holds its shape through the long cook better than a plains bean would.
Kaale channe ka khatta	Kullu & Mandi	शाकाहारी	Black chickpeas in a thin, dark, deliberately loose tamarind-and-jaggery gravy, poured over rice by a server walking the row. It resets the palate between the ghee-heavy courses, and every ingredient in it that provides the sourness has been carried up from the plains.
Mash daal	Kullu & Mandi	शाकाहारी	Whole black urad simmered long with ginger and asafoetida and loaded with ghee, cooked thick enough to sit on a leaf plate without running into the next dish.
Meetha bhaat	Kullu & Mandi	शाकाहारी	Rice with sugar or jaggery, raisins, saffron and dry fruit, served last. When it comes down the row the meal is over, and the row knows it.
Babru	Kullu & Mandi	शाकाहारी	Leavened wheat dough wrapped round a paste of soaked, ground black gram and fried flat — a hill kachori, standard at fairs and on festival mornings, eaten with tamarind chutney.
Patande	Kullu & Mandi	शाकाहारी	A thin wheat-batter pancake cooked on a hot tawa and eaten rolled with ghee, sugar or honey. It is made from a batter rested overnight, which gives it a faint sourness that distinguishes it from a plain crepe.
Bhey	Kullu & Mandi	शाकाहारी	Lotus stem in thin discs, tossed in gram flour and spices and slow-fried until the fibres crisp at the edges. It comes from wetland lakes rather than from this valley, which makes it a good marker of how far a hill kitchen's supply lines actually reach.
Chha gosht	Kullu & Mandi	मांसाहारी	Mutton cooked in a yoghurt-and-gram-flour gravy — the madra technique carried over to meat, with the gram flour stabilising the yoghurt through a longer cook. It is not served at a dham, because a dham does not serve meat.
Khatta meat	Kullu & Mandi	मांसाहारी	Mutton finished sour with anardana or amchur instead of tomato and cooked down dry, so the sourness sits on the meat. A winter dish, and a use for the dried sour powders that are the only acid in the house.
Beas trout	Kullu & Mandi	मांसाहारी	Brown and rainbow trout, introduced into the Beas and its tributaries by British anglers and now raised at hatcheries along the valley. Cooked simply — floured, pan-fried with a little chilli and lemon — because the fish is the point and nothing in the local repertoire was designed for it.
Aktori	Kullu & Mandi	शाकाहारी	A thick pancake of buckwheat flour, sometimes cooked over leaves, belonging originally to Lahaul over the Rohtang crest and eaten in the upper Beas villages that trade and marry across it.
Gucchi	Kullu & Mandi	शाकाहारी	Wild morels gathered on the Great Himalayan slopes after snowmelt, dried, and cooked with rice or in a yoghurt gravy. Almost all of the crop is sold rather than eaten, because the price it fetches away from here is far beyond what a collecting household would spend on a meal.
Sepu badi	Kullu & Mandi	शाकाहारी	Fried urad-dal patties simmered in a spinach and yoghurt gravy until they soften through. It belongs most strongly to the Kangra dham and appears here in the western part of the region, which is a fair index of how far the two feast traditions overlap.
Tibetan and Manali road food	Kullu & Mandi	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Momo, thukpa and thenthuk in every bus stand and bazaar, alongside the Israeli, Italian and Korean cooking that Manali and the Parvati valley have been serving to long-stay travellers since the 1970s. Some of it has been here long enough to count as local.
Bhatt ki churkani	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	Black soybean roasted until it splits, then simmered with a slurry of rice or wheat flour into a thick dark dish eaten with rice. Chudkani is the coarse version and dubke the wet-ground one; households are firm about which they make and mildly rude about the other.
Dubke	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	Black gram or black soybean soaked, ground wet on a stone and simmered with jakhiya and asafoetida into a smooth, heavy dal. Eaten over rice with a spoon of ghee, and unambiguously winter food.
Gahat ki dal and gahat ke paranthe	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	Horse gram cooked thin and dark, or ground and stuffed into a paratha. It is a winter pulse credited in household practice with breaking kidney stones — a belief widespread enough that the crop is grown partly for it.
Aloo ke gutke	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	Boiled potato in thumb-sized pieces tossed in mustard oil with jakhiya, red chilli and coriander seed, and eaten with bhang ki chutney. The default breakfast, travel food and guest food of the hills.
Bhang ki chutney	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	Hemp seed roasted and ground on a stone with lemon, green chilli and salt. The seed carries no intoxicant; the plant is a field-margin weed and the seed is gathered rather than farmed.
Pisyun loon	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	Salt pounded with garlic, chilli, turmeric and one of several herbs or seeds into an oily green or ochre paste. Every household makes a slightly different version, and a good one is a reason to visit a particular aunt.
Kappa	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	Green leaves boiled, chopped and set with a slurry of ground rice, then tempered — the Kumaoni counterpart of Garhwal's kafuli, made from the same logic with a different name and a slightly thinner finish.
Jholi	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	Buttermilk turned with gram flour and turmeric and tempered with jakhiya, fenugreek and asafoetida. The everyday sauce, made from what remains after the butter has been churned out.
Bhaddu ka rajma	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	Small hill rajma cooked in a lidded bronze bhaddu over embers for hours until the skins go soft and the liquor thickens by itself. The Munsiyari and Harshil beans are the ones people ask for by name.
Sisunak saag	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	Stinging nettle cut young, boiled to disarm it and cooked as a green or a thin soup. Free, abundant and, once cooked, one of the more nutritious things growing on a Kumaoni field boundary.
Singal	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	A batter of semolina or rice flour with curd and banana, piped into hot oil in a ring or a horn and fried. A festival and fair sweet rather than an everyday one.
Bal mithai	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	Khoya cooked down until it darkens and caramelises into a fudge, cut into cubes and rolled in tiny white sugar balls. It is an Almora bazaar invention, and its keeping quality is why it is the sweet that leaves the region.
Singori	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	Sweetened khoya, often with coconut, set in a cone of fresh malu leaf, which scents it as it cools. It keeps for a day or two at most, which is why it stayed a local sweet while bal mithai travelled.
Ghughute	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	Wheat-flour dough figures — birds, drums, pomegranates — deep-fried and strung with an orange into a necklace for children at Uttarayani, who then call the crows to eat them.
Buckwheat and barley roti of the high valleys	Kumaon	शाकाहारी	Above 2,500 m the flour changes. Buckwheat, barley and amaranth roti eaten with dried greens, chhurpi-type hard cheese and butter tea in the Rung and Shauka valleys — a Tibetan-facing plate on the Indian side of the crest.
Festival and sacrificial meat	Kumaon	मांसाहारी	Goat at deity festivals and weddings, cooked in an iron kadhai with jakhiya, turmeric, chilli and a great deal of garlic, and distributed by household share. In the high valleys meat is also dried in the cold and kept through the winter.
Kutchi dabeli	Kutch	शाकाहारी	Spiced mashed potato pressed into a buttered pav with tamarind-and-date chutney, garlic chutney, roasted peanuts, pomegranate seeds and sev. Invented in Mandvi in the 1960s by Keshavji Gabha Chudasama, and now so widespread in Maharashtra that most people who eat it have no idea it comes from here. Dabeli means "pressed".
Bajra no rotlo with white butter	Kutch	शाकाहारी	A thick hand-patted millet bread eaten hot with unsalted white butter, jaggery and raw onion or garlic chutney. This is the everyday meal of the region and the base against which everything else is an addition.
Kutchi kadhi	Kutch	शाकाहारी	Buttermilk and gram flour simmered with ginger, green chilli, curry leaf and a clear quantity of jaggery, thinner and distinctly sweeter than the Punjabi or Rajasthani versions. Eaten over rice or khichdi.
Khichdi and kadhi	Kutch	शाकाहारी	Rice and moong cooked soft with ghee, with the kadhi poured over. The standard evening meal in Kutchi households, and the standard convalescent food.
Bajra ni raab	Kutch	शाकाहारी	Millet flour cooked into a thin gruel with ghee, jaggery and ajwain, drunk hot in winter and given to women after childbirth. Grain, fat and sugar in the most digestible form available without a stove doing much work.
Lasan chutney	Kutch	शाकाहारी	Raw garlic pounded with dried red chilli and salt, sometimes with a little oil. The sharpest thing on a Kutchi table and the reason the rest of the food does not need to be hot.
Khichiya and papad	Kutch	शाकाहारी	Rice-flour discs rolled thin and sun-dried in summer, then roasted or fried through the year. Dry-stores technology dressed up as a snack.
Sev tameta	Kutch	शाकाहारी	Tomatoes cooked into a thin sweet-sour gravy and topped with crisp gram-flour sev at the table. A dish for a kitchen with no fresh vegetables — both components keep for weeks.
Banni mutton and rotlo	Kutch	मांसाहारी	Goat or sheep cooked simply with onion, chilli and whole spice in the Maldhari and Jat households of the Banni, eaten with bajra rotlo. Meat is occasional and tied to guests and to festivals, not routine.
Coastal fish and prawn	Kutch	मांसाहारी	Fried or in a thin masala at Mandvi and around the Jakhau fishing harbour, one of Gujarat's larger landing points. Inland Kutch does not eat it, and the two kitchens sit forty kilometres apart.
Dal pakwan and Sindhi kadhi	Kutch	शाकाहारी	Chana dal with crisp fried flatbread, and the tamarind-and-vegetable Sindhi kadhi that is a different dish from the Kutchi one of the same name. Both are at home in the towns, and are the clearest everyday trace of the region's continuity with Sindh.
Adadiya pak	Kutch	शाकाहारी	Urad flour cooked slowly in ghee with edible gum, dry ginger, pepper and dry fruit, set and cut into squares. A winter preparation eaten as a strengthening food rather than as a sweet course, in small pieces.
Gulab pak and mawa sweets	Kutch	शाकाहारी	Reduced milk worked with ghee, dry fruit and rose, set and cut. Everything in this family is built on mawa because mawa keeps, which is what a sweet has to do in a place with this climate and these distances.
Sukhdi	Kutch	शाकाहारी	Wheat flour roasted in ghee and bound with jaggery, pressed into a tray and cut. Three ingredients, keeps for weeks, travels without damage — the standard food to take on a journey, and the standard thing to send with someone leaving.
Khaarek — fresh and dried dates	Kutch	शाकाहारी	Kutch is India's leading date-growing district, and the local habit is to eat the fruit at the doka stage — crisp and barely sweet — rather than waiting for it to soften. The Mundra and Mandvi groves crop in June and July.
Camel milk	Kutch	शाकाहारी	Drunk fresh or taken in tea by the Maldhari, and since the mid-2010s bought by dairies and sold pasteurised and as ice cream. It is naturally saltier and thinner than buffalo milk and does not set into curd, which is why it never developed a food culture of its own.
Skyu	Ladakh & Zanskar	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Small discs of wheat or barley dough pressed with the thumb into a shallow cup, dropped into a thick stew of root vegetables and, in winter, dried meat, and simmered until the dough is cooked through and has thickened the broth. The thumbprint is functional — it makes the piece thin enough to cook and cupped enough to hold liquid. The Ladakhi household dish above all others.
Chutagi	Ladakh & Zanskar	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Literally water bread: flat bow-tie shapes of dough boiled in a vegetable and meat broth. The dough is rolled, cut and pinched by hand in quantity, which makes it a dish for a household with people in it rather than for one cook.
Thukpa	Ladakh & Zanskar	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Hand-pulled or cut noodles in broth with vegetables and often dried meat, eaten as the whole meal. Its Ladakhi form is thinner and less spiced than the versions sold across the Himalaya, and the broth is expected to carry the dish.
Thenthuk	Ladakh & Zanskar	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	The same broth with dough torn straight into it in flat pieces rather than cut into noodles — faster, and made when the household is cold and in a hurry.
Mokmok	Ladakh & Zanskar	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Steamed dumplings of yak, mutton or vegetable, eaten with a thin chilli-and-tomato sauce that arrived later than the dumpling did. Mokthuk is the same dumpling served in broth.
Khambir	Ladakh & Zanskar	शाकाहारी	A thick, round, slightly sour leavened bread cooked on a griddle or in the embers, kept for days and eaten torn into butter tea at breakfast. The sourness comes from a retained piece of the previous dough — a continuously maintained starter, in a place with no yeast to buy.
Tigmo	Ladakh & Zanskar	शाकाहारी	Steamed leavened bread, spiralled or knotted, served with a stew to soak up. Steaming rather than baking saves fuel and does not need an oven.
Ngamphe and kholak	Ladakh & Zanskar	शाकाहारी	Roasted barley flour, either stirred into butter tea as a thin porridge or kneaded in the bowl with the fingers into a stiff ball. It is a full meal assembled at the table without a stove, and it is what a herder, a pilgrim or a traveller carries.
Paba	Ladakh & Zanskar	शाकाहारी	A dense dough of mixed barley, pea and buckwheat flours cooked stiff, sliced, and eaten with tangtur. The mixed flours are not a refinement but an inventory — it is made from whatever the household harvested.
Tangtur	Ladakh & Zanskar	शाकाहारी	Cold buttermilk soured further, with dried or fresh greens, wild herbs and sometimes a little flour stirred through. Eaten with paba in summer, and the closest thing the region has to a salad.
Zan	Ladakh & Zanskar	शाकाहारी	Barley flour cooked with water into a thick porridge and eaten with butter or with a broth poured over. Older, plainer and more fuel-hungry than kholak, and now mostly eaten by choice rather than necessity.
Sha skam	Ladakh & Zanskar	मांसाहारी	Winter-dried meat, shredded or chipped into stews. Used in small quantity for savour rather than eaten as a portion, and hung visibly in the store room as a measure of the household's winter.
Yarkhandi pulao	Ladakh & Zanskar	मांसाहारी	Rice cooked with meat, carrot and onion in the Central Asian manner, kept alive in Leh's Muslim trading households and in Nubra as a direct residue of the caravan road to Yarkand. It is the one dish in the region built on rice, and it did not come up from India.
Phating	Ladakh & Zanskar	शाकाहारी	Dried apricots, either eaten as they are, stewed into a thick soup with a little flour, or cooked with the cracked kernels stirred back in. In Nubra and along the lower Indus it is the winter sweet, and no sugar is added to it.
Chhurpi	Ladakh & Zanskar	शाकाहारी	Hard cheese chipped from a block, chewed slowly on the move or softened into stews. The soft fresh form is eaten with sugar or with tea as a treat when the milk is running.
Mas podichathu	Lakshadweep	मांसाहारी	Masmin pounded or flaked and worked with grated coconut, onion, green chilli, turmeric and lime. It is the standard accompaniment to rice, it needs no cooking, and it is what a household eats when the sea has been closed for a week.
Mas huni	Lakshadweep	मांसाहारी	The Minicoy breakfast — smoked tuna shredded fine with grated coconut, onion, chilli and lime, eaten with a wheat roshi. The same dish, under the same name, is breakfast across the Maldives.
Clear tuna broth with rice	Lakshadweep	मांसाहारी	Fresh skipjack boiled in salted water, the broth poured over rice and sharpened at the table with lime, chilli and raw onion. Plain by design; the fish is hours old and is not asked to taste of anything else.
Tuna curry in coconut milk	Lakshadweep	मांसाहारी	Skipjack or yellowfin cooked in thin coconut milk with chilli, turmeric, ginger and kodampuli, finished with thick milk off the heat. The northern islands' answer to the Minicoy broth, and the point at which the Malabar kitchen is most audible.
Octopus fry	Lakshadweep	मांसाहारी	Reef octopus, caught by hand at low tide on the lagoon flat, cleaned, tenderised by beating, then fried hard with garlic, green chilli and pepper. Octopus is a lagoon food rather than a boat food, which is why it belongs to the household and not to the fishery.
Mus kavaab	Lakshadweep	मांसाहारी	Tuna worked with onion, tomato and spice into a thick fried or pan-set cake. The word is the Arabic-Persian kebab as it arrived by sea rather than overland.
Kilanji	Lakshadweep	शाकाहारी	A thin rice-flour and egg pancake rolled around a filling of coconut and jaggery. The islands' best-known sweet and the one that turns up at every Eid table.
Batla appam	Lakshadweep	शाकाहारी	A steamed rice-flour cake built up in layers, made with coconut milk and jaggery. Steaming rather than baking is the rule here for the same reason it is on the Malabar coast — the household has a pot, not an oven.
Kadalakka	Lakshadweep	शाकाहारी	Chickpea and egg cooked with coconut, sometimes with almonds and raisins from the shipped stores. One of the very few island dishes with no fish in it, which is what makes it worth naming.
Fried reef fish	Lakshadweep	मांसाहारी	Emperor, snapper, trevally and parrotfish taken from the lagoon and reef edge, rubbed with chilli, turmeric and salt and shallow-fried in coconut oil. The reef catch feeds the household; the tuna catch is the cash crop.
Roshi	Lakshadweep	शाकाहारी	A soft unleavened wheat flatbread, cooked on a griddle and eaten with mas huni. Wheat is entirely imported, so this is a bread of the shipping schedule rather than of any field.
Coconut jaggery sweets	Lakshadweep	शाकाहारी	Rice, coconut and palm jaggery in various steamed and boiled combinations, made for Eid and for weddings. At Minicoy these sit closer to the Maldivian sweet repertoire than to the Kerala one; the published record of their local names is thin.
Litti-chokha	Magadh	शाकाहारी	Wheat balls stuffed with sattu, ajwain, pickle masala and mustard oil, baked in embers, cracked open, drowned in ghee and eaten with a mash of roasted brinjal, tomato and potato. The best version is cooked over cow-dung cakes and eaten with the fingers, standing up.
Sattu ka sharbat and sattu paratha	Magadh	शाकाहारी	Roasted gram flour whisked into water with black salt, lemon and roasted cumin — the summer drink of the whole region — or stuffed into a paratha, called makuni, with pickle masala and onion.
Dal pitha	Magadh	शाकाहारी	Rice-flour dumplings filled with spiced chana dal and steamed, then sometimes fried — the region's own dumpling, eaten as a meal rather than a snack.
Ghugni and chura	Magadh	शाकाहारी	Whole black gram or peas cooked with ginger and served with flattened rice. Standard morning food across Magadh, and the default offering to a visitor.
Kadhi-bari	Magadh	शाकाहारी	Gram-flour dumplings in a sour, panch-phoran-tempered curd gravy — the festive vegetarian dish.
Chana ghugni with tilkut	Magadh	शाकाहारी	Eaten together at Makar Sankranti, when tilkut is at its freshest and every household has a supply.
Silao khaja	Magadh	शाकाहारी	A multi-layered fried pastry from the village of Silao near Nalanda, soaked in syrup, dry on the outside and shattering when bitten. It holds a geographical indication, and the village makes little else.
Gaya ka tilkut	Magadh	शाकाहारी	Sesame and jaggery pounded to a flaky disc, made only in the cold months. Ramna and Tekari Road in Gaya are where it is beaten, and the sound of the mallets is the town's winter.
Maner ka laddu	Magadh	शाकाहारी	A dark, coarse-grained gram-flour laddu made at Maner near the Sone confluence, sold to pilgrims visiting the dargah and along the highway.
Thekua and khurma	Magadh	शाकाहारी	Wheat and jaggery moulded and deep fried — the principal Chhath offering, made in quantity over two days.
Machh-bhaat of the river villages	Magadh	मांसाहारी	River fish in a thin mustard gravy with rice, along the Ganga, Sone and Punpun — less central here than in Mithila, and mostly a riverside rather than a regional food.
Champaran-style handi mutton	Magadh	मांसाहारी	Mutton sealed in a clay pot with mustard oil, garlic and whole spice and cooked over a slow fire — a north Bihar dish that has taken over the region's meat kitchens in the last two decades.
Anarsa and lai	Magadh	शाकाहारी	Rice-flour and jaggery discs rolled in sesame, and puffed-rice balls bound with syrup, made at festivals.
Kodo and kutki bhaat	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	शाकाहारी	Millet cooked exactly as rice is cooked, drained, and eaten with a thin dal or a green. Kodo holds its shape and eats coarse; kutki cooks in half the time and eats soft, which is why kutki goes to children and the sick.
Pej	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	शाकाहारी	Millet or rice gruel drunk cold from a pot carried to the field. The name covers a range from a thin drink to a thick porridge depending on how much of the day is left.
Mahua latta	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	शाकाहारी	Dried mahua flowers boiled with rice or kodo until the sugar in the flowers glazes the grain. It is sweet, faintly smoky and eaten as a meal, not a dessert — the clearest example of a forest product standing in for something a field would otherwise have to grow.
Mahua laddu	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	शाकाहारी	Dried mahua pounded with til or chironji kernels and pressed into a ball. No added sugar and no cooking; the flower is sweet enough by itself.
Chapda chutney	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	मांसाहारी	Red weaver ants and their eggs pounded raw with garlic, chilli and salt into a sharp, citrus-sour paste. Eaten in the southern and eastern forest belt; the Bastar version of the same dish, over the watershed, is the one that has been formally registered.
Bans karil	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	शाकाहारी	Bamboo shoot, either fresh in a thin curry through the monsoon or salted and soured in a pot for the rest of the year. The fermented version is used a spoonful at a time, as an acid rather than a vegetable.
Jungle bhaji	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	शाकाहारी	The plate of wild greens, each with a fortnight of season — charota with the first rains, koliyari from the bauhinia, chench, amari, munga, bohar. Boiled, drained and finished with garlic and salt. The kitchen has far more names for greens than it has for spices.
Rugda and boda	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	शाकाहारी	Wild mushrooms that fruit under sal within days of the first heavy rain and are dug rather than picked. They cannot be cultivated, appear for perhaps three weeks, and sell in Jabalpur and Mandla markets at prices no cultivated vegetable in the region approaches.
Tikhur	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	शाकाहारी	Starch washed out of the rhizome of Curcuma angustifolia, dug from the forest floor and settled in water over several changes. Set with jaggery it becomes a cool, translucent slab; stirred into water it is the region's summer drink.
Badi ki sabzi	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	शाकाहारी	Sun-dried urad dumplings fried and simmered — the stored protein of the wet months, and the northern and eastern edge of the region's food rather than its centre.
Bhutta and makka roti	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	शाकाहारी	Maize roasted whole on embers, or ground coarse and baked into a thick roti on the Satpura slopes.
Ember-roasted river fish	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	मांसाहारी	Small fish from the Narmada, the Banjar and the tanks, wrapped in leaf and put in the ashes, then pounded with salt and chilli. Larger river fish are smoke-dried on the hearth rack for the monsoon.
Ghughri	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	शाकाहारी	Whole grain or gram boiled and lightly salted, made at Pola and Nag Panchami and distributed rather than served. A ritual dish defined by being shared out, not by being cooked well.
Chironji	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	शाकाहारी	The kernel of Buchanania lanzan, cracked one at a time from a hard stone. It goes into sweets across north India and is collected almost entirely in forests like these, which is why it costs what it does.
Khoya jalebi	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	शाकाहारी	Jabalpur's own sweet — jalebi made from a khoya batter rather than a fermented flour one, so it comes out dense, dark and fudge-like instead of crisp. Sold by weight, warm, and not really found outside the city.
Thalassery biryani	Malabar	मांसाहारी	Short-grained kaima rice, not basmati, fried in ghee and cooked separately from the meat, then layered and sealed with coals on the lid. Fennel and shallot dominate the masala, fried onion and cashew go on top, and the plate arrives with a date-and-chilli chutney and a thin salad rather than a gravy.
Neychoru	Malabar	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Ghee rice — kaima cooked in ghee with whole spice and no colour at all, served beside a dark chicken or mutton curry. The everyday cousin of biryani, and the wedding dish in most Mappila households.
Pathiri	Malabar	शाकाहारी	A soft, pale, unleavened disc of scalded rice flour, rolled paper-thin and cooked dry, eaten with meat or fish curry and with coconut milk. Made in a dozen named variations, including one soaked in sweetened coconut milk and eaten as a sweet.
Chatti pathiri	Malabar	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Thin sheets layered in a pan with a filling of spiced meat or of coconut, egg and sugar, sealed with beaten egg, and baked with fire below and coals on the lid. Structurally a layered pie assembled from crepes, and the centrepiece of iftar tables through Ramadan.
Malabar parotta with erachi	Malabar	मांसाहारी	Laminated flatbread pulled apart at the table and eaten with a dry-fried meat masala. It is a late-night food by function: the parotta stall opens when the bus stand empties, and the pairing is the region's most exported plate.
Kallummakkaya nirachathu	Malabar	मांसाहारी	Mussels prised open on the shell, packed with spiced rice batter, steamed shut and then dipped in masala and fried. Sold from evening stalls along the Kozhikode and Kannur coast in the months the mussels are good, and not at all in the rest.
Arikkadukka	Malabar	मांसाहारी	The same mussel-and-rice preparation cut into rounds and shallow fried in a red masala crust — a Thalassery and Kannur speciality and the reason the mussel beds are worked at all.
Meen curry in a manchatti	Malabar	मांसाहारी	Sardine, mackerel or seer simmered with smoke-dried kudampuli, chilli, shallot and coconut oil in an unglazed clay pot. Nothing is stirred with a spoon; the pot is swirled, because a spoon breaks the fish.
Unnakkaya	Malabar	शाकाहारी	Ripe plantain steamed, mashed, flattened around a filling of grated coconut, sugar, cashew and egg, shaped into a spindle and fried. The shape is the name — it is meant to look like a cocoon.
Mutta mala and pinjanathappam	Malabar	शाकाहारी	Egg yolks strained into hot sugar syrup in fine threads and coiled into a garland, served with a steamed set custard made from the leftover whites. Nothing is wasted, and the two halves of the egg become two different sweets on the same plate.
Tharikanji	Malabar	शाकाहारी	Broken wheat cooked with coconut milk, jaggery or salt, shallot and spice, made in quantity at mosques through Ramadan and given away. The fasting month's staple, and the one dish an entire neighbourhood eats at the same minute.
Kalathappam	Malabar	शाकाहारी	A rice, jaggery and coconut cake baked in a covered vessel with embers above and below until the top caramelises and the base forms a crust — a north Malabar household sweet made without an oven.
Kozhikode halwa	Malabar	शाकाहारी	Wheat or coconut starch cooked with sugar and coconut oil to a dense translucent slab, cut into blocks and stacked in a wall of colours. Karutha halwa, the dark one made with jaggery, is the one locals buy.
Gandhakasala choru with Wayanadan kozhi curry	Malabar	मांसाहारी	The plateau's scented short rice, which is grown in small quantity and smells of the field before it is cooked, served with a black chicken curry heavy on pepper and coconut. Rice and coffee on the same holding.
Mulayari and forest gathering	Malabar	शाकाहारी	Bamboo seed, gathered when a stand flowers and dies — an event that comes once in decades — cooked like rice or ground into flour. Along with wild honey, tubers and greens, part of a Wayanad Adivasi food repertoire that is measured in seasons rather than in weeks.
Alisa	Malabar	मांसाहारी	Wheat and meat cooked together for hours and then pounded to a smooth paste, finished with ghee and fried onion. Made for Ramadan and for weddings in the Thalassery and Kannur Mappila households, and closely related to versions of the same dish across the Arabian Sea.
Akki rotti	Malnad	शाकाहारी	Rice-flour dough patted out by hand directly onto a hot tawa, usually with grated coconut, onion, dill or cucumber worked in. The Malnad version is thicker and softer than the maidan one and is eaten with a spoonful of ghee and chutney.
Kadubu	Malnad	शाकाहारी	Steamed rice dumplings, plain or with a jaggery-and-coconut filling, cooked in a covered pot or inside folded leaves. The jackfruit-leaf cup version is shared with the coast below, where it belongs as much as it does here.
Tambuli	Malnad	शाकाहारी	Cold buttermilk carrying a pounded raw leaf or root — doddapatre, brahmi, curry leaf, pepper, ginger, or the bark of a garden tree. Different households keep different plants and will explain what each is for. Eaten first, before anything hot.
Menasina saaru	Malnad	शाकाहारी	A thin, hot broth built on crushed black pepper, cumin, garlic and tamarind and poured over rice. In a region where pepper is a field crop and the monsoon lasts four months, it is medicine that happens to be dinner.
Kanile palya and kanile gasi	Malnad	शाकाहारी	Bamboo shoot, leached and brined, cooked either dry with coconut or in a coconut gravy. It appears with the first rains and is one of the few genuinely seasonal foods left that cannot be bought out of season.
Halasina kayi palya	Malnad	शाकाहारी	Tender green jackfruit cut down, boiled and cooked with coconut and a light spice paste — a vegetable with the texture of meat, and the reason a Malnad household plants a jackfruit tree before it plants anything ornamental.
Halasina happala and genasale	Malnad	शाकाहारी	Ripe jackfruit pulp cooked down with jaggery and spread thin on mats to dry into dark, chewy sheets, and thinner rounds dried into wafers that are fried before eating. Both keep for a year and are the standard gift from a Malnad house.
Todadevu	Malnad	शाकाहारी	A layered Malnad sweet of jaggery and flour, folded and fried so it comes out crisp and separates into leaves. Made in a small number of households, sold in a small number of shops, and effectively unknown outside the region.
Majjige huli	Malnad	शाकाहारी	Vegetables in a mild coconut-and-buttermilk gravy, thickened but never boiled hard, because boiling splits the curd. Ash gourd, cucumber or colocasia stem are the usual bodies.
Pandi curry	Malnad	मांसाहारी	Kodagu's defining dish — pork cooked with its fat in a dry-roasted paste of pepper, coriander, cumin and chilli, with no coconut at all, finished with a spoonful of kachampuli that turns the gravy almost black and sharpens it in a way no other souring agent does. Eaten with kadambuttu or akki otti.
Akki otti	Malnad	शाकाहारी	A soft, pale rice flatbread patted out by hand, the standard Kodava accompaniment to a meat curry. It is deliberately bland, because everything else on the plate is not.
Kadambuttu	Malnad	शाकाहारी	Steamed balls of coarse rice, dense and slightly chewy, made to be broken into gravy. The size and the grind are both fixed by convention and are argued about.
Paputtu	Malnad	शाकाहारी	A steamed cake of rice, milk and grated coconut, cut into squares and eaten with honey, with a meat curry, or with both. Kodagu's breakfast, and among the few Indian rice cakes made with milk.
Noolputtu	Malnad	शाकाहारी	Rice string hoppers pressed through a mould and steamed, eaten with chicken curry or with coconut milk and honey. The same object as the Malayali idiyappam, arrived over the same mountain.
Baimbale curry	Malnad	शाकाहारी	The Kodava bamboo shoot dish — leached shoot cooked with the household spice paste, sometimes with pork. Made only in the first weeks of the monsoon, when the shoots are young enough to cut.
Kumm curry	Malnad	शाकाहारी	Wild mushrooms gathered after the first heavy rain and cooked the same day in a light spice paste. The knowledge of which mushrooms is household knowledge, held by particular people rather than written down, and the season lasts a matter of days.
Indori poha	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	Steamed flattened rice with fennel seed in the tempering, finished at the counter with raw onion, fine sev, lemon, coriander, jeeravan and often pomegranate seeds. Eaten between seven and ten in the morning by a large fraction of the city, standing at a handcart.
Poha–jalebi	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	Not a dish but a fixed pairing — a plate of poha and a hot jalebi eaten together, the sugar syrup cutting the sour-salt dusting on the rice. It is the standard Malwa breakfast order and the shops are set up for it, with the jalebi kadhai working beside the poha vessel from dawn.
Dal bafla	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	Wheat balls boiled, then baked over embers, cracked open, drowned in ghee and eaten with a thin tuvar dal and a garlic-chilli chutney. The regional feast dish, cooked in quantity at weddings and at picnics on the Narmada and Chambal banks.
Bhutte ka kees	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	Fresh maize grated off the cob on a coarse grater, then cooked down in milk with mustard seed, green chilli and a little sugar until it turns to a coarse savoury porridge, finished with coconut and lemon. A monsoon dish, because it needs the cob at the milk stage and not a day later.
Garadu	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	Cubes of purple yam deep-fried twice so the outside sets hard and the inside stays floury, then tossed with jeeravan and lemon. It appears in November and disappears in February; the Ratlam-grown variety received a geographical indication in 2026.
Khopra patties	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	A potato shell around a filling of fresh coconut, green chilli, coriander and sometimes paneer, crumbed and shallow-fried, served split with two chutneys and a heavy dusting of sev. Coconut this far inland is a Maratha inheritance, not a coastal one.
Sev — ratlami, laung and barik	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	Gram-flour strands fried from the extruder. Ratlami sev carries clove and black pepper and holds a geographical indication; the finer barik sev exists mainly to be sprinkled on everything else. Malwa puts sev on poha, on chaat, on dal, on rice and into a sabzi of its own.
Sabudana khichdi	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	Tapioca pearls soaked overnight, tossed with crushed peanut, green chilli, cumin and potato. A Maharashtrian fasting dish that arrived with the Holkar administration and became an everyday Malwa breakfast alongside poha.
Chakki ki shaak	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	Steamed wheat gluten sliced into a curd-and-besan gravy. A dish invented by a wheat surplus and a vegetable shortage, and a marker of the Malwa–Nimar kitchen wherever it turns up.
Dahi bada	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	Urad dumplings soaked soft and buried under whipped curd, tamarind, and sev. Indore's version is served with the vada tossed and turned in the air at the counter, which began as a way of shaking off excess water and is now the reason people queue.
Indori shikanji	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	Not lemonade. Malwa's shikanji is thickened milk whipped with sugar, cardamom, saffron and chopped dry fruit, served cold and eaten nearly with a spoon — a name that means one thing here and something entirely different two states away.
Mawa bati	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	A ball of reduced milk solids with a nut filling, deep-fried and steeped in sugar syrup — heavier and more granular than a gulab jamun, and the standard sweet-shop counter item across the plateau.
Raabdi	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	Maize or jowar flour cooked into buttermilk and left to sour slightly, drunk cool with salt through the hot months. It shares only its name with the thickened-milk rabri of the north, and it is a working day's food rather than a sweet.
Gatte and dried-vegetable curries	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	Gram-flour rolls simmered in curd gravy, and the dried ker, sangri and kachri preparations of the arid kitchen. These appear at the plateau's northern and western margin and thin out towards Indore — the clearest taste-line between Malwa and the Rajasthan country it shades into.
Puran poli and shrikhand	Malwa Plateau	शाकाहारी	A gram-and-jaggery stuffed flatbread, and hung curd sweetened and scented with cardamom. Both came up the old Maratha route from the Deccan in the eighteenth century and are now made in Malwa households that have no memory of the fact.
Marathwadi mutton rassa	Marathwada	मांसाहारी	Goat on the bone in a thin, near-black gravy of kala masala, with a film of red oil on top that is not skimmed. The blackness is roasted dry coconut, not chilli; the heat is separate and arrives afterwards. Eaten with jowar bhakri and raw onion, never with rice.
Naan qalia	Marathwada	मांसाहारी	Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar's own dish and a genuinely Deccani one — mutton braised with whole spice, fried onion and yoghurt into a thin red-brown qalia, eaten with a leavened naan baked against the wall of a tandoor. It belongs to the same family as Hyderabad's braises and to nothing in western Maharashtra.
Jowar bhakri	Marathwada	शाकाहारी	The staple. Patted by hand from unleavened sorghum flour and finished on coals so it balloons; coarse, slightly sweet, and heavy enough that a working day is built around two of them.
Hurda	Marathwada	शाकाहारी	Tender green jowar grain, fire-roasted in the ear and rubbed out by hand, eaten with lemon, salt, thecha, curd and jaggery. Available roughly three weeks a year, only where the crop stands. Farmers host hurda parties in the field in December and January and the whole thing is the occasion, not the food.
Shev bhaji	Marathwada	शाकाहारी	A fierce thin gravy of onion, garlic and dark masala into which crisp gram-flour shev is dropped at the table, so it is still holding its shape in the first mouthful and dissolved by the last. It belongs to a belt rather than to one region — Khandesh, Marathwada and Vidarbha all claim it, and the northern districts make it hottest.
Bharli vangi	Marathwada	शाकाहारी	Small round brinjals slit crosswise and packed with kala masala, roasted groundnut, sesame and dry coconut, then cooked in a shallow tamarind gravy. The Marathwada version is darker and hotter than the Pune one, which sweetens the same dish with jaggery.
Khichdi	Marathwada	शाकाहारी	Rice and moong dal cooked soft with turmeric and a groundnut-oil tempering, eaten with plain curd and lime pickle. Ordinary food everywhere in India, but here it is what a household eats when the masala tin is being saved, and it is the standard offering at a death in the family.
Khichda	Marathwada	मांसाहारी	A Muharram dish and a different thing entirely from khichdi — cracked wheat, several dals and mutton pounded together over many hours until the meat has gone to fibre and the whole pot is one texture. Cooked in large deghs and distributed from the Deccani neighbourhoods through the ten days.
Ambil	Marathwada	शाकाहारी	Cold soured jowar or bajra gruel thinned with buttermilk, salted, sometimes with a green chilli crushed into it. Summer field food, drunk from a tumbler.
Thecha and kharda	Marathwada	शाकाहारी	Green chilli, garlic, salt and roasted groundnut pounded on stone. Thecha is drier, kharda coarser and wetter with oil. Present at every meal, and the reason a plain plate is not a dull one.
Pithla	Marathwada	शाकाहारी	Gram flour whisked into hot seasoned water until it thickens — twelve minutes from nothing to a meal, which is exactly why it exists. Eaten with bhakri and raw onion, and no household treats it as a recipe.
Shevayachi kheer	Marathwada	शाकाहारी	Hand-drawn wheat vermicelli simmered in milk with cardamom. Made for Eid in the Muslim households and for Nagpanchami and weddings in the Hindu ones, from the same shevaya dried on a sheet on the terrace in summer.
Kesar aamras	Marathwada	शाकाहारी	The pulp of the Kesar mango, which is grown across Jalna, Beed, Latur and the Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar orchards and holds a geographical indication of its own. Denser and more orange than Alphonso, and it takes heat and shallow soil far better, which is why it is the mango of a drought region.
Langar at Hazur Sahib	Marathwada	शाकाहारी	Roti, dal, a vegetable and kadah prasad served continuously in the free kitchen at Nanded's takht, cooked in Punjabi proportions with local wheat and eaten sitting in rows on the floor. The nearest thing the region has to a Punjabi institution, and it has been there since the eighteenth century.
Tuljapur prasad	Marathwada	शाकाहारी	Puran poli and coconut offered at the Bhavani temple and eaten on the temple steps. The Dasara and Navratri crowds turn the town's entire lane system into a food economy for ten days.
Chettinad kozhi or aatu kuzhambu	Marava & Ramnad	मांसाहारी	Chicken or mutton in a gravy built on a masala roasted for that pot — pepper, star anise, kalpasi, marathi mokku, fennel and a little chilli — with shallots, tomato and ground coconut. The heat should register on the back of the tongue as pepper, not on the front as chilli.
Uppu kari	Marava & Ramnad	मांसाहारी	Salted, sun-dried mutton soaked back to life and fried hard with pepper, shallot and curry leaf. Chewy, intensely savoury and completely unlike fresh mutton — a preservation method eaten as a delicacy.
Karuvadu kuzhambu	Marava & Ramnad	मांसाहारी	Dried fish rinsed, roasted and simmered in a thin, very sour tamarind gravy with brinjal or drumstick. The standard protein of the interior villages, and the smell is half the dish.
Mundu milagai vathal kuzhambu	Marava & Ramnad	शाकाहारी	Sun-dried vegetables fried in gingelly oil and cooked down in tamarind with the local round Mundu chilli, which gives colour and body more than raw heat.
Idiyappam with mutton kuzhambu	Marava & Ramnad	मांसाहारी	Rice string hoppers pressed fresh and steamed, eaten with a peppery mutton gravy. The Nagarathar breakfast, and a form the community carried to and from Ceylon and Malaya where it has near-identical cousins.
Kuzhi paniyaram	Marava & Ramnad	शाकाहारी	Fermented idli batter cooked in a dimpled pan with a tempering of shallot, chilli and curry leaf pressed into each well, so the outside crisps and the inside stays soft.
Vellai paniyaram	Marava & Ramnad	शाकाहारी	Unfermented raw-rice batter fried in the same pan into a pale, lacy disc with a soft centre — deliberately white, deliberately not sour, and eaten with coconut chutney.
Paal paniyaram	Marava & Ramnad	शाकाहारी	Small fried urad-and-rice dumplings dropped into thickened sweetened milk with cardamom and left to soak. A Nagarathar wedding item that has escaped into general use.
Kandarappam	Marava & Ramnad	शाकाहारी	A batter of rice with several pulses and jaggery, deep-fried into a dense, dark, slightly chewy cake. It is one of the ritual sweets of the Nagarathar clan temple offerings and is almost never made outside the community's own kitchens.
Seeyam	Marava & Ramnad	शाकाहारी	A ball of sweetened chana dal and jaggery paste, coated in a rice or urad batter and deep-fried, so it comes out crisp outside and soft in the middle. There is a savoury masala seeyam as well.
Ukkarai	Marava & Ramnad	शाकाहारी	Soaked pulses ground coarse, steamed, then broken up and cooked with jaggery, ghee and cardamom into a crumbly mass. Ritual food, made in quantity for temple and family occasions.
Athirasam	Marava & Ramnad	शाकाहारी	Rice flour and jaggery dough rested for a day and deep-fried into a dense disc, pressed between two ladles as it comes out to force the oil back out. The resting is what separates a good one from a hard one.
Kavuni arisi	Marava & Ramnad	शाकाहारी	Black glutinous rice cooked slowly with jaggery and coconut into a dark, sticky pudding. The rice came back from Burma with the banking families and stayed; the dish is the clearest single trace of that trade on a plate.
Milagu varuval	Marava & Ramnad	मांसाहारी	Mutton or chicken cooked down with a great deal of coarsely crushed black pepper until the liquid is gone and the pepper has caramelised onto the meat. The most direct statement the kitchen makes.
Chettinad kola urundai	Marava & Ramnad	मांसाहारी	Minced mutton pounded with roasted gram, fennel and pepper into a tight ball and fried, with a stock made separately from the trimmings.
Rameswaram meen kuzhambu and nandu masala	Marava & Ramnad	मांसाहारी	Reef and bay fish in a thin tamarind gravy, and Palk Bay crab cooked down with pepper and shallot. The island's catch changes with the season and the boat, and the menu follows it rather than the other way round.
Dal baati churma	Marwar & the Thar	शाकाहारी	Hard wheat balls baked in embers or an oven, cracked open and drowned in ghee, eaten with a five-lentil dal and sweet crushed churma. Baati keeps for days, which is exactly why it exists.
Laal maas	Marwar & the Thar	मांसाहारी	Mutton cooked in a fiery red gravy of Mathania chillies, yoghurt and garlic. The colour is chilli, not tomato, and the heat is the dish. A Rajput hunting-camp preparation.
Gatte ki sabzi	Marwar & the Thar	शाकाहारी	Gram-flour dumplings steamed, sliced and simmered in a spiced yoghurt gravy. Invented for a place with no fresh vegetables and no way to keep them.
Ker sangri	Marwar & the Thar	शाकाहारी	The desert on a plate — sun-dried ker berries and sangri beans from the khejri tree, rehydrated and cooked with dried red chilli, amchur and plenty of oil. Both ingredients grow wild and are gathered, not farmed.
Pyaaz kachori	Marwar & the Thar	शाकाहारी	A flaky fried pastry filled with spiced onion, cracked open and topped with chutney. Jodhpur's is the reference version and it is eaten for breakfast.
Mirchi vada	Marwar & the Thar	शाकाहारी	A whole large green chilli stuffed with spiced potato, dipped in gram-flour batter and fried. Less hot than it looks, and eaten with a bread roll in Jodhpur.
Ghevar	Marwar & the Thar	शाकाहारी	A disc of batter poured into hot ghee so it sets as a honeycomb, then soaked in syrup and topped with rabri. Made and eaten mainly around Teej and Raksha Bandhan.
Mawa kachori	Marwar & the Thar	शाकाहारी	A kachori shell filled with khoya, dry fruit and cardamom, fried and dipped in sugar syrup. Jodhpur's contribution to sweets.
Bajre ki roti with lehsun ki chutney	Marwar & the Thar	शाकाहारी	Millet flatbread slapped out by hand, eaten with a coarse garlic-and-red-chilli chutney and white butter. The everyday village meal across the west.
Safed maas	Marwar & the Thar	मांसाहारी	The pale opposite of laal maas — mutton in a white gravy of cashew, almond, curd and coconut, with no chilli powder at all. A palace kitchen dish.
Papad ki sabzi	Marwar & the Thar	शाकाहारी	A curry made from broken papad in a besan-and-yoghurt gravy, cooked in fifteen minutes when there is nothing else in the house.
Makhaniya lassi	Marwar & the Thar	शाकाहारी	Thick saffron-and-cardamom lassi topped with a slab of cream and crushed ice, served in a clay tumbler.
Dal baati churma	Mewar	शाकाहारी	The shared Rajasthani plate, made differently here. Mewar's baati is smaller and denser, baked over cow-dung embers rather than in an oven, and the panchmel dal beside it leans on urad and chana rather than moong. The churma is crushed coarse and sweetened with jaggery in the villages and with boora in town.
Chakki ki sabzi	Mewar	शाकाहारी	Wheat dough washed under running water until only the gluten remains, steamed into a firm cake, sliced and simmered in a spiced curd gravy. The texture is deliberately meat-like, and it is a wedding and festival dish rather than an everyday one because the washing takes an hour.
Sau ukale ki kadhi	Mewar	शाकाहारी	A thin buttermilk kadhi taken to the boil and off it repeatedly over several hours — the "hundred boils" of the name — finished with asafoetida and curry leaf. The repetition sets the curd so it will not split and lets the pot stand overnight without souring.
Safed maas	Mewar	मांसाहारी	Mutton in a white gravy of cashew, almond, curd and coconut with no chilli powder at all, so the heat comes only from white pepper. A palace-kitchen dish, and the deliberate counterpart to laal maas — one shows what the kitchen could afford, the other what the hunting camp could carry.
Laal maas	Mewar	मांसाहारी	Mutton in a red gravy of dried chilli, curd and a great deal of garlic, usually finished with dhungar smoke. Mewar's version is more garlic-forward than Marwar's and often built on Nimbahera-grown chilli; the colour is chilli and nothing else.
Jungli maas	Mewar	मांसाहारी	The shikar camp dish reduced to what a hunting party could carry — meat, ghee, salt, whole dried red chillies and water, and nothing else. No onion, no tomato, no ground spice. It is the honest ancestor of laal maas and still cooked on the Aravalli slope.
Soola	Mewar	मांसाहारी	Meat — traditionally game, now mutton or chicken — marinated in curd and hung spice, threaded on skewers, grilled over embers and smoked. It is the closest thing Rajasthan has to a barbecue tradition, and Mewar is where it survived as a household technique rather than a restaurant one.
Panchkuta	Mewar	शाकाहारी	Five dried things — ker, sangri, kumat, gunda and dried mango — rehydrated and cooked in oil with red chilli. In Marwar these are gathered wild; here they are bought dry from the desert districts, which makes the dish a store-cupboard luxury rather than a subsistence food.
Dal dhokli	Mewar	शाकाहारी	Wheat-flour diamonds simmered directly in a sweet-sour dal so the dough thickens the pot. It arrives from the Gujarat side and gets steadily more common as you go south down the Aravalli slope.
Makki ki raab	Mewar	शाकाहारी	Coarse maize flour cooked slowly into buttermilk, salted, sometimes soured overnight and drunk warm or cold. It is breakfast, it is what a field worker takes out at dawn, and it is the dish that marks Mewar off from the millet country on the other side of the range.
Gulab jamun ki sabzi	Mewar	शाकाहारी	Fried khoya balls, unsweetened, dropped into a spiced curd-and-tomato gravy. A wedding-feast curry that exists because a Rajasthani banquet is expected to include something extravagant that is not a sweet.
Nathdwara peda	Mewar	शाकाहारी	Dense khoya peda, lightly grained, sold within a few hundred metres of the Shrinathji temple by shops that turn over their stock on the darshan timings. Pedas are the town's default prasad and its default export.
Thor	Mewar	शाकाहारी	A large flat fried Pushtimarg sweet made for temple offering and sold on in the bazaar. Older accounts describe it being perfumed by smoking with camphor before it was offered, a step now rarely performed.
Kasturi pak and suhag sonth	Mewar	शाकाहारी	Winter-only temple sweets built on dry ginger, gum, nuts and ghee — warming preparations offered at Nathdwara through the cold months and then withdrawn from the counter when the season turns.
Mahua roti and mahua	Mewar	शाकाहारी	Dried mahua corollas ground with maize flour into a dark, sweetish bread on the hill slope, and the same flower fermented and distilled into the local spirit. Both are seasonal, both depend on collecting the flowers as they fall in March and April, and the distilling has been variously licensed, taxed and prohibited by successive governments without ever stopping.
Poha jalebi	Mewar	शाकाहारी	Flattened rice steamed with turmeric, mustard seed and onion, eaten with a hot jalebi on the same plate. A Malwa breakfast that crossed the plateau edge and is now the standard morning meal in Chittorgarh and common in Udaipur — a good marker of how far east the region reaches.
Machh-bhaat	Mithilanchal	मांसाहारी	Freshwater fish — rohu, katla, mangur or small pond fish — cooked in a thin mustard-and-turmeric gravy and eaten with rice. In a Maithil household this is a ritually appropriate food, not a departure from one.
Makhana kheer	Mithilanchal	शाकाहारी	Popped foxnut simmered in reduced milk with cardamom until it swells and softens. The region's signature sweet and a fixture at weddings and fasts.
Dahi-chura with gur	Mithilanchal	शाकाहारी	Flattened rice with thick curd and jaggery, eaten in quantity at Makar Sankranti with a fried fish or a tilkut on the side. The most Maithil meal there is.
Tilkor ki sabzi	Mithilanchal	शाकाहारी	Ivy-gourd leaves fried in mustard oil until they crisp — a small dish that Maithils away from home ask for first.
Bagiya and pittha	Mithilanchal	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Rice-flour dumplings, steamed in leaf, filled with spiced chana dal, khoya or occasionally fish. Made in winter and at festivals.
Kadhi-bari	Mithilanchal	शाकाहारी	Gram-flour dumplings in a sour curd gravy tempered with panch phoran — the standard festive vegetarian dish.
Aloo-bhanta chokha with sattu	Mithilanchal	शाकाहारी	Mashed potato and roasted aubergine with raw mustard oil, green chilli and onion, eaten with rice or with a sattu-stuffed bread.
Tarua	Mithilanchal	शाकाहारी	Sliced vegetables — brinjal, pumpkin, potato, colocasia leaf — dipped in gram-flour batter and shallow fried in mustard oil, served at every feast.
Maachh aur makhana ka jhor	Mithilanchal	मांसाहारी	A thin fish curry with popped makhana added at the end so it absorbs the gravy — a Darbhanga speciality.
Thekua and khajur	Mithilanchal	शाकाहारी	Wheat and jaggery dough pressed in a carved mould and deep fried in ghee. The principal offering at Chhath, made in enormous quantity over two days.
Anarsa and khaja	Mithilanchal	शाकाहारी	Rice-flour and jaggery discs rolled in sesame, and layered fried pastry in syrup — festival sweets across the region.
Sattu ka sharbat and litti	Mithilanchal	शाकाहारी	Roasted gram flour drunk cold with salt, lemon and black salt, or packed into a baked wheat ball. Shared with Magadh and Bhojpur, and eaten here through the hot months.
Kheer-makhana at weddings, and the fish in the ritual	Mithilanchal	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	A Maithil wedding requires both — makhana in the sweet and fish in the ritual gifts exchanged between the two households. Neither is optional.
Bai	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	The regional dish. Seasonal greens, beans, edible fern and whatever herbs are at hand are boiled in water with a little chingal, then seasoned with a spoon of sa-um or a knob of bekang. It is soupy, barely salted and served over rice. Versions carry the name of what went in — vawksa rep bai with smoked pork, anthur bai with roselle leaf — and the vegetable list changes every fortnight with what the jhum plot is producing.
Smoked pork	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	मांसाहारी	Pork hung on the hearth rack until it is dark, dry and hard, then rehydrated by long boiling with bamboo shoot, ginger and chilli. Smoking is the storage method, so the dish tastes of the house it was made in — the wood on the fire is the only variable in the recipe.
Fermented pork fat	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	मांसाहारी	Cooked abdominal pork fat fermented three days or more in a hung bottle gourd. Pungent, semi-liquid and used a spoonful at a time. It divides opinion sharply among visitors and is entirely non-negotiable among Mizos — the taste that a person raised outside the hills is least likely to acquire and most likely to be offered.
Rice porridge with herbs	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	शाकाहारी	A soft savoury rice porridge finished with powdered roasted rice, spring onion, coriander and black pepper, eaten from a bowl with a spoon. It is Aizawl's afternoon snack, sold from small counters and school gates, and one of very few dishes here that is genuinely street food rather than home food carried out.
Chicken rice porridge	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	मांसाहारी	Rice cooked down with chicken, ginger and garlic into a thick porridge. It is the standard dish for feeding a crowd at a funeral, a church gathering or a community work day, because one pot scales and needs no accompaniment.
Meat-cooked rice	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	मांसाहारी	Rice cooked together with pork, beef or chicken so the grain takes the fat. Where a plains kitchen would layer and season, this one simply puts everything in at the start — the technique is deliberately flat, and the meat is expected to carry it.
Steamed mixed vegetables	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	शाकाहारी	Whatever is green, steamed together with nothing added but salt, and eaten with a chilli chutney. It is the plainest dish in the region and the one that most clearly shows what the kitchen thinks a vegetable should taste of.
Fermented soybean	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	शाकाहारी	Soybeans fermented under leaves and ash, then either mashed with chilli into a relish or dropped whole into bai. It belongs to the same family as Naga axone and Manipuri hawaijar, and the three are close enough that a cook from one hill can work with the other's jar without instruction.
Tree bean with smoked pork	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	मांसाहारी	Parkia pods — the flat, strong-smelling tree bean known as yongchak in the Imphal valley and petai across Southeast Asia — boiled with smoked pork. The bean is seasonal, briefly available and expensive in the market, and its arrival is treated as an event.
Fermented bamboo shoot	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Young shoot sliced and left to sour in water in a covered pot. It is the region's acid — a bai without a tomato gets its edge from this — and it is also cooked as a dish in its own right with pork. Smoke-dried shoot, mautuai rep, is the dry-season equivalent.
Chilli chutney	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	शाकाहारी	Bird's-eye chilli pounded raw with garlic, salt and often onion or tomato. Every table has it, and it is the only source of heat in the meal — which is why the cooked dishes can be as mild as they are.
Sticky rice cake	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	शाकाहारी	Sticky rice pounded fine, formed into flat cakes and eaten with cane jaggery and black tea. It is the closest thing the tradition has to a sweet, and it is a tea-time food rather than a course.
Bamboo-tube chicken	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	मांसाहारी	Chicken, herbs and a splash of water sealed in a green bamboo internode and cooked over embers. Made in the fields and at festivals rather than in a kitchen, because the vessel has to be cut fresh.
Corn and meat stew	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	मांसाहारी	Hulled maize simmered for hours with beans and meat until it thickens — the defining winter dish of the Chin Hills, made across the ridge from Champhai and rare on the Indian side, where rice displaced maize as the everyday grain.
Zan	Monpa & Tawang Belt	शाकाहारी	Roasted millet, buckwheat or maize flour stirred into boiling water to a stiff porridge and eaten with vegetables, meat, fermented cheese or chamin. The default meal of the belt, and the fastest one to make.
Puta	Monpa & Tawang Belt	शाकाहारी	Buckwheat noodles pressed straight into boiling water, drained and eaten with a vegetable stew, fermented cheese or plain butter. Buckwheat's earthiness is the whole flavour; nothing is added to disguise it.
Khura	Monpa & Tawang Belt	शाकाहारी	A thick buckwheat pancake cooked on a griddle, eaten with butter tea, chamin or a vegetable curry. The bitter buckwheat version is darker and more assertive than the sweet.
Gyapa khazi	Monpa & Tawang Belt	मांसाहारी	Rice cooked with fermented cheese, small dried fish, chilli, ginger and butter. A festive dish, because the rice and the fish both have to be brought up from lower ground — it is a dish that announces an occasion by its ingredients alone.
Thukpa	Monpa & Tawang Belt	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Noodle soup with minced meat, vegetables and chilli. Local variants substitute the grain — dheb-thukpa uses rice, and a maize-and-bean version is made in the middle valleys.
Momo	Monpa & Tawang Belt	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Steamed dumplings of minced meat or vegetable, served with a bowl of the steaming broth and with chamin. Ubiquitous across the Himalayan belt and made here with a coarser filling and more fat than the town versions sold on the plain.
Chamin	Monpa & Tawang Belt	शाकाहारी	Chilli ground with fermented cheese, sometimes with garlic or a wild herb. It is on the table at every meal and it is the single seasoning the kitchen cannot do without.
Churpi	Monpa & Tawang Belt	शाकाहारी	Yak cheese in two states — soft, used in cooking, and hard, dried on a string and chewed for an hour at a time. Arunachal Pradesh Yak Churpi holds a geographical indication registered in 2023.
Suja	Monpa & Tawang Belt	शाकाहारी	Boiled brick tea churned with yak butter and salt. Salty rather than sweet, drunk continuously, and the first thing put in front of a visitor. Refusing it is difficult and not advisable.
Bresi	Monpa & Tawang Belt	शाकाहारी	Sweet rice with melted butter, raisins and sugar, made for religious occasions and for guests. One of the few sweet dishes in the repertoire.
Ashum thukpa and dheb-thukpa	Monpa & Tawang Belt	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	The maize-and-bean and the rice-based versions of the noodle soup. Which one a household makes is mostly a question of what its own land grows.
Dried yak meat	Monpa & Tawang Belt	मांसाहारी	Strips hung in the roof space above the hearth until hard, then either chewed as they are or pounded and dropped into a stew. Smoke from the cooking fire does the preserving as a by-product.
Fermented greens with churpi	Monpa & Tawang Belt	शाकाहारी	Soured and dried turnip tops or mustard greens rehydrated and cooked with soft cheese and chilli — the winter vegetable in a valley with no winter vegetables.
Chhang	Monpa & Tawang Belt	शाकाहारी	Home-brewed beer from millet, barley, maize or rice, brewed in every household and offered as a matter of course. The millet-and-buckwheat version made for Losar is sweeter than the everyday brew.
Ara	Monpa & Tawang Belt	शाकाहारी	Grain spirit distilled at home in a pot-over-pot still, served hot in small cups, sometimes with butter or a beaten egg stirred in against the cold. The same drink, and the same still, as across the Bhutan valleys.
Smoked pork with axone	Naga Hills	मांसाहारी	The dish the whole region is identified by. Hearth-dried pork belly, wet or dried axone, raja mircha, ginger and water, simmered until the fat softens back. No oil is added at any point — the pork supplies it. Sumi in origin and now cooked everywhere.
Pork with anishi	Naga Hills	मांसाहारी	Ao household cooking. The dried yam-leaf cake is broken into the pot with smoked pork and dissolves into a dark, slightly bitter gravy that tastes of nothing else in India.
Pork with bamboo shoot	Naga Hills	मांसाहारी	Fermented shoot and its liquor cooked with fresh or smoked pork. The sourest of the standard dishes, and the one that reads most clearly as a Southeast Asian rather than an Indian preparation.
Galho	Naga Hills	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Rice cooked down with greens, an axone or bamboo-shoot ferment and usually smoked meat, until it is between a porridge and a khichdi. The everyday one-pot meal, made vegetarian without any adjustment of method.
Hinkejvu	Naga Hills	शाकाहारी	An Angami dish of mixed boiled greens — cabbage, mustard leaf, colocasia stem and beans — barely seasoned, eaten to balance a plate that is otherwise smoke and salt. Proof that the vegetarian half of this kitchen is a real tradition and not an accommodation.
Smoked beef with bamboo shoot	Naga Hills	मांसाहारी	Beef is unremarkable here and is cooked by exactly the same logic as pork — dried on the rack, then simmered with a ferment. Widely sold in the Kohima and Dimapur markets.
Axone chutney and raja mircha chutney	Naga Hills	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Roasted king chilli pounded with ginger, garlic, salt and either axone or dried fish. Served in a small quantity beside the food so each eater sets their own heat.
Zutho and thutse	Naga Hills	शाकाहारी	Rice beer, thick and cloudy, drunk from a bamboo mug. Zutho is Angami, thutse is Ao, and every community has its own name and starter. Historically it was the field drink, carried out to work in a gourd.
Boiled chicken with herbs	Naga Hills	मांसाहारी	Local chicken simmered with culantro, fish mint and Sichuan-pepper leaf and nothing else. It is the clearest demonstration of the aromatic system — every note in the bowl comes from a leaf.
Fish in bamboo	Naga Hills	मांसाहारी	River fish or terrace-field fish packed into a bamboo section with herbs and set at the edge of the fire until the tube chars. The bamboo both cooks and seasons; nothing is washed up afterwards.
Silkworm pupae and hornet larvae	Naga Hills	मांसाहारी	Eaten fried or boiled in season, and sold openly in the markets. Insects were an important protein source on slopes where large livestock is expensive to keep, and they remain a delicacy rather than a memory.
Snails with bamboo shoot	Naga Hills	मांसाहारी	Freshwater snails gathered from the terrace channels, boiled with fermented shoot. A by-product of wet terracing — the fields grow fish, snails and frogs alongside the rice.
Perilla seed chutney	Naga Hills	शाकाहारी	Roasted perilla pounded with chilli and salt into a coarse, oily paste. In a kitchen with no cooking fat, this is where the fat comes from.
Naga-style rice	Naga Hills	शाकाहारी	Plain boiled rice, sticky or not depending on the community, is not a background item here — it is the volume of the meal, and everything else is a small intense thing served next to it.
Smoked pork with fermented bamboo and colocasia stem	Naga Hills	मांसाहारी	The Lotha and Rengma version of the standard braise, using colocasia stem for texture. It thickens slightly on standing, which is the closest this cuisine comes to a gravy.
Kappa and meen kuzhambu	Nanjil Nadu	मांसाहारी	Boiled and mashed tapioca eaten with a fierce red fish curry — the plate that defines the region and that no other Tamil district eats as a default. The tapioca is cooked with turmeric and salt only; all the flavour is in the curry it is dipped into.
Meen kuzhambu with kodampuli	Nanjil Nadu	मांसाहारी	Seer, sardine or the small estuary fish simmered with shallot, chilli and smoked Garcinia rind in a clay pot. The souring agent is the giveaway — a hundred kilometres east the same curry is made with tamarind and tastes like a different cuisine.
Appam and kadala curry	Nanjil Nadu	शाकाहारी	Fermented rice-and-coconut pancakes, lacy at the rim, with a dark black-chickpea curry. Ordered at the same counter and at the same hour as an idli plate, which is the most ordinary and the most revealing thing about eating here.
Idiyappam with coconut milk	Nanjil Nadu	शाकाहारी	Steamed rice-string hoppers eaten either sweet, with first-extract coconut milk and sugar, or savoury with fish curry. The sweet version is the one children are given, the savoury one the one fishermen take out.
Puttu with kadala or ripe banana	Nanjil Nadu	शाकाहारी	Coarse rice flour and grated coconut steamed in a cylinder. Eaten here with a mashed ripe nendran and a spoon of sugar as often as with chickpea curry.
Idli, dosai and the Tamil breakfast	Nanjil Nadu	शाकाहारी	The other half of the morning — urad-and-rice batter, steamed or griddled, with sambar, coconut chutney and a gunpowder that is milder than the Kongu version. It shares a kitchen with the appam batter and neither is treated as foreign.
Nanjil kodai virundhu	Nanjil Nadu	शाकाहारी	The temple-festival and wedding feast on a plantain leaf — pickles, thoran-style poriyal, aviyal, olan, sambar, rasam, buttermilk and payasam, in the Travancore sequence and finished with coconut oil rather than ghee.
Nanjil aviyal	Nanjil Nadu	शाकाहारी	Mixed vegetables cut long, cooked until just done and bound with ground coconut, cumin and green chilli, then finished with raw coconut oil and curry leaf off the heat. The raw-oil finish is what distinguishes it from an otherwise identical Tamil kootu.
Vanjaram varuval	Nanjil Nadu	मांसाहारी	Seer fish steaks marinated in chilli, turmeric, pepper and lime and shallow-fried in coconut oil until the crust sets. Landed at Colachel, Chinnamuttom and Muttom and best eaten within sight of where it came ashore.
Nandu masala	Nanjil Nadu	मांसाहारी	Estuary crab cooked down with shallot, coconut and a heavy dry-roasted masala. The Manakudy and Thengapattinam estuaries produce it, and it is a monsoon dish because that is when the crab runs.
Kappa vattal kuzhambu	Nanjil Nadu	शाकाहारी	Dried tapioca rehydrated and simmered in a tamarind and coconut gravy. This is the lean-season dish — what the sun-drying yard exists for, and what a household eats when the fresh crop is not in.
Mutton kuzhambu with clove	Nanjil Nadu	मांसाहारी	Mutton on the bone with shallot, coconut and a noticeably clove-and-nutmeg-forward masala, using spice grown on the slope above the village. Few south Indian meat curries use whole clove this freely, and it is a straightforward consequence of local supply.
Kanji with karuvadu chutney	Nanjil Nadu	मांसाहारी	Rice gruel taken with its starch water and a pounded dried-fish chutney with shallot and chilli. The evening meal of the working household on both coasts.
Ela ada	Nanjil Nadu	शाकाहारी	Rice dough spread on a plantain leaf, filled with coconut and jaggery, folded and steamed so the leaf perfumes the parcel. Made for kodai and for Onam in the Malayalam-speaking households.
Neyyappam	Nanjil Nadu	शाकाहारी	Rice, jaggery and banana batter fried in ghee to a dark sphere in a dimpled pan. Temple offering and household sweet in the same recipe.
Pandanus paste	Nicobar Islands	शाकाहारी	Boiled and pressed pandanus pulp, eaten fresh or dried into keeping cakes. The traditional starch of the islands, and effectively unknown as a staple anywhere else in India.
Roast pig	Nicobar Islands	मांसाहारी	Pig killed, singed and roasted or pit-cooked for a feast — most importantly the mortuary feast, at which the number of animals killed is the measure of the occasion. Pork is feast food and not everyday food.
Smoked fish	Nicobar Islands	मांसाहारी	Reef and lagoon fish hung above the hearth fire inside the raised house until dry. Because the fire burns most of the day anyway, preservation costs nothing extra.
Fish with coconut	Nicobar Islands	मांसाहारी	Fish boiled or cooked with grated coconut and coconut milk, salted, sometimes with chilli. The commonest cooked dish, and the point at which Nicobarese and Andamanese settler cooking most resemble each other.
Nicobari aloo	Nicobar Islands	शाकाहारी	A cultivated yam, a form of Dioscorea alata, grown and stored on Car Nicobar and boiled or roasted. It is the subject of a body of documented traditional cultivation knowledge, which is unusual for a tuber crop anywhere in India.
Coconut, at every stage of ripeness	Nicobar Islands	शाकाहारी	Tender for drinking, soft-fleshed for eating, mature for milk and oil, sprouted for the spongy apple inside. The single most eaten thing in the islands, and the reason the coconut palm is counted, inherited and disputed like land.
Boiled banana and breadfruit	Nicobar Islands	शाकाहारी	Cooking banana, breadfruit and papaya from village groves, boiled or roasted. The garden crops that fill the gap between pandanus and rice.
Rice from the ration	Nicobar Islands	शाकाहारी	Rice arrives by ship and through the public distribution system, and has become a daily staple over the last several decades. It is worth naming as a dish because its arrival changed the food system more than any single ingredient in the islands' recorded history.
Toddy	Nicobar Islands	शाकाहारी	Coconut sap, drunk fresh or fermented. Present at every gathering and closely tied to feast obligations.
Turtle and dugong	Nicobar Islands	मांसाहारी	Recorded in the older ethnography as feast and prestige food. Both are now protected species under the Wildlife Protection Act, and this entry is history rather than a menu.
Betel quid	Nicobar Islands	शाकाहारी	Areca and leaf, chewed as widely here as anywhere in island Southeast Asia, and traded between islands alongside pigs and coconuts.
Dal pania	Nimar	शाकाहारी	Maize rotis wrapped in leaves and baked in wood embers, served with a thin spiced tuvar dal, ghee and a garlic-chilli chutney. The defining Nimadi meal, cooked outdoors as often as in, and the dish the region is named for as far as the rest of the state is concerned.
Dal bafla	Nimar	शाकाहारी	Boiled-then-baked wheat balls cracked open and soaked in ghee, with dal and chutney. Shared with the plateau above and cooked at the same feast scale, but eaten here with a noticeably hotter chutney.
Bhutte ka kees	Nimar	शाकाहारी	Grated fresh maize cooked down in milk with green chilli and mustard seed. Nimar grows the maize the plateau makes this from, and eats it in the same monsoon window.
Chana nimona	Nimar	शाकाहारी	Coarsely ground gram cooked to a thick, heavily spiced pottage. Recorded across the Nimar and Malwa belt and served on state ceremonial menus as a regional dish; the name it shares with the green-pea nimona of the Gangetic plain covers two rather different preparations.
Lal mirch ka thecha and lehsun chutney	Nimar	शाकाहारी	Pounded chilli and garlic, raw or briefly roasted, put on the table in its own bowl. In a valley that grows chilli commercially this is not a garnish; it is a course.
Jowar bhakri and makai roti	Nimar	शाकाहारी	Coarse-grain flatbreads patted out by hand and cooked on an iron plate over wood. The bhakri is the everyday bread of the valley floor, and the reason wheat roti reads here as a slightly formal food.
Raabdi	Nimar	शाकाहारी	Soured buttermilk thickened with maize or jowar flour, salted and drunk cool. The valley's summer staple and a working meal in itself.
Mahua ke laddu and mahua roti	Nimar	शाकाहारी	Dried mahua flowers cooked with flour and ghee or ground into a sweet. A forest food of the Bhil, Bhilala and Barela households on both slopes, and a genuine calorie source rather than a curiosity.
Narmada river fish	Nimar	मांसाहारी	Fried or curried with dry red chilli in the fishing settlements along the river. The ghat towns themselves are vegetarian by convention, so the two food cultures sit within a kilometre of each other and do not mix.
Kadhi and chakki ki shaak	Nimar	शाकाहारी	Buttermilk-and-besan kadhi, and the wheat-gluten curry shared with the plateau. Between them they carry most of the household's cooking through the months when no vegetable is growing.
Gud papdi and til-gud	Nimar	शाकाहारी	Jaggery cooked with wheat flour and ghee and set into squares, and sesame-and-jaggery brittle made at Makar Sankranti. Winter sweets built on jaggery rather than on reduced milk, which is the poorer and older pattern.
The Bohra thal at Burhanpur	Nimar	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Eight or so people around one large steel platter, eating in a fixed sequence that opens and closes with something sweet, with a pinch of salt taken first. Burhanpur's Dawoodi Bohra community and its pilgrimage traffic keep the practice conspicuous in a town otherwise known for its Mughal buildings.
Kacche kele ki sabzi	Nimar	शाकाहारी	Raw banana cooked as a vegetable, common in and around Burhanpur, which is among the state's largest banana districts — a case of a commercial crop working its way into the everyday kitchen.
Chironji, tendu and forest gathers	Nimar	शाकाहारी	Chironji kernels, tendu fruit and amla collected off the Satpura slope, eaten fresh in season and dried for the rest of the year. Chironji is also a cash gather, sold up to the sweet trade on the plateau.
Malpua and gud ki kheer at the fairs	Nimar	शाकाहारी	Fried batter discs in syrup and a jaggery rice pudding, cooked in bulk at the Singaji and Narmada fairs. Fair food in Nimar is jaggery-based and cooked in the open in vessels the size of a cartwheel.
Koli fish curry	North Konkan	मांसाहारी	Bangda, surmai, paplet or halwa simmered in a ground paste of fresh coconut, red chilli, garlic and coriander seed, soured with kokum and finished thin enough to be poured over rice. No tomato, no onion browning, and it is cooked in under twenty minutes because the fish landed that morning.
Bombil fry	North Konkan	मांसाहारी	Fresh Bombay duck pressed in semolina and rice flour with chilli and turmeric and shallow-fried until the crust holds a fish that has almost no structure of its own. The dried version, sukka bombil, is a different food entirely — roasted over a flame and torn into a chutney with garlic and chilli.
Sol kadhi	North Konkan	शाकाहारी	Kokum extract in thin coconut milk with pounded garlic and green chilli, pale pink and served cold at the end of the meal. It is digestive rather than decorative, and a fish thali here is considered unfinished without it.
Agri-style chicken	North Konkan	मांसाहारी	Country chicken in a thin, fiery gravy built on a garlic-heavy Agri masala with roasted dry coconut, served with rice bhakri. The Agri kitchen uses more garlic and less aromatic spice than any of its neighbours, which is what distinguishes it from the Malvani chicken further south.
Vaal or birdi usal	North Konkan	शाकाहारी	Field beans sprouted, skinned and cooked into a loose curry with goda-style spice and coconut. It is the Agri and Kunbi monsoon protein for the weeks when boats are not going out.
Prawn koliwada	North Konkan	मांसाहारी	Prawns in a red, ajwain-scented batter, deep-fried and served with raw onion and lime. Named for the Sion Koliwada neighbourhood where the preparation was popularised, and now on menus a thousand kilometres away with no idea what a koliwada is.
Khara bangda and sukat chutney	North Konkan	मांसाहारी	Salted mackerel rinsed and fried, and pounded dried shrimp with garlic, chilli and a little coconut. Both are monsoon food — what a fishing household eats when the sea is shut.
Vada pav	North Konkan	शाकाहारी	A spiced potato ball in gram-flour batter inside a split pav with dry garlic chutney and a fried chilli. It was engineered for the mill and station crowds of the 1960s and 1970s — hot food, one hand, no plate, no cutlery, no waiting — and it outlived the mills that created the demand.
Pav bhaji	North Konkan	शाकाहारी	Mixed vegetables mashed on a flat griddle with butter and a distinct blend, eaten with buttered pav. It is generally traced to the mill-district and market food trade, where the unsold vegetables of the day and a griddle already hot were what a cook had to work with at midnight.
Bottle-masala meat curry and fugias	North Konkan	मांसाहारी	The core East Indian Catholic meal — mutton or chicken in a dark curry whose entire character comes from the household's own bottle masala, eaten with fugias, soft fried dough balls leavened with toddy or yeast. Made for feast days, weddings and Christmas rather than for a weekday.
Dhansak and patra ni machhi	North Konkan	मांसाहारी	Parsi cooking's two most recognisable plates — mutton with several lentils, vegetables and a sweet-sour spice mix served over browned rice, and pomfret coated in green coconut-coriander chutney and steamed in a banana leaf. Dhansak is not, in Parsi households, a celebration dish; it is traditionally eaten on Sunday and after the fourth day of mourning.
Berry pulao and sali boti	North Konkan	मांसाहारी	Rice with meat and barberries, and mutton in a sweet-sour tomato gravy under a heap of fried potato straws. The barberry is imported and is the clearest surviving Iranian thread in the Parsi kitchen.
Malida	North Konkan	शाकाहारी	A Bene Israel offering of roasted flattened rice with grated coconut, sugar, cardamom and fruit, made for the ceremony of thanksgiving and vow-fulfilment addressed to Eliyahu Hannabi, the prophet Elijah. It is food that exists only as part of a liturgy.
Ukadiche modak	North Konkan	शाकाहारी	Steamed rice-flour dumplings pleated by hand around coconut and jaggery, made in enormous numbers for Ganesh Chaturthi. The count of pleats and the thinness of the skin are the two things a household is judged on.
Tandalachi bhakri with kalvan	North Konkan	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Rice flatbread patted out by hand and cooked on a griddle, eaten with fish curry or with a vegetable. It is what the coast eats when nobody is watching, and it does not travel because it stiffens within an hour.
Brun maska and mawa cake	North Konkan	शाकाहारी	A hard-crusted bun split and buttered, dunked in strong sweet Irani chai, and a dense cardamom-scented milk-solid cake from the same counter. The Irani cafe was Bombay's neutral ground — a place with cheap food, marble tables and no rules about who sat where.
Ragi mudde	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	A ball of finger millet cooked to a smooth stiff mass and swallowed in pinched pieces dipped in saaru. It is the region's calorie engine — cheap, slow to digest, high in calcium, and eaten by preference with nati koli saaru, country-chicken broth thinned to the consistency of the dip rather than a curry.
Bisi bele bath	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी	Rice, toor dal and vegetables cooked together with tamarind and a wet-ground masala, finished with ghee and eaten with fried boondi and potato chips. Usually attributed to the Mysore palace kitchen. The name means hot lentil rice and the temperature is part of the specification — served lukewarm it is a different and much worse dish.
Mysore rasam	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी	A thin tamarind broth built on a freshly ground paste of roasted coriander seed, chana dal, pepper and coconut, rather than on a shelf powder. It is darker, sweeter and more aromatic than the Tamil rasam it is often confused with, and the coconut is the tell.
Nati koli saaru and nati koli fry	Old Mysore	मांसाहारी	Country-bred chicken — lean, dark, slow-cooked — in a thin peppery broth, with a dry-fried portion alongside. The Mandya and Ramanagara highway kitchens built an entire cuisine on it, and the birds are still sold live so the buyer can judge the leg.
Mysore masala dosa	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी	A dosa smeared on the inside with a red chutney of chilli, garlic and roasted gram before the potato palya goes in, and finished with a lump of butter. The red layer is what separates it from every other masala dosa in the country; without it the dish is simply a masala dosa.
Benne masala dosa	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी	The butter-heavy variant of the Malleshwaram tiffin rooms, cooked on a tawa kept deliberately at a lower heat so the crust stays soft and the butter does not clarify. Ordering it and a plate of vada in the same sitting is standard practice.
Rava idli	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी	A semolina idli leavened with curd and soda rather than fermented, studded with cashew and coriander. The account attached to it — that it was devised during a Second World War rice shortage — is repeated by the tiffin room that claims it and has never been seriously contested.
Chow chow bath	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी	Two dishes on one plate — khara bath, a savoury semolina upma, next to kesari bath, the same semolina sweetened with sugar, ghee and saffron. The point is the contrast in a single sitting, and asking for only one half is a legitimate but slightly disappointing order.
Puliyogare	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी	Rice folded through a dark tamarind, sesame and jaggery paste (the gojju) rather than cooked in it, so the grains stay separate. The Melukote version, given as temple prasada, is the benchmark, and the paste keeps for weeks — which is why it became travel food.
Maddur vada	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी	A flat, crisp, onion-heavy fritter of rice flour, semolina and maida, named for the town on the Bengaluru–Mysuru railway where it was sold to passengers through the carriage window. It is thin because it had to fry fast between two trains.
Avarekai palya, saaru and uppittu	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी	For ten weeks from December the hyacinth bean takes over every menu in the Bengaluru belt. The prized version is sippe tegeda avarekai — beans individually skinned by hand, which is a household afternoon's work for a single meal and is done anyway for the aroma the skin masks.
Ragi rotti and akki rotti	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी	Flatbreads patted out by hand directly on the hot tawa rather than rolled — finger millet in one, rice flour in the other, both worked with onion, curry leaf and grated coconut. They cannot be rolled with a pin because neither flour has gluten, which is why the technique is a patting motion.
Obbattu (holige)	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी	A paper-thin flatbread stuffed with jaggery and either split gram or coconut, eaten hot with ghee or floated in milk. Made in batches for Ugadi and for weddings, and the household's reputation rides on how thin the last one on the stack is.
Mysore pak	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी	Gram flour, sugar and a great deal of ghee, cooked to a porous honeycomb that dissolves rather than chews. It was made in the palace kitchen for Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV by a cook named Kakasura Madappa, who named it on the spot when asked what it was. The hard commercial slab sold elsewhere under the name is a different sweet.
Nanjangud rasabale	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी	A short, thin-skinned, intensely aromatic banana grown on a narrow strip of land near Nanjangud and almost lost to Panama disease before a deliberate revival. It holds a geographical indication, and it does not travel or ripen off the plant like a commercial banana.
Filter coffee	Old Mysore	शाकाहारी	Decoction dripped through a two-chamber steel filter, mixed with boiled milk and sugar and pulled between a tumbler and a davara to cool and aerate it. Ordering by two — one serving split into two tumblers — is a whole social form, not a way of saving money.
Kari dosai	Pandya Nadu	मांसाहारी	Dosa, egg and minced mutton pressed together on the griddle so the three fuse into one layered thing, served with a mutton gravy. Madurai's single most identifiable dish, and best after dark.
Kothu parotta	Pandya Nadu	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Parotta chopped on the griddle with egg, gravy and meat under two iron blades. A dish invented to use up the day's unsold parotta and now the reason many stalls stay open at all.
Kalakki	Pandya Nadu	मांसाहारी	Egg beaten into a hot pan with pepper and cut off the heat while still loose, scooped over parotta. Sold by the same stalls, ordered by everyone, and almost never written on a board.
Aatu kaal paya	Pandya Nadu	मांसाहारी	Goat trotters simmered overnight into a thin, gelatinous, pepper-heavy soup, eaten at dawn with idiyappam or parotta. The overnight cooking is the point — the collagen has to break down before the shift starts.
Mutton chukka	Pandya Nadu	मांसाहारी	Mutton boiled with turmeric and then fried down with shallots, curry leaf and coarse-crushed pepper until the moisture is gone and the masala grips the meat. Dry by design so it travels and keeps through a shift.
Mutton kola urundai	Pandya Nadu	मांसाहारी	Minced mutton pounded with roasted gram, fennel and chilli into a tight ball and deep-fried. A wedding-feast item in the region long before it was a restaurant one.
Kari kuzhambu and elumbu rasam	Pandya Nadu	मांसाहारी	Mutton on the bone in a thin, sharply hot tamarind gravy, with the marrow bones separated out into a peppery broth drunk before the rice. Two dishes from one pot.
Jigarthanda	Pandya Nadu	शाकाहारी	Reduced milk, nannari syrup, soaked badam pisin gum and a scoop of milk ice cream, served in a tall steel tumbler. The name is Urdu, not Tamil, and the makers still call the gum kadal pasi — seaweed — although what goes in now is almond gum.
Paruthi paal	Pandya Nadu	शाकाहारी	Hot cottonseed milk with jaggery, coconut milk, dry ginger and cardamom, drunk in the morning and offered to guests. A dryland drink that has been revived commercially in the last decade after nearly disappearing.
Kambu koozh	Pandya Nadu	शाकाहारी	Overnight-soured pearl millet gruel, thinned with buttermilk and eaten with raw shallot, green chilli and salted pickle. Field food, and the region's most efficient answer to a working morning in the heat.
Ragi kali	Pandya Nadu	शाकाहारी	Finger millet stirred into a stiff, glossy mass and eaten in pieces dipped into a hot gravy, usually with country chicken or dried fish. Cooked without stopping, because it seizes the moment the stirring does.
Srivilliputhur palkova	Pandya Nadu	शाकाहारी	Milk reduced with sugar over a long slow fire until it turns grainy and pale brown, cut into blocks and wrapped. Registered as a geographical indication in 2019-20, and sold from a row of shops on one street.
Palani panchamirtham	Pandya Nadu	शाकाहारी	Virupakshi hill banana mashed with jaggery, ghee, honey and cardamom, with dates, raisins and sugar candy — and no water and no preservative at all. It keeps because the hill banana carries so little moisture. Registered in 2019-20, the first temple prasadam in India to hold a geographical indication.
Nannari sarbath	Pandya Nadu	शाकाहारी	Sarsaparilla root syrup with lime and water, drunk through the summer for its claimed cooling effect. The same syrup does duty in jigarthanda.
Malai vazhaipazham	Pandya Nadu	शाकाहारी	The Virupakshi and Sirumalai hill bananas — small, dense, sharply aromatic and grown only on the Palani and Sirumalai slopes. Both hold geographical indications from 2008-09, and one of them is the reason Palani's prasadam keeps.
Smoked pork with bamboo shoot	Patkai & Tirap Belt	मांसाहारी	The defining dish across Nocte, Wancho and Tangsa kitchens. Hearth-smoked pork boiled with fermented bamboo shoot, king chilli and ginger until the fat dissolves into the broth. Nothing is fried at any point, and it is served wet.
Boiled pork with wild herbs	Patkai & Tirap Belt	मांसाहारी	Fresh pork simmered with foraged aromatic leaves, garlic and chilli and nothing else. The cooking is deliberately plain because the meat is the occasion; seasoning is added at the plate from the chilli relish.
Bamboo-tube meat and rice	Patkai & Tirap Belt	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Pork, fish or rice roasted inside a green bamboo internode and eaten from the split tube. Field cooking that became festival cooking.
Phalap	Patkai & Tirap Belt	शाकाहारी	Bamboo-cured smoked tea, brewed dark and drunk plain. The Singpho were making it before the commercial industry existed, and the plants a Singpho chief handed to a British trader in 1823 are the origin of the Assam tea economy. Granted a geographical indication in January 2024.
Rice beer	Patkai & Tirap Belt	शाकाहारी	Brewed in every non-Buddhist household from cooked rice and a herb starter cake, and poured at every festival, funeral and negotiation. Each community has its own name and its own starter recipe; because those names are used inconsistently in print, none is asserted here.
King chilli relish	Patkai & Tirap Belt	शाकाहारी	Fire-roasted king chilli pounded with salt, garlic and often dried fish or fermented soybean. It is the seasoning system of the whole meal, kept at the side so each eater sets their own heat.
Fermented soybean paste	Patkai & Tirap Belt	शाकाहारी	Leaf-fermented soybean pounded with chilli into a dark paste, or dried into cakes and crumbled into a boil. Related to the axone of the Sumi Naga next door and to the fermented soybeans of the Chin and Kachin hills across the ridge.
Sticky rice	Patkai & Tirap Belt	शाकाहारी	Glutinous rice steamed and eaten by hand, central in the Tai Khamti and Buddhist Tangsa households and at Sangken. It is the clearest food marker of the Tai layer in this belt, and it arrived with a language family, not with a road.
Dried river fish	Patkai & Tirap Belt	मांसाहारी	Small fish from the Noa-Dihing and the Tirap, split and dried hard on the hearth rack, then broken into a boil of greens or pounded into chilli relish. The dried fish is a seasoning as much as a protein.
Taro, yam and colocasia stems	Patkai & Tirap Belt	शाकाहारी	Boiled tuber and stem, the reliable calorie in the months between the jhum harvest and the next planting. Colocasia stems are peeled and simmered long enough to lose their irritant edge.
Foraged forest greens	Patkai & Tirap Belt	शाकाहारी	Fern fiddleheads, wild banana flower, bamboo shoot, mushrooms and a long list of leaves. In the Lisu villages beyond Namdapha this is not a garnish tradition but a substantial share of what is actually eaten, and the knowledge held there about what the forest yields in which week is unmatched in the belt.
Pork at Chalo Loku	Patkai & Tirap Belt	मांसाहारी	Pigs are killed at the Nocte harvest festival and the meat distributed by clan and household under fixed rules, with the chief's household receiving a defined portion. The distribution, not the cooking, is the ritual content.
Sangken rice cakes and offerings	Patkai & Tirap Belt	शाकाहारी	Sweetened and steamed rice preparations made for the Theravada water festival in mid-April and offered at the temple before they are eaten. A Tai Khamti and Singpho Buddhist tradition within the same district as the pork-and-beer villages.
Tibetan noodle and momo cooking	Patkai & Tirap Belt	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Thukpa, momo and butter tea, brought by the Tibetan community settled at Miao since 1975 and now standard fare in every town along the road. A fifty-year-old layer that has become the region's most visible restaurant food.
Plantation tea	Patkai & Tirap Belt	शाकाहारी	The foothill gardens grow ordinary Assam-type tea for the auction market, in the same districts where the Singpho cure phalap by hand. The two exist side by side and have almost nothing to do with one another commercially.
Sarson da saag and makki di roti	Punjab Doabs	शाकाहारी	Mustard greens, usually with some bathua and spinach, boiled long, mashed with a wooden churner, thickened with a little maize flour and finished with a tadka of ghee, onion, ginger and green chilli. Eaten with hand-patted maize bread and a lump of white butter. It is a winter dish because mustard is a winter crop and maize was a rain-fed cereal stored for the cold months — served in June it is a performance rather than a meal.
Mah di dal	Punjab Doabs	शाकाहारी	Whole black urad, sometimes with a handful of rajma or chana, cooked on residual heat overnight until it turns creamy on its own, finished with ginger and a spoon of ghee. The restaurant dish that descends from it adds butter and cream and shortens the cooking, which is a substitution of fat for time.
Kadhi pakora	Punjab Doabs	शाकाहारी	Soured buttermilk thickened with gram flour and simmered until it loses its raw taste, with gram-flour fritters dropped in. The Punjabi version is thinner and tarter than the Gujarati one and is eaten with rice rather than bread — one of the few occasions rice appears on a Punjabi table.
Amritsari chole with kulcha	Punjab Doabs	शाकाहारी	Chickpeas darkened by cooking with tea leaves or dried amla and soured with ground anardana, served with a kulcha — a leavened bread stuffed with spiced potato or paneer, slapped onto the tandoor wall and brought out dripping with butter. The colour is not from spice, and this is the single dish that says Amritsar fastest.
Amritsari fried fish	Punjab Doabs	मांसाहारी	Freshwater fish, traditionally river catfish, marinated with ginger, garlic and a heavy hand of ajwain, then coated in a gram-flour batter and fried. Ajwain is the identifying flavour and also the practical one — it cuts the oil and the muddiness of a river fish. Eaten with onion, lemon and a mint chutney.
Tandoori murgh and the seekh repertoire	Punjab Doabs	मांसाहारी	Yoghurt-and-spice marinated chicken cooked upright in the clay oven so the fat drips away and the surface chars. It is the dish through which the Punjabi tandoor entered restaurant cooking across India after partition, and its worldwide career is entirely post-1947.
Tari wala meat	Punjab Doabs	मांसाहारी	Goat cooked with a great deal of browned onion, ginger, garlic and whole spice until the fat separates and rises as a red tari. No cream, no cashew, no tomato in the older village version — the gravy's body comes from the onion and the meat itself.
Wadi aloo	Punjab Doabs	शाकाहारी	Sun-dried spiced urad dumplings fried and simmered with potato. It is a preserved-protein dish for the months with no fresh vegetables, and the wadi is made in bulk on rooftops in summer for use in winter.
Langar dal and parshada	Punjab Doabs	शाकाहारी	The standard langar meal — a thin, mild dal, a seasonal vegetable, a hand-rolled wheat bread, a spoon of kheer or a sweet, served to everyone seated in a row. Its plainness is a design requirement, not a limitation, because it has to be acceptable to every diet, every community and every budget at once.
Chana masala and bhatura	Punjab Doabs	शाकाहारी	Chickpeas with a fried leavened bread. Very much a twentieth-century urban dish, developed and popularised by Punjabi refugee cooks in Delhi and the cities after 1947, and now claimed everywhere.
Meethe chawal and gur wale chawal	Punjab Doabs	शाकाहारी	Rice cooked with jaggery, ghee and a little cardamom and fennel, made at Lohri, Basant and after harvests. Jaggery, not sugar, is the point; the dish is a way of eating the cane crop.
Pinni	Punjab Doabs	शाकाहारी	Wholewheat flour roasted long in ghee, mixed with jaggery, almonds, dried ginger and edible gum, and rolled into a dense ball. It is winter food — high fat, high energy, keeps for weeks, and is made in a large batch once a year.
Panjiri	Punjab Doabs	शाकाहारी	The same roasted-flour principle in loose form, with gum, melon seed and dried ginger, made for new mothers in particular and eaten through the cold months by everyone else.
Karah parshad	Punjab Doabs	शाकाहारी	Wholewheat flour, ghee and sugar in equal measure, cooked to a dense halwa and distributed in the gurdwara to everyone present in the order they are seated. The equal proportions and the equal distribution are both part of the point.
Phirni and kheer	Punjab Doabs	शाकाहारी	Ground rice set in milk in a shallow earthen bowl, or whole-rice milk pudding cooked down slowly. Both are langar and festival sweets before they are restaurant ones.
Aloo posto	Rarh	शाकाहारी	Diced potato cooked in mustard oil with nothing but ground poppy seed, green chilli, salt and a little turmeric, finished so the paste coats rather than pools. It is the dish the region is identified by, eaten several times a week, and considered a cooling food for the hot months.
Postor bora	Rarh	शाकाहारी	Poppy-seed paste beaten with onion, green chilli and a little flour and shallow-fried into flat cakes, eaten with the first course of rice. Crisp outside, almost custard-soft inside.
Jhinge posto and potol posto	Rarh	शाकाहारी	The same paste carried onto ridge gourd and pointed gourd — the seasonal variations that keep posto on the table year-round without anyone tiring of it.
Shukto	Rarh	शाकाहारी	A mild milk-and-ginger stew of bitter gourd, drumstick, raw banana and bori, finished with radhuni and a spoon of ghee. Deliberately bitter, deliberately first, and the clearest surviving evidence that the Bengali meal is a sequence rather than a spread.
Machher jhol	Rarh	मांसाहारी	A thin turmeric-and-ginger broth with fried fish and vegetables in it. In the Rarh the fish is almost always pond-raised rui or katla, or the tiny mourala fried whole, and the jhol is lighter than the delta's because the fish is leaner.
Ghugni	Rarh	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Dried yellow peas simmered soft with ginger and a little coconut, finished with roasted cumin and chilli powder and eaten with muri or on its own from a cart. In the western districts it is the standard bus-stand and mela food, and a mutton version appears at fairs.
Muri and jhalmuri	Rarh	शाकाहारी	Puffed rice eaten by the bowl with mustard oil, chopped onion, green chilli and whatever is at hand — with ghugni, with tea, with a coconut sliver. In Bankura and Purulia it is not a snack but a meal, taken twice a day by a large part of the population.
Panta bhat	Rarh	शाकाहारी	Rice left overnight in water so it sours slightly, eaten in the morning with raw onion, green chilli and mustard oil. It is field food in a hot, dry district, and the light fermentation is the point rather than an accident.
Chholar dal with narkel	Rarh	शाकाहारी	Bengal gram cooked sweet with raisins, ghee, whole garam masala and fried coconut slivers. Festival and luchi food rather than everyday food.
Bardhaman sitabhog	Rarh	शाकाहारी	Fine white strands of chhana and rice flour pressed through a sieve so the result looks like a plate of cooked rice, mixed with tiny pantua. It carries a registered geographical indication, and the family stories attach its invention to a reception for a visiting Viceroy in the early twentieth century.
Bardhaman mihidana	Rarh	शाकाहारी	Grains of syrup-soaked fried batter far finer than boondi, made from Gobindobhog rice flour and gram flour. Also a registered geographical indication, and a consignment of it was exported to Bahrain in 2021 as the first shipment of the GI product abroad.
Langcha	Rarh	शाकाहारी	A dark, cylindrical chhana fritter soaked through with syrup, sold from a continuous strip of shops at Shaktigarh on the Grand Trunk Road. It is a highway sweet in the literal sense — a whole town's economy built on cars slowing down.
Bishnupur motichur laddu	Rarh	शाकाहारी	A fine-grained laddu from the temple town, carrying its own registered geographical indication — a rare case of a GI granted to a sweet made for a specific temple economy rather than a city.
Nolen gurer payesh and sandesh	Rarh	शाकाहारी	Winter sweets built on date-palm jaggery — Gobindobhog rice simmered in milk with nolen gur, and chhana worked with the same jaggery into sandesh. Available for roughly ten weeks and then gone.
Handia	Rarh	शाकाहारी	Rice fermented with a herbal starter cake in an earthen pot, drunk mildly sour and cloudy. It is the ritual and social drink of Santal and Kurmi households on the western edge, offered to guests and to ancestors, and brewed at home rather than bought.
Ragi sangati	Rayalaseema	शाकाहारी	Finger-millet flour beaten into boiling water with a little rice until smooth, then rolled into fist-sized balls. It is not chewed — a piece is broken off, dipped in the broth and swallowed, which is exactly why the accompaniment must be thin and sour rather than dry.
Natu kodi pulusu	Rayalaseema	मांसाहारी	Country chicken in a thin, fiery tamarind gravy, simmered long enough to soften a tough bird. The standard partner to sangati, and the dish by which a Rayalaseema kitchen is judged.
Ulava charu	Rayalaseema	शाकाहारी	Horse-gram broth: the pulse boiled long, the liquor drawn off, reduced and left to stand until it thickens of its own accord, then tempered and soured. Horse gram is elsewhere a fodder crop; here the water it was cooked in is the dish.
Uggani and mirapakaya bajji	Rayalaseema	शाकाहारी	Puffed rice moistened, tempered with mustard, curry leaf, onion and green chilli, and eaten with a deep-fried stuffed chilli fritter dropped on top. The standard morning food of Anantapur and Kurnool and almost unknown on the coast.
Rayalaseema kodi and mutton vepudu	Rayalaseema	मांसाहारी	Meat cooked down dry with pounded chilli, garlic and curry leaf until the fat renders and coats it. There is no gravy by design — the sangati or rice brings the moisture.
Chintachiguru mamsam	Rayalaseema	मांसाहारी	Mutton cooked with tender tamarind leaf, available for a few weeks in spring. The leaf sours the dish without tamarind pulp's sweetness, which is a different acidity altogether.
Kandi podi	Rayalaseema	शाकाहारी	Roasted redgram pounded with chilli, garlic and salt, eaten with a spoon of ghee or groundnut oil over rice or sangati. In many households it is the meal on most days of the year.
Karam podi and nuvvula podi	Rayalaseema	शाकाहारी	Chilli-and-cumin powder, and sesame powder. The first supplies heat and salt, the second fat and body; a household keeps several jars and treats them as separate dishes.
Ragi java and ambali	Rayalaseema	शाकाहारी	Thin millet gruel drunk warm, or soured overnight with buttermilk and drunk cold. Field food, and the reason a working day can start without lighting a fire.
Jonna and ragi rotte	Rayalaseema	शाकाहारी	Sorghum or finger-millet flatbread patted out by hand, often with onion, chilli and curry leaf worked into the dough. There is no gluten, so the shaping is a hand skill and the bread must be eaten hot.
Gutti vankaya and dry vegetable kura	Rayalaseema	शाकाहारी	Small brinjals slit and stuffed with a roasted groundnut, sesame and chilli paste. The stuffing is dry spice and oilseed rather than a wet masala, which is the region's habit in general.
Pulihora and temple annadanam	Rayalaseema	शाकाहारी	Tamarind rice, chitrannam and a ghee-heavy vegetarian meal cooked at scale in the temple kitchens and served free to pilgrims. At Tirumala this operates at a scale of tens of thousands of meals a day, and it is a distinct cuisine from the village one.
Tirupati laddu	Rayalaseema	शाकाहारी	A large boondi laddu of gram flour, ghee, sugar, cashew and cardamom, made in the temple's Potu kitchen and issued as prasadam. It holds a geographical indication registered in 2009, which is the instrument the temple administration uses against imitations sold under the name.
Kadapa kaja	Rayalaseema	शाकाहारी	Madatha kaja — dough folded repeatedly into leaves, cut, fried until the layers separate, and steeped in sugar syrup so it stays soft inside and crisp at the edges. The folding is what distinguishes it from the coastal Tapeswaram kaja, which is a tighter, harder roll.
Banaganapalle mango and mamidi tandra	Rayalaseema	शाकाहारी	A large, fibreless, thin-skinned mango from the Nandyal belt, GI-registered in 2017–18 and grown as Benishan across much of south India under other names. Surplus fruit is pulped, spread in thin layers on mats and sun-dried into tandra, a leather that keeps until the next season.
Bakshalu (bobbatlu) and ariselu	Rayalaseema	शाकाहारी	A jaggery-and-lentil stuffed flatbread cooked in ghee, and a rice-flour-and-jaggery fritter made at Sankranti. Both are festival foods that exist because jaggery keeps and sugar was expensive.
Rampuri taar korma	Rohilkhand & Katehar	मांसाहारी	Mutton in a reduced yoghurt and browned-onion gravy cooked until it threads. Served with sheermal or a plain roti; the test of the cook is the consistency, not the spicing.
Adrak ka halwa	Rohilkhand & Katehar	शाकाहारी	Ginger grated, squeezed, cooked down with khoya, ghee and sugar until dark and pungent — a winter sweet unique to Rampur, made nowhere else in India in this form.
Shab deg	Rohilkhand & Katehar	मांसाहारी	Turnips and meat sealed in a pot and cooked all night, so the turnip turns dark and dense. Made in winter; the same dish exists in Kashmir and nowhere between.
Doodhiya biryani	Rohilkhand & Katehar	मांसाहारी	A pale Rampuri biryani cooked with milk, with almost no chilli and a great deal of restraint — a court dish that reads as under-seasoned until you have had it twice.
Khade masale ka keema	Rohilkhand & Katehar	मांसाहारी	Minced meat cooked with whole spices left in, sharp with ginger and green chilli.
Moradabadi dal	Rohilkhand & Katehar	शाकाहारी	Yellow moong dal cooked thin, poured over a heap of raw onion, coriander, green chilli, lemon and a dry masala, and eaten with a spoon from a leaf bowl on the street. Moradabad's own dish and a local obsession.
Bareilly ki nihari and kebab	Rohilkhand & Katehar	मांसाहारी	The old-city nihari trade, sold from before dawn with kulcha, and a seekh kebab tradition that runs to a coarser grind than Lucknow's.
Sewaiyan and sheer khurma	Rohilkhand & Katehar	शाकाहारी	Fine vermicelli in reduced milk with dates and nuts, made in enormous quantity at Eid — the region supplies dried sewai to much of north India.
Bedmi, kachori and jalebi	Rohilkhand & Katehar	शाकाहारी	The plain's standard morning meal, identical to the Doab's and eaten just as early.
Gur ki roti and gannay ka ras	Rohilkhand & Katehar	शाकाहारी	Fresh jaggery worked into bread, and cane juice pressed at the roadside through the crushing season.
Tharu bagiya and jhingri	Rohilkhand & Katehar	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Steamed rice-flour dumplings with a lentil or fish filling, and small river fish cooked whole with wild herbs — the terai kitchen, which uses no wheat and very little dairy.
Amroha and Bijnor mangoes	Rohilkhand & Katehar	शाकाहारी	Dussehri, Langra and Chausa from orchards along the Ganga, sold from late June — the region competes with Malihabad and does not always lose.
Bajra no rotlo	Saurashtra	शाकाहारी	A thick hand-patted pearl-millet flatbread, eaten hot with a lump of white butter, jaggery and a bowl of chaas. It is the single item that most reliably identifies a Kathiawadi meal, and it is eaten by hand with the rotlo crushed into the accompaniment rather than torn and dipped.
Ringan no olo	Saurashtra	शाकाहारी	Brinjal roasted in embers, peeled and mashed with raw garlic, green chilli, coriander and oil. Distinct from the north Indian bharta in that it is not cooked again after mashing and carries no tomato or onion masala.
Lasaniya bataka	Saurashtra	शाकाहारी	Small potatoes crushed and tossed in a thick paste of red chilli and raw garlic with a great deal of oil. It is the dish that defines the region's reputation for heat, and it is not made sweet anywhere.
Sev tameta	Saurashtra	शाकाहारी	A thin tomato gravy served with a fistful of gram-flour sev thrown on at the table, so the sev half dissolves and half stays crisp. The timing is the dish — sev added in the kitchen arrives as paste.
Undhiyu	Saurashtra	शाकाहारी	Winter vegetables, purple yam, sweet potato, papdi beans and fenugreek muthiya cooked slowly with green garlic and coriander. The Kathiawadi version is drier and hotter; the Surti one to the south is greener, wetter and heavier on papdi. Made in quantity between December and February and almost never outside it.
Khaman and dhokla	Saurashtra	शाकाहारी	Steamed fermented squares — khaman yellow and soft from chana dal or besan, dhokla firmer and more sour from a rice-and-dal batter — tempered with mustard, sesame, curry leaf and green chilli. Bhavnagar and Surat both claim particular versions.
Bhavnagari gathiya with sambharo	Saurashtra	शाकाहारी	Soft, thick gram-flour strands fried at a low temperature so they stay pliable rather than brittle, served with fried green chillies and a warm shredded papaya and carrot sambharo. The soft texture is what separates gathiya from the harder ganthiya sold elsewhere.
Fafda and jalebi	Saurashtra	शाकाहारी	Crisp gram-flour strips with jalebi, papaya sambharo and a besan kadhi. Eaten across the region on Dussehra morning specifically, to the point that shops plan the year around that one day.
Khichdi and kadhi	Saurashtra	शाकाहारी	Rice and mung cooked soft with ghee, and a thin buttermilk-and-besan kadhi poured over it. The evening meal in most households, and the one that reveals the region's dairy base most plainly.
Bharela ravaiya and marcha	Saurashtra	शाकाहारी	Small brinjals or long chillies slit and packed with a besan, groundnut, coriander and spice stuffing, then cooked covered until they collapse. The groundnut in the stuffing is local, not borrowed.
Kharwa coastal fish	Saurashtra	मांसाहारी	The fishing communities of Veraval, Mangrol and Porbandar cook and dry what the majority kitchen around them does not eat — bombil, ghol, surmai and prawn, simply fried with red chilli and turmeric or dried on racks for the trade. Veraval is one of India's largest fishing harbours and yet fish is nearly absent from a Kathiawadi restaurant menu, which tells you how community-bounded the cuisine is.
Dabeli	Saurashtra	शाकाहारी	A spiced potato filling in a pav with pomegranate, roasted groundnut and sev. It was invented in Mandvi in Kutch, not here, and was adopted across Saurashtra so completely that most visitors assume it is Kathiawadi.
Kesar keri no ras	Saurashtra	शाकाहारी	Pulped Gir Kesar mango with a little milk and cardamom, eaten with hot puri and ghee as a full meal rather than as a course. The season runs from mid-May to late June and stops.
Adadiya and gundar pak	Saurashtra	शाकाहारी	Winter-only sweets of urad flour or edible gum bound in ghee and jaggery with dry ginger, pepper and nuts, cut into thick squares. They are eaten as a seasonal tonic on cold mornings and disappear entirely by March.
Sukhdi and mohanthal	Saurashtra	शाकाहारी	Wheat flour roasted in ghee and set with jaggery, and its richer besan cousin set with sugar and saffron. Sukhdi keeps for weeks without refrigeration, which is why it travels in every tiffin leaving the region.
Apong	Siang & Adi Belt	शाकाहारी	Rice beer, and the centre of the social system rather than an accompaniment to it. It is offered on arrival, poured at every ritual, drunk during kebang proceedings, and brewed by women in every household. The plain version is pale, cloudy and mildly sweet. Adi Apong was granted a geographical indication in January 2024, which makes it one of the few home-brewed beverages in India with a registered name.
Ash-filtered apong	Siang & Adi Belt	शाकाहारी	The dark counterpart, drawn through a bed of burnt rice-husk ash. It is smoky, alkaline and much less acidic than the plain brew, and it keeps better. The same technique is used by the Mising downstream, where the ash version is the everyday one.
Millet beer	Siang & Adi Belt	शाकाहारी	Finger millet fermented rather than rice — heavier, sourer, and traditionally the beer of the higher villages where millet outperforms rice. Marua Apo also holds a geographical indication granted in 2024.
Bamboo-tube rice	Siang & Adi Belt	शाकाहारी	Rice cooked inside a green bamboo internode over a fire and eaten straight from the split tube. The bamboo supplies moisture and a faint sweetness, and the finished rice holds together in a cylinder you break with your hands.
Bamboo-tube fish	Siang & Adi Belt	मांसाहारी	River fish, seasoned with little more than salt, chilli and ginger, sealed in bamboo and roasted. It is the most direct expression of the whole cuisine: two ingredients, one vessel, no fat.
Bamboo-tube pork	Siang & Adi Belt	मांसाहारी	Pork marinated with turmeric, ginger, garlic and chilli, wrapped in Phrynium leaf and packed into bamboo before roasting. The leaf keeps the meat off the charring wall of the tube, and the parcel is done when the visible leaf-seal turns olive.
Fermented pork-fat pickle	Siang & Adi Belt	मांसाहारी	Pork fat fermented with bamboo shoot and king chilli into a dense, sharp, extremely hot relish eaten by the spoonful with plain rice. It is a preservation solution before it is a condiment — a way of keeping the fattiest and least storable part of a slaughtered pig usable for months.
Smoked pork with bamboo shoot	Siang & Adi Belt	मांसाहारी	The default dinner. Hearth-smoked pork is boiled with fermented bamboo shoot, king chilli and local ginger until the fat has given itself up to the broth. Nothing is fried at any stage, and the dish is served wet, as much broth as meat.
Dried meat with chilli	Siang & Adi Belt	मांसाहारी	Hearth-dried meat torn into shreds and pounded or tossed with king chilli and salt, eaten dry alongside apong. Reported widely as an Adi preparation; the name is used loosely across the belt for more than one version of the same idea.
King chilli chutney	Siang & Adi Belt	शाकाहारी	Fresh or fire-roasted king chilli pounded with salt, ginger and sometimes a little dried fish. It is the hottest thing on the table by a wide margin, and the reason nothing else in the meal needs to be.
Boiled greens	Siang & Adi Belt	शाकाहारी	The everyday vegetable dish — foraged and cultivated greens, gourd, colocasia leaf and bamboo shoot boiled together, often lifted with a pinch of alkali. Oying is a Tani word used for a curry or vegetable preparation generally, and among the Mising downstream it names specific dishes such as pitang oying, chicken thickened with rice flour.
Leaf-wrapped glutinous rice	Siang & Adi Belt	शाकाहारी	Glutinous rice wrapped in aromatic leaf, tied and boiled into a firm parcel. It is properly a Mising dish — the anchor of their Ali-Aye-Ligang feast on the Assam floodplain — and it is included here because the technique, the leaf and the language are the same as in the hills. It travels up and down the Tani line rather than belonging to one end of it.
Fermented soybean paste	Siang & Adi Belt	शाकाहारी	Soybean fermented to a strong dark paste and pounded with chilli. Reported as an Adi preparation and part of the same fermented-soybean family that runs east into the Naga hills and north into Sikkim under other names.
Smoked river fish	Siang & Adi Belt	मांसाहारी	Small fish taken from the Siang and its tributaries, gutted and left on the hearth rack until brittle, then rehydrated in a broth with bamboo shoot. Preservation, not flavouring, is the point — the river gives unevenly and the rack evens it out.
Mithun at Solung	Siang & Adi Belt	मांसाहारी	Mithun is sacrificed at Solung and the meat distributed by clan and household according to fixed rules. It is almost never eaten outside a ritual context, because a mithun is a unit of wealth — the animal in which bride-price and fines are counted — and killing one is a public act of expenditure.
Butter tea and hard cheese	Siang & Adi Belt	शाकाहारी	At the head of the valley around Tuting and Mechuka, where the households are Memba and Buddhist, the food changes completely: churned butter tea, dried hard cheese, barley and wheat. The transition happens over about a day's travel, and it is the clearest food boundary in the region.
Momo	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Steamed wheat-flour dumplings of minced pork, buff, chicken or vegetable, served with a thin bone broth on the side and a pounded dalle-and-tomato achar. The broth is not a garnish — it is the reason the dumpling is eaten without a curry. Pan-fried it becomes kothey; deep-fried, phaley.
Thukpa and thenthuk	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	A one-pot noodle soup — thukpa with drawn or cut noodles, thenthuk with dough torn into the broth by hand. It is the standard cold-weather meal above 1,500 m, built to be made from flour, a little meat and whatever green is in the house.
Gundruk ko jhol and gundruk sadeko	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	शाकाहारी	The fermented leaf eaten two ways — simmered into a thin sour soup with potato and dried chilli, or soaked, squeezed dry and dressed raw with mustard oil, timmur, lemon and chopped dalle. The soup is winter food; the sadeko is the standard drinking accompaniment.
Sinki ko jhol	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	शाकाहारी	Pit-fermented radish boiled with potato, tomato and chilli into a sharply sour broth, drunk almost as a restorative. Distinctly more acidic than gundruk, and unmistakable by smell from the doorway.
Kinema curry	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	शाकाहारी	Fermented soybean fried with onion, turmeric, chilli and tomato into a thick gravy eaten with rice. It is Limbu in origin and is the region's principal source of protein in villages that keep few animals.
Phagshapa	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	मांसाहारी	Strips of pork belly with the fat left on, stewed with radish and whole dried red chillies and almost no other spice. A Bhutia dish, and a demonstration of the principle that above a certain altitude fat is the point.
Chhurpi soup and ningro-churpi	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	शाकाहारी	Soft churpi cooked with fiddlehead fern (ningro), or churpi simmered alone into a thick, faintly sour stew. The fern is foraged from stream banks through the monsoon and the pairing is close to a regional signature.
Sel roti	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	शाकाहारी	Rice soaked, ground to a batter, sweetened lightly, left to ferment overnight and piped in a ring into hot oil, where it puffs crisp outside and stays soft inside. Made in quantity at Tihar and Dasain, and kept for days without going stale — the ferment is what does that.
Dhindo	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	शाकाहारी	Millet, maize or buckwheat flour stirred into boiling water to a stiff dough and eaten in pinched lumps with gundruk soup, dal or meat. A grain-efficient staple of the higher villages, and now also a deliberate marker of hill identity on restaurant menus.
Aloo dum, Darjeeling style	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	शाकाहारी	Small potatoes simmered in a thin, dark, chilli-and-tomato gravy, served in a bowl with a spoon and eaten standing. Sold at every school gate and taxi stand on the ridge; sharper and thinner than any plains dum aloo.
Sha phaley and khapse	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Sha phaley is a meat-stuffed round of dough deep-fried until blistered; khapse are the twisted fried biscuits stacked in tall structures in Bhutia and Tibetan homes at Losar and taken down and eaten through the following weeks.
Gya kho	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	मांसाहारी	A Sikkimese hot-pot cooked at the table in a chimneyed brass or copper vessel with a charcoal core — meat, dried radish, glass noodles and greens in broth, added and eaten in rounds. A winter and celebration dish rather than an everyday one.
Sisnu ko jhol	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	शाकाहारी	Stinging nettle boiled with rice-flour thickening into a green soup. Eaten as much as medicine as food, and a reminder that a good part of this cuisine is foraged rather than farmed.
Dalle khursani ko achar	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	शाकाहारी	The round chilli pounded raw with salt, or stuffed and pickled whole in mustard oil and brine. It carries the heat of the meal, and it sits on the side of the plate so each eater sets their own level.
Surti locho	South Gujarat Littoral	शाकाहारी	A deliberately under-set khaman batter, steamed until it is soft enough to collapse, scooped into a dish and finished with oil, butter, sev, raw onion and masala. The name means a mess or a blunder, and the standard account is that it began as a batter that failed to set and was sold anyway. It is eaten with a spoon, which no other khaman is.
Ponk	South Gujarat Littoral	शाकाहारी	Soft green jowar kernels roasted at the milk stage and eaten warm with sev, garlic chutney, lemon and sometimes ghee, or bound into ponk vada. Available roughly from December to February and genuinely not available otherwise — this is one of the few Indian foods with no year-round substitute.
Undhiyu and ubadiyu	South Gujarat Littoral	शाकाहारी	The Surti undhiyu is greener, wetter and heavier on papdi beans and green garlic than the Kathiawadi version, and is eaten with puri. Ubadiyu is its plainer village cousin — the same pot method with no oil at all and banana leaf instead of masala.
Ghari	South Gujarat Littoral	शाकाहारी	A flat disc of thin pastry filled with sweetened mawa and nuts and sealed under a layer of ghee. It is eaten in quantity on Chandani Padvo, the full-moon night in autumn, when Surat eats it on rooftops with bhusu — a single sweet with a single night attached to it.
Surti khaman and sev khamani	South Gujarat Littoral	शाकाहारी	Softer and more open-crumbed than the Saurashtra version, and often served crumbled as sev khamani with sev, pomegranate and coconut folded through it.
Patra	South Gujarat Littoral	शाकाहारी	Colocasia leaves layered with a spiced besan paste, rolled, steamed, sliced and tempered with mustard and sesame. The tamarind and jaggery in the paste are structural, not decorative.
Nankhatai and batasa	South Gujarat Littoral	शाकाहारी	Short, crumbly biscuits from the Parsi and Irani bakeries of Surat, whose ancestry is usually traced to Dutch ship's bread adapted after the European factories left and the bakers had to sell locally.
Dhansak	South Gujarat Littoral	मांसाहारी	Mutton cooked into a purée of several dals and vegetables, served with caramel-browned rice, kachumber and a kebab. It is the best-known Parsi dish and the most misunderstood — it is a Sunday and mourning-week dish by convention, and not a celebration one.
Patra ni machhi	South Gujarat Littoral	मांसाहारी	Pomfret coated in a green coconut, coriander and green chilli chutney, wrapped in banana leaf and steamed. It is a fixture of the Parsi wedding menu, where it is served early in the sequence.
Sali boti and sali marghi	South Gujarat Littoral	मांसाहारी	Mutton or chicken in a sweet-sour tomato and jaggery gravy, topped at the table with sali — matchstick potato straws fried crisp. Added early, they go soft, which is why the topping goes on last.
Akuri	South Gujarat Littoral	मांसाहारी	Eggs scrambled soft and wet with onion, tomato, coriander, green chilli and a little cream, eaten with pav. The Parsi rule is that the egg must remain runny.
Lagan nu custard	South Gujarat Littoral	शाकाहारी	A baked custard of reduced milk, egg, nutmeg and charoli, made for weddings — lagan means wedding — and cut into squares. It sets dense rather than wobbling, which is the point of reducing the milk first.
The Bohra thaal	South Gujarat Littoral	मांसाहारी	Eight or so people eat from one large steel platter in a fixed order — a pinch of salt first, then alternating sweet and savoury courses, ending with salt again. Smoked kheema samosas, dabba gosht, khichda and malai khaja belong to this table. Nothing is left on the thaal, and the sequence is the meal's structure rather than its garnish.
Nagli na rotla with forest greens	South Gujarat Littoral	शाकाहारी	Finger-millet flatbread eaten with wild greens, bamboo shoot, tubers and a raw chilli-and-garlic paste. It is the everyday meal of the Dangs slope and has no relationship to the Gujarati thali sold on the plain below.
Coastal fried fish	South Gujarat Littoral	मांसाहारी	Boomla, ghol, prawn and pomfret fried with a rice-flour or semolina crust in the fishing settlements from the Tapi mouth down to Umbergaon. Daman's version carries a Portuguese-era layer — more vinegar, more garlic, and a taste for a strong chilli paste.
Sutarfeni and khaja	South Gujarat Littoral	शाकाहारी	Shredded, ghee-laminated sweets from the Surat halwai tradition — sutarfeni pulled into fine strands and dusted with cardamom and pistachio, khaja folded into brittle layers.
Malvani fish curry	South Konkan	मांसाहारी	Surmai, pomfret, mackerel or prawns in a ground paste of fresh coconut, roasted Malvani masala and Bedgi chilli, soured with kokum and finished with cracked tirphal. Dark red, thin enough to pour, and cooked in under half an hour because the fish is fresh.
Kombdi vade	South Konkan	मांसाहारी	The dish the region is asked for by name. Country chicken in a thin, fiercely spiced coconut gravy, eaten with vade — small deep-fried breads of rice flour with urad, fenugreek and black pepper worked in, which are neither puri nor bhatura and go leathery within an hour of frying.
Malvani mutton and mutton sukka	South Konkan	मांसाहारी	The same animal twice — a thin dark curry on the ground masala with coconut milk, and a dry preparation finished with roasted grated coconut until it clings. Served together at weddings and at the temple feast, and the sukka is the one people argue about.
Sol kadhi	South Konkan	शाकाहारी	Kokum extract in thin coconut milk with pounded garlic and green chilli, served cold at the end of a meal. In Malvani households the version without coconut — plain kokum water with salt and cumin — is drunk more often, and is what an unwell person is given.
Tisrya masala and sukka	South Konkan	मांसाहारी	Clams gathered from the estuary mud, cooked in the shell with ground coconut and masala, or dried off into a sukka. The Karli and Kalaval estuaries are the source, and the season ends when the rain starts.
Bangda hooman	South Konkan	मांसाहारी	A thin coconut-milk mackerel curry with tirphal and kokum and very little grinding — hooman is the light, everyday register of the same kitchen that makes the heavy ground kalvan for guests.
Ghavane and shevai	South Konkan	शाकाहारी	A lacy rice-flour crepe cooked on one side only, and hand-pressed rice vermicelli. Both are eaten with sweetened coconut milk (rasa) at breakfast, or with chicken curry at a wedding — the same two items serve as the sweet and the savoury course.
Kulith pithla and pej	South Konkan	शाकाहारी	Horse gram ground and cooked into a peppery thin gravy, and the rice gruel drunk with it. This is what the laterite country ate when the mango money had not yet arrived, and it is still the monsoon meal in most village households.
Sandan and patoli	South Konkan	शाकाहारी	Steamed rice cakes — sandan, a jaggery-and-coconut cake set in a mould, and patoli, the same batter wrapped and steamed in a fresh turmeric leaf so it takes the leaf's scent. Patoli is made at Nag Panchami and for Gauri.
Ukadiche modak	South Konkan	शाकाहारी	Steamed rice-flour dumplings hand-pleated around coconut and jaggery, made in quantity for Ganesh Chaturthi, which in this region is the festival that governs the calendar. Twenty-one is the offering count, and the pleats are counted too.
Ambe poli and phanas poli	South Konkan	शाकाहारी	Sun-dried sheets of mango and of jackfruit pulp, cut in strips and eaten as they are or soaked back into a dish through the year. Nothing is added — no sugar, no preservative — because the sugar in the fruit and the sun do the entire job.
Kaju usal and ole kaju	South Konkan	शाकाहारी	Tender fresh cashew kernels, available for only a few weeks after the harvest, cooked in a light coconut gravy. The nut is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century plantation crop here that has quietly become the second cash crop after mango.
Solkadhi bhat and tandalachi bhakri	South Konkan	शाकाहारी	Parboiled rice and hand-patted rice flatbread — the two carbohydrates that everything above is eaten with. Bhakri here is rice, not the jowar bhakri of the plateau above the ghat, and the two regions can be told apart by that alone.
Alphonso, eaten plain	South Konkan	शाकाहारी	The region's actual signature dish is an unprocessed fruit. Devgad and Ratnagiri Alphonso is harvested at three-quarter maturity, ripened in hay-lined baskets for a week or so, and eaten with nothing added; the thin skin and the saffron flesh with no fibre are why it prices at a multiple of every other mango.
Aamras and mango preserves	South Konkan	शाकाहारी	Pulp with a little milk or ghee, eaten with poli during the season, plus the pickles made from the windfall raw fruit — kairi loncha, and the sweet-sour murabba the surplus goes into.
Kokum sarbat and amsul kadhi	South Konkan	शाकाहारी	Kokum syrup diluted with cold water, salt and cumin — drunk against heat exhaustion through the summer and prescribed for it. The tree's economic value now rests as much on this as on the cooking rind.
Pakhala with badi chura	South Odisha & Ganjam	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Overnight-fermented rice eaten with its sour water, a crushed fried badi, a fried leafy green, a raw onion and often a piece of fried dried fish. It is the hot-weather meal from March to June and the default lunch in most households on this plain.
Mansa jhola, Berhampur register	South Odisha & Ganjam	मांसाहारी	Goat cooked slowly with a ground paste of roasted dried chilli, garlic and whole spice, soured with tamarind and finished with potato. It is recognisably the Odia mutton curry, made hotter and more acidic than the version north of Chilika, and it is the Sunday dish of the town.
Chingudi jhola	South Odisha & Ganjam	मांसाहारी	Prawn in a thin mustard-and-tamarind gravy. The Rushikulya estuary and the Chilika arm at Rambha both supply it, and the estuary prawn is preferred for being sweeter and smaller.
Kankada jhola	South Odisha & Ganjam	मांसाहारी	Mud crab from the Chilika arm and the Bahuda backwaters, cooked with garlic, chilli and very little water so the shell liquor thickens the gravy. Rambha and Sonapur are where it is worth eating.
Sukhua bhaja and sukhua besara	South Odisha & Ganjam	मांसाहारी	Sun-dried fish either fried straight or cooked into a ground-mustard sauce. It is a monsoon and lean-season food and it is the smell by which a coastal village announces itself.
Besara	South Odisha & Ganjam	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Vegetables or fish in a ground raw-mustard sauce with garlic and turmeric, the paste added at the end because heat turns it bitter. Here it carries more chilli than the delta version and is often finished with tamarind as well.
Dalma	South Odisha & Ganjam	शाकाहारी	Pigeon pea cooked together with raw banana, pumpkin and colocasia rather than separately, tempered with pancha phutana and dried chilli in ghee. The everyday dal from the Mahanadi to the Bahuda.
Ambula rai	South Odisha & Ganjam	शाकाहारी	Sun-dried mango simmered until soft and dressed with ground mustard and curd. Sour, sharp and cold, and the standard companion to pakhala.
Khatta	South Odisha & Ganjam	शाकाहारी	The sweet-sour preparation that ends a full meal — tomato, dates and date-palm jaggery, or ambula alone, tempered with pancha phutana. It is served last and is not a chutney; it is a course.
Chhena poda	South Odisha & Ganjam	शाकाहारी	Fresh chhena kneaded with sugar, semolina and cardamom, baked in a leaf-lined pan under coals until the top is properly burnt. The invention is credited to the Sahoo family's shop at Daspalla in Nayagarh, inland and north of this region, in the early twentieth century; Ganjam's claim is not to the recipe but to the raw material, since much of the state's chhena is made here. It has no geographical indication as of 2026 — an application has been pressed for years and is not settled.
Chhena kheeri and chhena tarkari	South Odisha & Ganjam	शाकाहारी	Two consequences of a milk surplus: crumbled chhena simmered in reduced milk as a pudding, and — less expected — chhena cooked as a savoury curry with onion and chilli, which is a Ganjam household dish rather than a sweet-shop one.
Enduri pitha	South Odisha & Ganjam	शाकाहारी	A fermented rice-and-black-gram batter with a coconut and jaggery filling, spooned into a fresh turmeric leaf and steamed. Tied to Prathamastami in the winter, when the leaf is available.
Manda and kakara pitha	South Odisha & Ganjam	शाकाहारी	Steamed and fried rice-flour dumplings filled with coconut and jaggery — the standing festival and offering sweets, made in every household for Ganesh Chaturthi and Kumar Purnima.
Ragi jau and mandia peja	South Odisha & Ganjam	शाकाहारी	Finger millet cooked to a thin gruel, cooled overnight and drunk in the morning before work. The ordinary breakfast on the ghat slope and almost unknown on the plain thirty kilometres away.
Roasted cashew	South Odisha & Ganjam	शाकाहारी	Ganjam's coastal laterite carries a large cashew belt, and roasted kernels sold by weight at the road side are the local equivalent of a peanut stall. The shell liquid is caustic, which is why the nut has to be roasted before it can be handled at all.
Kakrar jhal	Sundarbans	मांसाहारी	Mud crab cooked in the shell with mustard, green chilli and a little coconut, thick enough to cling. It is eaten with the hands over a long time, and the fat from inside the carapace is the part people argue over.
Chingri malaikari	Sundarbans	मांसाहारी	Tiger prawn or the giant freshwater golda in coconut-milk gravy with cardamom and ghee. Here it is made with prawn caught the same day and with fresh coconut rather than tinned milk, which changes it more than any spice would.
Ilish bhape	Sundarbans	मांसाहारी	Hilsa steamed sealed with ground mustard, green chilli and raw mustard oil. The fish is caught at the river mouths on its run upstream, so the Sundarbans eats it earlier in the season than the towns upriver do.
Chingri diye lau ghonto	Sundarbans	मांसाहारी	Bottle gourd cooked down with small prawns until the two are indistinguishable. A standard way of making a little protein carry a whole dish, and one of the commonest meals in the polder villages.
Bhetki paturi	Sundarbans	मांसाहारी	Barramundi fillet in mustard paste, wrapped in banana leaf and griddled until the leaf blackens. Bhetki is an estuarine fish and is at its best where salt and fresh water meet, which is exactly here.
Parshe machher jhal	Sundarbans	मांसाहारी	Mullet in a thin mustard gravy with nigella. A brackish-water fish that the western delta buys and the Sundarbans catches, and the household benchmark for whether a cook can balance mustard.
Kancha kolar kofta	Sundarbans	शाकाहारी	Green banana mashed with spices, bound and fried into balls, then simmered. Green banana grows on the embankment slope where little else will, which is why it appears so often on an island menu.
Nona jol-er chingri bhorta	Sundarbans	मांसाहारी	Small brackish prawns mashed with raw mustard oil, green chilli, onion and salt, uncooked or barely warmed. A bhorta in the eastern-delta manner, eaten with rice at the start of a meal.
Golda chingrir malai	Sundarbans	मांसाहारी	The giant freshwater prawn, taken from the sweeter northern creeks and ponds, cooked in coconut with its head on. Farmed golda and bagda ponds now occupy a large share of the polder belt, which has changed both the diet and the soil.
Kochu shaak with prawn	Sundarbans	मांसाहारी	Taro leaf and stem slow-cooked with small prawns and coconut. Taro is one of the few crops indifferent to waterlogging, so it survives seasons that kill everything else in the plot.
Shutki bhuna	Sundarbans	मांसाहारी	Dried fish rehydrated and fried down hard with onion, garlic and chilli. More common on the eastern side of the forest than the western, and a dish that divides households on the same island.
Bhaat with nona-jol machher jhol	Sundarbans	मांसाहारी	Rice with a thin curry of whatever small brackish fish the creek gave that day — tangra, bhangon, khorsula — with potato and turmeric. This, not the crab, is the region's actual staple meal.
Joynagar moa	Sundarbans	शाकाहारी	Kanakchur puffed rice bound with nolen gur and studded with gawa ghee, khoya and nuts. It carries a registered geographical indication, is made only between roughly December and February because the gur exists only then, and does not keep — a sweet with both a season and a shelf life.
Nolen gurer payesh	Sundarbans	शाकाहारी	Rice pudding sweetened with date-palm gur instead of sugar, made in the same ten-week window. The gur is added off the heat, because boiling it turns the flavour flat.
Sundarbans honey	Sundarbans	शाकाहारी	Wild honey from the giant rock bee, dark and thin, varying with the flowering — khalisha honey is the prized grade, garan and keora honeys are darker and stronger. It received a registered geographical indication on the Indian side in 2024.
Hyderabadi kachchi dum biryani	Telangana	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Raw mutton marinated in yoghurt, papaya, fried onion, mint and green chilli, layered under parboiled basmati, sealed with dough and finished over a slow fire so meat and rice come to doneness together. Served with mirchi ka salan and a thin dahi chutney, which are not garnishes — the salan supplies the sourness the rice deliberately lacks.
Hyderabadi haleem	Telangana	मांसाहारी	Wheat, lentils and mutton pounded in a deg for hours into a single shredded paste, finished with fried onion, lime, mint and ghee. It is a Ramzan food and largely disappears for the other eleven months. It holds a geographical indication registered in 2010 — the first non-vegetarian dish in India to get one.
Sarva pindi	Telangana	शाकाहारी	A thick savoury pancake of rice flour with soaked chana dal, peanuts, sesame, curry leaf and green chilli, pressed by hand into a cold pan, holed with a finger and cooked slowly until the base is crisp and the interior set. Also called ginnappa. Made on a Sunday or a festival because it takes an hour.
Jonna rotte and sajja rotte	Telangana	शाकाहारी	Sorghum or pearl-millet flour worked with hot water and patted flat between the palms on a wet cloth, then cooked on a griddle. There is no gluten to hold it, so the shaping is entirely a hand skill and the bread must be eaten within the hour.
Sakinalu	Telangana	शाकाहारी	Rice-flour dough seasoned with ajwain and sesame, piped by hand into a flat concentric spiral and deep fried. Made in quantity at Sankranti by groups of women working together, because one person cannot pipe and fry at the same rate.
Ambali	Telangana	शाकाहारी	A cold soured millet gruel drunk from a tumbler in the fields through summer, often with buttermilk, salt and raw onion. The plateau's answer to a hot morning and no time to cook.
Pachi pulusu	Telangana	शाकाहारी	Literally raw broth — tamarind extract, raw onion, green chilli and salt, with a tempering poured over and no cooking at all. Eaten over rice or jonna rotte in the hottest weeks.
Gongura pachadi	Telangana	शाकाहारी	Roselle leaf wilted in oil and pounded in a rolu with dried chilli and garlic until it is a coarse dark paste. Sour enough on its own that it needs no tamarind, and it keeps for weeks under oil.
Kandi podi and karam podi	Telangana	शाकाहारी	Dry powders — roasted redgram with chilli and garlic, or chilli with cumin and salt — eaten with a spoonful of oil or ghee over rice or roti. In a household with no vegetables in the house they are the meal, not the seasoning.
Natu kodi pulusu and golichina mamsam	Telangana	मांसाहारी	Country chicken simmered long in a tamarind and pounded-chilli gravy; and mutton cooked down dry with onion and chilli until the fat renders and coats it. Both assume a lean, tough animal that needs time.
Mirchi ka salan and bagara baingan	Telangana	शाकाहारी	Long green chillies, or small brinjals, in a thick gravy of roasted sesame, peanut, coconut and tamarind. The salan exists to sit beside biryani; the baingan is the same gravy given a vegetable that will absorb it.
Dalcha and khatti dal	Telangana	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Bottle gourd and mutton bone cooked into chana dal and soured hard with tamarind; and its vegetarian cousin, a thin sour dal eaten with plain rice. The everyday food of the old city, and the dish that shows the Deccani kitchen using tamarind the way the villages do.
Maleeda and sattu pindi	Telangana	शाकाहारी	Wheat or jowar roti crumbled with jaggery and ghee, and roasted-gram flour worked with jaggery. Made as the naivedyam for Bathukamma and handed round among the women at the end of the evening.
Boti and talakaya kura	Telangana	मांसाहारी	Offal and goat's head cooked with heavy spice — the parts of the animal a village slaughter produces once and cannot store, so they are eaten first and fast.
Double ka meetha and qubani ka meetha	Telangana	शाकाहारी	Fried bread soaked in reduced saffron milk, and dried Turkish apricots stewed to a dark syrup and served with cream. The apricot is imported, and always has been; it is the clearest ingredient trace of the city's Persianate supply line.
Irani chai and Osmania biscuit	Telangana	शाकाहारी	Tea decoction and a separately reduced milk combined at the counter, drunk in a small cup with a biscuit that is salted and sweet at once and designed to hold together when dunked. The Irani cafés that serve it are an institution of the city, not a food fashion.
Kanchipuram idli	Tondaimandalam	शाकाहारी	A coarse, longer-fermented idli seasoned with whole pepper, cumin, dry ginger and sesame oil, steamed in dried leaf cups or as a deep cylindrical block and cut into wedges — not the flat white disc sold elsewhere. It is a temple food first, and the shape and the seasoning both follow from having to survive hours of distribution.
Idli, vada and the tiffin canon	Tondaimandalam	शाकाहारी	Steamed rice-and-urad cakes, a fried urad doughnut, sambar, three chutneys and molaga podi. The combination was standardised in Madras hotels in the early twentieth century and is now the default breakfast of half the country, which was not the case before those kitchens made it portable.
Idli with vada curry	Tondaimandalam	शाकाहारी	A Chennai speciality — crumbled lentil vadai simmered in an onion and tomato gravy and served over idli. It exists because a shop with unsold vadai needed a use for them, and it is now ordered on purpose.
Paper roast and Madras masala dosa	Tondaimandalam	शाकाहारी	A dosa spread very thin and cooked long enough to shatter, served either plain and enormous or folded over potato masala. The city's hotels compete on diameter, which is a marketing decision rather than a culinary one.
Chettinad pepper chicken and kuzhambu	Tondaimandalam	मांसाहारी	Meat cooked in a fresh-ground masala of fennel, star anise, kalpasi and a great deal of pepper. It came to Chennai with merchant families from the dry country south of here and became the city's idea of a Tamil non-vegetarian restaurant, which has slightly misrepresented both the cuisine and the region.
Ball curry and yellow rice	Tondaimandalam	मांसाहारी	Anglo-Indian household cooking — spiced mince rolled into balls in a thin tomato and coconut gravy, served with turmeric rice. It belongs to the railway colonies at Perambur and to the Vepery and Egmore streets, and it is now cooked in far fewer kitchens than it once was.
Mulligatawny (milagu thanni)	Tondaimandalam	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Literally pepper water — a thin peppery tamarind broth that the household drinks mixed with rice and that the colonial table turned into a soup course by adding meat stock and rice to the bowl. The English name is a mispronunciation of the Tamil one, and the dish exists in both forms simultaneously.
Sappadu on a plantain leaf	Tondaimandalam	शाकाहारी	The full meal — rice, sambar, rasam, curd, two or three vegetable dishes, appalam, pickle and payasam, served in a fixed order and in fixed positions on the leaf, with the tip of the leaf pointing left. The order is the argument; eating it out of sequence is what marks an outsider.
Sundal	Tondaimandalam	शाकाहारी	Boiled pulses tempered with mustard, curry leaf and grated coconut, given to Navaratri visitors on a nine-day rotation and sold on the Marina in paper cones for the rest of the year. Cheap, dry, and the most-eaten street food in the city.
Kothu parotta	Tondaimandalam	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Layered flatbread chopped on the griddle with egg, meat and gravy, worked with two blades in a rhythm audible from the street — the sound is the advertisement. A late-night food, and a north-Tamil town food before it was a city one.
Atho	Tondaimandalam	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	A Burmese noodle salad of wheat noodles, fried onion, cabbage, tamarind and chilli oil, sold near Burma Bazaar and in Parry's Corner by families who came from Rangoon in the 1960s. It has been in Chennai for sixty years and is still made almost nowhere else in India.
Meen puyabaisse	Tondaimandalam	मांसाहारी	The Creole fish stew of the enclave — several kinds of fish in a turmeric-tinted broth, built on a French bouillabaisse idea and cooked with Tamil aromatics and often ghee. Served with bread rather than rice, which is the giveaway.
Yeral vindail	Tondaimandalam	मांसाहारी	Prawn in ground mustard, vinegar, turmeric and coconut milk, from the Creole kitchen of the enclave and descended from the Portuguese vinha d'alhos through the Indian Ocean trade. It is a relative of the Goan vindaloo, not a local copy of it, and it is milder and mustard-forward.
Puducherry bread and the bakery habit	Tondaimandalam	शाकाहारी	A working baguette-style loaf and croissant tradition that has survived in the enclave's bakeries for generations, eaten with coffee at breakfast and with fish stew at lunch — the most everyday and least curated survival of the French period.
Filter coffee	Tondaimandalam	शाकाहारी	Decoction and boiled milk, pulled between tumbler and davara. Chennai drinks it at least twice a day, and the sabha canteens in December serve it in quantities that noticeably shape the concert intervals.
Kuttanad duck roast	Travancore & Kuttanad	मांसाहारी	Duck cut on the bone and cooked down with shallot, a great deal of crushed black pepper, coconut slivers and curry leaf until the masala clings and the pan goes dry. The local Chara and Chemballi birds are herded on harvested paddy, so the meat is lean and dark and takes far more pepper than chicken would.
Tharavu mappas	Travancore & Kuttanad	मांसाहारी	The gentler treatment of the same bird — duck simmered in thin coconut milk with whole spices, potato and shallot, thickened at the end with the first extract, and served with appam or kallappam. Mappas is the Nasrani side of the Kuttanad kitchen, roast the toddy-shop side.
Karimeen pollichathu	Travancore & Kuttanad	मांसाहारी	Pearl spot, the Kerala state fish and a lagoon species rather than a sea one, scored to the bone, packed with a shallot and chilli masala, wrapped in a passed-over-the-flame banana leaf and pan-roasted until the leaf blackens. The leaf is the cooking vessel and the seasoning at once.
Nadan meen curry with kudampuli	Travancore & Kuttanad	मांसाहारी	Fish simmered in a thin, fiercely red gravy of chilli, shallot and kudampuli in an unglazed manchatti that is never washed with soap. It is deliberately cooked a day ahead — the gravy is considered right on the second day, and the clay holds the acid that would strip a metal pan.
Meen peera	Travancore & Kuttanad	मांसाहारी	Small fish — netholi, mathi or the lagoon's tiny kozhuva — cooked dry with grated coconut and kudampuli in a shaken pot. Eaten with kanji rather than rice, and the cheapest good thing in the region.
Konju and raw mango curry	Travancore & Kuttanad	मांसाहारी	Backwater prawn cooked with green mango and coconut, so the sourness comes from fruit rather than kudampuli. Made when the mango is in and the prawn is running, which is a narrow window in April and May.
Kappa puzhukku with kanthari chammanthi	Travancore & Kuttanad	शाकाहारी	Tapioca boiled with turmeric and salt, then mashed in the same pot with grated coconut, shallot, cumin and green chilli. Eaten on its own with a paste of bird's-eye chilli and shallot, or with fish curry. The crop arrived through the Portuguese and became the food that carried the region through the shortages of the 1940s.
Kallappam and vellayappam	Travancore & Kuttanad	शाकाहारी	Rice batter raised overnight with palm toddy instead of lentils, which is why the rim comes out lacy and the centre spongy. Kallappam is thicker and eaten with duck or beef stew; vellayappam is the thinner, whiter version.
Olan	Travancore & Kuttanad	शाकाहारी	Ash gourd and red cowpea simmered in thin coconut milk with two green chillies and nothing else, then finished with raw coconut oil and curry leaf. There is no tempering, no mustard and no masala. It is the sadya item that shows whether a cook can leave things out.
Puli inji	Travancore & Kuttanad	शाकाहारी	Ginger and green chilli fried down in tamarind and jaggery to a dark, sweet-sour-hot paste, served in a teaspoon quantity at the top-left of the leaf. It keeps for weeks, which is why it is also the travelling condiment of the region.
Ambalappuzha palpayasam	Travancore & Kuttanad	शाकाहारी	A thin milk-and-rice payasam offered at the Ambalappuzha Sree Krishna temple and served warm in a steel tumbler. It carries no jaggery, no coconut and almost no spice, and is famous precisely for how little is in it.
Palada payasam	Travancore & Kuttanad	शाकाहारी	Steamed rice-flake ada reduced in milk and sugar for hours until it turns pink. The onam sadya's closing item wherever a household can afford the milk and the time.
Unniyappam	Travancore & Kuttanad	शाकाहारी	Small dark spheres of rice, jaggery, banana and coconut fried in ghee in a dimpled appakkara. Offered at temples and made at home for Vishu; the good ones are crisp at the equator and soft through the middle.
Aranmula vallasadya	Travancore & Kuttanad	शाकाहारी	The boatmen's feast at the Aranmula Parthasarathy temple, running to sixty and more items, in which each dish must be asked for in sung verse before it is served. It is sponsored by devotees as an offering, and the singing is the ordering system rather than an entertainment laid on after the meal.
Fish molee	Travancore & Kuttanad	मांसाहारी	Fish poached pale in coconut milk with whole green chilli, ginger and a little vinegar — no chilli powder, no browning. The dish sits at the meeting point of the Nasrani kitchen and the European table, and it is the one Kerala fish preparation designed not to be red.
Kanji and payar	Travancore & Kuttanad	शाकाहारी	Rice gruel drunk with its own starch water, eaten with green gram cooked with coconut, a roasted pappadam and a spoon of pickle. The standard evening meal across the region and the one served free at temples during Karkidakam.
Fermented dried fish	Tripura Hills & Plains	मांसाहारी	Small freshwater fish, sun-dried and fermented, pressed into cakes and sold by weight. It goes into vegetables, meat, chutney and broth, and a Tripuri kitchen without it is not recognisable as one. Its smell is the first thing a visitor notices in a hill market and the last thing they get used to.
Gudok	Tripura Hills & Plains	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	The signature dish. Vegetables — often bamboo shoot, jackfruit or seasonal greens — with berma, chilli and garlic, packed into a green bamboo tube or a covered pot and cooked slowly with no oil. The bamboo version tastes faintly of the culm; the pot version does not, which is the whole argument for cutting fresh bamboo.
Chakhwi	Tripura Hills & Plains	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Bamboo shoot boiled with berma, seasonal vegetables and a little chilli into a thin, sour, deeply savoury dish eaten over rice. It is the monsoon dish, made when the shoots are cut, and the clearest single example of how sourness rather than fat carries flavour here.
Awan bangwi	Tripura Hills & Plains	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Rice cooked with seasonal vegetables and berma inside a wrapped leaf parcel and steamed, then opened at the table. A single-parcel meal designed to be carried to a field, and still made for festivals and for guests.
Wahan mosdeng	Tripura Hills & Plains	मांसाहारी	Pork, boiled and then chopped or minced fine, dressed raw with chilli, onion and coriander. The meat is cooked and the dressing is not, which gives it the sharpness of a salad and the weight of a meat dish at the same time.
Mosdeng serma	Tripura Hills & Plains	मांसाहारी	Tomato pounded raw with berma, dried red chilli and garlic into a coarse chutney. It appears at almost every hill meal, and it is the version of mosdeng most likely to be the first Tripuri thing a visitor actually enjoys.
Muya bai wahan	Tripura Hills & Plains	मांसाहारी	Bamboo shoot cooked with pork, and typically with jackfruit or green papaya to take up the fat. Muya is the shoot and wahan is the pork; almost every dish name in this kitchen is a list of what is in the pot.
Muya awandru	Tripura Hills & Plains	मांसाहारी	Bamboo shoot with rice flour and berma, cooked until the flour thickens the liquid into a porridge. The only thickened dish in the repertoire, and the one that shows most clearly what a cook does when there is no fat available to build a sauce with.
Kosoi bwtwi	Tripura Hills & Plains	मांसाहारी	Beans stewed with berma. Bwtwi is the word for this kind of slow boiled stew, and the dish is named for whatever pulse or vegetable has gone into it — the naming convention is a shopping list, not a recipe title.
Pachon	Tripura Hills & Plains	शाकाहारी	The Chakma dish of the Bizu new year — a mixed vegetable curry that must contain at least five different vegetables, and by preference many more, cooked together in one pot. It is made deliberately at the turn of the year to use up what the old year has left.
Fish in light gravy	Tripura Hills & Plains	मांसाहारी	The plains staple — freshwater fish from a homestead pond or a tank fishery, in a thin turmeric and mustard-oil gravy with potato. It is the everyday meal of the western plain and shares its grammar with the delta on the other side of the ranges rather than with the hills twenty kilometres east.
Dried fish	Tripura Hills & Plains	मांसाहारी	Sun-dried fish cooked with onion, chilli and mustard oil. Drier and less fermented than berma, and the point at which the two kitchens are closest — a hill cook and a plains cook are both reaching for a preserved fish, and disagreeing only about how far to let it go.
Matabari pera	Tripura Hills & Plains	शाकाहारी	The milk-and-sugar prasad of the Tripura Sundari temple at Udaipur, made in a narrow lane of confectioners beside the temple and sold in leaf-lined baskets. It received a geographical indication in 2024 as Matabari Pera Prasad — a sweet whose registration is tied to a single temple rather than to a district.
Rice cakes	Tripura Hills & Plains	शाकाहारी	Steamed and fried rice-flour cakes with coconut and jaggery fillings, made on the plain at the winter solstice and at Hangrai in the hills — the same object arriving from two directions at the same point in the calendar.
Neer dosa	Tulu Nadu	शाकाहारी	A soft, unfermented rice crepe, folded twice, eaten with coconut chutney, chicken gassi or jaggery and coconut. The batter is watery enough to be poured rather than spread, and the pan is never oiled after the first dosa.
Kori rotti	Tulu Nadu	मांसाहारी	Wafer-thin, brittle sheets of dry-baked rice rotti broken into a bowl and drowned in chicken gassi, so the rotti softens unevenly and holds both crisp and sodden pieces in the same mouthful. A Bunt household dish that restaurants adopted without changing.
Kori gassi	Tulu Nadu	मांसाहारी	Chicken in a thin red gravy of wet-ground roasted coconut, Byadagi chilli, coriander and tamarind. The base recipe from which most of the region's meat and fish curries are variations.
Meen gassi	Tulu Nadu	मांसाहारी	The Mangalorean fish curry — mackerel, seer or pomfret in the same coconut and Byadagi base, soured with tamarind and finished with a tempering of coconut oil, mustard and curry leaf. Cooked in unglazed clay and better on the second day.
Kane tawa fry	Tulu Nadu	मांसाहारी	Ladyfish, split and rubbed with chilli paste, pressed into coarse semolina and shallow-fried in coconut oil until the crust shatters. Kane is a soft, bone-heavy fish that would collapse without the rava, which is why the technique exists.
Patrode	Tulu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Colocasia leaves layered with a spiced rice-and-tamarind paste, rolled tight, steamed and then sliced and pan-fried. The tamarind is not optional — the raw leaf contains crystals that irritate the throat, and the acid neutralises them.
Pundi	Tulu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Steamed balls of coarse rice batter, sometimes with grated coconut and mustard worked in, eaten with coconut chutney or a thin gassi. Breakfast in the ghat foothills more than on the coast.
Goli baje	Tulu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Soured curd and refined flour batter, left to ferment, dropped by hand into hot oil and served hot with coconut chutney. Sold everywhere in coastal Karnataka as Mangalore bajji; hollow and chewy rather than crisp.
Udupi sambar	Tulu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Toor dal with a masala ground fresh from roasted coconut, Byadagi chilli, coriander and fenugreek, with jaggery to round it. It is thicker, sweeter and more aromatic than the tamarind-forward Tamil sambar it is usually confused with, and it is why the sambar served in Udupi hotels across India tastes the way it does.
Kotte kadubu and moode	Tulu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Idli batter steamed in cups of jackfruit leaf or in cones of screwpine, so the cake takes the shape and the scent of the leaf. Made for festivals and for Nagara Panchami.
Mangalore buns	Tulu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Overripe banana worked into a curd-and-flour dough, rested overnight to ferment, then rolled and deep fried into a soft sweet-savoury puri. A use for fruit that would otherwise be thrown away.
Kundapura koli ghee roast	Tulu Nadu	मांसाहारी	Chicken reduced in ghee with a wet Byadagi and tamarind paste until the gravy clings. It began in the lunch homes of Kundapura in the twentieth century and is now the single most copied dish of the region.
Dukra maas (pork bafat)	Tulu Nadu	मांसाहारी	Pork cooked slowly with the household's own bafat powder and toddy vinegar, eaten with sanna. Central to Mangalorean Catholic feast cooking and almost unknown outside those households.
Sanna	Tulu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Steamed ground-rice cakes raised with palm toddy — spongier and sweeter than an idli, and made for weddings, Christmas and Monti Fest.
Mattu gulla gojju	Tulu Nadu	शाकाहारी	A tender green brinjal grown only around Mattu village near Udupi, held under a geographical indication, and cooked in a light coconut and tamarind gravy. Traditionally supplied to the Krishna Matha kitchen.
Gadbad	Tulu Nadu	शाकाहारी	Three ice creams, jelly, dry fruit and cut fruit layered in a tall glass. The name means a mess or a muddle, which is an honest description, and it is the one dish visitors to Mangaluru are told to order before any other.
Mahaprasad	Utkal	शाकाहारी	The Jagannath temple's cooked offering — rice, dals, vegetable preparations, khechedi, sweets and pithas running to dozens of items across the day's sequence. It is cooked in earthen pots, offered to the deity, then carried to the Bimala shrine and offered again, and only then is it mahaprasad. It is sold, not given, and it is eaten by strangers seated together from the same leaf.
Pakhala	Utkal	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Rice left under water overnight and eaten with its sour liquor, badi chura, a fried leafy green, fried fish and a raw onion. Basi pakhala is the fermented overnight form, saja is same-day, jira pakhala is tempered with cumin and curd. It is the summer meal and a matter of some regional pride.
Dalma	Utkal	शाकाहारी	Split pigeon pea cooked together with raw banana, pumpkin, papaya and colocasia rather than separately, and tempered with pancha phutana, cumin and dried chilli in ghee. A temple dish that became the household's everyday dal.
Santula	Utkal	शाकाहारी	Mixed vegetables boiled with very little water and finished with raw mustard oil, garlic and green chilli — a deliberately underseasoned dish that exists as a counterweight to besara on the same plate.
Besara	Utkal	शाकाहारी और मांसाहारी	Vegetables, or fish, in a ground-mustard sauce with garlic and turmeric. The sharpest thing on an ordinary Odia plate.
Khechedi	Utkal	शाकाहारी	Rice and dal cooked together with ghee, black pepper and ginger, no onion or garlic. It is the principal cooked offering at Puri and, at home, the thing made when someone is unwell or when the day is a fast day.
Ghanta tarkari	Utkal	शाकाहारी	Many vegetables cut small and cooked together with whole spices and a little coconut, made in quantity for festivals and for temple and community feeding.
Macha besara	Utkal	मांसाहारी	Freshwater or lagoon fish in mustard sauce. Chilika's mullet, bhekti and khainga are the prized catches and the price shifts with the salinity of the lagoon in a given season.
Chilika kankada	Utkal	मांसाहारी	Mud crab from the lagoon, cooked simply with mustard, garlic and turmeric, or roasted. Sold at the roadside at Barkul and Balugaon by weight and cooked while you wait.
Chingudi tarkari	Utkal	मांसाहारी	Prawn from the lagoon and the creeks, cooked with mustard or with potato and tomato in the plainer domestic version.
Ou khatta	Utkal	शाकाहारी	Grated elephant apple cooked down with jaggery and mustard tempering — sour, sweet and slightly resinous, served in a small quantity beside the main food rather than as a dish.
Dahi bara aloo dum	Utkal	शाकाहारी	Urad dal fritters soaked in spiced curd, served with a spiced potato curry and a ghuguni ladle over them. Cuttack's own, eaten from breakfast onwards, and different from the northern dahi vada by the addition of the potato and the pea.
Chhena poda	Utkal	शाकाहारी	Fresh chhena kneaded with sugar and semolina, poured into a leaf-lined pan and baked slowly until the top and base caramelise. Credited to a sweet-maker at Nayagarh in the early twentieth century, which makes it among the youngest well-known sweets in India.
Rasagola	Utkal	शाकाहारी	Chhena balls boiled in thin syrup, softer and less white than the Bengali version and traditionally cooked until the syrup caramelises slightly. Odisha Rasagola is registered as a geographical indication, and the claim rests on the Niladri Bije offering at the end of Ratha Jatra.
Rasabali	Utkal	शाकाहारी	Flattened chhena patties fried and steeped in thickened, cardamom-scented milk. Associated with the Baladevjew temple at Kendrapara, where it is an offering.
Khaja	Utkal	शाकाहारी	Layered wheat pastry fried and soaked in syrup, made dry enough to keep for days — which is precisely why it became the sweet a pilgrim carries home. A standing offering at Puri.
Enduri pitha	Utkal	शाकाहारी	A fermented rice-and-black-gram batter with a coconut and jaggery filling, steamed inside a fresh turmeric leaf. Made for Prathamastami, for the eldest child of the house.
Pesarattu	Uttarandhra	शाकाहारी	Whole green gram soaked and ground with green chilli, ginger and a little rice, spread thin on a hot tawa and eaten with ginger chutney. It is not a dosa with green gram in it; there is no fermentation and no urad, and the batter is used the same day it is ground.
Bongulo chicken	Uttarandhra	मांसाहारी	Chicken marinated with chilli, turmeric and local herbs, packed into a green bamboo tube and roasted at an angle over a fire. It began as a way of cooking without vessels on a hill slope and is now the dish visitors go to Araku for, which has made it a road-side trade in its own right.
Chepala pulusu	Uttarandhra	मांसाहारी	Sea fish simmered in a tamarind gravy with onion, chilli and fenugreek, cooked without stirring so the pieces stay whole, and eaten the next day by preference because the sourness settles into the flesh.
Royyala iguru	Uttarandhra	मांसाहारी	Prawn cooked dry with onion, ginger-garlic and ground chilli until the masala clings. The Bheemili and Pudimadaka landings supply it, and the smaller estuary prawn is preferred.
Endu chepala pulusu	Uttarandhra	मांसाहारी	Sun-dried fish soaked, then cooked in tamarind with drumstick or brinjal. A monsoon dish, made when the boats are off the water, and unmistakable from two houses away.
Ragi ambali and ragi sankati	Uttarandhra	शाकाहारी	Finger millet as a cold soured gruel in the morning and as a stiff ball with a thin curry at midday. The ghat staple, and the reason the hill kitchen needs almost no oil.
Gongura pappu	Uttarandhra	शाकाहारी	Roselle leaf cooked into pigeon-pea dal. The leaf does the souring, so no tamarind goes in. It is eaten here, but without the near-devotional status it has in the deltas.
Mamidikaya pappu	Uttarandhra	शाकाहारी	Raw mango cooked with pigeon pea, tempered with mustard, curry leaf and dried chilli, and finished with a little jaggery — the small sweet correction that marks this register out from Guntur's.
Kandi podi and nuvvula podi	Uttarandhra	शाकाहारी	Roasted pulse or sesame pounded with dried chilli and garlic into a coarse powder, eaten with rice and a spoon of hot oil. It is a whole meal in a dry season and it keeps for weeks without a container that seals.
Forest greens and bamboo shoot	Uttarandhra	शाकाहारी	Wild leafy greens gathered by the season, and tender bamboo shoot sliced, boiled off and cooked or soured into a pickle. What is on the plate above the scarp is set by the week of the year.
Mamsam pulusu, Uttarandhra register	Uttarandhra	मांसाहारी	Goat cooked in a thin tamarind-and-chilli gravy with whole spice, less oily and less fiery than the Rayalaseema or Guntur versions, and usually eaten with rice rather than with a bread.
Palasa jeedipappu	Uttarandhra	शाकाहारी	Cashew from the Srikakulam laterite belt, roasted and sold by grade. Palasa and Kasibugga process a very large share of the region's crop, much of it brought in from Odisha and West Africa as well as grown locally.
Bellam and Anakapalli jaggery	Uttarandhra	शाकाहारी	Cane boiled down to jaggery at Anakapalli, which runs one of the largest jaggery markets in the country. It is eaten plain with rice and ghee, and it is the reason the local kitchen sweetens its sour dishes.
Bobbatlu and boorelu	Uttarandhra	शाकाहारी	A jaggery-and-gram filling either sealed in a thin wheat disc and griddled, or wrapped in a green-gram batter and deep-fried. The two standing festival sweets, made for Ugadi and for Sankranti.
Kudumulu in turmeric leaf	Uttarandhra	शाकाहारी	Steamed rice-flour dumplings with coconut and jaggery, cooked inside a fresh turmeric leaf for Vinayaka Chavithi. The leaf is the flavouring and the season is set by it.
Araku coffee	Uttarandhra	शाकाहारी	Shade-grown arabica from the ghat villages, registered as a geographical indication in 2019 as Araku Valley Arabica. The distinctive thing is not the cup but the ownership structure — the coffee is grown on small Adivasi holdings and processed through cooperatives, which is unusual for a specialty origin anywhere.
Saoji mutton rassa	Vidarbha	मांसाहारी	Goat on the bone in a thin, dark, glossy gravy with a heavy skim of red oil, built on the poppy-seed and dry-coconut masala. The heat is peppery and cumulative rather than sharp, and it keeps building for several minutes after the plate is finished. Served with plain roti or bhakar and raw onion, and traditionally without a spoon anywhere near it.
Varhadi mutton rassa	Vidarbha	मांसाहारी	The household style of the cotton plain — the same goat in a darker, drier masala of roasted coconut, sesame and a great deal of red chilli, with the gravy tighter than a saoji and the heat more frontal. Eaten with bhakar.
Varhadi kombdi	Vidarbha	मांसाहारी	Country chicken in the Varhadi masala, cooked long enough for a bird that has walked. Weddings and harvest meals in the cotton districts are built around it, cooked outdoors in a large pot.
Tarri poha	Vidarbha	शाकाहारी	Nagpur's breakfast and its most distinctive single dish. Flattened rice steamed plain, then flooded at the counter with tarri — the spiced red oil skimmed off a pot of chana usal — with raw onion, coriander, lemon and a fistful of shev on top. Eaten standing, off a leaf plate, from about seven in the morning.
Patodi rassa	Vidarbha	शाकाहारी	Set gram-flour diamonds simmered in a thin fiery gravy of onion, garlic, dry coconut and chilli. The vegetarian centrepiece of a Varhadi wedding meal, and the dish by which a Vidarbha cook is judged.
Zunka bhakar	Vidarbha	शाकाहारी	Gram flour cooked dry with onion, garlic and green chilli until it crumbles, eaten with jowar bhakar. The standing meal of the working day across the plain, and the cheapest complete protein a field kitchen can make.
Wada bhaat	Vidarbha	शाकाहारी	Urad-dal vadas served over plain rice with a thin dal poured across, an oil tempering and a lemon. A Varhadi festive and funeral dish both, and one of the few in the region where rice is the point in the western districts.
Bharit	Vidarbha	शाकाहारी	Brinjal buried in embers until the skin blisters and the flesh collapses, peeled, mashed with onion, garlic, groundnut and green chilli. The Vidarbha version is hotter and less oily than Khandesh's, and it is made only with the large field brinjal grown for it.
Chana usal with tarri	Vidarbha	शाकाहारी	Whole black chana in a dark gravy, cooked in a large pot so the spiced oil separates on top. It is the parent dish of tarri poha and is eaten in its own right with pav.
Bamboo shoot curry	Vidarbha	शाकाहारी	Fermented or dried bamboo shoot cooked with tamarind, a light masala and sometimes dried fish. Sour, faintly sulphurous and completely unlike anything cooked forty kilometres west. Available fresh only in the first weeks of the monsoon.
Chapda chutney	Vidarbha	मांसाहारी	Red weaver ants and their eggs pounded with salt, garlic and chilli, eaten with rice by Madia and Gond households in the eastern forests. The sourness is formic acid from the ants themselves. Gathered from nests built in tree canopies, and seasonal.
Chinnor bhaat	Vidarbha	शाकाहारी	Plain steamed rice of the short-grain aromatic Chinnor landrace grown in the Bhandara and Gondia tank country, eaten with a thin dal and ghee. The aroma is the entire dish, which is why nobody puts a masala near it.
Santra barfi	Vidarbha	शाकाहारी	Milk solids cooked down with Nagpur mandarin juice and zest into a soft orange fudge. A twentieth-century sweet built on a nineteenth-century crop, and the thing every visitor to Nagpur is sent home with.
Thecha with Bhiwapur chilli	Vidarbha	शाकाहारी	Chilli, garlic and salt pounded on stone. Made here with the Bhiwapur chilli of southern Nagpur district, which holds a geographical indication and is valued for colour and pungency rather than for size.
Mahua	Vidarbha	शाकाहारी	Dried mahua flowers eaten as they are, cooked into a coarse bread, boiled into a sweet gruel, or distilled. In the forest districts the March flowering is a working season with its own calendar and its own household economy.

नृत्य 418

नाम	क्षेत्र	प्रकार	टिप्पणी
Karma and Jhumar	Andaman Islands	जनजातीय	Circle dances to the mandar drum, danced around a branch of the karam tree at the Karma festival. The repertoire came from the Ranchi plateau with the labour recruitment of the early twentieth century and has been kept up in island villages ever since.
Nicobari dance, performed at Port Blair	Andaman Islands	लोक	The Nicobarese form, performed away from its own islands. Its home context belongs to the Nicobar region; what happens at Port Blair is a diaspora and stage performance, and is worth naming as that rather than as Andaman tradition.
Bengali and Tamil devotional and festival forms	Andaman Islands	लोक	Kirtan and dhunuchi dancing at the pujas, kolattam and temple processions in the Tamil settlements. All transplanted whole, and all now several generations old on the islands.
Bihula-Bisahari performance	Anga & Seemanchal	अनुष्ठान	The story of Bihula, who floats her dead husband's body down the river to win his life back from the snake goddess, is sung over several nights while Manjusha paintings of the episodes are displayed and, at the end, immersed.
Jhumar and jhumta	Anga & Seemanchal	लोक	Circling dances to dhol and jhaal, shared across the Bihar-Jharkhand-Bengal meeting point.
Domkach	Anga & Seemanchal	लोक	A night-long women's performance after the baraat leaves, with role reversal and bawdy song.
Santhal dance of the southern fringe	Anga & Seemanchal	जनजातीय	Line dances with flute, tamak and tumdak drums, performed in the Santhal villages that begin where the plain meets the Rajmahal hills.
Nautanki	Antarved Doab	लोक	A sung folk-opera in doha-chaubola metre, performed on an open platform through the night at enormous volume, led by a pair of kettledrums. The Kanpur style is the more melodic and the Hathras style the more metrically strict, and the repertoire runs from Amar Singh Rathore to contemporary crime stories.
Swang	Antarved Doab	लोक	Sung satirical drama shared with Haryana, performed in the round with minimal staging and heavy audience participation.
Rasiya and Holi dance of the western margin	Antarved Doab	लोक	The Braj repertoire, sung and danced across the Yamuna-facing districts of the Upper and Central Doab.
Charkula on the Braj fringe	Antarved Doab	लोक	The lamp-wheel dance, carried into the Doab's western districts from Braj across the Yamuna.
Kathak, Lucknow gharana	Awadh	शास्त्रीय	The nazakat-leaning school of Kathak, weighted towards abhinaya, thumri interpretation and bhav rather than pure rhythmic display. The lineage runs from Ishwari Prasad through Thakur Prasad to Bindadin and Kalka Prasad, then Achhan, Lachhu and Shambhu Maharaj, and to Birju Maharaj. Its counterpart, the Jaipur gharana, favours tayyari and footwork — the same dance argued from opposite ends.
Rahas	Awadh	अनुष्ठान	The Krishna–Radha dance drama the last Nawab wrote, produced and himself performed in — a Shia Muslim king staging Vaishnav devotional theatre. It is the clearest single object in the region's syncretic record.
Jhoola and kajri circle dance	Awadh	लोक	Monsoon swing songs danced in a slow circle in courtyards and orchards through Savan.
Domkach	Awadh	लोक	A night-long women's wedding dance performed after the men leave with the baraat, with parody, teasing songs and cross-dressed roles. Shared with Bhojpur and Magadh.
Karma	Bagelkhand	जनजातीय	A branch of the karam tree is cut, planted in the dancing ground and worshipped, and men and women dance around it in linked lines through the night, moving in and out with a step that shifts on a drum cue. The mandar drum leads. It is the central festival dance of the whole central Indian Adivasi belt and Bagelkhand sits inside its range rather than at its edge.
Saila	Bagelkhand	लोक	A stick dance in which each dancer strikes the stick of the man ahead of him while the ring rotates, so the rhythm is produced by the dance itself rather than only by the drum. Danced in Bagelkhand, Chhattisgarh and the Mahakoshal forests.
Rai	Bagelkhand	लोक	The Bundelkhandi spinning dance, present across Satna and western Rewa where the Bundeli cultural reach extends. It is a borrowed form here rather than a native one, and it stops well short of the Son valley.
Kol dances	Bagelkhand	जनजातीय	Line and circle dances with dhol and timki, performed by men and women together, with sung couplets exchanged between the two lines. The Kol are one of the largest Scheduled Tribe populations of the region and their forms are much less documented than Gond ones.
Baredi and Diwari	Bagelkhand	लोक	A stick-and-leap dance with sung couplets, carried in from Bundelkhand and strongest around Satna.
Dhamail	Barak Valley	लोक	The defining performance form of the Surma–Barak plain. Women stand in a ring, sing and clap on the beat and move sideways with a bent-knee dip, with no instrument required beyond the clap and no stage. The repertoire is largely Radharaman Dutta's and is Vaishnav in subject, but it is sung at Hindu and Muslim weddings alike and is learnt entirely by ear. It is the clearest evidence that the valley's cultural axis runs downstream.
Manipuri Raas Leela	Barak Valley	शास्त्रीय	The Krishna cycle danced through the night in the potloi and veil, with the slow circular grammar and the pung drum of the Imphal valley tradition. It has been performed continuously in the Cachar settlements since the nineteenth century, and the Cachar performance calendar is set independently of Manipur's.
Pung cholom	Barak Valley	शास्त्रीय	Drummers who play the barrel pung while leaping and turning, the drum strapped to the body and never silenced by the movement. Performed as the opening of a Raas.
Jhumur	Barak Valley	लोक	The circling line dance of the Adivasi tea-garden population, with madal drum and a call-and-response couplet form in Sadri. It arrived with the labour migration of the nineteenth century and is now a settled Assam form with no living link to the villages it came from.
Bishnupriya Manipuri Dhap Kirtan	Barak Valley	अनुष्ठान	Devotional singing to the flat dhap frame drum, performed standing and in procession, distinct from the Meitei nata sankirtan though both are Vaishnav and both are at home in the same valley.
Gaur dance	Bastar	जनजातीय	Men in gaur-horn headdresses move in a slow driving circle to a bank of drums while women dance in a line inside it with iron staves struck on the ground. The step is short and heavy because the headdress cannot be jolted, and the horn is the community's public identifier at every fair in the region.
Hulki	Bastar	जनजातीय	A ring dance of alternating young men and women moving anticlockwise to the mandar drum, with sung call-and-response verses. Named for the swinging half-step that carries it.
Karsana	Bastar	जनजातीय	A faster paired dance with a stamped rhythm, sung by the dancers rather than by a separate chorus. Elwin recorded Hulki and Karsana as the two forms every ghotul member was expected to know.
Gedi	Bastar	लोक	Danced on bamboo stilts to a drum, in monsoon months when the village ground is flooded and the stilts are practical footwear before they are a performance. Competitive by nature, and now a fixture of school and state functions.
Kaksar	Bastar	अनुष्ठान	A pre-sowing dance in which young men in bells and women in beads circle to a long drum, performed to secure the season's crop. It is a work-calendar ritual, and its timing is set by the village priest.
Mandri	Bastar	जनजातीय	A drum-led processional danced as a village enters a Madai ground, with the drums setting the tempo for a line that grows as it goes.
Dollu Kunitha	Bayaluseeme	लोक	Barrel drums slung at the waist and played while the ring of drummers dances, drops into crouches and leaps. The drumming and the dance are a single act and cannot be separated for a stage.
Halagi mela	Bayaluseeme	लोक	Flat single-headed frame drums played with stick and palm by a walking line, in fast interlocking patterns. The characteristic street sound of North Karnataka.
Somana Kunita	Bayaluseeme	अनुष्ठान	A masked dance in which the performer wears a very large painted wooden mask of the guardian deity Soma and dances the deity's presence into the village. The mask is heavy enough that the dance is short and the performer is supported.
Jokumaraswamy procession	Bayaluseeme	अनुष्ठान	A clay figure of the rain and fertility deity Jokumara is carried house to house in a basket with songs that are frankly sexual, then disposed of in water or in a field at the end of the week. It is a rain rite in a district where rain is the entire question.
Lavani in the border towns	Bayaluseeme	लोक	The Marathi song-and-dance form performed in the bilingual towns of the Belagavi belt, where audiences follow both languages and troupes work on both sides of the line.
Dhunuchi naach	Bengal Delta	अनुष्ठान	Danced holding earthen censers of burning coconut fibre and camphor, sometimes three at once and one gripped in the teeth, to the dhak's rhythm. It is improvised, competitive and unchoreographed, and the smoke is the whole visual effect.
Gaudiya Nritya	Bengal Delta	शास्त्रीय	A twentieth-century reconstruction of a Bengali temple dance, rebuilt from sculpture, Sanskrit texts and surviving kirtan movement. Its historical continuity is argued over; what it demonstrably is, is a modern form built out of local materials.
Rabindra Nritya Natya	Bengal Delta	शास्त्रीय	The dance-drama style Tagore assembled at Santiniketan out of Manipuri, Kathakali, Kandyan and Baul movement set to his own songs. It is performed across the delta as a school and amateur form, not only by professionals.
Ranapa	Bengal Delta	लोक	Stilt dancing on wooden legs a metre or more high, a practical skill in flooded country turned into a performance. Now much reduced and kept alive mainly through fairs and folk festivals.
Launda naach	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	लोक	Boys and men dressed as women dance and act at village weddings and in Bidesiya theatre. It is the oldest continuous performing tradition of the region, and its performers, drawn mostly from the poorest communities, live with a stigma that has never lifted.
Domkach	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	लोक	A women's night-long performance of mock marriages, role reversal and bawdy song.
Jhijhiya and jhumar	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	लोक	Circling dances shared with Mithila and the Jharkhand plateau, danced to dhol and jhaal.
Dhobiya naach and Farrua	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	लोक	Caste-associated dance forms of the Bhojpur villages, performed with dholak, jhaal and a lead singer, and full of topical satire.
Bihu dance	Brahmaputra Valley	लोक	Fast hip and wrist movement to dhol, pepa and gogona, danced originally in open fields at the start of the sowing season. Unambiguously a courtship dance in origin, and still the most joyful public thing in the Assamese year.
Sattriya	Brahmaputra Valley	शास्त्रीय	Created by Srimanta Sankardev in the 15th–16th century as part of monastic practice in the sattras, and recognised as one of India's classical dance forms by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in 2000. It was a living monastic discipline for 500 years before it ever reached a proscenium stage.
Bagurumba	Brahmaputra Valley	लोक	The "butterfly dance" — dancers spread the ends of their dokhona and move in slow wide arcs, to the serja fiddle and sifung flute.
Jhumur	Brahmaputra Valley	लोक	Brought to Assam by labourers taken from Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh to the tea gardens in the 19th century, and now a distinct Assamese form with its own repertoire, danced in a linked line.
Deodhani	Brahmaputra Valley	अनुष्ठान	A possession dance performed by a woman said to be inhabited by the deity, ending in trance and prophecy. Old, and not staged for audiences.
Ali-Ai-Ligang dance	Brahmaputra Valley	लोक	Danced along the field bunds at the start of the agricultural cycle, to the gong and drum, in a stepping line.
Raslila	Braj	अनुष्ठान	A sung and danced enactment of Krishna's life in which the performers, all male and pre-pubescent for the principal roles, are treated as the deities themselves during the performance — the audience touches their feet afterwards. It combines a fixed nritya opening with a lila episode, and runs for hours.
Charkula	Braj	लोक	A woman dances balancing a large multi-tiered wooden wheel on her head carrying scores of lit oil lamps, her face covered, to rasiya accompaniment. The form is specific to Braj and is said to commemorate the announcement of Radha's birth.
Mayur nritya	Braj	लोक	The peacock dance — a performer in a peacock frame imitates courtship display, referring to an episode in which Krishna and Radha dance as peacocks in the groves of Vrindavan.
Phool-Holi and Lathmar dance	Braj	अनुष्ठान	Barsana's women drive the visiting men of Nandgaon with long staves while the men defend with leather shields and sing taunting rasiya. It is choreographed, expected, and taken entirely seriously by both towns.
Rai	Bundelkhand	लोक	The region's signature dance — a fast continuous spin performed by a woman in a heavy lehnga while a mridang player drives and answers her. The form is hereditary to the Bedia community, and the position of Bedni performers has long been bound up with caste, patronage and sexual exploitation; that context is part of the record of the dance and is documented as such in Indian social research.
Diwari (Monkhara)	Bundelkhand	लोक	A stick dance in a circle, danced with a leap and a hard downward strike, accompanied by dhol and nagariya and by sung Diwari couplets. Village troupes travel between settlements through the Diwali week.
Mauniya	Bundelkhand	अनुष्ठान	Dancers keep complete silence — maun — for the whole of the day they dance, moving between villages with peacock feathers and sticks and communicating by gesture. The vow is the performance; the dance is what keeps it visible.
Badhaiya	Bundelkhand	लोक	Congratulation dancing performed at the doorway of the household being celebrated, for which the troupe is paid on the spot. The nagariya — a pair of small kettledrums — is the Bundeli sound.
Saira	Bundelkhand	लोक	A slower circling dance with clapping, sung in Bundeli, performed after the fields are cut.
Suggi Kunitha	Canara Coast	लोक	Men in tall headdresses of peacock feathers and flowers dance village to village with drums and long sticks through the Suggi weeks, collecting contributions and performing at each house. It is a processional form with a route, not a stage form, and the route follows village obligation.
Gumte Pang	Canara Coast	लोक	Singing in a ring to the gumte, a small clay drum with a single head, with a lead voice and a chorus that answers. The drum is played with the fingers of both hands and pitched by pressing the shell against the body.
Damaami	Canara Coast	लोक	Drum-led dance performed by the Siddi community, whose ancestors were brought to this coast from East Africa from the sixteenth century onwards, largely by the Portuguese, as soldiers, servants and enslaved labour, and whose descendants settled in the forest interior. The dance is driven by hand drums and by a call-and-response vocal, and the community itself is Hindu, Muslim and Catholic across different families. It was recognised as a Scheduled Tribe in Karnataka in 2003, and it is one of the few African-descended communities in South Asia with a continuous settled presence.
The Badagutittu movement idiom	Canara Coast	लोक	The northern Yakshagana style's dance — broad circling entries, heavy stamping to the chende, and long sequences of pure rhythm before a character speaks. Badagutittu, the northern style, is prevalent from the Sharavathi down to roughly the Sitanadi in Udupi district; Tenkutittu, the southern style, runs from there into Tulu Nadu and towards Kasaragod, and differs in headgear, drumming and the balance between dance and dialogue. Mixing the two is understood locally as a mistake, not a fusion.
Ghurei	Chenab Valley & Chamba	लोक	A slow circle dance of Gaddi women in luanchari, moving with small steps and a dipping shoulder, sung unaccompanied or to a single drum. It is danced in the villages of Bharmour and Holi valley and at the Chamba fairs when Gaddi households come down.
Dangi	Chenab Valley & Chamba	लोक	A narrative women's dance built around a sung story of Gaddi lovers, performed in a line with linked arms and a slow forward-and-back movement. The song carries the plot and the dance keeps the metre.
Nati	Chenab Valley & Chamba	लोक	The chain dance common to the whole Himachali hill belt — a long open line moving anticlockwise to a shehnai, narsingha and dhol ensemble, joined and left at will. The Chamba variants are slower and less ornamented than the Kullu ones.
Nuala	Chenab Valley & Chamba	अनुष्ठान	An all-night domestic ritual in which the story of Shiva is sung, danced and enacted before a temporary shrine set up in the courtyard, with the entire village fed at the end. It is not a calendar festival — a household holds a nuala when it has undertaken to, which can be years after the vow.
Thoda	Chenab Valley & Chamba	युद्धकला	A contest in which archers shoot blunt wooden-headed arrows at the legs of the opposing team while its members dance and dodge, scored by hits below the knee. Its home ground is the Shimla and Sirmaur hills rather than Chamba, and it appears here as a visiting item at large fairs — a useful reminder that Himachal's folk forms are not evenly distributed across the state.
Kud on the Chenab side	Chenab Valley & Chamba	अनुष्ठान	The same night-long ring dance to narsingha and drum that is danced across the Duggar hills, performed in the Chenab valley villages and marking the continuity of the Pahari ritual belt across the watershed.
Panthi	Chhattisgarh Plains	अनुष्ठान	A men's dance around the jaitkhamb, danced bare-chested in white dhotis to a mandar drum. It begins slow and accelerates continuously, the dancers building human pyramids and dropping out of them without breaking the beat, and it ends when the tempo can go no higher — the ending is a physical limit, not a choreographic one. The songs are nirgun verses on Guru Ghasidas's Satnam teaching, so the dance is doctrine performed at speed.
Raut Nacha	Chhattisgarh Plains	लोक	The herders move through the village in peacock crowns and ankle bells to the gadwa baja ensemble, stopping at each house to recite dohas — couplets that are half blessing and half needling, aimed at the household in front of them, which is obliged to take them. It is danced on the day the cattle come back into the village, and it is the herders' annual claim on a place that otherwise belongs to the cultivators.
Suwa	Chhattisgarh Plains	लोक	Women circle a basket holding a clay parrot, clapping a two-beat pattern and singing to the bird. The songs are addressed to the suwa because it can carry a message, and they are among the frankest accounts of marriage in the region's repertoire — sung publicly, in front of everyone, precisely because they are addressed to a parrot.
Karma	Chhattisgarh Plains	अनुष्ठान	The karma branch planted in a courtyard and danced around all night in a linked line. It arrives here from the Maikal and the Chota Nagpur side and thins out towards the middle of the plain.
Saila and Danda Nacha	Chhattisgarh Plains	लोक	A stick dance in a rotating circle, each dancer striking his neighbour's stick on the beat so that a mistake is instantly audible. Danced by touring bands that go village to village through the dry months.
Gaura-Gaura	Chhattisgarh Plains	अनुष्ठान	Clay images of Shiva and Parvati are married in a night-long ceremony and immersed at dawn, with possession and drumming through the middle of it. Gond and Chhattisgarhi households keep the rite together, which is unusual enough to be worth noticing.
Bharatanatyam, Thanjavur bani	Chola Nadu	शास्त्रीय	The concert order every Bharatanatyam dancer still performs — alarippu, jatiswaram, sabdam, varnam, padam, javali, tillana — was fixed by four brothers at the Thanjavur court in the first half of the nineteenth century. Before them the repertoire existed; after them it had a sequence, a syllabus of adavus and a compositional literature to fill it.
Bhagavata Mela	Chola Nadu	अनुष्ठान	A masked dance-drama in Telugu performed by men in the village street in front of the temple, on a fixed annual date, by families settled here since the Nayak period. It is not a revival — the Melattur cycle has run with interruptions since the seventeenth century, and the Prahlada Charitram is performed every year.
Kuravanji	Chola Nadu	शास्त्रीय	A dance-drama built around a gypsy fortune-teller who reads a lovelorn heroine's palm — a form the Thanjavur Maratha court cultivated heavily, with Serfoji II himself credited with the Sarabhendra Bhupala Kuravanji.
Poikkal kudirai attam	Chola Nadu	लोक	The dummy-horse dance — a lightweight frame worn at the waist with wooden legs strapped to the dancer's feet, so the horse appears to prance. Thanjavur is one of its main homes, and the frames are made locally.
Karagattam and Devarattam	Chola Nadu	लोक	Pot-balancing and stick dance at village goddess festivals. Both are stronger further south and west, but travel into the delta with troupes hired for temple festivals.
Chhau of Seraikela	Chota Nagpur Plateau	युद्धकला	A masked dance built out of a martial movement vocabulary, in which the face is fixed and every meaning is carried by the angle of the head, the line of the spine and the arms. The masks are made by Sutradhar families in Seraikela from clay moulds and layered paper. Chhau in its Seraikela, Purulia and Mayurbhanj forms was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010 — Seraikela and Purulia masked, Mayurbhanj without masks.
Paika	Chota Nagpur Plateau	युद्धकला	A shield-and-sword dance in a fast circle to the mandar and nagara, with leaps and mock combat. The name is the old word for a foot-soldier, and the form retains the drill.
Jhumair	Chota Nagpur Plateau	लोक	The plateau's general-purpose dance — a linked line moving with a swinging step to the mandar, sung in Sadri, Khortha or Kurmali. Mardana jhumair is danced by men, janani jhumair by women. It travelled with migrant labour and is now danced in the Assam tea gardens and the Dooars as well.
Jadur and Sarhul dance	Chota Nagpur Plateau	अनुष्ठान	Danced on the sal blossom, from the sarna grove to the akhra, with the pahan leading and the line growing as it passes each house.
Lagre, Dong and Baha	Chota Nagpur Plateau	जनजातीय	Named Santal dance-song genres, each with its own drum pattern on the tamak' and tumdak' pair. Dong is a wedding form; Baha belongs to the spring flower festival; Lagre is danced at almost anything.
Karam dance	Chota Nagpur Plateau	अनुष्ठान	Danced around a karam branch planted in the courtyard, all night, with the jhumair step and Karam songs answered line for line between two groups.
Domkach	Chota Nagpur Plateau	लोक	A night-long women's dance with parody, cross-dressed roles and teasing songs, sung in Nagpuri or Khortha. Shared with Magadh and Bhojpur to the north.
Lavani	Desh	लोक	A fast dholki-driven song-and-dance form in nauvari, built on suggestive verse and precise footwork under a heavy drape. Two live traditions survive — the seated, vocally exacting Baithakichi Lavani or Sangeet Bari, and the standing Dholki Fad Lavani of the tamasha stage. The performing communities have carried the form for generations while being socially penalised for it, and that history is part of the form's record.
Dhangari Gaja	Desh	लोक	Men in dhoti and pheta dance in a ring around drummers, arms overhead, to songs addressed to Khandoba and to Banai, the Dhangar wife of the deity. It is danced at the end of the transhumance year, when flocks come back off the dry grazing.
Gondhal	Desh	अनुष्ठान	An overnight invocation performed in a lamp-lit square with sambal drum and tuntune, mixing genealogy, myth and direct address to the family that commissioned it. It is contracted for a specific household event, not staged.
Mangalagaur	Desh	लोक	A night of sung games — jhimma, phugadi, bhui-chakri — performed by women in a house, with no male audience and no stage. Physically demanding and competitive, and one of very few Indian folk forms with no performer-spectator division at all.
Vasudev	Desh	अनुष्ठान	A single itinerant singer in a conical cap of peacock feathers who arrives at first light, sings, spins once and leaves without being asked in. A door-to-door devotional form that survives mainly around Pune and Satara.
Gindad	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	लोक	Shekhawati's Holi dance. Men in costume — including men playing female and comic roles — circle a huge nagara drum, striking sticks and singing verse that is often satirical about local affairs. It runs for weeks rather than on one day, and the drum is a village asset kept between seasons.
Chang and dhap	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	लोक	Frame drums played in a walking circle through the streets of the Shekhawati towns in the fortnight before Holi, with singers trading verses over the beat. The instrument gives the season its name locally.
Ghoomar	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	लोक	The circular veil dance. The Dhundhari form is slower and more upright than the western Rajasthani version, and in Jaipur it is now as often a staged performance as a courtyard one.
Kachhi Ghodi	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	लोक	Dancers wearing a dummy-horse frame stage a mock fight with swords to fife and drum, usually narrating the exploits of a local outlaw hero. Shekhawati is one of the tradition's home tracts and it is a paid wedding-procession trade here.
Kathputli	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	लोक	String puppetry with a bamboo-and-cloth articulation and a reed voice modifier, with a woman narrating and translating for the audience. Jaipur is the main market for it, which is where most working troupes now spend their season.
Jhumur (jhumair)	Dooars & Terai	लोक	A linked-arm line dance moving in a slow, low, side-stepping rhythm to the madal drum, with the line lengthening as people join. It came from the Chota Nagpur plateau with the labour recruitment of the nineteenth century and became the signature public form of the gardens; the songs attached to it took on plantation subjects the plateau versions never had.
Karam dance	Dooars & Terai	अनुष्ठान	Danced all night around a branch of the karam tree planted in the courtyard, with the sisters of the household fasting for their brothers and the branch immersed at dawn. The dance is the vigil — it is the means of staying awake through the ritual, not an entertainment attached to it.
Sarhul dance	Dooars & Terai	जनजातीय	Danced at the sarna grove when the sal comes into bloom, marking the point at which the earth may be ploughed again. The dance follows the priest's offering and moves from grove to village.
Bagurumba	Dooars & Terai	लोक	A women's dance in dokhona and aronai with the arms extended and the cloth held wide, the steps and the wing shapes taken directly from butterflies and birds. Accompanied by the kham drum, the siphung flute and the serja fiddle.
Hudum	Dooars & Terai	अनुष्ठान	A rain-calling rite performed by women alone in a field at night, with song and dance addressed to Hudum Deo, from which men are excluded entirely. It is one of the oldest strata of Rajbanshi practice and sits outside the Brahminical calendar altogether.
Tusu immersion dance	Dooars & Terai	लोक	The decorated Tusu frame is carried to the river singing, danced around at the bank and set afloat. The songs are composed fresh each year and are frequently about the year that has just passed.
Pandav Lila	Garhwal	अनुष्ठान	The Mahabharata staged over nights, sometimes weeks, in a village courtyard — not as a play with a script but as a possession cycle in which named dancers take on the Pandavas and are treated as them for the duration. Episodes include the Chakravyuh and the Gaindi hunt, in which a rhinoceros is hunted in a landscape that has never had one — a memory, most likely, of the Terai forests below.
Langvir nritya	Garhwal	लोक	An acrobatic display danced on top of a tall pole set in the ground, the performer balancing on his stomach and spinning to the dhol below. It survives at a handful of fairs and depends entirely on whether a village still has anyone willing to learn it.
Chaunphula and Jhumeila	Garhwal	लोक	Slow circle dances with linked arms, sung by the dancers themselves in call-and-response. Chaunphula runs through the night in a set of named sequences; Jhumeila is the women's form and its texts are mostly about absence.
Thadya	Garhwal	लोक	A standing dance — thad means standing — performed in the courtyard, more restrained than Chaunphula and often sung by an older woman leading a line.
Barada Nati	Garhwal	लोक	A linked-line dance of the Tons and Yamuna valleys, danced in heavy wool and silver, with a step and a musical accompaniment that belong to the Western Pahari world rather than to Garhwali Garhwal.
Jagar	Garhwal	अनुष्ठान	Not a performance for an audience. The jagariya sings the deity's genealogy and story through the night to a hurka drum and a struck brass plate, and the deity is understood to arrive in the body of a pashwa, who dances, speaks and answers questions. The proceedings end with the deity being sung back out.
The Wangala dance	Garo Hills	अनुष्ठान	Two lines — men carrying long dama drums slung at the waist and beating them as they move, women in a parallel line in dakmanda and feathered headband — advancing, wheeling and closing on each other. Brass gongs and a buffalo-horn call carry over the drums. The drums are not accompaniment but the dance itself, which is why the modern festival is counted in drums rather than in dancers.
Chambil Mesara	Garo Hills	लोक	The pomelo dance, named for the fruit that is swung or held in the movement. It is one of the lighter, unritualised forms in the repertoire and it is danced for enjoyment.
Do'kru Sua	Garo Hills	लोक	One of the named Wangala-season dances, performed in line and circle formations to the dama and rang. The Garo repertoire runs to a couple of dozen named dances, most of them tied to a particular moment in a rite rather than to a stage.
The Songsarek ritual dances	Garo Hills	अनुष्ठान	A set of named forms — Ajema Roa, Kambe Toga, Chame Mikkang Nia among them — attached to specific rites in the indigenous Songsarek calendar rather than to public performance. As Christianity became the majority religion, these moved from being the ordinary practice of a village to being maintained deliberately, which is a different kind of survival.
Mando	Goa & Gomantak	लोक	A slow song and dance in Konkani, in six-eight time, danced in facing rows with fans and handkerchiefs. It developed in the nineteenth century among the Catholic landed families of Salcete — Loutolim, Curtorim, Raia, Benaulim — and its texts are about love, separation, and often the politics of the period, written in a register of Konkani that borrowed freely from Portuguese. Every mando is followed by a dulpod, which is fast, comic and domestic, so the pairing moves an evening from formality to release.
Dekhni	Goa & Gomantak	लोक	A semi-classical dance in Konkani that stages a Hindu subject — most famously a temple dancer asking a boatman to ferry her across — performed largely within the Catholic community and set to a melody that is openly indebted to both traditions. It is the single clearest artefact of the region's crossed inheritance.
Fugdi	Goa & Gomantak	लोक	A circular dance driven by a rhythmic breath sound rather than by instruments, accelerating until the ring breaks. It needs no accompaniment and no stage, which is why it survived in courtyards when staged forms did not.
Dhalo	Goa & Gomantak	अनुष्ठान	Night-long singing in two facing rows on the village mand, over several successive nights, with songs of household and fertility and no male participation. The mand — a defined open ground with a sacred marker — is the institution, not the dance.
Ghode Modni	Goa & Gomantak	लोक	Dummy-horse dance, in which men wear a horse frame at the waist and move in formation with swords to drum and cymbal. It is understood locally as a commemoration of cavalry, and it belongs to the New Conquest taluks where warrior lineages survived Portuguese rule longest.
Goff and Talgadi	Goa & Gomantak	लोक	In Goff, dancers hold coloured cords hung from a central pole and plait them into a braid by the pattern of their steps, then unplait it by reversing. Talgadi and Tonyamel are the stick and clap dances of the same festival week.
Corridinho	Goa & Gomantak	लोक	A quick paired dance taken directly from the Portuguese folk repertoire and kept in Goan village halls long after it faded elsewhere. It is danced in lines of couples to a brass or string band.
Chakri	Hadoti	लोक	A spinning dance in wide gathered skirts, performed to dholak and manjira, in which the dancer turns continuously for long stretches while the skirt holds a full circle. It is specific to the Hadoti districts and is the region's best-known folk form.
Lehangi	Hadoti	लोक	A men's circle dance struck out with short sticks, recorded in the folk-dance surveys of Rajasthan as a Sahariya form of the Baran forest tracts. It is danced by the same households that come to Sitabari.
Ghoomar	Hadoti	लोक	The circling women's dance common to all Rajasthan, danced here at the same festivals as elsewhere; the Hadoti version is danced in printed cotton rather than in bandhani.
Bindori	Hadoti	लोक	The groom is taken through the village on horseback over several nights with dancing at each halt — a procession form rather than a performance, and still the commonest reason to hear a dhol in a Hadoti village.
Haryanvi Ghoomar	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	लोक	A slow circle dance in which the wide skirt is made to flare by the turn itself, sung to as it is danced. It shares a name and a shape with the Rajasthani ghoomar and is danced flatter and slower, with less spin and more emphasis on the sung line.
Khoria	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	लोक	The women's dance performed in the courtyard once the wedding party has departed, with parody of the absent men, cross-dressed roles and teasing songs. It is closed to male spectators by convention, which is precisely why the songs are as frank as they are.
Dhamal	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	लोक	A men's circle dance around a fire, sung to the dhamal drum with sarangi and been, performed through the night. It is documented as one of the older surviving forms in the southern districts.
Loor	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	लोक	Two lines of girls face each other and dance forward and back, one line singing a question and the other answering it. The name is glossed locally both as a word for a lamb and as a word for the spring crop.
Been and Gugga dance	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	अनुष्ठान	Processional dance with the chhari — a decorated pole with peacock feathers — performed to the been and the damru as the Gugga standard is carried between villages.
Chaupaiya and Manjira dance	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	लोक	Danced to the manjira, duff and bhapang, with the performers striking cymbals held in each hand while moving in a squat. It belongs to the Mewati and Ahirwati side of the region rather than to the Bangar.
Manipuri (Raas Leela)	Imphal Valley	शास्त्रीय	One of India's recognised classical dance forms, and the most restrained of them. There is no percussive footwork, no sharp stop, no direct address; the body moves in continuous curves with the feet placed softly, and the expressive weight sits in the torso, the hands and the eyes. Its themes are Krishna and the gopis, its principal repertoire the Maha Raas, Kunja Raas, Basanta Raas and Nitya Raas, and its codification is credited to the court of Bhagyachandra in the later eighteenth century. The costume is part of the technique, not an addition to it.
Pung Cholom	Imphal Valley	शास्त्रीय	Drum dance — the performer plays a barrel drum slung at the waist while leaping, spinning and dropping to the floor without breaking the rhythm. It opens most Raas and Sankirtana performances, and the physical demand on the player is the point of the form.
Thang-Ta (Huyen Langlon)	Imphal Valley	युद्धकला	Sword and spear — thang and ta — with an unarmed component and a ritual component. It is taught in three registers: as a ritual performance with its own invocation, as a demonstration form, and as actual combat practice. The circular footwork and the body mechanics are recognisably the same system that underlies the dance.
Lai Haraoba	Imphal Valley	अनुष्ठान	"The pleasing of the gods" — a ritual festival, days long, in which a maibi enacts the creation of the world and the making of a human body through a fixed sequence of gestures, accompanied by the pena fiddle. It is older than Vaishnavism in the valley and it is where much of the classical dance's gesture vocabulary can be seen in its ritual form.
Thabal Chongba	Imphal Valley	लोक	A moonlight circle dance in which participants hold hands and move to a simple stepped rhythm, held in open ground in every locality. It is one of the few occasions with an explicitly social, courtship function, and it now runs to amplified music.
Khamba-Thoibi jagoi	Imphal Valley	लोक	A duet danced before the deity, drawn from the Moirang epic of Khamba and Thoibi. Its steps are simpler and more grounded than the classical repertoire, and it belongs to the pre-Vaishnav layer.
Kud	Jammu Duggar	अनुष्ठान	A ring dance performed through the night in the courtyard of a hill village, danced to narsingha horns, chhaina cymbals and a large flat drum, with no rehearsed choreography — participants join and drop out as the night runs. It is performed to thank a lineage deity for a specific thing that happened that year, so the occasion is decided by the household, not the calendar.
Heran	Jammu Duggar	लोक	A costumed dance-drama of comic and mythological sketches taken village to village through the winter months by small troupes, closer to itinerant theatre than to a dance and now very nearly gone.
Chhajja	Jammu Duggar	लोक	A decorated bamboo-and-paper structure shaped like a peacock or a canopy is carried on the shoulder and danced through the lanes for the days before Lohri while the group collects contributions of jaggery, sesame and money. The chhajja is dismantled or burned at the end.
Fumenie and Jagarana	Jammu Duggar	लोक	Fumenie is sung and danced by the women on the night the bride will leave; jagarana is the all-night vigil that follows it. The songs are about departure and are meant to make the bride cry, which is understood as the point rather than a side effect.
Bhangra and jhummar at the plain edge	Jammu Duggar	लोक	In Kathua, Samba and the Lakhanpur belt the Punjab dance forms are simply local. The line where jhummar stops and kud begins is roughly the line where the ridges start.
Veeragase	Kalyana Karnataka	अनुष्ठान	A vigorous stamping dance performed with a drawn sword and a Virabhadra plaque held at the chest, to a driving drum and horn. The performer recites Virabhadra's story between passages of dance; the sword work is display, not combat.
Lambani dance	Kalyana Karnataka	लोक	A circling line dance with clapping and a heavy stamping step, sung in Gor Boli, with the mirror-work costume doing much of the visual work as the line turns.
Dollu Kunitha	Kalyana Karnataka	लोक	Large barrel drums slung at the waist and played while dancing in a ring, with the drummers dropping into crouches and leaps. The dance and the drum are the same act.
Halagi mela	Kalyana Karnataka	लोक	The flat single-headed halagi frame drum, played with a stick and the palm in fast interlocking patterns by a line of players walking ahead of a procession. It is the sound of a North Karnataka street event.
Alai kunita	Kalyana Karnataka	अनुष्ठान	Drumming and stepping around the panjas — the metal standards carried in village Muharram observances — through the ten nights. In much of the rural plateau these observances are kept by households that are not Muslim, an arrangement documented in these districts since the nineteenth century.
Nati, Kangri form	Kangra & Dhauladhar	लोक	The Pahari chain dance — dancers link at the waist or shoulder and move in a slow serpentine to a fixed drum-and-shehnai cycle that accelerates only at the end. Kangra dances it, but the form belongs most strongly to Kullu, Mandi and the Sutlej valleys, and a Kangri nati is recognisably the western, gentler end of it.
Jhamakda	Kangra & Dhauladhar	लोक	A women-only courtyard dance sung and clapped rather than accompanied, with teasing and satirical verses aimed at the in-laws. It is danced without men present, which is why it has stayed largely undocumented.
Gaddi dance	Kangra & Dhauladhar	लोक	Danced in the chola and dora with the rope still wound, in a slow circle to the dhol and the flute — closer to Bharmour's repertoire than to the valley floor's, because the community moves between the two.
Cham	Kangra & Dhauladhar	अनुष्ठान	Masked ritual dance in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, performed at Namgyal and the Gyuto monastery at Sidhbari. It arrived in the valley in 1960 and is now part of its calendar.
Rouf (Rov)	Kashmir Valley	लोक	Two lines of women stand shoulder to shoulder with arms linked behind each other's backs and advance and retreat with a rocking step while singing in call and response. There is no instrument and no soloist — the rhythm is made by the feet and the alternating lines, which is why it can be performed in a courtyard at any hour without disturbing a household.
Hafiz Nagma	Kashmir Valley	शास्त्रीय	The danced form of Sufiana Mausiqi, in which a single dancer interprets the maqam being played on santoor, saz-e-Kashmir and sehtar. It went into steep decline in the twentieth century as the patronage that supported both the musicians and the dancers disappeared, and survives now mainly through documentation and a few conservatory revivals.
Bacha Nagma	Kashmir Valley	लोक	A village adaptation of Hafiz Nagma performed where a woman dancer would not appear — the boy trains for years in the same repertoire, and the form is one of the few places the classical Sufiana material reaches a rural audience.
Dumhal	Kashmir Valley	अनुष्ठान	Danced in long conical caps and embroidered robes around a banner planted in the ground, to the singers' own drumming and chorus. It is performed by one community, on set occasions and at set places, and is not a general-purpose folk dance available for hire.
Bhand Jashan	Kashmir Valley	लोक	The dance and processional element of the Bhand troupe's performance, with swarnai and dhol, used to gather a crowd before the satirical play begins.
Gher	Khandesh	जनजातीय	Circling lines of dancers to large drums and flute, moving from village to village through the Holi week and converging on fairs where marriages are negotiated. It is the year's principal social event on the slope, and it runs across the Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat lines as one calendar.
Bhawada	Khandesh	अनुष्ठान	Masked night performances in which performers take on deities and figures from local myth, with drums, an open ground and no stage. Documented across Khandesh and the Satpura foothills, and increasingly rare.
Kanbai processions	Khandesh	अनुष्ठान	A metal or paper mask of the goddess Kanbai is installed on a decorated pole in the house, offered rot — a thick unleavened wheat bread that must be eaten entirely within the household and not carried outside — and then taken in procession to water for immersion. The festival is specific to Khandesh and is not kept in the same form anywhere else in Maharashtra.
Tamasha and lavani	Khandesh	लोक	The Marathi travelling form circulates through Khandesh's fairs as it does through the plateau, and Khandeshi audiences and some troupes are part of its circuit; the songs, however, are in Marathi rather than Ahirani.
Gondhal and Jagran	Khandesh	अनुष्ठान	Commissioned overnight invocations to Renuka, Bhavani and Khandoba, performed in the house or courtyard of the family that vowed them.
Ka Shad Nongkrem (Ka Pomblang Nongkrem)	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	अनुष्ठान	A thanksgiving and propitiation dance held at the ceremonial house of the Khyrim chieftaincy at Smit, south of Shillong. Pomblang means the beheading of goats, and the goat sacrifice is the formal core of it. The Syiem holds the political office and the Ka Syiem Sad, the high priestess through whom the line runs, holds the religious one — the two roles together are the clearest working illustration of how Khasi matriliny and Khasi office-holding fit each other. Unmarried women dance in the inner ground in crown and silk; men dance outside them with sword and yak-hair whisk.
Ka Shad Suk Mynsiem	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	अनुष्ठान	The dance of the joyful heart, held after sowing as a thanksgiving. The same spatial grammar as Nongkrem — women in the centre moving with small steps and downcast eyes, men circling outside at speed — and the occasion at which the indigenous Niam Khasi community is most publicly visible in a majority-Christian city.
Laho	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	लोक	A woman between two men, arms linked, the three of them stepping together to a chanted phawar rather than to drums. It is one of the very few dances in the hills where men and women dance linked, and it is danced for enjoyment rather than as a rite.
Ka Shad Mastieh and the warrior dances	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	अनुष्ठान	The men's dance vocabulary is built around the waitlam sword in one hand and the symphiah whisk in the other, with a shield in some forms. It is danced on the outside of the circle and at a different tempo from the women's, and the two are never merged.
Kayang	Kinnaur & Spiti	लोक	The characteristic Kinnauri chain dance — dancers link arms or hold a common sash and move in a slow open line or arc that closes into a circle, stepping to a drum-and-shawm ensemble. It is danced for hours and its variants are named for the formation rather than for the occasion.
Bakayang and Banyangchu	Kinnaur & Spiti	लोक	Variants of the same linked-line form, differing in the shape the line takes and in the tempo the drums set. The distinctions matter locally and are invisible to a visitor, which is a fair description of most folk repertoire anywhere.
Cham	Kinnaur & Spiti	अनुष्ठान	Masked monastic dance performed in the monastery courtyard to long horns, shawms, cymbals and frame drums. It is liturgy rather than entertainment — the masks are protective deities and the sequence enacts the subjugation of obstacles — and it is one of the clearest points at which Spiti's practice is continuous with Ladakh's and Tibet's.
Losar Shona Chuksam and deity-procession dance	Kinnaur & Spiti	अनुष्ठान	Dance performed around the palanquin of a village god as it is carried between villages, with its own drum patterns and its own order of precedence among the carriers. The devta procession is the Hindu half of the region's ritual calendar and runs on a completely separate logic from the monastic one.
Nati	Kinnaur & Spiti	लोक	The slow circular Himachali dance of the middle hills, which comes up the Sutlej as far as lower Kinnaur and no further. Where nati stops and kayang begins is roughly where Western Pahari stops and Kinnauri begins.
कथकली	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	शास्त्रीय	एक नृत्य-नाट्य जिसमें पूरी कथा हस्त मुद्राओं और आँखों तथा चेहरे की संहिताबद्ध भाव-भाषा से रात भर कही जाती है। हरा, लाल और काला चेहरे का रंग लगाने में घंटों लगते हैं और एक शब्द गाए जाने से पहले ही पात्र का प्रकार बता देता है। गायन नर्तक नहीं, अलग गायक करते हैं।
मोहिनीअट्टम	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	शास्त्रीय	"मोहिनी का नृत्य" — धीमा, लहराता, वृत्ताकार, जिसमें धड़ अंग्रेज़ी के आठ के आकार में चलता है। पोशाक क्रीम और सुनहरी होती है, जो सेट मुंडु का प्रतिबिंब है। 19वीं सदी में स्वाति तिरुनाल के संरक्षण में इसका वर्तमान रूप संहिताबद्ध हुआ।
कूडियाट्टम	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	शास्त्रीय	चाक्यार समुदाय द्वारा प्रस्तुत संस्कृत रंगमंच, जो संभवतः दुनिया का सबसे पुराना निरंतर प्रस्तुत होता रंगमंच रूप है। एक ही अंक को कई रातों में विस्तार दिया जा सकता है। यूनेस्को ने इसे मानवता की अमूर्त सांस्कृतिक विरासत की प्रतिनिधि सूची में अंकित किया है।
थेय्यम	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	अनुष्ठान	यह प्रस्तुति से अधिक एक अवतरण है। वेश और रंग धारण कर लेने के बाद कलाकार को स्वयं देवता माना जाता है, वह देवता के रूप में बोलता है, और आने वालों को आशीर्वाद तथा न्याय देता है। थेय्यम के 400 से अधिक अलग-अलग रूप हैं, जिनमें कई देवत्व प्राप्त पूर्वजों, योद्धाओं और अन्याय सही स्त्रियों को समर्पित हैं।
तिरुवातिरकलि (कैकोट्टिकलि)	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	लोक	जलते दीपक के चारों ओर वृत्त में किया जाने वाला सामूहिक नृत्य, जिसमें ताल पर तालियाँ बजती हैं और तिरुवातिर गीत गाए जाते हैं। केरल में सबसे व्यापक रूप से किया जाने वाला नृत्य, क्योंकि इसे कोई भी सीख सकता है।
कलरीपयट्टु	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	युद्धकला	इस क्षेत्र की एक मार्शल कला, जो ज़मीन में धँसे मिट्टी के गड्ढे (कलरी) में सिखाई जाती है और जिसमें शरीर-साधना, शस्त्र-क्रम और मर्म (दाब-बिंदु) ज्ञान के साथ एक चिकित्सा परंपरा भी जुड़ी है। इसे अक्सर सबसे पुरानी जीवित युद्ध-प्रणालियों में गिना जाता है।
ओप्पना	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	लोक	बैठी हुई दुल्हन के चारों ओर वधू पक्ष का गीत और ताली नृत्य, मापिला मलयालम में, अरबी से आई शब्दावली और लय के साथ।
पडयनि	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	अनुष्ठान	सुपारी के पेड़ के छिलके से काटे गए विशाल चित्रित कोलम वाले मुखौटा नृत्य — भैरवी, यक्षी, पक्षी — जिन्हें कंधों पर उठाकर ढोल और मशालों की रोशनी में नाचा जाता है।
Devarattam	Kongu Nadu	लोक	A processional line dance to a drum, performed without props in a slow synchronised step that speeds up through the piece. It is described in the folklore literature as a Kongu form descended from an older court dance, and it is danced at village temple festivals rather than on a stage.
Karagattam	Kongu Nadu	लोक	A decorated pot balanced on the head and danced with, to naiyandi melam. Its origin is a ritual water offering; the version now booked for functions is frankly a professional entertainment and its performers say so.
Silambam	Kongu Nadu	युद्धकला	Stick fighting with a bamboo staff, worked in circular patterns at speed. It survives here as a demonstration art at temple festivals and in village gymnasiums, and its practitioners keep the training vocabulary intact even where the fighting use has gone.
Thappattam and parai isai	Kongu Nadu	लोक	A frame drum played with two sticks, one thin and one flat, whose players were historically both musicians and the village announcement system. The instrument has been deliberately reclaimed in recent decades and is now taught in urban classes.
Oyilattam	Kongu Nadu	लोक	A slow line dance built on a repeated forward-and-back step, with handkerchiefs and bells, sung as it is danced. It runs across the southern Tamil country and is at home here.
Dhemsa	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	जनजातीय	A line of women linked arm-to-arm behind the back, moving in a slow serpentine to a fixed step pattern that speeds up over a long sequence. The drum ensemble — dhol, tamak, and the mahuri reed — sets the tempo, and the line simply lengthens as more women join. It is the region's default social dance and belongs to no single community.
Ghumura	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	लोक	Danced with the ghumura — an earthen or wooden pitcher-shaped drum slung from the neck and struck with both hands — in fast crouching formations that read as martial. It is Kalahandi's signature form and the one it sends out to national parades.
Dhap	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	लोक	A courtship dance in two facing lines to the flat dhap drum, with sung exchanges between the sides. The song is improvised and the exchange is the substance of it.
Karma	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	लोक	Danced in a ring around a branch of the karam tree planted in the courtyard, through the night, with sisters fasting for brothers. Shared with the Chota Nagpur plateau and with the Chhattisgarh plains.
Dalkhai	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	लोक	A song-and-dance form named for the refrain "dalkhai bo" that closes every line, danced by women with men playing dhol, nisan and tasa. It belongs to the western Odia belt and reaches this region through Balangir and Titlagarh.
Kuchipudi	Kosta Andhra	शास्त्रीय	Kuchipudi is a village in the Krishna delta before it is a dance form, and that order matters. The village families held a land grant — confirmed in the late seventeenth century under Golconda rule — on condition that they continue performing the dance-drama. So the form was a hereditary obligation attached to a piece of land, performed all night in the open by an all-male troupe as narrative theatre with speech, song and dance in one body. Its transformation into a solo proscenium classical dance performed largely by women happened in the twentieth century, principally through the school of Vempati Chinna Satyam. Both versions exist; the village one is the older and the rarer.
Bhamakalapam	Kosta Andhra	शास्त्रीय	A full-length dance-drama in which one performer sustains a single character for hours, introduced by the jada — the entry in which Satyabhama's plait is brought on stage before she is. It is the core Kuchipudi text and is attributed to Siddhendra Yogi.
Veedhi Bhagavatam	Kosta Andhra	लोक	Street dance-drama on the same repertoire as Kuchipudi, played on open ground with a hand-held curtain and no stage. It is the substrate the classical form was refined out of, and it is still performed at village level.
Kolatam	Kosta Andhra	लोक	Stick dance in concentric moving circles, where the pattern of strikes carries the complexity.
Gangireddu and Haridasu at Sankranti	Kosta Andhra	अनुष्ठान	A decorated bull trained to nod, bow and dance to a nadaswaram at a household's door; and a singer with a brass bowl on his head who walks the street at dawn and accepts grain rather than money. Both are calendrical, both are door-to-door, and both are contracting fast.
Nati	Kullu & Mandi	लोक	The defining dance of the region and one of the few Indian folk forms performed by a crowd rather than for one. Dancers link at the waist or shoulder and move in a slow serpentine chain to a fixed cycle of dhol, nagara and shehnai, with a small step repeated for a very long time and a gradual acceleration at the close. There is no soloist and no front. A mass nati recorded at Kullu Dussehra in 2015, with close to ten thousand women dancing together, was entered as a world record for the largest folk dance, which is a modern gloss on an old fact — the form is designed to scale.
Devta rath procession	Kullu & Mandi	अनुष्ठान	Not a dance in any formal sense, but the region's most striking choreography. The palanquin is carried on poles by teams who move it in a rhythmic sway and, at moments, in sudden surges the bearers describe as the deity's own movement rather than theirs. Two palanquins meeting on a road will bow to each other according to a precedence everybody present knows.
Deo Nati and Kariyala-type village play	Kullu & Mandi	अनुष्ठान	Dance and rough comic playlets performed through the night at a devta fair, with stock characters, satire of officials, and the deity's presence in the courtyard the whole time.
Gaddi and Gujjar herding dances	Kullu & Mandi	लोक	Slower circle dances performed in woollen coats to the dhol, brought into the valley by herders who summer on its ridges and winter elsewhere.
Chholiya	Kumaon	युद्धकला	A sword-and-shield dance performed in front of the groom's party by men in white and red costume, moving in paired combat sequences to dhol, damau, turi and ransingha. It is a stylised armed escort — the wedding party is being protected, historically from actual raiding — and it is strongest in Champawat, Pithoragarh and Almora.
Jhora	Kumaon	लोक	A linked-arm circle dance that grows as people join it, moving in a slow anticlockwise shuffle to a sung call-and-response. There is no audience and no performer — the dance is the crowd, and a large jhora at a fair can run to hundreds.
Chanchari	Kumaon	लोक	A slower and older circle form associated with the Danpur country behind Bageshwar, sung in a characteristic long-breathed line with the hurka keeping time.
Chhapeli	Kumaon	लोक	A courtship duet danced with a mirror and a handkerchief, quick-footed and flirtatious, sung to hurka and manjira. It is the one Kumaoni form built around a couple rather than a circle.
Jagar	Kumaon	अनुष्ठान	Night-long invocation in which the jagariya sings the deity's story to hurka and thali until the deity arrives in a human vehicle, who then dances, is questioned and answers. Golu, Bholanath, Kalbisht, Airy, Haru and Saim are among the deities called. It functions as therapy, arbitration and court of appeal, and it is entirely current.
Hurkiya baul	Kumaon	अनुष्ठान	A ritualised work performance in which the hurkiya stands in the flooded field singing a heroic ballad while the transplanting crew works to his rhythm and answers his lines. The song sets the pace of the labour, and the drummer is paid out of the crop.
Hilljatra	Kumaon	अनुष्ठान	A masked agricultural pageant of ploughmen, oxen and the fearsome Lakhiya Bhoot, which came into Pithoragarh from the Sorar country across the Kali and is performed on both sides of that river to this day.
Garba and ras	Kutch	लोक	Circling dance around a lamp or an image, and the paired stick dance done to it. Kutch dances the Gujarati forms, but the costume carries the local marker — the mirror work and the community bodice, not a stage version of it.
Hudo	Kutch	लोक	A vigorous paired dance in which partners meet and strike palms together on the beat, danced to dhol. It is more strongly a Saurashtra form than a Kutchi one and is danced here by the same pastoral castes.
Rasada	Kutch	लोक	A large women's circle in which the whole group moves as one to a single drum, sometimes several dozen dancers deep. Unlike garba it is not devotional in occasion.
Maldhari fair dancing	Kutch	लोक	Loose circle dancing to dhol and jodiya pava at the fairs where herds are traded — the social occasion the pastoral year is organised around, and the reason the fairs matter beyond livestock.
Cham	Ladakh & Zanskar	अनुष्ठान	Masked dance performed in the monastery courtyard in heavy brocade robes and carved or moulded masks — the wrathful protectors, the skeleton lords of the charnel ground, the black-hat dancers, the stag and the bull. It is liturgy, not spectacle: the sequence enacts the subduing of obstructive forces and ends with the destruction of an effigy. The dancers are monks under vow, the steps are prescribed in manuals, and the audience's participation is to watch, which is itself understood to confer merit.
Jabro	Ladakh & Zanskar	लोक	A nomad line dance from the Rupshu and Kharnak grazing grounds, danced in a linked row with a stamping step to a sung text and to the damnyan lute. Its rhythms are slower and heavier than the Indus valley forms, which is generally read as a difference between a dance done in boots on frozen ground and one done in a courtyard.
Shondol	Ladakh & Zanskar	लोक	The Ladakhi royal dance, performed in full perak and sulma in slow circling formation to daman and surna. It survived the end of the monarchy by becoming a civic performance, and mass versions with hundreds of dancers are now staged at Leh.
Spao	Ladakh & Zanskar	युद्धकला	The hero or warrior dance, performed with sword and shield in a heavy stepped rhythm to daman and surna, with sung verses recalling campaigns. It preserves the vocabulary of a mounted and armed society that ceased to exist in the nineteenth century.
Chabs-skyan tses	Ladakh & Zanskar	अनुष्ठान	The dance of serving chhang, performed while carrying the pot and ladling — an etiquette turned into choreography, in which the order of service and the depth of the bow encode the seating order of the room.
Mentok Stanmo	Ladakh & Zanskar	लोक	A dance associated with the flowering of the high pastures, performed in village grounds with sung exchanges between groups. It marks the point in the year when the herds move up.
Lava	Lakshadweep	लोक	Minicoy's signature dance and the clearest evidence of its separateness. Rows of men in a bright wrapped costume and headgear move in unison to drums and a sung refrain in Dhivehi, the formation opening and closing as the tempo rises. Each village fields its own troupe, which is what makes the dance a village institution rather than a stage item.
Kolkali	Lakshadweep	लोक	A circling stick dance in which pairs strike short wooden batons in time to a sung line, the circle contracting and expanding. It is the same form found across the Malabar coast, and its presence here maps the islands' Malayali half exactly.
Parichakali	Lakshadweep	युद्धकला	A mock combat with sword and small shield — paricha — performed in a ring to drumming, descended from the martial exercise of the Malabar coast and now kept alive as performance.
Duffmuttu	Lakshadweep	लोक	Beaten on the duff, a shallow single-headed frame drum, with a sung Arabic-Malayalam text in praise of the Prophet or of a local saint. The body moves from the waist; the drum carries the form.
Thaara, Bandiya, Dandi and Fuli	Lakshadweep	लोक	The rest of the Minicoy repertoire, all of it shared with the Maldives. Bandiya is danced by women with metal water pots; Thaara is a seated drum-and-chorus form of Arab derivation.
Jhumar	Magadh	लोक	A circling dance to a swaying rhythm, danced by linked lines of men or women with dhol and jhaal — shared with Jharkhand and eastern Uttar Pradesh, and the region's most common social dance.
Natua nach	Magadh	युद्धकला	An acrobatic dance with staves, somersaults and mock combat, performed to dhol and shehnai — a hereditary performing tradition now sustained by very few families.
Domkach	Magadh	लोक	A night-long women's dance with role reversal, mock weddings and songs that would not be sung in front of men.
Ropni and sohni dance-songs	Magadh	लोक	Work songs sung standing in the water, with a call-and-response structure keyed to the rhythm of the task itself.
Karma	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	अनुष्ठान	A branch of the karma tree is cut, planted in the courtyard and danced around all night in a shoulder-linked line that gathers and releases to the mandar drum. The dance ends at dawn with the branch taken to water. It is the region's central monsoon rite and it runs east into Chhattisgarh and Chota Nagpur with different theology attached at each stop.
Rela and Rina	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	जनजातीय	Rela is the men's line dance to dhol and timki, taken at a running tempo; Rina is the women's counterpart, slower, sung in call and response. Both are named after their song form rather than their steps.
Saila	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	लोक	A stick dance in which each dancer strikes his neighbour's stick on a fixed beat while the circle rotates, so a mistake is audible instantly. Shared with the Chhattisgarh plains and the Sarguja fringe.
Dandari and Gussadi	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	अनुष्ठान	A troupe travels from village to village for several days performing narrative sequences, led by Gussadi dancers in peacock-feather crowns and body ash who are treated as embodying the deity rather than representing him. Strongest in the Adilabad uplands.
Baiga Dashera	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	जनजातीय	Danced in two facing lines with a dipping, wave-like step, to a drum and a bamboo flute. The Baiga repertoire is separate from the Gond one despite the villages often being a kilometre apart.
Theyyam	Malabar	अनुष्ठान	The deity is not represented; the deity arrives. The performer sits while the face is painted over hours, the thottam pattu narrating the deity's origin is sung as the costume goes on, and at a fixed point he is handed a mirror. From the moment he sees the painted face in it he is addressed as the deity, and remains so until the costume comes off — speaking in the deity's voice, receiving petitions, giving blessings and settling disputes for households who in ordinary life rank far above the man inside the costume. Over four hundred distinct kolams are documented; many are deified humans, and a large number of those are people who were killed unjustly, including women.
Thirayattam	Malabar	अनुष्ठान	The same ritual family as Theyyam, performed south of the Korapuzha under a different name, with a lighter costume, a heavier percussion accompaniment and its own set of deities. The change of name at a small river is the cleanest evidence that the north–south line inside this region is real.
Poorakkali	Malabar	लोक	A circle dance round a lamp in eighteen sequences of increasing difficulty, danced by men in a bare torso and mundu, and led by a panikkar. It is unusual for having a scholastic component attached to it.
Kolkali	Malabar	लोक	A circle of twelve or more strikes short sticks against each other on the beat, tightening the circle as the tempo doubles. The same form appears down the coast and inland under other names; here it is sung to Mappila verse.
Oppana	Malabar	लोक	Song and clap around the seated bride, in Mappila Malayalam whose Arabic and Persian vocabulary sits openly on the surface. The bride does not dance; she is the still point the whole form is arranged around.
Duffmuttu	Malabar	लोक	Seated or standing rows strike the duff, a shallow frame drum, while singing devotional verse in praise of the Prophet and of saints. The drum is played with the whole hand and the rhythm is carried by the body rocking, not by a lead player.
Kalaripayattu, northern style	Malabar	युद्धकला	The vadakkan style begins with meithari — long, low body-conditioning sequences performed for months before any weapon is touched — and moves through kolthari with wooden weapons to ankathari with steel, ending with the urumi, a flexible sword that is dangerous mainly to the person holding it. Marma knowledge and a manual therapy tradition are taught in the same building by the same teacher, and the kalari has a guardian deity and a lamp at its western corner.
Ummathat	Malnad	लोक	A circling dance in full ceremonial saree and head scarf, the dancers striking small brass cymbals in their own hands and singing as they turn. The tempo builds across the song and the circle tightens.
Bolakat and Kolat	Malnad	लोक	Stick dances in kupya and chele — Kolat with short sticks struck in pairs, Bolakat with longer staves and a more combative step, both danced in a ring to the dudi drum.
Peeliyat	Malnad	लोक	A peacock-feather dance, performed with plumes held or fixed at the waist, in a fast circling formation.
Veeragase	Malnad	अनुष्ठान	A sword-and-plaque dance with recited narration of Virabhadra's story, performed at jatras through the Shivamogga and Chikkamagaluru country and out onto the maidan beyond.
Yerava and Jenu Kuruba line dances	Malnad	जनजातीय	Line and circle dances to hand drums, performed within the community rather than for audiences, and documented far less than the settled communities' forms around them.
Matki	Malwa Plateau	लोक	A slow circling dance performed with an earthen water pot balanced on the head, sometimes several stacked, to a dhol and thali beat. The step is deliberately restrained because the pot sets the limit — the display is in the stillness of the head, not in the feet.
Phefariya	Malwa Plateau	अनुष्ठान	Danced on the completion of a vow, usually before a village deity and often at the same time as a household brings its offering. It belongs to the vow-and-fulfilment economy of Malwa's shrine calendar rather than to any performance circuit.
Bhagoria dancing of the western hills	Malwa Plateau	जनजातीय	Dhol, mandal drum and bansuri played in a large open circle at the weekly markets of the Vindhyan west. The tourist framing of Bhagoria as a marriage market is a simplification the communities themselves dispute; it is a market, a festival and a courtship occasion at once.
Gair and Rai at the fringes	Malwa Plateau	लोक	The stick-and-circle Gair of the Rajasthan margin and the Rai of the Bundelkhand-facing east both appear at Malwa's edges, and neither is native to the plateau's core — a useful reminder of where the region's boundaries actually run.
Gondhal	Marathwada	अनुष्ठान	A night-long invocation performed by a standing troupe with sambal drum, tuntune and a lit torch, calling the goddess into the house before a wedding can proceed. Tuljapur is its centre of gravity, and the performance is an obligation discharged rather than an entertainment booked.
Dhangari Gaja	Marathwada	लोक	Men in dhoti and pheta circle a dhol player in a tightening spiral, arms raised, to a fixed accelerating rhythm. The songs address Biroba, the shepherds' own deity, and the form belongs to the transhumant grazing economy of the Balaghat uplands.
Lambani (Lengi) dance	Marathwada	जनजातीय	A circling clap-and-step dance in full mirrored dress, with the songs in Gor Boli rather than Marathi. The Marathwada tandas share the repertoire with those in Telangana and northern Karnataka.
Lavani	Marathwada	लोक	Present here but not native — Lavani's institutional home is the Desh, west of the Balaghat, and Marathwada receives it through the touring tamasha circuit that works the jatra season.
Potraj	Marathwada	अनुष्ठान	A whip-carrying devotee moving through the village to a drum, striking his own back, collecting for the goddess of epidemic disease. It is a survival of a village public-health ritual and reads as such.
Silambam	Marava & Ramnad	युद्धकला	Staff fighting with a bamboo stave, practised in circular footwork with the stick spun into a defensive envelope. The southern dry districts, and this region in particular, hold most of the surviving teaching lineages, and Ramnad's military history under the Sethupathis is the reason.
Karagattam	Marava & Ramnad	लोक	Pot-balancing danced to naiyandi melam, performed here at village goddess and Ayyanar festivals, often through the night.
Oyilattam and Kummi	Marava & Ramnad	लोक	A slow, disciplined line dance with kerchiefs and bells, and its women's counterpart danced in a circle with clapped rhythm and sung verses.
Devarattam	Marava & Ramnad	लोक	A vigorous group dance to urumi and thappu drumming, historically described as a victory dance and now performed at temple festivals across the southern districts.
Poikkal kudirai and mayilattam	Marava & Ramnad	लोक	Dummy-horse and peacock dances performed in costume frames as part of a procession rather than as a stage item.
Ghoomar	Marwar & the Thar	लोक	A circular dance whose name comes from ghoomna, to spin. Dancers move in a ring with a swinging ghagra and clap on the turn; the veil stays drawn throughout.
Kalbeliya	Marwar & the Thar	लोक	Serpentine, fast and acrobatic, danced in a black skirt with mirror work to the been and dholak. Inscribed by UNESCO on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010, at a time when the community's traditional livelihood had been made illegal.
Bhavai	Marwar & the Thar	लोक	The dancer balances a stack of seven to nine brass pots on her head while performing on the rim of a brass thali or the edge of a sword or a glass.
Terah Taali	Marwar & the Thar	अनुष्ठान	Thirteen small manjeeras (cymbals) tied to the ankles, wrists, elbows and waist, struck in sequence by the seated dancer while a man sings and plays the tandoora.
Kachhi Ghodi	Marwar & the Thar	लोक	Dancers in a dummy-horse frame stage a mock battle with swords to fife and drum, usually narrating the exploits of local bandit-heroes.
Gair and Fire dance	Marwar & the Thar	लोक	Gair is a large mixed-gender circle dance of the Bhil at Holi, danced with sticks. The fire dance of the Jasnathi sect at Bikaner involves dancers stepping onto and dancing on live embers to nagara drumming.
Kathputli	Marwar & the Thar	लोक	String puppetry from the Bhat community of the Nagaur region, performed with a bamboo-and-cloth articulation and a reed voice-modifier, with a female narrator translating for the audience.
Ghoomar	Mewar	लोक	The circular veil dance, danced with the odhni drawn and the ghagra swinging on the turn. Its origins are Bhil and it was taken up at the Rajput courts, which is the direction of travel worth noting — the court borrowed from the hill, not the other way round.
Gair	Mewar	लोक	A large circle dance struck out with sticks in a cross-rhythm against dhol and thali, with dancers moving inwards and outwards from a centre. Mewar's Holi Gair is danced through several days rather than one.
Gavri	Mewar	अनुष्ठान	Not a dance so much as a season. A village takes on Gavri once every few years and, having done so, its troupe performs ten to fifteen hours a day for forty consecutive days, travelling to the villages its married daughters have gone to. Participants go barefoot for the whole period, sleep on the ground, eat no meat, drink no liquor and abstain from sex. Women do not perform; men play the female roles.
Terah Taali	Mewar	अनुष्ठान	Thirteen small cymbals tied to ankles, wrists, elbows and waist and struck in sequence by a seated dancer. Common across the region's fairs and performed at Mewar's Ramdev shrines.
Jhijhiya	Mithilanchal	लोक	Women dance balancing an earthen pot perforated with dozens of holes and lit from inside, moving in a circle to a fast rhythm. It is explicitly a protective ritual against black magic, addressed to the goddess, and the pot is made afresh each year.
Jat-Jatin	Mithilanchal	लोक	A sung dance-drama about a husband who has gone away to work and the wife who waits, quarrels and reconciles with him. It is the region's own account of labour migration, performed as comedy and understood as autobiography.
Domkach	Mithilanchal	लोक	A night-long women's performance with role reversal, mock marriages and bawdy songs, held in the courtyard when the men have gone.
Salhesh nach	Mithilanchal	अनुष्ठान	Dance and narration of the Raja Salhesh epic at the god's earthen shrines — a Dalit devotional tradition that also produced the Godna style of Mithila painting.
Cheraw	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	लोक	Four to six men kneel in pairs and clap long bamboo staves together in a fixed rhythm on a cross-frame of horizontal poles; women in puanchei step in and out of the closing gaps. The dance is a timing problem solved by ear — the pole-clappers are the instrument, and the steps are laid over their beat rather than over a drum. It is the region's export image, and in March 2010 Aizawl assembled ten thousand seven hundred and thirty-six dancers for it, taking a Guinness record for the largest bamboo dance.
Khuallam	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	लोक	The dance of guests. Performers move in a circle draped in puandum to the beat of the darbu, the set of brass gongs, entering the ground as the invited party of a household holding a feast of merit. It is choreography as etiquette — the guests' arrival is itself the performance.
Chheihlam	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	लोक	Danced to chheih hla, a chanted song improvised on the spot, with the group seated in a ring clapping and one or two dancers rising in the middle. Unlike the festival dances it has no fixed costume and no fixed text, and it developed in the early twentieth century as an evening entertainment rather than a ritual.
Chai	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	लोक	A circle in which men and women alternate, the men holding the women's waists and the women resting their hands on the men's shoulders, moving to drum and gong and singing chai hla. It is the oldest of the Kut dances and the one that keeps the festival's song repertoire alive.
Sarlamkai	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	लोक	Also called Solakia. Gongs and cymbals set the beat rather than drums, and the movement is heavier and more deliberate than the central-hills dances — one of several markers separating the southern Lai and Mara repertoire from the Duhlian-speaking centre.
Zangtalam	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	लोक	A men-and-women line dance from the Churachandpur uplands, danced with a hand-clap pattern that carries the rhythm where a drum is not available. It sits alongside a dozen comparable dances among the Thadou, Vaiphei, Hmar and Zou, each of which reads as a variation on the same idea.
Cham	Monpa & Tawang Belt	अनुष्ठान	Masked and costumed monastic dance performed in the monastery courtyard to cymbals, long horns and drums. It is liturgy rather than theatre — each figure is a deity or a protector, the sequence is prescribed, and the culminating act is the destruction of an effigy that carries away the year's accumulated harm.
Ajilamu	Monpa & Tawang Belt	लोक	A masked pantomime and dance-drama performed outside the monastic sequence, with comic and satirical characters alongside the sacred ones. It is where the village, rather than the monastery, gets to speak.
Yak dance	Monpa & Tawang Belt	लोक	A yak built over a wooden frame with a cloth body and a carved head, animated by two men, with herders and a comic keeper around it. The narrative attached to it is one of gratitude to the animal the economy rests on, and it is danced where children can see it.
Lion dance (senge cham)	Monpa & Tawang Belt	लोक	The snow lion animated by two dancers, performed at new year for good fortune. Shared with Bhutan, Sikkim and the Tibetan world generally.
Khiksaba dances	Monpa & Tawang Belt	लोक	The dance and procession cycle of the Sherdukpen year-end festival, distinct in music and costume from the Monpa forms above it, and belonging to a different language family entirely.
War dance	Naga Hills	जनजातीय	Lines of men in full shawl and headgear advancing with dao and spear to a shouted call-and-response and a stamped rhythm, with a leader's cry answered by the group. Every community has its own version and they are not interchangeable; the differences are in the footwork and the shout, not the costume.
Feast of Merit and stone-pulling songs	Naga Hills	अनुष्ठान	A household that had accumulated grain and mithun could give a graded series of feasts to the whole village, earning the right to new shawl designs, house horns and carved posts. The pulling of a memorial stone or a log drum into the village was done as a mass rhythmic haul with its own song cycle. The institution redistributed surplus and converted it into status — a wealth-levelling machine with a textile receipt.
Aoleang dance	Naga Hills	जनजातीय	Circling and line dances performed through the six days of the Konyak spring festival, the men in full ornament, the women in bead collars, with songs that mark the turn from sowing to waiting.
Sekrenyi dances	Naga Hills	अनुष्ठान	The Angami purification festival's public half — processional singing and dance after the private household rites, with the young people's Thekra Hie day given over to song.
Bamboo and pounding-table dances	Naga Hills	लोक	Rhythms taken from work — the paddy pounding table, the clash of bamboo — turned into set dances, in the same way as across the massif to the south.
Kolattam and kummi at kodai	Nanjil Nadu	लोक	Stick and clap circle dances performed on the temple ground through the festival nights, with the songs carrying local narrative rather than a fixed repertoire.
Poikkal kudirai attam	Nanjil Nadu	लोक	The dummy-horse dance — a light frame worn at the waist with false legs, danced to thavil and nadaswaram in procession, which is the Tamil half of the region's festival street.
Adi murai and varma kalai	Nanjil Nadu	युद्धकला	The southern martial tradition, weighted to empty-hand technique and to varmam — the pressure-point knowledge that doubles as a bone-setting and manual-therapy practice. Most asans here earn their living from the therapy rather than the fighting, and the two are taught as one body of knowledge.
Kaikottikali	Nanjil Nadu	लोक	The Travancore clapping circle dance, still danced at Onam in the western taluks, in a district whose other half is preparing for Pongal four months later.
Chavittu Nadakam	Nanjil Nadu	अनुष्ठान	Musical theatre performed on a resonant wooden stage that the actors stamp on, so the stamping is part of the score. The subjects are European chivalric ones, the language is the coast's own, and the form is shared with the Latin Catholic villages up the western shore.
Nicobarese circle dance	Nicobar Islands	लोक	Danced in a ring, arms linked or on shoulders, with a unison jump and a sung line that carries the beat. It is performed at night and can continue for hours, and at a mortuary feast it is part of the rite rather than an entertainment attached to it.
Canoe racing	Nicobar Islands	लोक	Not a dance, but the same thing socially — village against village, crewed by young men, and the main public contest of the year. The hodi is the boat it is raced in.
Gangour	Nimar	लोक	Danced in procession and in the courtyard around the images of Gauri and Isar through the eighteen days after Holi. Nimar's Gangaur is one of the longest and most elaborate observances in the region's calendar, and the dance is inseparable from the songs sung to carry it.
Kanara	Nimar	लोक	A Nimadi circle dance to dhol and thali, danced in a ring that opens and closes on the beat. It is documented as a Nimar form in the state's folk-dance record and is now seen mainly at organised fairs.
Aada-khada nach	Nimar	लोक	Danced in lines that alternately cross and stand — the name describes the figure. A Nimar form, and one of the few in the valley performed by men and women together.
Bhil, Bhilala and Barela dancing of the slopes	Nimar	जनजातीय	Large open circles to dhol, mandal and bansuri, danced for hours at the weekly markets in the week before Holi and at the seasonal festivals. The dancing is continuous and participatory rather than staged, and the circle absorbs anyone who joins it.
Koli nritya	North Konkan	लोक	Danced in two lines, men and women facing, with the arm movements of rowing, casting and hauling a net quoted directly. It is one of the few Indian folk dances whose vocabulary is an occupation performed at double speed.
Tarpa nach	North Konkan	जनजातीय	A closed spiral of dancers, shoulder to shoulder, circling a single player of the tarpa — a wind instrument of gourd, bamboo and palm leaf that is played with circular breathing and does not stop. The spiral tightens and unwinds for hours; the same spiral is what Warli painters draw.
Bohada	North Konkan	अनुष्ठान	A masked night procession in which dancers wearing large painted wooden masks take the parts of village and Puranic deities one after another, each entering to its own drum pattern. The masks are village property and are repainted rather than replaced.
Lezim and dhol-tasha	North Konkan	लोक	Rhythmic drill with a small jingling bow, and the massed drum troupes that lead immersion processions. The form is a plateau import that the city adopted and industrialised.
Bharatanatyam, Mysore style	Old Mysore	शास्त्रीय	A distinct school kept alive by palace patronage, with a wider use of the stage, softer arm lines and a repertoire including Kannada devaranama and compositions written for the Wadiyar court. Its transmission ran through Jatti Tayamma, who taught at the palace into the twentieth century.
Kamsale	Old Mysore	अनुष्ठान	Performers sing the Mahadeshwara epic while striking a pair of heavy brass discs — one held, one struck — and dance in a widening circle. The instrument keeps time for a narrative that can run all night, and the singers are initiates rather than professionals.
Veeragase	Old Mysore	अनुष्ठान	A vigorous sword dance in Veerabhadra costume with a large forehead plate, performed to the beat of the sambal drum. It leads the Dasara procession and is the loudest thing in it after the elephants.
Somana Kunitha	Old Mysore	अनुष्ठान	Masked dance in which the performer wears a huge painted wooden mask, sometimes over a metre tall, representing the village guardian. The mask belongs to the temple and is repainted rather than replaced.
Dollu Kunitha	Old Mysore	लोक	Large barrel drums slung at the waist and played while moving in formation, with a leader controlling the tempo by cymbal. The drums are heavy enough that the dance is as much load-bearing as choreography.
Karagattam	Pandya Nadu	लोक	A decorated pot balanced on the head while the dancer moves through increasingly difficult positions, accompanied by naiyandi melam. Originally an offering to Mariamman for rain; now also a paid entertainment, and the region is its heartland.
Kavadi attam	Pandya Nadu	अनुष्ठान	A decorated arched frame carried on the shoulders to a Murugan shrine, danced rather than merely carried, to a fixed drum pattern. Palani is its principal destination and pilgrims walk for days to reach it.
Oyilattam	Pandya Nadu	लोक	A slow, precise line dance with kerchiefs and ankle bells, built on a repeating step that lengthens as the tempo rises. Its name means grace, and its discipline is closer to drill than to display.
Silambam	Pandya Nadu	युद्धकला	Staff fighting with a bamboo silambam, practised in a circular footwork pattern with the stick spun to build a defensive envelope. The southern Tamil districts are where the surviving teaching lineages are.
Mayilattam and poikkal kudirai	Pandya Nadu	लोक	Peacock and dummy-horse dances performed in heavy costume frames, usually as part of a temple procession rather than as a stage item.
Chalo Loku dances	Patkai & Tirap Belt	लोक	Line and circle dances performed over the several days of the Nocte harvest festival, with the village moving between the chief's house and the community ground. Costume, sequence and the order in which households join are all fixed by custom.
Oriah dances	Patkai & Tirap Belt	लोक	Danced through the days of the Wancho spring festival, with men in full ceremonial dress and the log drum sounding. The festival runs about six days and the dancing is the public face of a set of household and chiefly rituals that are not.
Moh-Mol dances	Patkai & Tirap Belt	लोक	Group dances at the Tangsa spring festival, differing between the many Tangsa groups — Tikhak, Mossang, Longchang, Muklom and others each maintain their own version, which is the single most important thing to know about Tangsa performance.
Manau	Patkai & Tirap Belt	अनुष्ठान	A processional dance in long serpentine files around a set of tall painted posts, led by ceremonially dressed elders. It is the Kachin manau of northern Myanmar, performed on the Indian side of the same community's range.
Tai Khamti temple and festival dance	Patkai & Tirap Belt	लोक	Slow, hand-led dance in the Tai idiom, performed at Buddhist festival occasions. It shares its vocabulary with Shan and Thai forms rather than with anything else in the district.
Bhangra	Punjab Doabs	लोक	A harvest dance from the western districts of undivided Punjab, danced to a dhol in a loose circle with shoulder and arm movements built around the harvest gestures themselves. After 1947 it was restaged as a standardised troupe form for state folk festivals, absorbing steps from jhummar, luddi and sammi into a single choreographed item, and in that form it became Punjab's public face. From the 1980s Punjabi communities in Britain crossed the dhol rhythm with recorded pop production, and bhangra became a global music genre distinct from the dance that named it.
Giddha	Punjab Doabs	लोक	Women form a ring, one or two step into the centre, and the dance is punctuated by boliyan — sharp rhymed couplets called out and answered, with the ring clapping the rhythm. The verses are the point: they are improvised, frequently satirical about husbands, mothers-in-law and marriage itself, and giddha is one of the few licensed public spaces in which they can be said aloud.
Jhummar	Punjab Doabs	लोक	Slower and more circular than bhangra, in a swaying triple feel, from the bar uplands of western Punjab and carried east by families displaced in 1947. It is danced in a ring around the drummer and is closer to what Punjabi harvest dancing looked like before the stage version standardised it.
Malwai giddha	Punjab Doabs	लोक	The men's counterpart to giddha in the Malwa districts, danced to the bugchu, the chimta and the ghara, with boliyan traded between the dancers. Older men perform it, and it has none of bhangra's athleticism.
Sammi and luddi	Punjab Doabs	लोक	Sammi is a women's dance from the western bar country with a distinctive arm-and-chest gesture; luddi is a men's dance of victory or celebration, danced with a hand behind the back. Both came east with partition migrants and survive mainly inside stage bhangra's borrowed vocabulary.
Kikli	Punjab Doabs	लोक	Two girls cross hands, lean back and spin, singing a fixed rhyme. It is a children's game and the first Punjabi dance most people learn.
Gatka	Punjab Doabs	युद्धकला	Stick-and-sword sparring practised as a martial discipline with its own footwork, drills and drum accompaniment. It is demonstrated at Hola Mohalla alongside horsemanship and is now taught competitively.
Purulia Chhau	Rarh	युद्धकला	A masked dance-drama with no speech and no song from the dancers, driven entirely by the dhamsa and dhol and by the shehnai. Episodes are drawn from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas, and the vocabulary is built out of leaps, spins and combat postures — the mask covers the face, so expression has to be produced by the whole body. Chhau was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010, in an entry covering all three of its regional styles.
Raibenshe	Rarh	युद्धकला	A vigorous stick-and-staff dance performed to the dhak, descended from the drill of village guards and retainers. Birbhum and the Bardhaman side hold the surviving tradition, and it is danced in lines with lowered stances and long lunges.
Nachni and Jhumur	Rarh	लोक	A woman dances and sings Jhumur verse to the accompaniment of her rasik, who composes and sings with her. The form is virtuosic and the social position of the nachni has historically been precarious, with performers excluded from ordinary village rites — a fact the tradition's own songs address directly.
Santali dance	Rarh	जनजातीय	Danced in a long linked line, women in front, men behind with tamak and tumdak drums and the flute, moving sideways in a slow repeating step for hours at the akhra, the village dancing ground. It is participatory rather than presentational — there is no audience.
Bhadu and Tusu processions	Rarh	अनुष्ठान	Decorated frames and small idols are carried in procession to the river and immersed, with songs composed fresh each year. Tusu is the larger of the two and belongs to the Manbhum tract on both sides of the state boundary.
Kolatam	Rayalaseema	लोक	Stick dance in two concentric rings turning against each other, so each dancer meets a new partner on each beat. In the Chittoor belt it is often performed to Tamil as well as Telugu songs.
Pagati Veshalu	Rayalaseema	लोक	Daytime impersonation — a performer arrives in a village in full costume as a mendicant, a hunter, a policeman, a Bairagi or a woman, stays in character for hours and is paid at the end. The form's discipline is that it never announces itself as a performance.
Chekka Bhajana	Rayalaseema	लोक	Devotional group singing with wooden clappers and a stepped circular movement, strongly established in the Chittoor and Kadapa belt and sharing repertoire with Tamil bhajana traditions across the line.
Garagalu	Rayalaseema	अनुष्ठान	A decorated pot balanced on the head, sometimes with a lit lamp, danced through a procession without being steadied by hand.
Lambadi	Rayalaseema	जनजातीय	A circle dance in mirror-worked skirts, sung in Gor Boli rather than Telugu.
Chenchu dances	Rayalaseema	जनजातीय	Hunting and clan dances of a forest community whose mythology is embedded in the Nallamala temple narratives — the goddess Chenchu Lakshmi at Ahobilam and Srisailam is a Chenchu woman married to the deity, and the shrines acknowledge the connection ritually.
Tharu Holi and Sakhiya Pai dance	Rohilkhand & Katehar	जनजातीय	Line and circle dances performed to drum and cymbal over several nights, with the Barka Nach retelling episodes of the Mahabharata in a Tharu version. Performed in the villages of the terai and rarely staged outside them.
Laat Sahab procession	Rohilkhand & Katehar	अनुष्ठान	A figure titled Laat Sahab is seated on a buffalo cart and paraded through the city, pelted with shoes and abuse along the way — a ritual mockery of colonial authority that has survived as the town's defining public event, and requires heavy policing to keep it good-humoured.
Nautanki and swang	Rohilkhand & Katehar	लोक	The sung folk-opera of the northern plain, in the same tradition as the Doab's Hathras and Kanpur styles.
Naqqal and bhand	Rohilkhand & Katehar	लोक	Mimicry and comic sketch, historically attached to the Rampur court and now almost gone.
Garba	Saurashtra	लोक	A circular dance around a garbo — a perforated earthen pot with a lamp burning inside it. The perforations are the whole idea: the pot stands for the body and the lamp for what is inside it, and the light is visible only through the holes. Dancers move anticlockwise around it with a clap on the beat, and the tempo climbs across the night. The stadium-scale sponsored garba of recent decades is a commercial descendant of a form that is still danced in village squares with a single drum.
Raas and dandiya raas	Saurashtra	लोक	Danced with a pair of short sticks struck against a partner's on the count, in two counter-rotating circles so partners change continuously. It is attached to the Krishna cycle and to Dwarka, and it is structurally a mock combat rather than a courtship dance.
Hudo	Saurashtra	लोक	Danced in pairs with the palms struck hard against the partner's palms on the beat, the whole body dropping into each clap. It is fast, physically punishing and performed most visibly at the Tarnetar fair.
Tippani	Saurashtra	लोक	Long wooden staves brought down rhythmically on the ground in unison. It began as the labour of compacting lime floors and terraces, where the beat kept a line of women striking together, and became a dance when the work method disappeared.
Mer raas	Saurashtra	लोक	A heavier, faster men's raas performed with large drums and full swings of the arm, distinct from the lighter Navratri dandiya in tempo and in the size of the circle.
Sidi Dhamal	Saurashtra	अनुष्ठान	Drumming and dance carried by a community of African descent settled in the Gir country for centuries, using the mugarman drum and coconut rattles, with a coconut broken on the head at the climax. It is devotional in origin and is now also performed for visitors, which has changed it.
Ponung	Siang & Adi Belt	अनुष्ठान	A slow linked-arm circle danced by young women around a miri — the ritual specialist — who stands at the centre holding a ceremonial sword and sings the lines the dancers answer. The dance is the delivery mechanism for the text: the miri narrates and the circle carries the refrain, and a full Ponung can run through the night.
Tapu	Siang & Adi Belt	युद्धकला	The war dance, performed with dao and shield in short violent bursts that re-enact an engagement. It is danced at Aran, the hunting festival in early March, and its footwork is closer to drill than to display.
Delong	Siang & Adi Belt	लोक	A men's dance performed in the community hall at Etor in May, the festival that marks the fencing of fields and the welfare of cattle and mithun.
Popir	Siang & Adi Belt	लोक	The Galo circle dance of Mopin, danced in white ceremonial dress after participants have smeared each other with ette, a wet rice-flour paste. The whiteness is the point — rice powder on face and cloth is a public statement about the crop the festival is for.
Cham	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	अनुष्ठान	Masked liturgical dance performed in the monastery courtyard to a score of long horns, shawms, cymbals and drums, in which monks embody protector deities and the year's accumulated obstruction is destroyed in the final sequence. It is a rite, not a performance — the dancer is under vow, the steps are prescribed in manuals, and the audience is a congregation. Rumtek and Pemayangtse hold the best-known cycles.
Pangtoed Chham	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	अनुष्ठान	A warrior dance performed in battle dress at the festival that consecrates Kanchenjunga as guardian of the land, attributed to the third Chogyal, Chakdor Namgyal. The mountain deity is danced by a masked figure in red; the festival itself commemorates the blood-brotherhood pact between the Lepcha bongthing Thekong Tek and the Bhutia ancestor Khye Bumsa, which is why it is read as the region's founding covenant.
Singhi Chham	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	लोक	The snow lion dance, also credited to Chakdor Namgyal. The white lion with its blue mane is the animal form of Kanchenjunga, whose five peaks are read as the lion's shape — the dance is an impersonation of the mountain, not of a beast.
Maruni	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	लोक	One of the oldest Nepali folk dances, danced by women in full gunyu-cholo and heavy jewellery to a nine-piece naumati baja ensemble, with a masked clown figure who breaks the formality. Historically the female roles were danced by men.
Tamang Selo	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	लोक	Song and dance driven by the damphu — a single-headed hand frame drum whose off-beat is the entire rhythmic identity of the form. Selo moved from village courtyard to cassette and radio faster than any other genre here.
Chyabrung (Ke lang)	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	लोक	A two-headed drum slung at the waist and struck with hand and stick while the drummer dances, the steps imitating animals and agricultural actions. The drummer leads; the line follows the drum, not a singer.
Dhan nach (Ya:lang)	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	लोक	A slow interlocked-arm line dance performed round a heap of paddy, sung to palam verses exchanged between the men's and women's halves of the line. It is a courting institution as much as a dance.
Chu Faat and Zo-Mal-Lok	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	जनजातीय	Chu Faat honours Kanchenjunga and the four attendant peaks with offerings of butter lamps and ferns; Zo-Mal-Lok mimes the cycle of sowing, weeding and reaping. Both are danced to a small ensemble and were documented late, which is why the repertoire is thin compared with the songs.
Sakela sili	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	जनजातीय	A circle dance around a ritual ground, led by a mangpa, in which each sili is a fixed movement sequence imitating a bird, an animal or a farming action. The number of silis a community keeps is a measure of how much of its liturgy survives.
Tarpa dance	South Gujarat Littoral	जनजातीय	A single player works the tarpa — a dried gourd resonator with bamboo pipes and a palm-leaf bell — while dancers link arms behind him in a chain that coils and uncoils in a spiral. There is no drum and no singing. The chain follows the player's movement and the dance stops the moment he stops blowing, which is why the instrument is treated as the leader rather than the accompaniment.
Dangi Nritya	South Gujarat Littoral	जनजातीय	Long lines of dancers with linked arms moving in step to drum and shehnai, building up human pyramids and interlocking figures. It is performed for days at a stretch at Holi, which is the principal festival of the slope.
Gher	South Gujarat Littoral	लोक	Troupes in costume, some cross-dressed, moving from house to house over the days of Holi with drum and dance and collecting contributions. The visit is the form — a gher that does not come to your door has not performed.
Garba and raas in Surat	South Gujarat Littoral	लोक	Surat's Navratri runs several parallel traditions in the same wards — Kathiawadi circles brought by the diamond workforce, Surti circles, and Marathi-influenced observance in the same weeks as an unusually large Ganesh Chaturthi, which the rest of Gujarat does not share.
Naman and Khele	South Konkan	लोक	An evening form that opens with a naman, an invocation to Ganapati and the village deity, and moves into khele — comic and satirical sketches with cross-dressed roles, danced to the dholki with the balya dance between items. It is looser and funnier than Dashavatar and is performed by the village itself rather than by a paid company.
Balya nach	South Konkan	लोक	A fast circling dance to dholki and tal, performed between the sketches of a Naman-Khele night, with the pace increasing until the drummer stops it.
Shimga palkhi and romat	South Konkan	अनुष्ठान	The village deity is carried house to house in a palanquin over several days, with drums, and the romat processions of Sindhudurg escort it with dance, colour and considerable noise. The palkhi's route is the village's actual social map, and the order of houses matters.
Dhangari gaja	South Konkan	लोक	A drum-driven men's dance performed around the drummers in a tightening ring, brought down the ghat with the transhumant flocks.
Danda Nata	South Odisha & Ganjam	अनुष्ठान	Not a performance with a ritual attached but a penance with a performance inside it. A troupe takes a vow for the lunar month: one meal a day, no household bed, sleeping on sand at a village shrine, and moving from village to village every night. The penance escalates in three named stages — dhuli danda on the dust, pani danda in water, agni danda over fire — and between them the troupe performs comic and mythological interludes with fixed character pairs: Hadi and Hadiani the sweeper couple, Sabara and Sabaruni the hill hunter couple, Chadheya and Chadheyani the fowlers. The theology is Shaiva and the pairs are drawn from communities at the bottom of the village order, which is the point: for one month the penitents are outside the ordinary rules, and the drama says so out loud.
Ranapa	South Odisha & Ganjam	लोक	Stilt dancing — rana pa, literally "war leg" — performed on wooden stilts roughly a metre high to dhol and mahuri, with Krishna themes and acrobatic formations. It survives as a Ganjam speciality and as a school and mela item, and the skill is taught to children young enough to fall safely.
Bagha Nacha	South Odisha & Ganjam	लोक	Tiger dance. Bodies are painted in yellow and black stripes, a tail is fixed on, and the dancer moves on all fours to a drum beaten in a stalking rhythm. It is a Berhampur town form and it belongs to the goddess's procession rather than to a stage.
Ghumura	South Odisha & Ganjam	लोक	Danced with a pitcher-shaped drum slung at the neck and struck with both hands. Its heartland is Kalahandi in the uplands behind and above this region, not the Ganjam coast; it reaches this plain through the ghat passes, through migrant work and through the state's competitive folk circuit, and is best understood here as a borrowed form rather than a local one.
Sakhi Kandhei	South Odisha & Ganjam	लोक	String puppetry with jointed wooden figures about a foot and a half high, worked from above to a sung narrative with mardala and harmonium. Ganjam is one of the two Odia string-puppet districts, and the number of working troupes is now very small.
Bonbibir Pala	Sundarbans	अनुष्ठान	An all-night dramatised recitation of the Bonbibi Johuranama, staged in a village yard on a bare platform with harmonium, dhol and kartal. It runs from Bonbibi's arrival in the forest through the Dukhey episode to the settlement with Dakshin Rai, and the audience knows every line. Performers are not professionals; the same people go into the forest the next week.
Jhumur and village dance at the melas	Sundarbans	लोक	Song-and-dance troupes brought in from the mainland for the fair season, playing to island audiences. The form is not local; the market for it is.
Dhunuchi naach	Sundarbans	अनुष्ठान	Danced with an earthen censer of burning coconut fibre, as everywhere in the delta. At the forest shrines the same censer is used to smoke the image before a party leaves for the forest.
Perini Sivatandavam	Telangana	शास्त्रीय	A vigorous solo male form reconstructed in the twentieth century from sculpture on the Ramappa and Thousand Pillar temples and from the Nrittaratnavali of Jayapa Senani, the Kakatiya general who wrote a dance treatise. It is fair to call it a reconstruction rather than an unbroken lineage, and the sculpture is the primary source.
Bathukamma circle	Telangana	अनुष्ठान	Not a choreographed dance so much as a sustained clapping circle around the flower stacks, moving anticlockwise, with a call-and-response song line and a rhythm that accelerates through the evening.
Perantalu and Bonalu procession dance	Telangana	अनुष्ठान	Women carry the offering pot on the head to the goddess's temple while a bare-chested male figure, the Pothuraju, dances ahead of the procession with a whip and turmeric. The pot must not be set down.
Oggu Dolu and Dappu	Telangana	लोक	Frame-drum ensembles that lead every village procession on the plateau. The dappu is a shallow single-headed drum of hide over a wooden ring, played with two sticks of different weight so one hand keeps time and the other cuts across it.
Gussadi	Telangana	जनजातीय	Dancers in peacock-feather headdresses, deer horn and cowries move through a village-to-village circuit over several days during the Dandari festival. The costume is assembled once and kept for a lifetime.
Lambadi	Telangana	जनजातीय	A circle dance in full mirror-worked skirts, with a stooping and rising step that makes the coin and cowrie work sound in time. The songs are in Gor Boli, not Telugu.
Kolatam	Telangana	लोक	Stick dance in concentric rings, the outer ring moving against the inner so that each striker meets a different partner every beat. Common across Telugu country and danced here to Bathukamma and jatara songs.
Bharatanatyam	Tondaimandalam	शास्त्रीय	The solo dance of the Tamil country, reconstituted in Madras in the 1930s from the sadir repertoire of the temple dancer lineages and moved onto the proscenium stage and into an institution. The transmission is contested and the shift is not a neutral one — the repertoire survived, the community that held it largely did not, and the argument about that is live and worth knowing before watching a performance.
Therukoothu	Tondaimandalam	अनुष्ठान	Street theatre in the round, performed all night in heavy costume and towering headgear, working through the Mahabharata episode by episode across successive nights and culminating in a fire-walk. It is liturgy rather than entertainment; the performance is an obligation the village owes the goddess.
Poikkal kudirai	Tondaimandalam	लोक	Dummy-horse dance — the performer wears a light cane and cloth horse at the waist and dances the animal, often on stilts inside the legs.
Karagattam and kavadi attam	Tondaimandalam	लोक	A balanced pot and a carried arch, both danced. The kavadi is a vow being discharged in public; the karagam began as a water offering and now runs largely as a booked performance.
Silambam	Tondaimandalam	युद्धकला	A staff-fighting form, performed at festivals in circular patterns at speed.
Mohiniyattam	Travancore & Kuttanad	शास्त्रीय	The lasya solo form, danced in off-white and gold with a knot of hair at the left temple, built on a continuous swaying torso and a soft, low-to-the-ground use of space. Its repertoire was organised under Travancore court patronage in Swathi Thirunal's reign, fell almost entirely out of practice in the later nineteenth century, and was reconstructed from surviving performers in the twentieth. What is danced now is a recovery, and its practitioners say so.
Kathakali, thekkan sampradayam	Travancore & Kuttanad	शास्त्रीय	The southern Kathakali line associated with Kaplingadu Namboothiri and carried by Travancore patronage, distinguishable from the northern Kalluvazhi school in make-up detail, in the handling of the attakatha text and in a more overtly dramatic choreography. It is one form argued two ways along a hundred kilometres of coast.
Padayani	Travancore & Kuttanad	अनुष्ठान	A night-long propitiation of Bhadrakali danced in painted areca-sheath kolams — Bhairavi, Kaalan, Yakshi, Pakshi and Marutha among them — to the flat thappu drum and a call-and-response of verses. Kadammanitta, Othera and Kottangal hold the best-known ones. The kolam is built and destroyed within the festival; nothing is kept.
Velakali	Travancore & Kuttanad	युद्धकला	Men in medieval Travancore battle dress with wooden shield and short sword advancing and retreating in ranks in front of the shrine, to drum. It is a re-enactment of a military parade rather than a dance about one, and it retains its formation drill.
Thekkan kalari and adi murai	Travancore & Kuttanad	युद्धकला	The southern branch of Kerala's martial tradition, weighted towards empty-hand technique and marma point work rather than the long weapon sequences of the north, and continuous with the adi murai practised further south. Kalari masters are also bone-setters, and in many villages that is now the main way the tradition earns.
Kaikottikali at Onam	Travancore & Kuttanad	लोक	A slow clapping circle dance to Onappattu, danced around the flower carpet through the ten days of Onam. The step is simple by design; the singing is what is judged.
Hojagiri	Tripura Hills & Plains	लोक	Four to six dancers balance standing on an earthen pitcher, with a bottle and a lit lamp on the head and further lamps held in the hands. Only the lower body moves — hips, waist and knees carry the whole dance while the head and shoulders stay absolutely still, because they have to. A full performance runs about half an hour and mimes the agricultural year. It is the single most technically demanding folk dance in the region and the one that travels furthest outside it.
Garia dance	Tripura Hills & Plains	अनुष्ठान	Danced around the Garia — a bamboo pole dressed as the deity — through the seven days and nights of the festival, as the pole is carried between households. The dance is the worship rather than an accompaniment to it, and the deity is asked for a good jhum year rather than for anything abstract.
Lebang Boomani	Tripura Hills & Plains	लोक	Men beat bamboo clappers in rhythm to drive the brightly coloured lebang insects out of the newly sown plot; women dance in pursuit of them. It is a pest-control operation that became choreography — one of very few dances anywhere whose original purpose was to make a specific noise at a specific insect.
Mamita	Tripura Hills & Plains	लोक	A thanksgiving dance performed when the new rice is in, with the whole village taking part rather than a trained troupe. It closes the agricultural cycle that Garia opens in April.
Hai-Hak	Tripura Hills & Plains	लोक	A post-harvest dance of the Halam, who are Kuki-Chin speakers within this region — which is why the movement vocabulary reads closer to the hill dances to the east than to the Kokborok dances beside it.
Bizu dance	Tripura Hills & Plains	लोक	Danced across the three days of the Chakma new year, alongside the making of pachon. The Chakma are Buddhist and speak an Indo-Aryan language written in its own script, so their calendar and their dance sit inside this region without belonging to either of its two main systems.
Sangrai and the Owa bamboo dance	Tripura Hills & Plains	लोक	A water festival with dance, and a bamboo dance in which performers step between clapped poles — the same structural idea as Cheraw in the hills to the east, arrived here by way of an Arakanese rather than a Kuki-Chin route.
Cheraw on the Jampui ridge	Tripura Hills & Plains	लोक	The bamboo dance of the Mizo hills, performed at the northern end of this region by the ridge villages — the clearest single marker that the Jampui crest belongs culturally to the hills east of it.
Dhamail	Tripura Hills & Plains	लोक	A circle of women singing and clapping in step, common to the Bengali households of this plain and to Sylhet on the other side of the ranges. It is sung rather than drummed, and the same songs are current on both sides.
Bhuta Kola	Tulu Nadu	अनुष्ठान	A night-long invocation in which a named spirit — Panjurli the boar, Guliga, Jumadi, the deified twins Koti and Chennaya, Kalkuda and Kallurti — is called into the body of a performer. The performer is costumed, painted, handed a mirror to see the deity in his own face, and then dances until possession shows as a tremor. From that point he is addressed as the daiva, not as himself: he hears complaints, settles land and family disputes, and gives a binding utterance that the village treats as judgement. Landholding households commission the Kola; the performers who become the gods for the night come from communities those same households rank below them, and both facts are held together without contradiction.
Nagamandala	Tulu Nadu	अनुष्ठान	An all-night serpent ritual danced around an enormous coloured floor drawing of an entwined naga made in dry pigments, with two performers — one who sings and one who is possessed — circling until the drawing is erased by their feet. Expensive enough that a family may hold one only once in decades.
Aati Kalenja	Tulu Nadu	लोक	A single costumed figure who walks house to house through the wettest, hungriest month with an umbrella of palm leaf, dancing to a drum to drive out sickness and receiving rice. The visit is the point: it is the one figure that appears when nothing else in the ritual calendar can be held.
Siri Jatre	Tulu Nadu	अनुष्ठान	Women assemble at a Siri shrine and enter possession together as figures from the Siri epic, speaking as those women and being answered by a male elder who takes the role of the ancestor. It is the region's one mass ritual in which the possessed are almost entirely women, and it has been studied as a channel for grievances that ordinary household authority does not admit.
Karadi Vesha	Tulu Nadu	लोक	Men painted head to foot as bears, dancing to a fast tase drum in the street processions. A twentieth-century urban form with no ritual claim at all, and the most popular thing on the street when it appears.
Odissi	Utkal	शास्त्रीय	The classical form of this coast, and one whose modern history should be stated plainly: what is danced today was assembled in the 1950s. A group of teachers and scholars — Kelucharan Mohapatra, Pankaj Charan Das, Deba Prasad Das, Mayadhar Raut and others, with the writer and critic circle around them — worked from three surviving sources: the repertoire of the maharis, the temple dancers whose practice was by then almost gone; the gotipua akhadas, boys trained as dancers in the villages around Puri; and the sculpture and the Abhinaya Chandrika text. The tribhanga stance and the chauka square are drawn from the temple images. It was recognised nationally as a classical form in the late 1950s. Calling it ancient without saying that is a misdescription; the reconstruction was real scholarship and does not need the exaggeration.
Gotipua	Utkal	लोक	Trained in akhadas from around the age of six, gotipuas dance in pairs with an acrobatic vocabulary — bandha nrutya — that folds the body into shapes taken directly from temple sculpture. A boy's career ends with puberty. Raghurajpur maintains akhadas and is where most visitors see it.
Mahari	Utkal	अनुष्ठान	The temple dancers, whose service included dancing the Gita Govinda before the deity at the night ritual. The institution declined through the twentieth century and effectively ended within living memory — the last surviving mahari of the temple died in 2015. Much of Odissi's abhinaya derives from what could be recorded of their practice.
Chaiti Ghoda	Utkal	लोक	A dancer carries a cloth-and-bamboo horse frame at the waist and moves to dhol and mahuri while a pair sing and speak the accompanying story of Basuli, the community's deity. Performed house to house through the fishing villages of the Puri and Kendrapara coast.
Sankha and Dhuduki processional dance	Utkal	लोक	The processional forms that accompany a deity through streets — conch, cymbal, drum and a loose dancing crowd. Structurally simple, and the commonest live performance anyone in the region actually sees.
Dhimsa	Uttarandhra	जनजातीय	A circle dance in which the line links arms at the waist and moves sideways in a slow, insistent step to the mori and tudumu drums, with the tempo raised over several hours rather than within a piece. The same dance is danced across the plateau into Koraput; the state line runs through the middle of the form and does nothing to it.
Thappeta Gullu	Uttarandhra	लोक	A drum dance specific to this coast: a heavy tappeta drum is slung at the waist, beaten with both hands and with sticks, and the dancers move in a crouch with the drum swinging, working up to acrobatic leaps. It is performed to invoke rain and to propitiate Gangamma, which is a fairly direct statement about a region that irrigates from tanks rather than canals.
Kolatam	Uttarandhra	लोक	Stick dancing in concentric circles, with the pattern of strikes rather than the footwork carrying the complexity. Common across the Telugu country and taught here as a schools item.
Sirimanu	Uttarandhra	अनुष्ठान	Not a dance but a ritual spectacle organised like one. A long, slender tree trunk is mounted on a cart with a priest bound to its far end, high above the crowd, and the whole assembly is drawn three times past the fort. The tree is selected by dream instruction, felled and used once.
Dandar	Vidarbha	जनजातीय	A men's dance in a moving line or circle to drum and flute, performed over several nights during the Diwali period, with troupes moving between villages. It carries narrative and comic sections as well as pure dance, which is why it sits on the boundary between dance and theatre.
Rela	Vidarbha	जनजातीय	A call-and-response song and circle dance with linked arms, driven by the dhol and the tudumi drum. The word names the song form as much as the dance.
Gedi	Vidarbha	जनजातीय	A dance performed on bamboo stilts. It begins as a practical way to cross flooded ground and becomes a competitive display, which is a fairly common route for a folk form.
Dhemsa	Vidarbha	जनजातीय	A linked-arm line dance moving in a slow sideways step, shared with the Bastar and Koraput country to the east rather than with anything in Marathi Maharashtra.
Lezim and Dhangari Gaja	Vidarbha	लोक	The percussive lezim-frame drill of the western districts and the shepherds' spiral dance around a dhol. Both belong to Marathi country broadly; the Payanghat versions are indistinguishable from Marathwada's.
Lengi	Vidarbha	जनजातीय	A clapping circle dance in full mirrored dress, sung in Gor Boli.

शिल्प 563

नाम	क्षेत्र	प्रकार	टिप्पणी
Padauk wood craft	Andaman Islands	जीआई टैग	The islands' best-known craft product — bowls, furniture and carved panels in a timber that grows nowhere else. Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024, in the first batch of GI tags the territory ever received.
Andaman and Nicobar coconut	Andaman Islands	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024. The listing matters less for the coconut than for what it signals — a territory whose products had no formal protection until the 2020s.
Shell and coral craft	Andaman Islands	Port Blair	A large tourist trade with a real legal problem inside it: several of the showiest shells and all corals are protected under the Wildlife Protection Act, and buying them is an offence. Government emporia sell only permitted material.
Cane and bamboo work	Andaman Islands	North and Middle Andaman	Settler-village craft using island material, taught through the administration's rural industries programmes rather than through any inherited island lineage.
Karen boat building	Andaman Islands	Mayabunder and Webi	The Karen came to the Andamans as forest workers and boatmen, and their villages have supplied small-boat builders and crews to the islands ever since.
Coconut shell craft	Andaman Islands	Territory-wide	The by-product craft of a coconut economy, made everywhere coconut is processed.
Bhagalpur silk weaving	Anga & Seemanchal	जीआई टैग	Tens of thousands of looms across the city and its villages, producing the textured wild silk sold across India as Bhagalpuri. The trade has been badly squeezed by power looms and by cheaper imported yarn.
Manjusha art	Anga & Seemanchal	Bhagalpur	One of the few Indian folk painting traditions that is explicitly narrative and sequential — the panels tell the Bihula story in order, and were traditionally made for the festival and then immersed.
Sikki and bamboo craft	Anga & Seemanchal	Purnia, Katihar, Araria	Household craft across the wetland districts, including the conical fish traps used in the flooded fields every monsoon.
Makhana processing	Anga & Seemanchal	Purnia, Katihar, Araria	Seemanchal has become the largest producing belt in the country alongside Mithila, with processing units now appearing beside the traditional village work.
Munger metalwork	Anga & Seemanchal	Munger	A metalworking town since the eighteenth century, when it supplied the East India Company's arsenal — a skill base that also produced a long-running illicit small-arms problem the town is very tired of being known for.
Tea cultivation in Kishanganj	Anga & Seemanchal	Kishanganj	Bihar's only tea belt, an extension of the Dooars and Nepal terai plantations, grown largely by small farmers since the 1990s.
Firozabad glass and bangles	Antarved Doab	जीआई टैग	The industry that supplies most of India's glass bangles, along with chandelier parts and scientific glassware. Furnace towns run day and night; the sector's child-labour and heat-exposure record has been a public issue for decades.
Kannauj attar	Antarved Doab	जीआई टैग	A perfume town of several hundred distilleries whose signature product, mitti attar, is the smell of the first rain distilled from baked earth. Registered as a geographical indication.
Saharanpur wood carving	Antarved Doab	जीआई टैग	A carving cluster of tens of thousands of artisans producing furniture and screens for domestic and export markets. A registered geographical indication.
Khurja pottery	Antarved Doab	जीआई टैग	Blue-and-white and polychrome glazed ware from a town that has been potting for centuries and now supplies hotel and laboratory ceramics alongside its traditional lines.
Mainpuri tarkashi	Antarved Doab	जीआई टैग	Brass-wire inlay, historically on the wooden sandals and boxes of a small number of families, and now on trays, doors and furniture.
Aligarh locks and hardware	Antarved Doab	Aligarh	A lock-making town since the eighteenth century, supplying most of India's hardware market from thousands of small workshops.
Moonj grass craft	Antarved Doab	Prayagraj	Coiled baskets, boxes and mats made almost entirely by women in the villages around Prayagraj, using a grass that grows on the river sands.
Kanpur leather and saddlery	Antarved Doab	Kanpur	A nineteenth-century industry built to supply army boots and harness that became one of India's largest leather clusters, with a heavy environmental cost along the Ganga.
Meerut sports goods and scissors	Antarved Doab	Meerut	A cluster making cricket bats, balls and sporting equipment, alongside a forged-scissor trade in the old city.
Chikankari	Awadh	जीआई टैग	The largest hand-embroidery cluster in India, involving an estimated two to three lakh workers, most of them women working from home for piece rates through a contractor chain.
Zardozi	Awadh	जीआई टैग	Court metal-thread embroidery that survived the court by moving into the bridal and costume market.
Mukaish or badla work	Awadh	Lucknow	An almost-extinct craft, once used to light a chikan dupatta from within. A handful of ageing badla-workers remain around Chowk.
Bone and horn carving	Awadh	Lucknow	The workshops that carved ivory before the 1972 ban converted to bone and horn and kept the lattice vocabulary intact.
Ittar blending	Awadh	Lucknow	Lucknow's perfume houses are the retail and blending end of a trade whose distilleries are concentrated at Kannauj; the signature note here is the rain-on-earth mitti attar.
Chinhat pottery	Awadh	Lucknow (Chinhat)	A twentieth-century pottery cluster on the eastern edge of the city, now much reduced.
Kol and Gond bamboo work	Bagelkhand	Rewa, Satna, Sidhi, Shahdol	Working equipment made to order for cultivators, and the largest craft employment in the region by number of hands. Almost none of it reaches a market outside the district.
Sal leaf plate pressing	Bagelkhand	Shahdol, Umaria, Sidhi	A minor-forest-produce trade, largely run by women's self-help groups and forest cooperatives, that collapsed under plastic and has partly recovered on the back of plastic bans.
Terracotta of the Son valley	Bagelkhand	Sidhi, Shahdol	Votive terracotta offered at village shrines, made by potter families to order and left in the open to weather. The same tradition runs east into Chota Nagpur and south into Gondwana.
Sandstone carving	Bagelkhand	Rewa, Satna	Vindhyan sandstone splits cleanly along bedding planes, which makes it excellent for slabs and lintels and difficult for deep undercutting — the reason Bagelkhand's temple sculpture is shallower and more linear than Khajuraho's, which used a better-quarried stone from Panna.
Rewa Sundarja mango	Bagelkhand	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2023 alongside the Morena gajak, and since exported commercially. It is the region's only registered indication.
Cane and bamboo work	Barak Valley	Cachar, Hailakandi, Karimganj	The largest craft employment in the valley, and almost entirely a household activity rather than a workshop one. Sitalpati mat weaving from murta cane is the most refined branch of it — a mat split so fine it is cool to lie on — and it is shared with the Tripura and Sylhet plains rather than owned by this valley.
Manipuri weaving	Barak Valley	Cachar	Worked at home by women in the Manipuri and Bishnupriya Manipuri villages of the Cachar plain, on looms brought across the hills after the Manipuri displacement of the 1820s. The tradition is unbroken; the market for it is thin.
Terracotta and clay work	Barak Valley	Cachar, Karimganj	Kumhar households making water pots, storage jars and the sealed pots that hidol is fermented in, plus votive figures for Manasa and Kali worship. The fermentation pot is the piece that keeps the trade alive.
Tea processing	Barak Valley	Cachar, Hailakandi	The valley is Assam's second tea district, distinct from the Brahmaputra belt and generally producing a lighter, less malty liquor. Planting began here in the 1850s; the Assam Orthodox geographical indication covers Assam-grown orthodox tea and is not a Barak-specific mark.
Boat building	Barak Valley	Cachar, Karimganj	A trade that exists because a third of the year is spent on water. The flat-bottomed nouka of the haors is built to be poled through standing paddy, not rowed in a channel.
Bastar Dhokra	Bastar	जीआई टैग	Cast by the Ghadwa community, historically for ritual objects — measuring bowls, lamps, deity figures, anklets — and now largely for sale. The wound-thread modelling is what gives Bastar work its corded surface and distinguishes it from the smoother Bengal and Odisha lost-wax traditions. Registered as a geographical indication in 2008, with a separate logo registration in 2014.
Bastar Iron Craft	Bastar	जीआई टैग	Traditionally lamps, ritual tridents, agricultural blades and shrine figures; since the mid twentieth century also large decorative panels and furniture. Registered as a geographical indication in 2008.
Bastar Wooden Craft	Bastar	जीआई टैग	Memorial pillars, house posts, ceremonial doors, deity figures and the carved combs young men made as courtship gifts. Practised by Bhatra and Badhai carpenter households. Registered as a geographical indication in 2008.
Bastar terracotta	Bastar	Nagarnar, Kondagaon	Votive horses, elephants, snakes and Nandis, made to a commission when a vow is fulfilled and left standing at the village shrine to weather. Nagarnar's potters are the best-known makers. The figures are not intended to last, which is why the shrine yards accumulate them in layers.
Bell and gong metalwork	Bastar	Kondagaon, Jagdalpur	Cattle bells, dance bells and small gongs — a working trade that shares smiths and scrap supply with the Dhokra casters and is rarely counted separately from them.
Bamboo and siyadi fibre work	Bastar	Across the region	Grain bins, fish traps, winnowing fans, umbrellas and the leaf-cups that every haat serves food in. The leaf-cup is the region's disposable plate and is stitched fresh each market day.
Kosa silk weaving	Bastar	Kondagaon, Jagdalpur	A forest-based sericulture rather than a farmed one — the cocoons are gathered from wild host trees. The state's Kosa geographical indication sits with Champa, not with Bastar.
Ilkal saree weaving	Bayaluseeme	जीआई टैग	A town that weaves one garment for a whole region, on pit looms in household workshops, with a red temple-form pallu that is the immediate identifier. Registered as a geographical indication.
Guledgudda khana weaving	Bayaluseeme	जीआई टैग	Cloth woven to be cut into one garment and no other. Registered as a geographical indication, and squeezed hard by power-loom imitations sold under the same name.
Kasuti embroidery	Bayaluseeme	जीआई टैग	Traditionally worked by women on their own sarees and on the black chandrakali worn at particular occasions. Registered as a geographical indication, and now largely produced through self-help groups rather than in households.
Navalgund durrie weaving	Bayaluseeme	जीआई टैग	A craft carried by a very small number of families, historically associated with weavers who moved into the town centuries ago. Registered as a geographical indication and genuinely endangered.
Dharwad pedha making	Bayaluseeme	जीआई टैग	Brought to Dharwad in the nineteenth century by a family that migrated from Unnao in the north and has made it in the same lane since. Registered as a geographical indication in the foodstuff category.
Kumartuli idol making	Bengal Delta	Kolkata (Kumartuli)	A single north Kolkata neighbourhood that supplies Durga, Kali, Saraswati and Jagaddhatri idols to the city, the districts and the diaspora. The images are unfired and made to dissolve on immersion, so the entire craft is designed around a product with a ten-day life. The eyes are painted last, on Mahalaya, in a separate rite.
Krishnanagar clay figures	Bengal Delta	Nadia (Ghurni, Krishnanagar)	Realistic figures of people at work — a fisherwoman, a cobbler, a barber — modelled at a small scale and fired. The potter families were settled at Ghurni by Maharaja Krishnachandra in 1728, and the craft's distinguishing feature is that it is portraiture, not iconography.
Sholapith craft	Bengal Delta	Nadia, Murshidabad and Malda	The white filigree behind the Durga idol — daker saj — and the bridal topor. The material is lighter than polystyrene and cannot be carved wrong twice, since a mis-cut sheet is waste.
Bell metal and brass at Khagra	Bengal Delta	Murshidabad (Khagra, Baranagar, Kandi)	Plates, water vessels and the thala-bati sets a Bengali household historically married into. Khagra's market is still the wholesale point for the trade, though aluminium and steel took most of its volume.
Conch shell cutting	Bengal Delta	Nadia, North 24 Parganas and Howrah	Shakha bangles for married women and the blown conch used at arati. The delta has no conch of its own; the raw shell has been shipped up the coast for centuries and cut here, which makes it a craft defined by a trade route.
Nakshi kantha embroidery	Bengal Delta	Nadia, Murshidabad and the eastern delta	A recycling craft that became a narrative one. Because the thread is pulled from the same old saris, the colours are limited to whatever the household had, and the ripple in the finished ground is a by-product of the stitch tension rather than a decoration.
Terracotta temple facing	Bengal Delta	Bardhaman (Kalna, Katwa) and Hooghly	The delta shares the brick-and-terracotta temple technique with Rarh because neither has building stone, but the delta's temples run to different subjects — river scenes, boats, European soldiers, Portuguese ships — recording what the builders could actually see from the bank.
Madurkathi mats	Bengal Delta	Purba Medinipur	Floor mats woven from a sedge that grows in the estuarine belt, registered as a geographical indication. The masland grade was a court commission under Murshidabad's nawabs and is still made in small quantity.
Banarasi silk weaving	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	जीआई टैग	The largest handloom silk cluster in India, employing several lakh people. Most weavers are Muslim Ansari families; most traders are Hindu; and power looms, Chinese silk yarn and Surat copies have squeezed the craft hard over the last two decades.
Bhadohi carpet knotting	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	जीआई टैग	India's largest carpet-making belt and a substantial export earner, built on a village outwork system with a long-scrutinised child-labour history and a certification regime that grew out of it.
Gulabi meenakari	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	जीआई टैग	A rose-pink enamelling technique held by a small number of families in Varanasi, distinct from the Jaipur blue-and-green tradition it descends from.
Varanasi metal repousse and wooden lacquerware	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	जीआई टैग	Temple vessels, lamps and images in beaten metal, and the bright lacquered wooden toys sold in every ghat lane.
Nizamabad black pottery	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	जीआई टैग	A pottery tradition of a single town, and among the most distinctive-looking ceramics in India.
Chunar sandstone carving	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Mirzapur (Chunar)	The quarry that supplied the stone for the Ashokan pillars, including the lion capital at Sarnath. It is still worked, mostly for building stone.
Banarasi paan	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Varanasi	A whole social institution rather than a product — the paan shop is where the city's conversation happens, and the fold and filling are adjusted per customer.
Sualkuchi weaving	Brahmaputra Valley	Kamrup	A whole town given over to silk handloom, sometimes called the Manchester of the East. Muga and pat mekhela chadors come out of thousands of household looms here.
Sarthebari bell metal	Brahmaputra Valley	जीआई टैग	The bell-metal centre of Assam, making the xorai — a footed offering tray with a cover, given as a mark of honour — along with bati bowls and ban-bati.
Majuli mask-making	Brahmaputra Valley	जीआई टैग	Masks of bamboo, clay and cloth made at Samaguri Sattra for Bhaona performances, some large enough for the performer to stand inside and with moving jaws and eyes. GI registered in 2024.
Majuli manuscript painting	Brahmaputra Valley	जीआई टैग	Illustrated sanchipat manuscripts painted on treated aloe-wood bark in the sattras, in an unbroken line from the 16th century. GI registered in 2024.
Asharikandi terracotta	Brahmaputra Valley	जीआई टैग	Terracotta and pottery by the Hira community, best known for the hatima putul — a mother-and-child doll figure.
Cane and bamboo	Brahmaputra Valley	—	Japi hats, murah stools, jaakoi fish traps, and the woven partitions of a traditional Assam-type house, which is built to flex rather than resist in an earthquake.
Sanjhi	Braj	Vrindavan, Mathura	A temple art of the Pitru Paksha fortnight, once made by priests as an offering and now sustained by a very small number of families in Vrindavan.
Deity poshak and shringar work	Braj	Vrindavan (Loi Bazaar)	An entire bazaar given over to clothing and ornamenting deities, supplying temples and household shrines across India and the Vaishnav diaspora.
Mathura stone carving	Braj	Mathura, Rupbas and Sikri quarries	The Kushan-era Mathura school was one of the two places where the Buddha was first shown in human form, and the red sandstone it used travelled as far as Sarnath. Carving continues locally for temple work.
Braj metal deity ware	Braj	Mathura, Vrindavan	A pilgrim-market trade producing everything a household shrine needs, at every price point.
Khoya and peda making	Braj	Mathura	Effectively a craft cluster — Mathura's khoya mandi supplies the sweet trade across western Uttar Pradesh and Delhi.
Bell metal ware of Datia and Tikamgarh	Bundelkhand	जीआई टैग	Domestic and ritual vessels, lamps, bells and measures. The craft holds a registered geographical indication covering both districts jointly, which is unusual — most GI grants name a single place.
Mahoba gaura patthar hastshilp	Bundelkhand	जीआई टैग	Bowls, lamps, boxes and figures carved from a stone found around Mahoba. It received a geographical indication in 2023, one of a group of seven Uttar Pradesh crafts registered together that year.
Kalpi handmade paper	Bundelkhand	जीआई टैग	A hand paper-making cluster on the Yamuna at Kalpi, supplying stationery, art paper and packaging. It was registered as a geographical indication in 2023.
Shazar stone of Banda	Bundelkhand	Banda	Found in the Ken riverbed near Banda and cut into rings and pendants. Each stone's "tree" is a mineral accident and cannot be repeated, which is the whole appeal. The craft is small, ageing and has been the subject of protection efforts; treat any claim of a registered indication as unverified.
Khajuraho and Panna stone carving	Bundelkhand	Chhatarpur, Panna	A living carving trade around Khajuraho supplying temple restoration, architectural work and the tourist market, staffed by families who also work on ASI conservation contracts.
Diamond cutting at Panna	Bundelkhand	Panna	A small cutting trade exists at Panna, but almost all Panna rough leaves for Surat to be cut. The region mines the stone and exports the value, which is the shape of most of its extractive economy.
Sirsi Supari	Canara Coast	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication for the areca of this upland belt, held through the growers' cooperative at Sirsi. The nut is not a food in the ordinary sense but it is the crop the entire upland economy is built on, and the grading craft is what the appellation protects.
Appemidi pickling	Canara Coast	जीआई टैग	The appemidi mango holds a geographical indication as a Karnataka appellation. The fruit comes from wild and semi-wild trees along the Aghanashini, Bedthi and Sharavathi, individual trees are named and inherited, and the state horticulture service has run conservation plantings because riverbank trees have been lost to submergence and clearing.
Siddi kawandi quilting	Canara Coast	Yellapur, Haliyal and Mundgod	A domestic textile made by Siddi women for household use, documented by researchers and shown in exhibitions from the 1990s onwards. It has no protected status and only a small organised market.
Yakshagana costume and headgear making	Canara Coast	Uttara Kannada and adjoining Udupi	A specialist trade supporting the troupes, with a handful of families making and repairing headgear and ornament sets that stay in use for decades. The maker's name travels with a good set.
Areca leaf-sheath ware	Canara Coast	Sirsi, Siddapur and Yellapur	A modern cottage industry built on a by-product that used to be burnt. It runs on small presses in garden villages and it exists because the areca palm sheds sheaths whether or not anybody has a use for them.
Boat building	Canara Coast	Karwar, Ankola, Honnavar and Bhatkal	Yards on the estuary banks still build and repair wooden fishing craft, though steel and fibreglass have taken the larger boats. The same yards historically built the coastal trading vessels that worked this shore.
Shell lime and cane work	Canara Coast	Aghanashini and Sharavathi estuaries	Lime from estuary shell went into plaster and into betel chewing; cane and bamboo work supplies the fishing and areca trades. Both are small, both are seasonal, and both depend on the estuary being left alone.
Chamba Rumal	Chenab Valley & Chamba	जीआई टैग	A court and household embroidery in which a painting school's compositions — raas-leela, Ramayana and Mahabharata scenes, hunting and marriage subjects — were transferred into silk. Patronised under Raja Umed Singh in the mid-eighteenth century, largely dormant by the twentieth, and revived from the 1970s onward by a documented programme that reconstructed original designs from museum pieces. Registered as a geographical indication in January 2007.
Chamba Chappal	Chenab Valley & Chamba	जीआई टैग	A light embroidered leather slipper made by a small number of families in and around Chamba town, registered as a geographical indication in 2021. The embroidery vocabulary overlaps with the rumal's.
Chamba metal art	Chenab Valley & Chamba	जीआई टैग	The living end of an unusually old lineage. The brass images at Bharmour and Chhatrari were cast in the seventh century for Raja Meru Varman and carry an inscription naming their maker, Gugga — one of the very few Indian sculptors of that period whose name survives. The contemporary craft, making temple images, masks, vessels and the Chamba thal, received a geographical indication in 2026.
Pahari miniature painting, Chamba school	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Chamba	The Chamba school takes shape in the eighteenth century when painters of the Seu and Nainsukh family settle here, and it feeds directly into the rumal. The Bhuri Singh Museum holds the principal collection, and a small number of painters still work in the technique in the town.
Chamba fountain slabs	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Chamba	Carved memorial slabs set up at water sources rather than at graves or cremation grounds, from roughly the tenth to the sixteenth century — the deceased is shown in the upper register with deities above and attendants below, and the merit accrues to whoever drinks. They are effectively a local architectural genre with no close parallel elsewhere in India.
Pahari wood carving	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Chamba (Bharmour, Churah, Pangi)	The seventh-century wooden temples at Bharmour and Chhatrari preserve carved doorframes that are among the oldest surviving wooden architecture in India, kept intact by deodar's resin content and by the valleys' inaccessibility. Village carpenters still work in a recognisably descended idiom.
Chikri wood turning	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Doda, Kishtwar, Bhaderwah	Widely practised in the Chenab valley, though the geographical indication for chikri woodcraft granted in 2023 belongs to Rajouri, on the far side of the Pir Panjal, and does not cover work made here.
Champa kosa silk	Chhattisgarh Plains	जीआई टैग	The region's one internationally known cloth, and the only registered geographical indication in this cultural region. The reeling and weaving are concentrated in a few Janjgir and Raigarh towns while the rearing happens across the forest fringe.
Bell metal and dhokra at Ektaal	Chhattisgarh Plains	Raigarh	Cast by Jhara households in and around Ektaal. The registered dhokra of Chhattisgarh is Bastar's, made at Kondagaon in a different cultural region; the Raigarh tradition is separate, older in this plain, and unregistered.
Village ironwork	Chhattisgarh Plains	Across the plain, and the Sarguja fringe	Agricultural tools, shrine lamps, tridents and votive figures made by village lohars. The famous central Indian wrought-iron craft with a geographical indication is Bastar's, from Kondagaon, and belongs to a different region; what the plain has is a working smithy tradition rather than a sculptural one.
Godna work	Chhattisgarh Plains	Janjgir-Champa, Sakti and the Mahanadi belt	Tattooing carried by the Ramnami and Devar communities among others. The Ramnami Samaj's practice of marking the body with the name of Ram, from around the end of the nineteenth century, is the most distinctive form of it, and its annual Bhajan Mela at Magh Purnima is when it is most visible.
Bamboo and sabai grass work	Chhattisgarh Plains	Sarguja, Jashpur and Korba	The craft of the northern rise, where forest replaces field. Sabai rope in particular is a cash product of the Sarguja fringe rather than a village-use item.
Votive terracotta	Chhattisgarh Plains	Across the plain	Left at village and clan shrines and then left to weather. The figures accumulate at a shrine over decades and are never repaired, so the shrine is a dated record of its own use.
Swamimalai bronze icons	Chola Nadu	जीआई टैग	Because the mould is destroyed to release the icon, every piece is a unique cast — there is no such thing as a reproduction, only a new carving. The sthapathis of Swamimalai work to the proportional canons of the Shilpa Shastras and trace their trade to the temple-building programmes of Rajaraja I. Registered in 2008-09.
Thanjavur painting	Chola Nadu	जीआई टैग	The high relief is what separates it from the Mysore painting it shares an ancestry with — Mysore keeps its gesso low and its landscapes elaborate, Thanjavur raises the gesso across large areas and keeps the figure frontal and static. Developed under the Thanjavur Maratha court and registered in 2007-08.
Thanjavur veena	Chola Nadu	जीआई टैग	Registered in 2012-13, and the first musical instrument in India to receive a geographical indication.
Narasingapettai nagaswaram	Chola Nadu	जीआई टैग	One village supplies most of the concert-grade nagaswarams in South India. The long pari instrument replaced the shorter timiri in the twentieth century when players began performing to larger halls. Registered in 2022.
Thanjavur thalaiyatti bommai	Chola Nadu	जीआई टैग	The nodding-head doll, made in pairs as a bride-and-groom set and given at weddings and at Golu. Registered in 2008-09.
Thanjavur art plate	Chola Nadu	जीआई टैग	A nineteenth-century Maratha-court presentation object that survived as a wedding gift. Registered in 2007-08.
Nachiarkoil kuthuvilakku	Chola Nadu	जीआई टैग	The standing temple lamp of the Tamil house, made by the Kammalar smiths of one village. Registered in 2012-13.
Thanjavur netti works	Chola Nadu	जीआई टैग	Pith models of the Big Temple and of Tirupati, made for pilgrims and for temple decoration. Registered in 2021.
Palm-leaf manuscript conservation	Chola Nadu	Thanjavur	Not a craft for sale but a live technical tradition, sustained at the Saraswathi Mahal Library, which holds tens of thousands of palm-leaf manuscripts and is one of the country's designated manuscript conservation centres.
Sohrai and Khovar painting	Chota Nagpur Plateau	जीआई टैग	Done by women of Kurmi, Santal, Munda, Oraon, Ganju, Teli and Prajapati households on the outer and inner walls of their own houses — Sohrai at the cattle festival after the harvest, Khovar on the marriage chamber before a wedding. The motifs are cattle, forest, wheel and plant, and they repeat forms found in the prehistoric rock shelters of the same district, which is the connection Bulu Imam spent decades documenting. Registered as a geographical indication in 2020.
Paitkar scroll painting	Chota Nagpur Plateau	East Singhbhum — Amadubi	Practised by Chitrakar families in a handful of villages, with Amadubi the surviving centre. Subjects run from the Ramayana and Krishna cycles to Santal creation narratives and the journey of the soul after death. Closely related to the Jadopatia tradition of Santal Pargana. Very few working painters remain.
Seraikela Chhau masks	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Seraikela-Kharsawan	Made by hereditary Sutradhar households in Seraikela town for the Chaitra Parva dance and, increasingly, for sale. The mask is a functioning instrument — its weight and balance determine what the dancer can do.
Lac work	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Khunti, Ranchi, Simdega	Jharkhand produces most of India's lac. It is an insect resin harvested twice a year from host trees, and the same material supplies bangles, sealing wax, shellac and traditional inlay. The national institute for lac and natural resins is at Namkum, near Ranchi.
Bamboo and sabai grass work	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Across the plateau	Grain bins, mats, fish traps, winnowing fans and rope. Sabai grass rope from the Singhbhum and Odisha border villages is a cash crop as much as a craft material.
Bell metal and Dhokra casting	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Khunti, Ranchi, Dumka	Practised by Malhar and Tanti caster households, mostly for ritual lamps, measuring bowls and figures. It is the same technique as Bastar's registered Dhokra, without the registration and with a smoother finish.
Tasar reeling and weaving	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Seraikela-Kharsawan, West Singhbhum, Godda	A forest-based sericulture — cocoons are reared on standing trees rather than in sheds. The finished cloth often leaves the region undyed and is dyed and finished elsewhere, which is where the margin goes.
Stone and wood carving	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Dumka, Sahibganj, Hazaribagh	Grave and memorial stones, house posts, and the carved wooden figure-necks of Santal banam fiddles. The memorial stones set at Santal burial grounds are the region's least-photographed sculpture tradition.
Kolhapuri Chappal	Desh	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2018–19, held jointly across Maharashtra and Karnataka — a GI whose defined area deliberately crosses a state line because the craft cluster does. The work is done overwhelmingly by Chamar and Dhor artisan households, and the traditional tanning is the part of the process now hardest to sustain.
Kolhapur Jaggery	Desh	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2013–14. Kolhapur's gul is graded and auctioned at its own market yard and is sold as far as Gujarat and Rajasthan.
Miraj musical instruments	Desh	Sangli (Miraj)	A cluster of a few dozen families, mostly of the Sitarmaker lineage, that has supplied Hindustani classical musicians for over a century. The supply chain is unusually local — the gourd, the wood and the ear are all within one district.
Sangli turmeric	Desh	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2018–19. Sangli's market yard has been one of India's principal turmeric trading centres since the nineteenth century; much of what it trades is now grown elsewhere and cured and sold here.
Kolhapuri Saaj silverwork	Desh	Kolhapur	The region's signature ornament, made in the lanes around Kolhapur's Gujari bazaar. Each pendant is a named creature or object, and a full saaj is a set rather than a design.
Mahabaleshwar strawberry	Desh	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2010–11. The plateau supplies the great majority of India's strawberries, from an area small enough to drive across in an hour.
Purandar fig and Waghya ghevada	Desh	जीआई टैग	Both registered in 2015–17 — the Purandar fig from the fort's dry slopes, and Waghya ghevada, a dark-mottled bean of the Satara uplands. They are examples of a GI protecting a dryland crop rather than a luxury one.
Ajara Ghansal rice and Mangalwedha jowar	Desh	जीआई टैग	Ajara Ghansal is a short-grained aromatic rice grown only in the ghat-foot pocket where rainfall allows paddy at all. Mangalwedha jowar is a large-grained rabi sorghum from the dryland east — the region's bread grain, GI-protected, from the taluka where Chokhamela lived.
Blue Pottery of Jaipur	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	जीआई टैग	A Persian and Central Asian technique that reached Jaipur through the Mughal courts and survives at scale essentially only here. The trade had almost died by the mid-twentieth century and was revived from the 1960s around the painter Kripal Singh Shekhawat, with backing from the crafts board and the Jaipur palace.
Sanganeri hand block print	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	जीआई टैग	The finer half of the Jaipur printing trade, historically supplying the higher end of the market and now largely supplying export buyers. Most of what is sold as Sanganeri in the city is screen-printed.
Bagru hand block print	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	जीआई टैग	The Chhipa printers of one quarter of Bagru village, working a coarser and more geometric vocabulary than Sanganer's. The natural-dye process is genuinely still used here, but so is the chemical one, and the difference is not visible in the shop.
Meenakari and kundan	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Jaipur	Jaipur's enamelling arrived with craftsmen brought from Lahore under Man Singh I and became the city's signature. The Jaipur red enamel is a technical marker — the colour is difficult and other centres avoid it.
Lac bangles	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Jaipur	Made by the Manihar community in a single lane off Tripolia Bazaar, which the 1727 plan assigned to the trade. The sizing is done in front of the customer, which is why the shops have not moved online.
Sanganer handmade paper	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Jaipur (Sanganer)	The Kagzi papermakers of Sanganer, working alongside the printing trade in the same town, now the largest handmade paper cluster in India. Most of the raw material is offcuts from the garment industry.
Shekhawati fresco	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Jhunjhunu, Sikar, Churu	Several hundred painted havelis, chhatris, temples and wells across the Shekhawati towns, almost all built between about 1830 and 1930 by merchant families living elsewhere. It is the largest concentration of domestic wall painting in India and it has no statutory protection as a body.
Marble and stone image carving	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Jaipur	Concentrated on Khajane Walon ka Rasta, a street the city plan assigned to the trade, where images are cut for temple commissions across India and abroad. Silicosis among the carvers is a documented occupational problem in the trade.
Gem cutting and setting	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Jaipur	Jaipur is one of the world's principal centres for cutting coloured stones, particularly emerald, and the trade runs on verbal deals struck in the bazaar. It employs far more people in the region than any traditional craft and is almost entirely invisible to visitors walking past it.
CTC tea manufacture	Dooars & Terai	Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar and the Terai	This belt produces a large share of India's tea by volume, mostly as CTC sold by grade rather than by garden. Unlike Darjeeling on the ridge above, Dooars and Terai tea carries no geographical indication, which is a substantial part of why the same day's work is worth so much less here.
Kalonunia rice cultivation	Dooars & Terai	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2024. Grown in small acreages by households that kept the seed through the decades when nobody was paying for aroma.
Rajbanshi cane and bamboo work	Dooars & Terai	Across the Dooars and Terai	A working technology rather than a decorative craft. The fish traps in particular are designed around the behaviour of specific fish in specific depths of water.
Sitalpati mat weaving	Dooars & Terai	Western Dooars and Cooch Behar	A mat cool enough to sleep on through a foothill summer, and the standard gift at a Rajbanshi wedding.
Bodo and Mech handloom	Dooars & Terai	Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri forest fringe	Near-universal domestic weaving among Bodo-Kachari households, now partly commercialised through self-help-group clusters.
Wood and forest produce work	Dooars & Terai	The forest fringe villages	The building tradition of the belt — a house frame of sal posts, split-bamboo walls plastered with mud, and a thatch or corrugated roof, raised on a plinth against the flood.
Garhwali woodcarving and the tibari	Garhwal	Pauri, Tehri, Chamoli, Uttarkashi	A tibari is the visible measure of a family's standing, and the carving was done by hereditary carpenter lineages paid in grain. Migration has emptied the houses faster than the carving has decayed, and dismantled tibari panels now sell in the antiques trade — a straightforward transfer of heritage out of the region.
Ringaal basketry	Garhwal	Chamoli, Rudraprayag, Uttarkashi, Tehri	Practised chiefly by the Ruriyal and other artisan communities. The doko is still the standard load-carrier on paths where nothing wheeled can go, which is the only reason the craft has a functioning market at all.
Garhwal Qalam painting	Garhwal	Srinagar Garhwal, Tehri	The school begins with a Mughal-trained painter who came to the Garhwal court with the fugitive prince Suleiman Shikoh in the mid-seventeenth century and stayed. Mola Ram, painter and poet, is its best-known figure and its historian. It is a court art that outlived its court by being small and portable.
Stone and slate craft	Garhwal	Across the middle hills	A slate roof is a fifty-year roof and a tin roof is a fifteen-year one, but tin is carried up by truck and slate is not — which is why the roofline of the middle hills changed colour within one generation.
Koti Banal timber-and-stone building	Garhwal	Uttarkashi (Rajgarhi)	Named after two villages, and the clearest surviving example of an indigenous earthquake-resistant technology in the Himalaya. Several of the towers are old, none are being built new, and the technique is studied more by engineers than practised by masons.
Copper and bell metal work	Garhwal	Across Garhwal, supplied largely from the Almora workshops	The gagar water pot, the cooking vessel and the temple bell. Garhwal has long been a consumer of a craft whose main workshops sit across the watershed in Kumaon — one of the clearer pieces of evidence that the two regions traded constantly across a boundary they otherwise insist on.
Cane and bamboo work	Garo Hills	Across the Garo hills	Carrying baskets slung from a headstrap, granary bins, fish traps, mats, stools, water containers and the cooking tubes themselves. On a jhum plot a day's walk from the house, almost every tool is cut on site.
Dakmanda weaving	Garo Hills	जीआई टैग	Household weaving, done by women, producing the wrap cloth that is both everyday wear and formal dress. Granted a geographical indication in 2024.
Chubitchi brewing	Garo Hills	जीआई टैग	The rice beer that accompanies Wangala and every clan occasion, poured in libation before it is drunk. Granted a geographical indication in 2024 as Garo Chubitchi — an unusual case of a GI attaching to a home-brewed drink rather than to a commercial product.
Nakham processing	Garo Hills	Simsang and Ganol valleys	A household preservation craft that supplies the region's single most important flavouring. Traded across the hills and, in the foothills, down to the plains markets.
Wood carving and kima posts	Garo Hills	Across the Garo hills	Carved posts, kima, were raised in Songsarek practice to mark a death, and carved members were worked into the nokpante and the nokma's house. The tradition is now largely historical, and surviving examples are held in museums at Tura rather than standing in villages.
Blacksmithing for the jhum plot	Garo Hills	Across the Garo hills	The heavy chopping blade used to fell and dress a jhum plot is the one tool that has to be forged rather than cut from the forest, and village smiths existed to make and resharpen it.
Feni distilling	Goa & Gomantak	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2009, and the only Indian spirit protected as a regional appellation. Cashew is not native — the Portuguese brought it from Brazil in the sixteenth century and planted it to hold laterite slopes against erosion. The fruit was a by-product of the nut until somebody distilled it.
Azulejo tile painting	Goa & Gomantak	Panaji and Bardez	Blue-and-white narrative and address tiles, on churches, house facades and street signs. The technique is Portuguese and the practice in Goa is a twentieth-century commercial revival by studios in Panaji rather than an unbroken colonial-era trade.
Ghumot making	Goa & Gomantak	Bicholim and Ponda	A handful of potter families still throw the drum body, and the change of skin from monitor lizard to goat after wildlife protection law altered the instrument's tone — a documented and openly discussed shift.
Chitari lacquered woodwork	Goa & Gomantak	Cuncolim, Salcete	Painted and lacquered wooden objects, toys and ceremonial items made by the Chitari artisan families of Cuncolim. Very few workshops remain.
Terracotta and pottery	Goa & Gomantak	Bicholim, Ponda and Quepem	Water pots, festival lamps, the frames for Ganesh Chaturthi idols and the Narkasur armatures. The idol trade keeps the craft alive on a seasonal cycle rather than a steady one.
Brass and bell metal	Goa & Gomantak	Bicholim and Ponda	Samai lamps, kansallem cymbals, temple bells and the tall multi-tiered deepstambh fittings for the New Conquest shrines.
Kota Doria weaving	Hadoti	जीआई टैग	Around Kaithun, weaving is still largely a household activity done by women on looms sunk into the floor of the house. Sari counts are named by the number of khats across the width — 300, 350 and 400 — and the higher the count, the finer and slower the work.
Bundi school miniature painting	Hadoti	Bundi	The Bundi school is identifiable by its blue-green palette and its treatment of vegetation and rain, and by a run of continuity unusual among Rajput schools: it worked from the seventeenth century into the nineteenth.
Kota school miniature painting	Hadoti	Kota	Kota separated from Bundi as a state in 1631 and its painters separated too, specialising in the shikar — the ruler on an elephant in a black tangle of forest, with the tiger mid-spring. It is the most convincing depiction of animal movement in Rajput painting.
Bundi mural painting	Hadoti	Bundi	The Chitrashala in Bundi's Garh Palace carries the largest surviving programme — Krishna cycles, court processions and hunts, worked over a blue-green ground — and the idiom continued into merchant havelis in the town below.
Kota stone dressing and carving	Hadoti	Kota (Ramganjmandi and Suket)	A quarrying belt rather than a craft cluster, but the dressing and edge-finishing is hand work, and the stone floors and paves an enormous share of Indian institutional buildings.
Sahariya forest work	Hadoti	Baran (Shahabad and Kishanganj)	Household production tied to the forest year rather than to a market, and the material base of the only Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group recognised in Rajasthan.
Panipat durrie and home textiles	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Panipat	Panipat is India's largest home-textile cluster and a very large consumer of imported used clothing, which it shreds and respins. The handloom durrie survives inside that industry as a small and shrinking segment; the GI application filed in 2025 is an attempt to defend it.
Phulkari	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication jointly across Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. The older Haryana baghs are recognisable by heavier, more geometric fields and a preference for gold and orange floss.
Jhajjar pottery	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Jhajjar	A pottery town known across north India for the surahi — the slim-necked water pitcher that made a fridge unnecessary. The trade has contracted sharply as steel and plastic replaced clay for storage, and survives largely on kulhads and decorative ware.
Khes weaving	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Panipat, Rohtak, Sonipat	The khes is the region's own cloth — thick, reversible and made to last a generation. Handwoven khes is now rare enough that a good one is treated as an heirloom.
Peedha and moodha weaving	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Across the region	Low stools, floor seats and the woven bed itself. The charpai's tape pattern varies by household and district and is one of the few surviving unselfconscious craft vocabularies in the region.
Sanjhi wall relief	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Across the Bangar	A craft that exists only for the duration of a festival and is then immersed. It is made by unmarried girls, taught mother to daughter, and has no market, no artisan class and no product.
Handloom weaving — Moirang Phee, Wangkhei Phee and Shaphee Lanphee	Imphal Valley	जीआई टैग	Household weaving on a scale that makes it the valley's largest craft occupation, almost entirely women. Moirang Phee, Wangkhei Phee and Shaphee Lanphee are the three registered products within it.
Longpi (Nungbi) pottery	Imphal Valley	Ukhrul — Tangkhul hills, not the valley floor	A Tangkhul Naga craft of the Nungbi villages, not a Meitei one, and it must be attributed that way even though most of it is sold in Imphal. The wheel-less method and the stone content make the vessels unusually heat-tolerant, which is why they are used as cookware and not only as display pieces. Machihan Sasa of Nungbi received the Padma Shri in 2024 for the tradition.
Andro and Chairel pottery	Imphal Valley	Imphal East (Andro); Thoubal (Chairel)	The valley's own pottery, made by the Chakpa communities of the fringe villages. Andro's potters produce cooking and ritual vessels; the wheel never displaced the paddle here, which is why the forms are rounder and thinner than wheel-thrown work of the same size.
Kauna reed craft	Imphal Valley	Bishnupur, Thoubal, Imphal West	Mats, cushions, baskets and now furniture, made from a reed that grows only in standing water. The craft is entirely dependent on the wetland's condition, which ties a household industry directly to the lake's hydrology.
Bamboo and cane work	Imphal Valley	Across the valley and the fringe	Baskets, fish traps, winnowing trays, umbrella frames and the conical fishing gear used on Loktak, plus the light bamboo structures used at festivals.
Brass and bell-metal work	Imphal Valley	Imphal	Sustained largely by the Sankirtana repertoire, which needs cymbals of particular weights and tones and re-fittings for the pung.
Basohli painting	Jammu Duggar	जीआई टैग	The earliest fully formed Pahari school, working from about 1680 under Raja Kirpal Pal, whose Rasamanjari series is its defining work. It later gave way to the cooler, naturalistic Guler and Kangra manner, which makes Basohli the hot, flat, archaic end of the whole Pahari sequence. Registered as a geographical indication in 2023.
Basohli pashmina weaving	Jammu Duggar	जीआई टैग	A small women-run weaving economy on the Ravi bank, registered as a geographical indication in 2023.
Ramban Sulai honey	Jammu Duggar	जीआई टैग	A monofloral honey from the Chenab approach hills, thick and slow to crystallise, registered as a geographical indication in 2023.
Dogra silver	Jammu Duggar	Jammu, Udhampur	The chounk-phool, gojru and chandanhaar vocabulary of hill jewellery, still made to order for weddings in a handful of Jammu and Udhampur workshops and undocumented as a craft cluster.
Akhnoor and Jammu terracotta	Jammu Duggar	Jammu (Akhnoor)	Modern village pottery in a place with a very long ceramic record — the Akhnoor terracotta heads excavated nearby, in a Gandhara-influenced idiom, are among the finest early sculptures found in the north-west.
Kalari making	Jammu Duggar	Udhampur (Ramnagar)	A hill dairy craft with a defined home district, a defined method and an unusually specific product, made almost entirely by pastoral households and sold onward without any protected name.
Bidriware	Kalyana Karnataka	जीआई टैग	The soil is not superstition and not marketing. It is taken from parts of the fort that have been sheltered from sun and rain for centuries, because sunlight breaks nitrate down — undisturbed shaded earth keeps the alkaline nitrates that the reaction needs. Soil from anywhere else gives a grey, uneven result. The craft dates to the Bahmani period at Bidar and is registered as a geographical indication; Hyderabad has always been its largest market, which is why it is so often described as a Hyderabadi craft.
Kinhal (Kinnal) craft	Kalyana Karnataka	जीआई टैग	Made by Chitragara families who also painted temple ceilings and built processional chariots. Registered as a geographical indication. The household repertoire runs to Garuda, Hanuman, cradles and toys, and the craft survives on a handful of families in one village.
Sandur Lambani embroidery	Kalyana Karnataka	जीआई टैग	Historically domestic work, made for a woman's own costume and carrying community and marital information in its patterning. Organised into a marketed craft from the 1980s by a centre at Sandur, and registered as a geographical indication.
Surpur (Shorapur) painting	Kalyana Karnataka	Yadgir (Surpur)	A small court school associated with the Surpur chiefs, working in a Deccani idiom recognisably its own and now surviving mainly in collections rather than in practice.
Kambli weaving	Kalyana Karnataka	Kalaburagi, Yadgir, Raichur	Shepherd households wove their own blankets from their own flocks. The trade is collapsing as synthetic sheeting undercuts it, and the wool is increasingly sold raw rather than woven.
Kangra painting	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Guler, Nurpur, Sujanpur Tira, Alampur	The mature phase of Pahari painting, developed in the workshops of Nainsukh's family at Guler and taken to its height under Sansar Chand Katoch between about 1780 and 1805. Its subjects are the Gita Govinda, the Bhagavata Purana, Nala and Damayanti and the Baramasa. After the Gurkha invasion of 1806 and the Sikh annexation that followed, the patronage collapsed and the painter families dispersed across the hills.
Thangka painting, appliqué and statue-making	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Sidhpur and Dharamshala	Rebuilt in exile as an institutional training system rather than a family one, most visibly at the Norbulingka Institute at Sidhpur, founded in 1988 to teach the Tibetan literary and craft arts to a generation born outside Tibet.
Khaniyara slate	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Khaniyara, near Dharamshala	The grey roof of the entire region comes out of a few quarries on the Dhauladhar foot. Slate is the only roofing that survives both three metres of rain and a metre of snow, and the quarrying has been contentious because it sits in the same fragile slope that produces the landslides.
Deodar carpentry and kath-kuni building	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Upper Kangra and Chota Bhangal	The building system of the whole western Himalaya, and best preserved here in the upper valleys where cement arrived late. Deodar is used because it resists rot and insects almost indefinitely — beams are routinely salvaged and reused from houses two centuries older.
Andretta studio pottery	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Andretta, near Palampur	A working pottery and teaching studio at Andretta, descended from the Delhi Blue studio tradition, which is how a village below the Dhauladhar became a place people go to learn to throw pots.
Silver ornament making	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Kangra town, Palampur, Baijnath	Sustained by the Gaddi and hill wedding market, where a bride's silver is still weighed rather than styled, and by the pilgrimage trade around the goddess temples.
Kashmir Pashmina	Kashmir Valley	जीआई टैग	The valley's signature export and the reason a Ladakhi pastoral economy and a Srinagar workshop economy have been linked for centuries. Machine-spun and blended cloth sold under the same name is the trade's standing problem, which is what the GI and the associated hallmarking scheme exist to address.
Kani weaving	Kashmir Valley	जीआई टैग	The most labour-intensive shawl technique surviving anywhere — years, not months, per piece — and the one that produced the paisley motif Europe copied and named after Paisley.
Sozni	Kashmir Valley	जीआई टैग	Embroidery fine enough to be mistaken for weaving, worked by men in workshops on a piece-rate system, with a single shawl often passing through several specialists.
Papier-mâché (kar-i-qalamdani)	Kashmir Valley	जीआई टैग	Named for the pen-case it was originally made to decorate. The painters work the same motif families as the shawl and carpet designers — chinar leaf, gul-i-vilayat, hazara, the bird-and-flower panels — because the design vocabulary crossed materials from the start.
Walnut wood carving	Kashmir Valley	जीआई टैग	The valley is one of the few places in India with walnut of furniture size and quality, and the carving grades are priced by how much of the piece is figured heartwood rather than by hours worked.
Khatamband	Kashmir Valley	Srinagar	A ceiling that can be taken apart and re-erected in another house, and that flexes rather than cracks when the ground moves — which in a seismic valley is not decoration but engineering. Named patterns run into the hundreds and are counted in pieces per unit.
Kashmir hand-knotted carpet	Kashmir Valley	जीआई टैग	A workshop craft rather than a household one, and the largest employer among the valley's crafts after embroidery. The talim system means a weaver need not be able to read the design as a picture.
Namda felting	Kashmir Valley	Baramulla, Anantnag, Srinagar	The cheapest warm floor covering the valley made, nearly extinguished by synthetic rugs and now the subject of state revival training. Felting needs no loom, which is why it was the craft of the poorest households.
Kashmir saffron	Kashmir Valley	जीआई टैग	Grown on the free-draining karewa terraces and nowhere else in the valley, because the corm rots in soil that holds water. The GI was registered in 2020 and the trade now runs through a spice park at Dussu in Pampore that grades and packs under it.
Kashmir willow cricket bat	Kashmir Valley	Anantnag and Bijbehara, along the Jhelum	A twentieth-century industry rather than an old craft, built on the fact that the same willow species grown in England will grow on a Kashmiri riverbank. The cluster around Sangam turns out bats by the lakh and has been pushing for formal protection of the name.
Jalgaon Banana	Khandesh	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2016–17. Jalgaon district is among India's largest banana-producing districts, and the crop reorganised the valley's water, credit and rail freight around itself.
Jalgaon Bharit Brinjal	Khandesh	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2016–17 — a GI granted to a vegetable defined by the dish it is cooked into rather than by a market grade.
Kurdai and papad making	Khandesh	Jalgaon, Dhule	The region's main household manufacture, run largely by women's self-help groups, and the industry that absorbs the pre-monsoon weeks when there is no field work.
Pithora and ritual wall painting	Khandesh	Nandurbar, Dhule (Satpura slope)	A Bhil, Pawra and Rathwa tradition continuous across the Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat hill country; the Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh versions are better documented than the Maharashtra ones.
Jalgaon gold trade	Khandesh	Jalgaon	A market disproportionate to the town's size, built on the cash flow of banana and cotton, and drawing buyers from across northern Maharashtra and the neighbouring Madhya Pradesh districts.
Satpura teak and bamboo work	Khandesh	Nandurbar, Dhule, Jalgaon	Working craft rather than a market craft — grain bins, cots, baskets and roofing from forest produce, made by Bhil and Pawra households and by valley carpenters.
Cane and bamboo work	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Across the Khasi and Jaintia hills	Baskets, mats, stools, fish traps and the umbrella-like knup rain shield worn over the back while working in the rain. Almost every household object here was bamboo before it was plastic.
Ryndia eri silk	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	जीआई टैग	Eri is spun rather than reeled, because the moth is allowed to emerge and break the filament — which is why the cloth is matte and slightly slubbed rather than lustrous. Granted a geographical indication in 2025.
Khasi handloom products	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	जीआई टैग	Granted a geographical indication in 2025, covering the woven output of Khasi, Bhoi and Jaintia weavers.
Larnai (Lyrnai) black pottery	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	जीआई टैग	A single Pnar village that has supplied cooking and storage pots to the Jaintia hills for generations, granted a geographical indication in 2024 as Lyrnai pottery.
Living root bridge cultivation	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	East Khasi Hills (War slope)	A structural technology rather than a decorative craft. A dead timber bridge in this climate rots in a few years and is torn out by monsoon spate; a living one gets stronger, because it is still growing. The jingkieng jri landscapes entered UNESCO's tentative World Heritage list in 2022.
Lakadong turmeric	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	जीआई टैग	A landrace with an unusually high curcumin content, grown around Lakadong village in the Jaintia hills and granted a geographical indication in 2024.
Khasi Mandarin	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	जीआई टैग	The plateau's commercial orange, known locally as soh niamtra, holding a registered geographical indication. It is the fruit that comes up the escarpment road in winter, and the sweet counterpart to the wild Citrus indica protected in the Garo Hills.
Khasi iron smelting	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Nongkrem and the central plateau	An extinct industry, and the region's most under-told one. Radiocarbon dates from slag at Nongkrem put iron production here at over two thousand years, and in the early nineteenth century the hills were exporting on the order of a couple of thousand tonnes of iron a year down to Bengal, much of it for boat-building. It disappeared from the export returns between 1858 and 1876 once imported industrial iron undercut it.
Sohra honey, bay and cinnamon	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	East Khasi Hills (Sohra)	The southern slope grows cinnamon and bay in quantity and produces a distinctive orange-blossom honey, most of which leaves the hills unbranded.
Kinnauri shawl weaving	Kinnaur & Spiti	जीआई टैग	The region's best-known product and now largely a cooperative and small-workshop industry serving a national market. The weaving itself remains a household skill, and most families still own a loom whether or not they sell what comes off it.
Kinnauri cap making	Kinnaur & Spiti	Kinnaur	Made in small workshops around Reckong Peo and Sangla, and now worn as a marker of Himachali identity far beyond the district that invented it.
Kath-kuni construction	Kinnaur & Spiti	Kinnaur and the lower Sutlej	The building system of the entire timber-rich western Himalaya, at its most elaborate in the tower temples. It disappears exactly at the treeline — above it there is no deodar, and the architecture changes to mud brick, rammed earth and flat poplar-and-willow roofs. Cement has displaced it fast, mostly because a kath-kuni wall now costs more in timber than a family can justify.
Mud-brick and rammed-earth building	Kinnaur & Spiti	Spiti and upper Kinnaur	The building tradition that produced Tabo and Dhankar and every ordinary Spiti house. Its weak point is exactly the change it now faces, since heavier snowfall and unseasonal rain punish flat mud roofs.
Thigma tie-dye	Kinnaur & Spiti	Spiti	A small surviving tradition shared with Ladakh, used on shawls, robe sashes and monastic furnishings.
Thangka painting and monastic mural work	Kinnaur & Spiti	Spiti	Carried on at the gompas and by a small number of lay painters. The Tabo wall paintings and clay figures are the region's great holding in this idiom, and the restoration work on them has trained a generation of local hands.
Chilgoza collection and grading	Kinnaur & Spiti	Kinnaur	A wild harvest that is also a serious cash economy, and one under pressure — over-harvesting removes the seed that would regenerate the stand, and the pine is slow to replace itself.
आरन्मुल कण्णाडि	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	जीआई टैग	काँच का नहीं, बल्कि पॉलिश की हुई धातु मिश्र का दर्पण। चूँकि परावर्तक सतह सामने की ही होती है, काँच के पीछे बनने वाला दूसरा प्रतिबिंब नहीं बनता। मिश्रधातु का संघटन एक ही गाँव के गिने-चुने घरों का पारिवारिक रहस्य है।
आलप्पी कॉयर	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	जीआई टैग	नारियल की जटा का रेशा बैकवाटर में सड़ाकर काता और बुनकर चटाइयाँ तथा दरियाँ बनाई जाती हैं। 19वीं सदी में यह शहर व्यावहारिक रूप से इसी उद्योग के इर्द-गिर्द खड़ा हुआ।
नडवरम्ब कांस्य दीपक	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	जीआई टैग	मूसारि समुदाय द्वारा ढाले गए कांसे के निलविलक्कु (खड़े दीपक) और उरुलि।
पय्यन्नूर पवित्र अंगूठी	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	जीआई टैग	गाँठ जैसे बल वाली सोने की अंगूठी, जो पितरों के अनुष्ठानों में पहनी जाती है; इसे केवल पय्यन्नूर के कुछ ही परिवार बनाते हैं।
केवड़ा-पत्ती और बाँस की चटाइयाँ	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	—	कोरा घास और केवड़े की चटाइयाँ, जो फ़र्श, सोने और मंदिर के उपयोग के लिए ज़्यादातर महिलाएँ तटीय अलप्पुझा और कोल्लम में बुनती हैं।
Bhavani Jamakkalam weaving	Kongu Nadu	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2005–06. The craft began as a deliberate response to imported mill cloth and now defends itself against power-loom copies with the same name.
Kovai Cora cotton weaving	Kongu Nadu	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2014–15, and a saree designed for a hot dry climate.
Coimbatore wet grinder	Kongu Nadu	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2005–06. The town has hundreds of manufacturers and makes the large majority of India's wet grinders, because it had granite, motors and lathes in the same square mile.
Salem Venpattu silk weaving	Kongu Nadu	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2007–08.
Erode turmeric curing	Kongu Nadu	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2019. The Erode market complex is one of the largest turmeric trading floors in the world, and prices set on it are quoted nationally.
Salem sago	Kongu Nadu	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2023. A South American root crop introduced in the colonial period, turned into a Tamil pantry staple by one district.
Karur home textile making-up	Kongu Nadu	Karur	A handloom belt converted almost entirely into an export made-ups cluster from the 1970s onward.
Kangayam cattle breeding	Kongu Nadu	Tiruppur (Kangeyam), Erode	A draught breed developed and maintained by the region's herding households, and the grazing system that goes with it, which is itself the rarer survival.
Kotpad natural-dye weaving	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	जीआई टैग	The region's one craft with a national market, sustained by a handful of Mirgan weaver families. The process is slow because the mordanting is slow, and the price a piece fetches is mostly a price for time.
Habaspuri weaving	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	जीआई टैग	A weave that had fallen to a few working looms and was rebuilt around a cooperative in the Kalahandi lowland.
Kapdaganda embroidery	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Rayagada and Kalahandi (Niyamgiri)	Made by unmarried Dongria Kondh women for their own use and for gifting rather than for sale, which is why pieces reaching the market are usually made to order and are not the same object.
Idital — Sora wall painting	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Rayagada (Puttasingi and the Gunupur uplands)	The picture is commissioned, not decorative. A diviner establishes which spirit is causing an illness or a loss, and the painting is made as a dwelling and a settlement for it. When the reason passes, the wall is replastered — which is why almost nothing old survives.
Dokra and bell-metal casting	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Practised in scattered Ghasi and Sithulia settlements across the uplands	Household-scale casting of lamps, measures, ritual figures and jewellery. Odisha's best-known dokra villages — Kuliana in Mayurbhanj and Sadeibareni in Dhenkanal — lie well outside this region; what survives here is the smaller, older, unbranded end of the same technique, and its closest kin is at Kondagaon across the forest in Bastar.
Terracotta votive figures	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Across the highland, at village shrines	Made to be given, not kept — the figures are placed at a shrine on the fulfilment of a vow and left to weather. A shrine's accumulated horses are a record of the promises a village has made.
Siali and sal leaf work, bamboo basketry	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Throughout	The packaging and containers of the whole regional economy — plates, cups, grain bins, fish traps, carrying baskets — made at home and sold by the dozen at the haat.
Machilipatnam Kalamkari	Kosta Andhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2007. The craft grew under Golconda-period patronage and then on export demand — this was the chintz that went out of the Coromandel ports to Persia, Southeast Asia and Europe — so its motifs are Persianate florals and repeating grids rather than temple narrative. Most of the working units are at Pedana rather than in Machilipatnam itself.
Kondapalli Bommalu	Kosta Andhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2005. The wood is light enough to carry a large figure and soft enough to carve fast, and the whole craft is timed to a single festival's demand.
Uppada jamdani weaving	Kosta Andhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2008. The technique arrived from the Bengal jamdani tradition and was substantially revived here in the late twentieth century after nearly dying out.
Mangalagiri weaving	Kosta Andhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2010. A cloth whose selling point is structural rather than decorative, which is unusual and is why it moved so easily into institutional and office wear.
Narasapur crochet lace	Kosta Andhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2020. Home-based piece work done by a very large number of women through an agent chain, producing table linen and furnishing lace almost entirely for export.
Durgi stone carving	Kosta Andhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2014. The stone is the same soft limestone that the Amaravati sculptors used two thousand years earlier, quarried from the same belt on the Krishna.
Udayagiri wooden cutlery	Kosta Andhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2015. Wooden cutlery that does not taint sour food, which in a kitchen that pickles in oil and cooks in tamarind is a functional specification rather than a novelty.
Kullu shawl weaving	Kullu & Mandi	जीआई टैग	A registered geographical indication and the region's largest craft employer, organised largely through weavers' cooperatives since the 1940s. The pattern vocabulary is younger than the craft, and everyone in the valley knows where it came from.
Kullu topi	Kullu & Mandi	Kullu valley	Made from the same border weaving as the shawl and functioning as a regional identity marker well beyond the valley, including in the state assembly.
Kath-kuni building	Kullu & Mandi	Seraj, upper Beas, Mandi hills	The construction system behind every old temple and granary in the region. The timber lets the whole wall flex and reseat itself in an earthquake instead of shearing, which is why kath-kuni structures repeatedly outlasted the masonry built beside them.
Devta mohra masks	Kullu & Mandi	Kullu, Mandi, Seraj	Each deity's treasury holds a set of metal faces, some of them centuries old, mounted on the palanquin for processions and kept locked away otherwise. They are the region's oldest surviving portable art and are almost never seen outside a fair, because they are property of the deity rather than of a museum.
Temple wood carving	Kullu & Mandi	Seraj, Kullu, Mandi	The carving is applied to load-bearing members rather than to added panels, so a temple facade is a structure and an artwork at once and cannot be conserved as two separate things.
Stone temple building of the Mandi basin	Kullu & Mandi	Mandi	Mandi town alone holds dozens of stone temples, several of them sixteenth-century, which is why it is called Chhoti Kashi. The contrast with the timber temples a valley away is a contrast of material availability and of patronage, not of belief.
Pullan footwear	Kullu & Mandi	Kullu and Seraj	Grass-and-hemp shoes made for walking on wet grass and snow-packed ground, once universal in the upper villages, now largely ceremonial and made by a small number of older households.
Aipan	Kumaon	Almora, Nainital, Bageshwar, Pithoragarh	Practised by women, taught mother to daughter, and still drawn on doorsteps at every festival across the middle hills. Its geometry — dots joined into grids, lotus registers, and the specific chauki designs — is shared with Mithila and Rajasthani floor arts in principle and with nothing in detail.
Tamta copper work	Kumaon	Almora and Bageshwar	The Tamta artisan community of Almora has made the gagar water pot, the cooking vessel, the temple bell and the ritual lamp for generations, supplying Garhwal as well as Kumaon. Aluminium and steel destroyed the cooking-vessel market; ritual and decorative work is what remains.
Likhai woodcarving	Kumaon	Almora	The carved doorway is the display surface of a Kumaoni house, and Almora's old bazaar lanes still show hundreds of them at first-floor height. As with Garhwali tibari carving, dismantled panels now move into the antiques trade faster than new ones are cut.
Ringaal basketry	Kumaon	Bageshwar, Pithoragarh, Almora	Working equipment rather than decoration — the doko is still how a load moves where no vehicle goes. The craft is held by specific artisan communities and is under pressure from plastic on one side and from restrictions on ringaal cutting on the other.
Bhotiya wool weaving	Kumaon	Pithoragarh (Munsiyari, Dharchula), Bageshwar	A craft that lost half its raw material and all of its market in the early 1960s and rebuilt as a cooperative economy, most visibly at Munsiyari. What is sold as Bhotiya wool now is often mill yarn worked by hand, and the difference is worth asking about.
Katyuri and Chand stone temple carving	Kumaon	Almora, Bageshwar, Champawat	A tradition of building many small temples in a cluster rather than one large one — Jageshwar alone has well over a hundred — which produced a distinctively Kumaoni skyline and a distinctively Kumaoni idea of what a temple site is. The masons' lineages are gone; the buildings are protected.
Suf embroidery	Kutch	जीआई टैग	Carried into Kutch by Sodha Rajput families from the Tharparkar side of the desert and worked also by Meghwal women. The chevron field known as leher is its signature.
Khaarek and paako embroidery	Kutch	जीआई टैग	The two are made in the same households and are often on the same garment, which is a useful demonstration that these styles are techniques with rules, not regional accents.
Rabari embroidery	Kutch	जीआई टैग	The most improvisational of the Kutch styles and the one with figurative content: camels, peacocks, temples and scenes from the community's own narratives, on a dark ground. Rabari embroidery is also the style most copied commercially, precisely because it is freehand.
Ahir embroidery	Kutch	जीआई टैग	Flowing, curvilinear and full of birds, peacocks and animals, and immediately distinguishable from Rabari work by the uniformity of its mirrors — the Ahir use one mirror shape, the Rabari use many.
Garasia Jat embroidery	Kutch	जीआई टैग	Worked by the Garasia Jat; the Fakirani Jat, who are more mobile, embroider far less. A single churi yoke can represent the better part of a year of intermittent work, which is why the garment is a dowry object rather than a purchase.
Mutwa embroidery	Kutch	जीआई टैग	The Mutwa are a small community and their work is the finest in the region by common agreement among the other embroiderers, which is the assessment that counts. It is also the least available commercially.
Aari or mochi bharat	Kutch	जीआई टैग	Court embroidery, made by men of the Mochi community for the Bhuj rulers in a Mughal-derived floral idiom. It is the one Kutch style that was professional and male rather than domestic and female, and it declined with the court that paid for it.
Ajrakh block printing	Kutch	जीआई टैग	Practised by Khatri families who have been printing it for generations, and shared with Sindh, where the same cloth is made in the same way. The register-printing of both faces is what makes it a garment for wrapping and throwing rather than a length of decorated fabric.
Bandhani	Kutch	Bhuj, Mandvi, Anjar	The dots are only released when the cloth reaches the buyer, which is why a bandhani odhni is sold still knotted. Kutch shares the craft with Jamnagar, Rajasthan and Sindh, and the tying is done here by the same Khatri families who print ajrakh.
Rogan painting	Kutch	जीआई टैग	Reduced to the Khatri households of Nirona — usually described as one family, though the craft organisations record two still working, and training has since brought in women from other communities. It has been awarded geographical indication status.
Copper-coated bells	Kutch	जीआई टैग	Made by Luhar smiths for livestock — a herder can identify an individual animal, and its distance, by its bell in the dark. They have been awarded geographical indication status, and the sets sold as wind chimes are the same objects tuned the same way.
Lacquer turning	Kutch	Nirona	Practised by a small number of Wadha families making ladles, rolling pins, toys and furniture legs. The heat that fixes the colour comes entirely from the friction of the spinning work against the lac.
Kharad weaving	Kutch	Kukma	Floor rugs, camel-back bags and grain covers, made to last decades. Two families still weave it, down from ten in the 1990s; the wool comes from the same Maldhari herds it always did.
Khavda pottery	Kutch	Khavda	Made by Kumbhar households in a village on the edge of the Rann, in a decorative idiom whose geometry is close to the counted embroidery worked a few kilometres away. Water storage and cooking vessels first, decorative ware second.
Meghwal leather work	Kutch	Bhuj taluka and the mainland villages	Bags, footwear, water carriers and animal trappings. The Meghwal are the community that historically worked hide, wove the dhabla and embroidered several of the region's styles, and their craft economy sits at the junction of all three.
Namda felting	Kutch	Kutch mainland	A small tradition here, and a far more prominent one in Kashmir and around Tonk in Rajasthan. What Kutch has is the raw material — pastoral fleece — rather than a large felting cluster.
Dhow building	Kutch	Mandvi	Wooden cargo vessels are still built here by hand for owners in the Gulf, on the same stretch of sand that built the ships that took Kutchi traders to Muscat and Zanzibar. The yard is open and working, not a museum.
Thangka painting	Ladakh & Zanskar	Leh and the monastic centres	Painting as measurement: the grid fixes the proportions of each deity so that a thangka is correct before it is beautiful, and a painter's training is largely the memorisation of those proportions. The pigments are ground minerals — azurite, malachite, cinnabar, orpiment — which is why the colours in eleventh-century murals have not shifted.
Mural painting in the early temples	Ladakh & Zanskar	Alchi, Mangyu, Sumda, Lamayuru	The murals at Alchi and its sister temples belong to an eleventh- and twelfth-century Kashmiri idiom — the dress, the jewellery, the faces and the architectural details in the paintings are those of the Kashmir valley of that period. They survive here because the buildings went out of ritual fashion and were never repainted, so Ladakh preserves the best evidence anywhere of a Kashmiri painting tradition that has not survived in Kashmir.
Metal work of Chiling	Ladakh & Zanskar	Chiling, on the Zanskar river	One village supplies a whole region's metalwork. Its families trace descent from Newar craftsmen brought from Nepal in the seventeenth century to cast the great copper-gilt Buddha at Shey, who then stayed — which is why a Ladakhi teapot carries details of form that belong to the Kathmandu valley.
Wood carving	Ladakh & Zanskar	Leh, Sham, Zanskar	Constrained entirely by supply: nothing large grows here, so willow and poplar do structure, apricot does small close-grained carving, and any timber of size is either very old or was carried in. The chogtse — a low table that folds flat — exists because a household that may move, or that heats one room, does not keep furniture standing.
Pottery	Ladakh & Zanskar	Likir and a handful of other villages	A shrinking craft, undercut by aluminium and steel vessels brought in by road; a few families continue, largely for ritual and chhang-brewing vessels that metal does not replace well.
Thigma tie-dye	Ladakh & Zanskar	Leh and the Indus valley	The region's only surface-pattern textile technique — Ladakh weaves plain and patterns afterwards, because a narrow strip loom does not lend itself to figured weaving.
Pashm combing and hand-spinning	Ladakh & Zanskar	Changthang and the villages that buy from it	A pastoral skill rather than a workshop craft, done by the herding household in the weeks when the goats shed. Efforts to build dehairing and spinning capacity inside Ladakh, so that more of the value stays with the herd, are recent and still small.
Mani stone carving	Ladakh & Zanskar	Throughout, on every approach road and village edge	Walls of carved stones, sometimes hundreds of metres long, built up over centuries as individual commissions — a passer-by pays a carver for a stone and adds it. They are walked past clockwise, which is why a mani wall in the middle of a road has traffic passing on one side only.
Wood-block printing of texts and prayer flags	Ladakh & Zanskar	Monastic printing houses	The technology that kept the monastic libraries stocked. The same workshops print the five-coloured prayer flags, whose colours stand for the elements and which are strung to be worn out by the wind rather than maintained.
Ladakhi apricot	Ladakh & Zanskar	जीआई टैग	The raktsey karpo cultivar — the name refers to its white seed — carries a geographical indication, the first granted for a Ladakhi product. It is selected for a sweet, edible kernel, so a single tree yields dried fruit, an eating nut and an oil, which is a great deal to ask of the only fruit tree that reliably crops at this altitude.
Coir spinning and coir products	Lakshadweep	Kavaratti, Kadmat, Kalpeni, Amini and the Amindivi islands	The islands' one manufactured export, run through administration-owned factories set up to give the coconut economy a second product beyond copra.
Masmin processing	Lakshadweep	All fishing islands, historically strongest at Minicoy and Agatti	Treated locally as a craft rather than a factory process — the smoke, the cut of the loin and the drying time are household knowledge, and the product is graded by hardness and colour.
Lacquered walking sticks and turned wood	Lakshadweep	Kalpeni and Kavaratti	A small, genuinely local craft producing walking sticks, paperweights, boxes and toys. The wood is imported, since nothing but coconut grows on the islands, which makes this a craft defined by its technique rather than by its material.
Coconut shell craft	Lakshadweep	Kavaratti, Kalpeni, Minicoy	The by-product craft of the copra economy — the shell that is left after the kernel is taken for oil.
Boat building	Lakshadweep	All inhabited islands, most distinctively Minicoy	Boats are the one large object the islands make. The odam, the tuna pole-and-line boat and Minicoy's jahadhoni are separate traditions, and the jahadhoni exists for racing and for ceremony rather than for work.
Tortoise-shell work	Lakshadweep	Historically Minicoy and Kavaratti	A documented historical craft that is now illegal — the hawksbill is protected under the Wildlife Protection Act — and is recorded here as history, not as something to buy.
Patna Kalam painting	Magadh	Patna	A school formed when Mughal-trained painters moved east in the eighteenth century and began painting ordinary people — bazaar sellers, artisans, festivals — for East India Company patrons. It is India's first substantially secular school of miniature painting, and it died out by around 1920.
Patharkatti stone carving	Magadh	Gaya (Patharkatti)	A carving village at the foot of the Barabar hills, working the same stone in the same way that the Mauryan quarry-workers did — the connection is claimed locally and is at least plausible geologically.
Silao khaja	Magadh	जीआई टैग	A single village's sweet, protected by a geographical indication and sold from a hundred shops in one bazaar.
Tilkut making	Magadh	Gaya	A seasonal industry that employs whole lanes of Gaya from November to February and shuts down completely in the heat.
Magahi paan cultivation	Magadh	जीआई टैग	The Magahi betel leaf is soft, pale and comparatively unpungent, and is regarded as the finest paan leaf in India. It holds a geographical indication and is grown by a small number of specialist cultivator families.
Stone Buddha carving at Bodh Gaya	Magadh	Gaya	A pilgrim-market carving trade supplying images to the monasteries of a dozen countries.
Pardhan Gond painting (Jangarh Kalam)	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Dindori (Patangarh), Mandla, and now Bhopal	A forty-year-old school of contemporary painting descended directly from a bardic caste. It has a founder, a named style, three generations of practitioners and an international market, and no geographical indication.
Digna and bhitti chitra	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Across the region	The wall and floor painting done by Gond and Baiga women. Every visual habit of the studio painting that made the region famous — the outline, the repeated fill, the flattened animal — is here first, on a surface designed to be washed off.
Baiga godna	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Dindori (Baiga Chak) and Balaghat	A body-marking system with its own named patterns, now rapidly declining, and increasingly reproduced as a drawing idiom on paper and cloth rather than on people.
Agaria iron	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Mandla, Dindori and the Maikal fringe	The smelting tradition of the Agaria, documented by Verrier Elwin in 1942 and now surviving mainly as blacksmithing rather than smelting. The famous central Indian wrought-iron craft with a geographical indication is Bastar's, over the watershed, and is a different tradition.
Bamboo basketry	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Mandla, Balaghat and Seoni	Grain bins, winnowing fans, fish traps and the flat tokni. The region grows more bamboo than almost anywhere in India and consumes most of it as containers rather than as construction.
Bhedaghat stone carving	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Jabalpur	A craft that exists because the raw material is lying at the foot of the cliff. Worked at the stalls above the Dhuandhar fall and almost nowhere else.
Votive terracotta	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Across the Satpura and Maikal	Made to be left at a clan shrine and then left to weather. The figures are not sold as art in the village and are not repaired; the shrine accumulates decades of them.
Payyannur pavithra ring	Malabar	जीआई टैग	A ring worn for rites for the ancestors, made by a handful of families in Payyannur and nowhere else. Registered as a geographical indication in 2010–11.
Cannanore home furnishings	Malabar	जीआई टैग	Furnishing cloth woven for export markets since the nineteenth century, when the Basel Mission industrialised weaving here. Registered as a geographical indication in 2009–10.
Beypore uru	Malabar	Kozhikode	Ocean-going wooden dhows built on a sandbank at the mouth of the Chaliyar, sold for centuries to Arab owners and still commissioned by Gulf buyers — now largely as heritage vessels and floating restaurants. The yards are among the last places on earth building ships of this size in wood.
Nilambur teak	Malabar	जीआई टैग	Timber from the Nilambur valley, prized for straight grain and a golden-brown colour, and the first forest produce anywhere in India to receive a geographical indication, registered in 2017–18.
Theyyam chamayam and mudi making	Malabar	Kannur and Kasaragod	The costume is built fresh for each kaliyattam by the men who will wear it, from material that is grown rather than bought, and dismantled afterwards. Nothing is stored between seasons except the knowledge.
Kalari weapon forging	Malabar	Kozhikode and Kannur	A very small number of smiths still forge the flexible urumi blade to a temper that will coil round the waist and still hold an edge. Demand now comes from performance troupes rather than from fighters.
Coffee growing and curing	Malnad	जीआई टैग	Coorg Arabica, Chikmagalur Arabica and Bababudangiris Arabica were among five Indian coffees granted geographical indications in 2019. The shade system is why these estates hold bird and mammal populations that a monoculture plantation would not, and why the pepper crop and the coffee crop are the same enterprise.
Coorg green cardamom	Malnad	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication. The colour is the grading criterion, and slow drying at controlled heat is what preserves it.
Coorg orange	Malnad	जीआई टैग	A loose-skinned mandarin with a distinct sharpness, registered as a geographical indication. Production has fallen heavily since its peak because of disease and because coffee pays better on the same land.
Appemidi mango pickling	Malnad	जीआई टैग	Appemidi holds a geographical indication as a Karnataka appellation. The trees are individually known, named and valued — a good one is a household asset — and the fruit is picked from riverbank groves rather than orchards.
Gudigar wood carving	Malnad	Sagara and Sorab in Shivamogga	The Gudigar carvers worked sandalwood and ivory for courts and temples, and the sandalwood trade's restrictions and the 1972 ivory ban between them forced the craft onto cheaper timbers. The carving vocabulary survived the material change.
Areca leaf-sheath ware	Malnad	Across the areca belt	A small modern industry built entirely on a by-product that used to be burnt. It is one of the very few new manufactures the areca economy has produced in a century.
Batik printing at Bherugarh	Malwa Plateau	जीआई टैग	A cluster of Chhipa printer families on the Shipra outside Ujjain, working an Indonesian-derived technique that was introduced here in the twentieth century and has become the plateau's identifying textile craft.
Leather toys of Indore	Malwa Plateau	जीआई टैग	A small workshop craft built on Indore's older tanning and leather trade, and one of the few Malwa products to hold a geographical indication in a non-textile category.
Thewa work of the Rajasthan fringe	Malwa Plateau	जीआई टैग	Practised at Pratapgarh on Malwa's north-western margin. It is registered as a geographical indication of Rajasthan, which is exactly the kind of fact a state-organised account loses and a regional one keeps.
Sev and namkeen making	Malwa Plateau	जीआई टैग	Ratlami sev holds a geographical indication, and Ratlam district also holds them for Riyawan garlic and, from 2026, for Sailana's balam kakdi and Ratlami garadu — four registrations, more than any other district in the state.
Papier-mâché and clay work of Ujjain	Malwa Plateau	Ujjain	An image-making economy that exists because of the pilgrimage calendar; production peaks before Navratri, Ganeshotsav and the Simhastha.
Opium poppy cultivation and processing	Malwa Plateau	Mandsaur, Neemuch, Ratlam	Not a handicraft but the plateau's oldest regulated skill. Malwa was one of the world's principal opium tracts in the nineteenth century, and the belt around Mandsaur and Neemuch remains one of the very few places on earth licensed to grow opium poppy legally, under the Central Bureau of Narcotics, with a government opium and alkaloid works at Neemuch.
Paithani weaving	Marathwada	जीआई टैग	The motif vocabulary — bangdi mor, asawali, muniya, lotus — is old and largely fixed. Most commercial output has moved to Yeola in Nashik district, which is outside this region, so the GI covers the technique and the name rather than a single town.
Himroo weaving	Marathwada	Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar	Down to a very small number of working handlooms in the old city. The name is now attached mostly to power-loom shawls sold to visitors, which is the usual endgame for a craft with no protected name.
Kagzipura handmade paper	Marathwada	Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (near Daulatabad)	A village whose name means the paper-makers' quarter, settled by papermakers in the medieval period beside the Daulatabad fort. Papermaking there has all but stopped, and the toponym now carries more of the history than the trade does.
Banjara embroidery	Marathwada	Nanded, Hingoli, Parbhani and the tandas of the Balaghat	The same tradition holds a geographical indication on the Karnataka side, registered for Sandur; the Maharashtra tandas work in the same idiom without one.
Ghongadi weaving	Marathwada	Beed, Dharashiv, Latur	Made by the shepherds who own the sheep, for their own use. The wool of the Deccani breed is coarse and unsuitable for garments, which is precisely what makes the blanket shed rain.
Stone carving	Marathwada	Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Beed	A living trade in temple repair and idol-making, and the direct descendant of the skill that produced Ellora. Basalt's difficulty is the reason the region's ancient sculpture is blocky and deeply undercut rather than fine.
Athangudi tiles	Marava & Ramnad	Sivaganga (Athangudi and around)	Invented locally as a cheaper substitute for the imported European floor tiles the mansions wanted, and now the more sought-after of the two. Traditionally eight inches square, about nine days from start to finish, and made by a small number of family units in and around one village. Despite frequent reports of an application, no geographical indication registration has been confirmed for it.
Chettinad kottan	Marava & Ramnad	जीआई टैग	The basket in which gifts, betel and ritual items are exchanged at Nagarathar ceremonies — a domestic requirement rather than a decorative craft, which is why it survived. Registered in 2012-13.
Kandangi saree weaving	Marava & Ramnad	जीआई टैग	Registered in 2019-20, and still woven in a small cluster of villages around Karaikudi.
Manamadurai pottery	Marava & Ramnad	जीआई टैग	Water pots, curd pots, cooking pots and stoves from one town, made to a clay recipe specific enough that it is part of the registration. Registered in 2023.
Ramnad Mundu chilli	Marava & Ramnad	जीआई टैग	Round as a cherry, thick-skinned, mild and aromatic rather than fiercely hot, and tolerant of both salinity and drought — which is why it has been grown here for something like two centuries. Registered on 22 February 2022, the first chilli variety from Tamil Nadu to hold a geographical indication.
Chettinad woodwork and lime plaster	Marava & Ramnad	Sivaganga	The mansions' two signature surfaces. Both are now more often encountered in salvage yards than in situ, because a demolished mansion's teak is worth more than the mansion.
Chank and shell craft	Marava & Ramnad	Ramanathapuram	The Gulf of Mannar chank fishery was a state monopoly for centuries and supplied the ritual conch trade across India and Bengal. A left-turning shell is ordinary; a right-turning valampuri is rare and priced accordingly.
Blue Pottery of Jaipur	Marwar & the Thar	जीआई टैग	Fired at low temperature from a quartz-and-glass dough with no clay at all, glazed in cobalt and copper. The technique arrived via Persia and Central Asia and survives essentially only here.
Miniature painting	Marwar & the Thar	Kishangarh, Bundi, Kota, Mewar, Marwar	Distinct court schools, each with its own conventions — Kishangarh's elongated eye and the Bani Thani profile, Bundi's dense vegetation and night skies, Kota's hunting scenes.
Molela terracotta plaques	Marwar & the Thar	जीआई टैग	Hollow relief votive plaques of local deities, made by the Kumhar community of one village and carried away by tribal communities from across the region to serve as shrines.
Meenakari and Kundan	Marwar & the Thar	Jaipur	Enamelling in mineral colours fired into gold, with Jaipur's red enamel a technical specialty; kundan sets stones in pure gold foil rather than claws.
Usta kala (Munawwat)	Marwar & the Thar	जीआई टैग	Gold-leaf embossing and painting on camel hide, applied to vessels, doors and ceilings.
Bikaneri Bhujia	Marwar & the Thar	जीआई टैग	A snack with a GI tag — moth-bean flour extruded and fried, first made in the late 19th century and now the reason the city's name is known nationally.
Nathdwara pichwai painting	Mewar	जीआई टैग	A workshop tradition of hereditary painter families settled at Nathdwara from the late seventeenth century to supply the temple's seasonal cloth. It received a Geographical Indication as Nathdwara Pichhwai in 2023. The commercial market for decorative pichwai now far exceeds the temple's own requirement.
Molela terracotta plaques	Mewar	जीआई टैग	Made by Kumhar families in one village near Nathdwara and bought by Bhil, Garasia and Gameti pilgrims from across southern Rajasthan and eastern Gujarat, who carry the plaque home and install it as the village shrine. The maker almost never sees where the god ends up.
Kaavad	Mewar	Chittorgarh (Bassi)	Made by a handful of Suthar carpenter families at Bassi and commissioned by kaavadiya bhats, who carry it from patron village to patron village. The genealogy of the patron family is painted into the object, which makes each one a commission rather than a stock item.
Mewar miniature painting	Mewar	Udaipur, Chittorgarh, Devgarh	An unusually well documented school, because Mewar's painters signed and dated. Nasiruddin's Ragamala was painted at Chavand in 1605; Sahibdin's Ramayana series for Jagat Singh I was made between 1649 and 1653 and the bulk of it is now in the British Library. Devgarh, a Mewar thikana, ran a distinct sub-school under Bagta and Chokha.
Koftgari	Mewar	जीआई टैग	Armour and weapon decoration that outlived the armoury, now applied to plates, boxes and knives. Registered as Udaipur Koftgari Metal Craft in 2023.
Thewa	Mewar	जीआई टैग	Held within one Soni family lineage at Pratapgarh for over two centuries, with the working details treated as family property rather than a trade skill.
Marble and stone carving	Mewar	Rajsamand	Rajsamand sits on one of India's largest working marble belts, and the temple-image workshops around Rajnagar supply installations far outside the region. The carving lineage is old; the quarrying scale is not.
Mithila (Madhubani) painting	Mithilanchal	जीआई टैग	A women's wall-painting tradition of the wedding chamber, moved onto paper during the 1966–67 famine when a handicrafts officer suggested it as relief work. Within a decade it was in Delhi galleries and abroad, and it is now the best-known folk art of India — and one of very few in which the artists are named.
Sikki grass craft	Mithilanchal	जीआई टैग	Boxes, containers and figures made by women, historically for storing a bride's belongings. The mauni — a lidded ritual basket — is given at weddings and used to carry offerings.
Sujini embroidery	Mithilanchal	जीआई टैग	A quilting tradition turned into a narrative medium by rural women's collectives, whose panels record dowry, migration, health and violence as often as they record deities.
Tikuli art	Mithilanchal	Darbhanga, Patna	A decorative-arts tradition that began as forehead ornament manufacture and survives as painted panels in a Mithila-derived idiom.
Papier-mache and clay figures for Sama-Chakeva	Mithilanchal	Madhubani, Darbhanga	The bird figures made by sisters for the Sama-Chakeva festival — a seasonal craft that exists for eight days a year and is then destroyed.
Makhana processing	Mithilanchal	जीआई टैग	Mithila Makhana holds a geographical indication registered in 2022. The region produces the overwhelming majority of the world's supply, and the work — diving and popping — is done by specific communities, chiefly the Mallah.
Loin-loom and fly-shuttle puan weaving	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	जीआई टैग	Five Mizo cloths were registered as geographical indications in August 2019. The craft is overwhelmingly practised by women, and in Thenzawl it is a full rural industry rather than a household activity.
Bamboo and cane basketry	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Across the region	The conical back-basket carried by a headband is the working tool of jhum agriculture, and it is made, repaired and replaced at home. With 57 per cent of Mizoram under bamboo, the material is the cheapest thing in the economy and is used for house frames, water pipes, floors, fences and cooking vessels.
Khumbeu bamboo hat	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Aizawl and the central hills	A working rain hat that became a ceremonial object, now worn chiefly with dance costume. Its shape is the practical answer to two thousand millimetres of rain falling on someone bent over a hillside.
Blacksmithing — the dao	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Village smithies across the region	The chempui or dao does everything here — clears jhum, splits bamboo, butchers, builds a house. Village smiths were historically a distinct occupational group, and a household's blade was maintained rather than replaced.
Mizo chilli cultivation	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	जीआई टैग	Mizo Chilli, a Capsicum frutescens bird's-eye type, holds a geographical indication in the agricultural class. It is small, thin-walled, very hot and aromatic, and it is the only spice in the regional kitchen that anyone bothers to argue about.
Wood carving and house building	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Across the region	Houses are built on stilted platforms cut into the slope, so the floor is level while the ground beneath it is not. The lower space historically held livestock; the arrangement is a direct response to having no flat land to build on.
Monpa handmade paper (Mon Shugu)	Monpa & Tawang Belt	जीआई टैग	The paper monasteries wrote and printed scripture on, historically traded to Tibet, Bhutan and beyond. The craft had all but stopped by the late twentieth century as cheap mill paper arrived; a Khadi and Village Industries Commission unit reopened production at Tawang in December 2020 with a handful of trained artisans. Monpa handmade paper was granted a geographical indication in January 2024.
Thangka painting	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Tawang and Bomdila	Painted for monasteries and household shrines, and taught by apprenticeship at the monastery and the government craft centres. A thangka is a ritual object first — it is consecrated, and it is rolled and carried rather than hung permanently.
Wooden mask carving	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Tawang and West Kameng	Masks for Cham and for Ajilamu, made to a fixed iconography for the ritual characters and with considerable licence for the comic ones. Carvers also turn wooden bowls and cups from burl wood, which are exchanged as gifts and were once a serious trade item.
Carpet and rug weaving	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Tawang, Bomdila, Dirang	Produced at the craft centres at Tawang and Bomdila and in households, mostly in the Tibetan motif vocabulary. Carpets are floor and seat coverings in a house with no chairs, so the trade has a domestic market as well as a tourist one.
Cane and bamboo bridges and containers	Monpa & Tawang Belt	West Kameng and Tawang	River crossings in a country of gorges. The Chakzam near Tawang is an iron-chain suspension bridge traditionally attributed to the fifteenth-century Tibetan bridge-builder Thangtong Gyalpo, and the attribution, whatever its documentary status, is part of how the belt tells its own history.
Yak dairy craft	Monpa & Tawang Belt	जीआई टैग	Arunachal Pradesh Yak Churpi was granted a geographical indication in 2023. The National Research Centre on Yak at Dirang works on the herds this depends on, and the Brokpa herding households at the high pastures are where the milk comes from.
Loin-loom weaving	Naga Hills	Across the region	The foundation craft of the region, worked almost entirely by women at home. Only the Chakhesang shawl currently holds a geographical indication; the rest of the repertoire is unprotected, and machine-made copies of restricted designs are a standing grievance among weavers.
Chakhesang shawl weaving	Naga Hills	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2017 on an application by the Chakhesang Women Welfare Society — the first and so far only Naga textile to be protected.
Wood carving	Naga Hills	Mon, Longleng, Mokokchung	Morung and village-gate carving in mithun heads, hornbills, tigers, warriors and human figures, in a flattened frontal style. Konyak carving is the most sought after, and the trade has moved to portable pieces for buyers.
Bamboo and cane work	Naga Hills	Across the region	Baskets graded by function — head-load carrying baskets with a tumpline, grain stores, fish traps, shields, rain shields, chair frames — plus the cane leggings worn as ornament. The Diezephe craft village near Chumoukedima is the organised cluster.
Naga king chilli	Naga Hills	जीआई टैग	Naga Mircha holds a geographical indication registered to the state's horticulture department. It was certified in 2007 as the hottest chilli then measured, at over a million Scoville units, and cultivator groups have since been authorised as registered users of the tag.
Blacksmithing	Naga Hills	Across the region	The dao — a heavy single-edged blade used to clear jhum, butcher, build a house and, historically, to fight — is the one tool a household cannot do without, and village smiths still make and re-temper them.
Bead and brass ornament	Naga Hills	Mon, Zunheboto, Kohima	Old bead strings were high-value property, exchanged as bride-price and inherited. The brass head pendants of the Konyak are the most recognisable single ornament in the region.
Naga tree tomato and Naga cucumber	Naga Hills	जीआई टैग	Both hold geographical indications — the tree tomato registered in 2015, the cucumber in 2021, both on applications by the regional agricultural marketing corporation. They are the region's other two protected products alongside the chilli and the Chakhesang shawl.
Temple jewellery of Nagercoil	Nanjil Nadu	जीआई टैग	Ornament made for temple deities and for Bharatanatyam dancers rather than for daily wear, and one of the few crafts of this region with an independent reputation. Registered as a geographical indication in 2007–08.
Kanniyakumari clove	Nanjil Nadu	जीआई टैग	The clove gardens of the southern Ghats slope produce a large share of India's crop, grown mostly on smallholdings under shade alongside nutmeg and pepper. Registered as a geographical indication in 2021–22.
Timber joinery of the Padmanabhapuram tradition	Nanjil Nadu	Kanyakumari	The carpentry tradition that built the palace and the older houses around it, still practised by thachan families doing restoration and temple work.
Coastal boat building	Nanjil Nadu	Kanyakumari	A working craft in transition. The shapes are dictated by launching through surf off an open beach, which is why the boats here differ from those of the sheltered lagoon coast to the north.
Rubber sheet processing	Nanjil Nadu	Kanyakumari (Marthandam, Kuzhithurai)	Smallholder rubber is the cash crop of the midland, and the sheet-rolling and smoking sheds behind the houses are the visible end of it. The grading standards used are those of the Rubber Board across the border.
Palm and screw pine plaiting	Nanjil Nadu	Kanyakumari	Mats, baskets, fish carriers and the roofing that still covers working sheds. Almost entirely a women's craft and almost entirely uncommercialised.
Hodi — the Nicobari outrigger canoe	Nicobar Islands	जीआई टैग	The defining object of Nicobarese material culture, and the territory's first GI application. Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024.
Nicobari hut (Chanvi Pati — Nyi hupul)	Nicobar Islands	जीआई टैग	A building type found nowhere else in India, and the clearest single piece of evidence that this archipelago belongs architecturally to island Southeast Asia.
Nicobari mat (Chatrai-hileuoi)	Nicobar Islands	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024. The same plaiting skill produces the house walls and roof, so the craft and the architecture are one body of knowledge.
Tavi-i-Ngaich — Nicobari virgin coconut oil	Nicobar Islands	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024. Note for the record that the virgin coconut oil GI belongs to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, not to Lakshadweep, which is a common confusion.
Kareau and hentakoi — carved guardian figures	Nicobar Islands	Recorded across the Nicobar group	The best-known Nicobarese carving tradition, heavily collected by colonial officers and now scattered through European museums. It is a healing and protective practice, and describing it as decorative art misses what it is for.
Chowra pottery	Nicobar Islands	Chowra, Nancowry Group	Chowra is the pottery island. The administration's own account of the group records pot-making as Chowra's specialisation, and in the ethnographic literature the island's monopoly on it, and the ritual standing that came with it, is one of the most-discussed features of Nicobarese society — a division of labour by island rather than by caste or guild.
Cane, shell and coconut work	Nicobar Islands	Territory-wide	Household craft, made for use rather than for sale, since there is no tourist market here.
Maheshwari weaving	Nimar	जीआई टैग	Founded under Ahilyabai Holkar in the eighteenth century, when weavers were brought to the town to make a cloth suitable as a gift of state. It nearly died out in the twentieth century and was rebuilt from 1979 by the Rehwa Society, which put the looms back inside the fort.
Narmada banalinga finishing	Nimar	Khandwa (Omkareshwar), Khargone	The Narmada's bed produces exceptionally hard, evenly rounded pebbles, which are treated as self-formed Shiva lingas and traded from the ghat towns across the country. The saying that every pebble of the Narmada is a Shiva is, in this trade, a business model as well as a belief.
Pithora painting of the Bhilala and Barela country	Nimar	Barwani, Khargone, and westward	Strongest among the Rathwa and Bhilala further west, and present on the Nimar side of the Vindhya and Satpura slopes. Its function is contractual — a painting that discharges an obligation to a deity.
Burhanpur textile and zari work	Nimar	Burhanpur	Burhanpur wove and finished cloth for the Mughal Deccan and shipped it out through Surat. The historic craft is largely gone; the town's textile employment is now overwhelmingly powerloom.
Bamboo, gourd and forest-material work of the Satpura slope	Nimar	Khargone, Barwani, Khandwa	Household production for household use in the Bhil, Bhilala and Barela villages — including the dhol and mandal drums the Bhagoria dancing depends on, which are made in the same villages that dance to them.
Warli painting	North Konkan	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in the name of the Warli community's association. Its move onto paper and cloth from the 1970s is largely credited to Jivya Soma Mashe, who painted outside the ritual occasion and thereby created a market that now supports several hundred artists — and a great deal of unattributed copying.
Pen Ganesh idol making	North Konkan	Raigad — Pen	A single small town supplies Ganesh idols across the country and abroad. The traditional material is river clay, which dissolves on immersion; the plaster that replaced it does not, which is the whole of the current immersion-pollution argument in one workshop.
Salt-making	North Konkan	Thane, Palghar and Raigad creeks	An industry old enough to have named a community and a taluka, now squeezed between land value and coastal-regulation law. The pans also function as the city's flood sponge, which is the argument their defenders now have to make in planning terms rather than cultural ones.
Karvi and bamboo wattle	North Konkan	Thane, Palghar and the ghat spurs	Karvi flowers in mass once in roughly seven or eight years and dies back; the dead stems are cut for walling, so the building cycle of a hill village is set by a plant's reproductive clock.
Wooden fishing-boat building	North Konkan	Alibag, Uran, Vasai and the city docks	Yards along the creeks still build and repair the trawler and dol-net fleet. The knowledge is held by a small number of families and is not written down anywhere.
Zaveri Bazaar goldsmithing	North Konkan	Mumbai	The largest concentration of the bullion and jewellery trade in the country, and the workshop end of it — thousands of artisans, largely migrants from Bengal and Gujarat, working in upper-floor rooms behind the shopfronts.
Mysore traditional painting	Old Mysore	जीआई टैग	A registered geographical indication, and a school with a documented institutional home — the Jaganmohan Palace collection at Mysuru holds the reference works, and the court kept painters on establishment into the twentieth century.
Channapatna toys and lacquerware	Old Mysore	जीआई टैग	A registered geographical indication. The local account traces the craft to artisans invited from Persia under Tipu Sultan, and the town has been a single-industry town ever since.
Mysore rosewood inlay	Old Mysore	जीआई टैग	A registered geographical indication, and the craft behind the panelled doors and screens of the palace interiors. The workshops cluster around the Mysuru palace and sell mostly through the state emporia.
Sandalwood carving	Old Mysore	Mysuru, Bengaluru, Shivamogga	Constrained by the raw material rather than the market. The tree has been state property regardless of whose land it stands on since the eighteenth century, a rule relaxed only in the early 2000s, so the carvers work on rationed stock at controlled prices.
Mysore Sandal Soap and sandalwood oil	Old Mysore	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication, and the most improbable industrial product in India — it exists because the First World War closed the export market and left the state sitting on unsold sandalwood in 1916.
Mysore agarbathi	Old Mysore	जीआई टैग	A registered geographical indication. The region is the centre of the Indian incense trade, and the industry's two halves — village rolling and urban perfumery — have never been in the same building.
Mysore Ganjifa	Old Mysore	जीआई टैग	A registered geographical indication and a near-dead craft, kept going by a handful of painters and by collectors rather than by anyone who plays the game.
Shivarapatna stone carving	Old Mysore	Kolar (Shivarapatna)	A village of hereditary shilpi families supplying stone deities to temples across the south, working to commission and to canon.
Madurai Sungudi	Pandya Nadu	जीआई टैग	Registered in December 2005. Machine-printed imitations vastly outnumber hand-tied pieces in the market, and the reliable test is the reverse of the cloth — a tied dot reads on both faces, a printed one does not.
Madurai malli	Pandya Nadu	जीआई टैग	Registered in 2012-13. The Madurai bud carries an unusually high concentration of aromatic compounds and thicker petals, which is why it is bought for perfumery as well as for garlands.
Dindigul locks	Pandya Nadu	जीआई टैग	Made by small workshops in one town since the nineteenth century, including the very large locks used on temple and prison doors. Registered in 2019-20.
Sivakasi fireworks, matches and offset printing	Pandya Nadu	Virudhunagar	A dry town with unreliable farming and low humidity, which turned out to be exactly the conditions match and cracker manufacture wanted. The printing came third, to make the labels, and outgrew both.
Kodaikanal malai poondu	Pandya Nadu	जीआई टैग	Small, tight-cloved, pungent hill garlic with a high allicin content and a long shelf life. Registered in 2019-20.
Virupakshi and Sirumalai hill bananas	Pandya Nadu	जीआई टैग	Both registered in 2008-09. Low moisture, high aroma, and the specific reason Palani panchamirtham keeps without refrigeration.
Sholavandan vetrilai and Cumbum panneer grapes	Pandya Nadu	जीआई टैग	Two agricultural registrations from the region — a tender betel leaf grown along the Vaigai, and the muscat table grape of the Cumbum valley, which takes two crops a year because the valley never gets cold.
Nayak stucco and pillar sculpture	Pandya Nadu	Madurai	The visual language of seventeenth-century Madurai — a thousand-pillar hall, a corridor of yali piers, and a gopuram covered in thousands of painted figures. It is a living trade because the repainting cycle never stops.
Wancho wood carving	Patkai & Tirap Belt	जीआई टैग	The most accomplished figural carving tradition in Arunachal Pradesh, and the belt's best-known craft. Its subject matter — human heads and figures, morung posts, drums — comes directly from the ritual system of the pre-Christian village, and the carvers now work largely for a collector and tourist market. Wancho Wooden Craft was granted a geographical indication in January 2024.
Log drum making	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Tirap and Longding	Very few new drums are made. The surviving ones sit at villages such as Wakka and are maintained rather than replaced, which means the craft exists now mainly as repair knowledge held by a handful of men.
Bead and brass ornament	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Longding and Tirap	Historically a system of insignia rather than decoration. Reproductions are now made openly for sale; genuine old strands stay in households.
Tangsa weaving	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Changlang	Woven by women at home, with distinct pattern sets across the many Tangsa groups. Bags and shawls are the products that sell; the full ceremonial pieces mostly do not leave the community.
Tibetan carpet weaving	Patkai & Tirap Belt	जीआई टैग	Introduced by the community settled at Miao from 1975 and run through the settlement's own cooperative alongside farming and a handicraft centre. Arunachal's handmade carpet received a geographical indication in January 2024.
Bamboo tea curing	Patkai & Tirap Belt	जीआई टैग	Singpho Phalap holds a geographical indication granted in January 2024 — a household craft with a registered name, made in the same districts as an industrial tea economy that has nothing to do with it.
Cane and bamboo work	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Across the belt	Carrying baskets, fish traps, mats, house walling, hats and the sheaths that daos live in. The unremarkable craft that everything else depends on.
Phulkari embroidery	Punjab Doabs	जीआई टैग	Made for the household, not for sale — a girl's phulkaris were begun at her birth and given at her wedding, and the type of piece indicated the occasion and the giver. Commercial production today is largely machine embroidery on synthetic cloth; genuine hand darn on khaddar survives in small cooperatives and among older embroiderers.
Punjabi jutti	Punjab Doabs	जीआई टैग	Malerkotla is the largest cluster and its households have made juttis for generations. Registered as a geographical indication. Machine-made imitation now dominates the low end of the market, and hand tilla work survives mostly at the wedding end.
Jalandhar sports goods	Punjab Doabs	Jalandhar	A cluster that grew very sharply after 1947, when the industry centred on Sialkot was split by the border and artisans and firms who moved east re-established themselves in Jalandhar. It supplies a large share of India's sports equipment and exports internationally — a whole industry created by a partition line.
Khes and darri weaving	Punjab Doabs	Malwa and Doaba	Dowry weaving done at home, largely by women, and displaced by mill cloth. A surviving weaver can still be found in most large villages, but the number who can set a double weave is small.
Nala and parandi making	Punjab Doabs	Across the region	Small textile objects made and given within households and sold at fairs, and among the few crafts that a household still routinely makes rather than buys.
Hoshiarpur inlay woodwork	Punjab Doabs	Hoshiarpur	A long-established workshop craft in the kandi town of Hoshiarpur, sustained now by furniture and gift markets rather than by court patronage.
Amritsar woollen weaving	Punjab Doabs	Amritsar	Founded on nineteenth-century migration of Kashmiri shawl weavers to the plains, and industrialised into one of north India's principal wool textile centres. Ludhiana's hosiery and knitwear industry is its twentieth-century successor at scale.
Ludhiana hosiery, bicycles and machine parts	Punjab Doabs	Ludhiana	Not a heritage craft, but the region's dominant manufacturing culture and a direct descendant of its artisan economy — thousands of small workshops, mostly family-run, supplying national markets in woollens, cycles and components.
Bankura Panchmura terracotta	Rarh	जीआई टैग	The stylised long-necked horse from Panchmura village is the best-known terracotta object in India and serves as the emblem of the national crafts council. It began as a votive offering left at village shrines, in quantity, and became a decorative object much later.
Bengal Dokra	Rarh	जीआई टैग	Cast by families of the Malhar community in a handful of villages, in a technique with a continuous history running back to the Bronze Age. The characteristic thread-wound surface is a by-product of the method rather than an applied decoration.
Chhau masks of Charida	Rarh	जीआई टैग	A single village street of mask-making households supplying the Chhau troupes of the whole tract. The Purulia Chau mask carries a registered geographical indication, and the trade has partially converted to decorative wall masks for buyers who will never dance in one.
Baluchari and Swarnachari weaving	Rarh	जीआई टैग	The narrative saree of Bengal, rebuilt at Bishnupur after the original Murshidabad trade collapsed. Weavers' earnings remain low relative to retail prices, which is the standard complaint of every GI handloom in India.
Santiniketan leather	Rarh	जीआई टैग	A craft invented in the twentieth century as part of Visva-Bharati's rural reconstruction programme, then built into a cooperative industry around Sriniketan. It is unusual among Indian crafts in having a documented founding date and a documented design source.
Dashavatar taas	Rarh	Bankura (Bishnupur)	A circular hand-painted playing-card pack made in Bishnupur for a game with its own rules, and now sustained by a very small number of families. It survives as an object more than as a game.
Terracotta temple brickwork	Rarh	Bankura, Birbhum, Bardhaman, Hooghly	Not a marketable craft but a building tradition, and the region's largest artistic achievement. It exists because the laterite shelf has no stone worth quarrying, so the only structural and decorative material available was clay.
Kantha stitch	Rarh	जीआई टैग	A domestic craft — quilts made from worn sarees for a household's own use — that has become a commercial embroidery industry around Bolpur, worked on new silk for the market.
Srikalahasti Kalamkari	Rayalaseema	जीआई टैग	Temple hangings and narrative panels — Ramayana, Mahabharata, Krishna Leela — made for shrines and processional cars. Registered as a geographical indication in 2004–05. The essential distinction is that Srikalahasti is drawn by hand for temples and Machilipatnam, on the coast, is block-printed and grew out of an export trade to Persia and Europe; they share a name and almost nothing else.
Tholu Bommalata leather puppetry	Rayalaseema	Sri Sathya Sai (Nimmalakunta), Anantapur	Nimmalakunta is the principal surviving cluster of a tradition that once travelled across the whole Telugu country. Its figures are among the largest in any shadow-puppet tradition anywhere, and the families have moved into lampshades and wall panels to stay in the trade.
Allagadda stone carving	Rayalaseema	जीआई टैग	A working sculptors' town supplying temple images across south India and abroad. Registered as a geographical indication in 2017–18, and one of the few crafts on this list that is expanding rather than contracting.
Vijayanagara mural painting	Rayalaseema	Sri Sathya Sai (Lepakshi), Anantapur	The Veerabhadra temple ceilings at Lepakshi hold the largest surviving body of sixteenth-century Vijayanagara mural painting, including a very large single figure of Veerabhadra on the mandapa ceiling. It is a school, not a living craft — nobody paints in this idiom now.
Banaganapalle mango cultivation	Rayalaseema	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2017–18. The same cultivar is grown across south India under the names Benishan and Safeda; the GI attaches to the Nandyal belt, which is the origin.
Yemmiganur handloom durries	Rayalaseema	Kurnool	A large weaving town on the Tungabhadra that has kept a coarse-cotton trade alive on institutional orders. Not currently GI-protected.
Machilipatnam Kalamkari — a neighbour, not a local craft	Rayalaseema	Krishna district, on the coast	Included only to correct a persistent confusion. Machilipatnam kalamkari is block-printed, was made for Persian and European export, and belongs to the delta coast. Its own GI, registered in 2008–09, is a separate registration from Srikalahasti's, and the two crafts should not be described as variants of one thing.
Moradabad metal craft	Rohilkhand & Katehar	जीआई टैग	Peetal Nagri — the brass city, one of India's largest handicraft export clusters, employing several lakh people across thousands of small units and supplying homeware to Europe and North America.
Pilibhit bansuri	Rohilkhand & Katehar	जीआई टैग	A town that makes the overwhelming majority of India's bamboo flutes — a few thousand artisans, mostly working at home, whose product goes out through Delhi to the whole country.
Amroha dholak	Rohilkhand & Katehar	जीआई टैग	Drum-making concentrated in a few mohallas of Amroha, supplying the north Indian folk and devotional music trade.
Sambhal horn and bone craft	Rohilkhand & Katehar	जीआई टैग	Combs, handles, tableware and figures made from abattoir by-products — a craft that expanded after the ivory ban and now exports widely.
Nagina ebony and wood carving	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Bijnor (Nagina)	A carving town on the Ganga side of the region, working in a heavier, darker idiom than Saharanpur's.
Rampuri chaku	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Rampur	The folding knife whose name entered Hindi cinema as shorthand for menace. The long-blade version has been restricted for decades, and the surviving trade makes smaller working knives.
Bareilly manjha and bamboo work	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Bareilly	Kite string prepared for competitive kite-cutting, made in Bareilly in enough quantity that the city's name is attached to it nationally, alongside a cane and bamboo furniture trade.
Bandhani	Saurashtra	जीआई टैग	Registered as Jamnagari Bandhani in 2016. Counting the number of tied points is how quality is judged, and a fine wedding gharchola can carry tens of thousands.
Rajkot Patola	Saurashtra	जीआई टैग	Registered in 2018. The double-ikat patola of Patan, in North Gujarat, is a separate registration and a separate craft; conflating the two is the most common error made about Gujarati silk.
Tangaliya weaving	Saurashtra	जीआई टैग	A Dangasia craft registered in 2009, historically made as the woollen ramraj skirt worn by Bharwad women and now surviving mainly through cooperative and design intervention.
Rabari, Ahir and Mahajan embroidery	Saurashtra	Across the peninsula	Documented in detail and commercially significant, but unregistered — the registered Kutch Embroidery geographical indication covers the neighbouring region's related styles.
Mochi bharat	Saurashtra	Bhavnagar, Junagadh, Rajkot	Fine hook embroidery made by Mochi craftsmen for Kathi and Rajput households — the courtly end of the peninsula's embroidery, and now practised by very few.
Moti bharat	Saurashtra	Across the peninsula	Beadwork torans hung over doorways, chaklas and animal covers, made in households rather than workshops and given rather than sold.
Sihor metalware	Saurashtra	Bhavnagar (Sihor)	A metalworking town at the foot of the Gohilwad hills that supplied vessels across the peninsula, and one of the few places where hand-tinning is still done to order.
Morbi ceramics	Saurashtra	Morbi	A twentieth-century industrial cluster that grew out of a local clock and tile-making tradition and is now among the largest ceramic manufacturing concentrations in the world. It belongs here as an example of a craft economy that industrialised rather than died.
Cane suspension bridges	Siang & Adi Belt	Across the Siang and Siyom	Built and rebuilt by village labour, and inspected and re-lashed on a cycle measured in a year or two because cane rots. The knowledge is procedural and held collectively rather than by specialists, which makes it exactly the kind of craft that disappears quietly once a steel bridge goes in upstream. Several survive on the Siang and Siyom and are still used.
Loin-loom weaving	Siang & Adi Belt	जीआई टैग	Adi Textile and Galo Textile hold separate geographical indications granted in January 2024. Weaving is women's work, done at home, and a ceremonial gale still takes weeks.
Cane and bamboo basketry	Siang & Adi Belt	Across the belt	The container technology of an economy with no pottery tradition worth speaking of and no pack animal. A household's baskets are graded by weave density: coarse for firewood, close for grain, very close for liquid work.
Dao forging	Siang & Adi Belt	जीआई टैग	The dao is tool, weapon and dress item at once, and it appears in every ceremonial photograph for that reason. The Arunachal dao was granted a geographical indication in January 2024.
Apong brewing	Siang & Adi Belt	जीआई टैग	A domestic craft with a registered name — Adi Apong and Marua Apo both received geographical indications in January 2024. The starter cake, not the grain, is what a family actually owns.
Wood and bamboo house building	Siang & Adi Belt	Across the belt	The moshup, the village dormitory and kebang hall, is the largest structure a village builds, and its hearth is where disputes are heard. Building it is a collective obligation rather than a commission.
Darjeeling orthodox tea manufacture	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	जीआई टैग	The first product registered as a geographical indication in India, in 2004–05, defined by a bounded set of gardens on this ridge. Only tea grown and processed within that area may carry the name.
Sikkim large cardamom, bhatti-cured	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2015. Sikkim is among the largest producers of large cardamom in the world, and the crop — not tea — is the cash backbone of most Sikkimese hill households.
Thangka painting	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Gangtok, Rumtek, Kalimpong	Taught at the monasteries and at the state cottage industries institute. A painter is judged on adherence to the grid, not on invention, which is why the tradition is legible across five centuries.
Lepcha bamboo and cane work	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Dzongu and the Teesta valley	A complete household technology in one material. The forms are still made in Dzongu, but the market for them collapsed with plastic and the knowledge now sits with a small number of older makers.
Choktse carving	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Gangtok and Kalimpong	The single piece of furniture in a traditional Bhutia room — it folds flat, which matters in a house that may be reached only on foot.
Cham mask carving	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Monastic workshops across the region	Masks are consecrated before use and stored in the monastery rather than sold, so the craft has no real retail market and survives entirely inside the institutions that need it.
Handmade paper	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Sikkim	The paper of Buddhist manuscript tradition, made from a shrub that regenerates from the cut stump, so the raw material is renewable by design. Small units still produce it for monasteries and for the craft market.
Sikkimese and Tibetan carpet weaving	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Gangtok	Established as an organised craft through the state cottage industries institute in Gangtok and by workshops set up with Tibetan refugee weavers around Darjeeling and Kalimpong after 1959.
Surat Zari Craft	South Gujarat Littoral	जीआई टैग	Registered in 2010. The trade supplies weaving centres across India, so a great deal of what is sold elsewhere as local zari work begins on this estuary.
Warli painting	South Gujarat Littoral	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2014, under a single state's name. The practice itself runs unbroken across the boundary into the Konkan and through the enclave between them, which is exactly the kind of split a region-based rather than state-based record exists to show.
Sadeli inlay	South Gujarat Littoral	Surat	A Surat micro-mosaic tradition once made in quantity for export, now practised by very few. Ivory was the original white element and has been replaced by bone and plastic.
Dangi bamboo work	South Gujarat Littoral	The Dangs, Valsad	Made for use rather than for sale, using the largest standing bamboo stock in the state. The fish traps in particular are engineered to the flow of a specific stream and are not interchangeable between valleys.
Diamond cutting and polishing	South Gujarat Littoral	Surat	Surat cuts and polishes the overwhelming majority of the world's diamonds by volume. It is a craft in the literal sense — hand skill, apprenticeship, family workshops — that happens to operate at industrial scale, and its workforce came from Saurashtra rather than from this coast.
Fishing craft and boat building	South Gujarat Littoral	Valsad, Daman, Navsari	Small trawler and gillnet hulls built and repaired on the Damanganga, Auranga and Par creeks, hauled out on the tide.
Sawantwadi lacquerware and wooden toys	South Konkan	Sindhudurg — Sawantwadi	Fruit, vegetables, boxes and toys turned and lacquered by families working around the Sawantwadi palace, where the former ruling family maintains a workshop in the Durbar Hall. Reports of a geographical indication for the craft have circulated; treat the registration as unverified here until it is checked against the register.
Ganjifa playing cards	South Konkan	Sindhudurg — Sawantwadi	A Persian-derived court game that survived in India mainly as a painted craft. Sawantwadi is one of very few places still making the cards, and the painters are the same families who do the lacquerware.
Chitrakathi	South Konkan	Sindhudurg — Pinguli	Held by Thakar families at Pinguli near Kudal, among the last practitioners of picture-storytelling in India, with only a handful of complete old pothis surviving. The Gangavane family, who keep a museum and teaching space in the village, have been nationally honoured for sustaining it.
Kaavi mural art	South Konkan	Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg temple walls	Coastal temple decoration running from the Konkan through Goa into coastal Karnataka. Much of it has been lost to repainting and cement renovation, which destroys the layer the technique depends on.
Alphonso mango cultivation	South Konkan	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2018 for the Konkan coastal districts, after decades in which fruit from anywhere was sold under the name. Devgad and Ratnagiri growers additionally market under their own collective marks, because the GI covers a larger area than either wants to share a price with.
Kokum processing	South Konkan	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication as Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri kokum. The tree needs no irrigation or chemical input and fruits on ground too poor for anything else, so it is a genuine smallholder crop and the processing is done at household and co-operative scale.
Cashew growing and processing	South Konkan	Sindhudurg — Vengurla, Devgad and Kudal	The Vengurla series of cashew varieties was bred at the research station there and planted across the Konkan and beyond. A geographical indication for Vengurla cashew has been reported; it is treated as unverified here.
Laterite stone cutting	South Konkan	Throughout	The region's building material is the plateau itself. It is soft enough to saw when freshly quarried and hardens on exposure, which is why every old wall, temple plinth and fort here is the same red-brown.
Berhampur silk weaving	South Odisha & Ganjam	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2010 as Berhampur Patta (Phoda Kumbha) Saree & Joda. The weaving quarters are inside the town, the yarn comes from outside the state, and the trade's most reliable customer is ritual rather than fashion.
Ganjam kewda distillation	South Odisha & Ganjam	जीआई टैग	Both Ganjam Kewda Flower and Ganjam Kewda Rooh were registered as geographical indications in 2010. Thousands of hectares of coastal kewda thicket behind the dunes feed a distilling trade whose product leaves the region almost entirely — into attar houses in the north, into paan and gutkha, and into the sweet trade. The plant also holds the dunes together, so the crop and the coastal defence are the same bushes.
Cashew processing	South Odisha & Ganjam	Ganjam	The laterite behind the beach ridge carries a large cashew belt, and the shelling yards employ mostly women on piece rates. The shell liquid blisters skin, which is why hand-shelling is done with oiled hands and why mechanisation has been pushed hard and adopted unevenly.
Horn craft	South Odisha & Ganjam	Gajapati (Paralakhemundi)	A small surviving craft on the hill road, working a material that is a slaughterhouse by-product and needs no felling. The workshops are few and the trade depends on emporium buying.
Lanjia Saura idital wall painting	South Odisha & Ganjam	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2022 as Painting of Lanjia Saura (IDITAL), Odisha. It is a votive painting made to a diviner's instruction after a death or an illness, not a decoration; the densest concentration is around Puttasing on the Rayagada side of the same hills, just inland of this region's edge.
Palm-leaf and pattachitra work	South Odisha & Ganjam	Ganjam	A thinner tradition than Raghurajpur's in the delta, kept up in a few households and by the Danda and jatra troupes who need painted properties.
Bonbibi and Dakshin Rai images	Sundarbans	South 24 Parganas	A distinct iconographic set made by village modellers: Bonbibi in Muslim dress, often on a tiger, with her brother Shah Jangali, the boy Dukhey, and Dakshin Rai as a moustached man or a tiger-headed figure. The images are not immersed like Durga; they are left in the shrine hut until the weather takes them.
Honey and beeswax processing	Sundarbans	South and North 24 Parganas	The forest's oldest licensed industry. Honey is graded by the flower it came from, khalisha being the lightest and most valued, and Sundarban Honey received a registered geographical indication on the Indian side in 2024. Wax was historically the more profitable half of the collection.
Boat building	Sundarbans	Across the islands, with yards at Canning, Gosaba and Namkhana	Every island economy rests on a boat that a local yard built. The characteristic small craft is the bhutbhuti, named for the noise its single-cylinder irrigation engine makes, and it is the region's bus, ambulance and goods lorry.
Golpata thatch and mat work	Sundarbans	Across the islands	Roofing from a mangrove palm, cut in a controlled season under permit. A golpata roof outlasts a straw one in salt air, which is why it is worth a licence.
Net and trap making	Sundarbans	Across the islands	Made and repaired at home, mostly by women, and the single largest item of household capital in a fishing family. The fine-mesh net used for prawn seed is the most controversial object in the region's economy.
Shola and pith work for the shrine	Sundarbans	South 24 Parganas	The same craft that dresses a Durga idol upriver supplies the crowns and backdrops for Bonbibi's image, made in the polder villages rather than bought in.
Cheriyal scroll painting	Telangana	जीआई टैग	Made by the Nakashi families of Cheriyal as the visual aid for itinerant caste-narrator communities, each of whom commissioned the episodes of their own patron deity's story. Registered as a geographical indication in 2010–11. A handful of families still paint, and the market has shifted from storytellers to collectors.
Pembarthi metal craft	Telangana	जीआई टैग	A sheet-metal tradition that began as temple and chariot fittings under Kakatiya patronage and survived by moving to decorative panels and lamps. Registered as a geographical indication in 2010–11.
Nirmal toys and paintings	Telangana	जीआई टैग	Three separate geographical indications were registered in 2008–09 — Nirmal toys and craft, Nirmal paintings and Nirmal furniture. The wood is the constraint: poniki grows locally, is soft enough to carve wet and hard enough to hold an edge when dry.
Adilabad Dokra	Telangana	जीआई टैग	Cast by the Ojha (Wojari) community of the northern forest belt, in a technique shared with Bastar and Chhota Nagpur. Registered as a geographical indication in 2017–18.
Karimnagar silver filigree	Telangana	जीआई टैग	Filigree of a fineness that requires the wire to be drawn on site. Registered as a geographical indication in 2007–08. It shares a technique with Cuttack's tarakasi and with Portuguese and Persian filigree, and the route by which it arrived is not settled.
Laad Bazaar lac bangles	Telangana	Hyderabad	The bangle lane running west from the Charminar has been selling to Hyderabadi brides for generations. The craft is not GI-protected and the material is now largely bought-in rather than locally made.
Pochampally and Puttapaka ikat weaving	Telangana	जीआई टैग	Some thousands of looms across a cluster of villages, working a design vocabulary that expanded enormously in the twentieth century. Double ikat is done in very few places on earth, and Puttapaka is one of them.
Warangal durrie weaving	Telangana	जीआई टैग	Registered in 2017–18. The trade sustained itself on institutional orders long after households stopped buying.
Bidriware — a neighbour, not a local craft	Telangana	Bidar, in Kalyana Karnataka	Included here only to correct a common misattribution. Bidri is named for Bidar and is made there, not in Hyderabad; Hyderabad was its principal market and remains the place most visitors buy it. The Bidar GI belongs to that region, not this one.
Kanchipuram silk weaving	Tondaimandalam	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2005–06. The trade runs on several thousand households, a cooperative and private buyer system, and a constant argument about power-loom copies sold under the name.
Mamallapuram stone carving	Tondaimandalam	Chengalpattu	A working sculpture town rather than a heritage display, supplying temple images, garden pieces and commissions across India and abroad. The workshops line the road and are audible before they are visible.
Ayyanar terracotta horses	Tondaimandalam	Across the tank villages of the plain	One of the largest unfired-to-fired terracotta traditions anywhere, made by hereditary potter families and renewed rather than restored — old horses are left to weather and new ones added beside them.
Real Madras Handkerchief weaving	Tondaimandalam	Chennai and the Palar towns	A four-century export trade that is invisible in India because almost none of the cloth is sold here.
Palar valley tanning and leather goods	Tondaimandalam	Vellore, Ranipet, Ambur	One of India's two largest leather clusters, built on a sand-bed river and the groundwater under it, supplying European footwear brands and employing on a scale that dominates the district's economy.
Puducherry handmade paper and craft workshops	Tondaimandalam	Puducherry	A twentieth-century craft economy rather than an inherited one, and now a substantial part of what the enclave sells to visitors.
Aranmula kannadi	Travancore & Kuttanad	जीआई टैग	A mirror with no glass and therefore no second surface, so the image sits on the front of the metal with no thickness between eye and reflection. Made by a small number of related families at Aranmula and by nobody else; the alloy proportions are held within those households. Registered as a geographical indication in 2004–05.
Alleppey coir	Travancore & Kuttanad	जीआई टैग	The industry the canal town was built around. Mechanised coir factories were established at Alappuzha from 1859, and the trade drew the labour force whose organisation ran through the region's twentieth century politics. Registered as a geographical indication in 2007–08.
Screw pine mats (thazhappaya)	Travancore & Kuttanad	जीआई टैग	Sleeping and drying mats plaited from screw pine that grows wild along the backwater margins. Registered as Screw Pine Craft of Kerala in 2008–09.
Brass-inlaid coconut shell craft	Travancore & Kuttanad	जीआई टैग	Bowls, ladles and boxes made from the hardest part of the coconut, with brass laid into the grain. Registered as Brass Broidered Coconut Shell Crafts of Kerala in 2008–09.
Central Travancore jaggery	Travancore & Kuttanad	जीआई टैग	Dark, soft cane jaggery from the midland cane belt, distinct from the paler Marayoor product of the high range. Registered as a geographical indication in 2010–11.
Chundan vallam building	Travancore & Kuttanad	Alappuzha, Pathanamthitta	The snake boat — over thirty metres long, rowed by about a hundred oarsmen, owned collectively by a village rather than by a person, and treated as a deity's property. It is launched with ritual and kept oiled with fish oil between seasons.
Kettuvallam construction	Travancore & Kuttanad	Alappuzha	The rice barge that moved the Kuttanad harvest before the roads did, now rebuilt as houseboats. The hull is a joinery argument — a stitched boat gives in a swell where a nailed one splits.
Padayani kolam painting	Travancore & Kuttanad	Pathanamthitta	Made to be used once. The pigments are made the same evening from what is at hand, and the finished kolam is destroyed after the night it is danced in.
Bamboo and cane craft	Tripura Hills & Plains	Agartala, Bishalgarh and the western plain	The region's largest craft economy by employment. Bamboo is Tripura's leading forest crop, and the state is a substantial supplier of the plain round sticks that the Indian incense industry runs on — an unglamorous, high-volume trade sitting underneath the decorative work that gets photographed.
Rignai Pachra and Risa weaving	Tripura Hills & Plains	जीआई टैग	Both Rignai Pachra and the Tripura Risa Textile were registered as geographical indications in 2024. The craft is domestic and female, and in most hill households the loom is set up in the veranda rather than a workshop.
Matabari Pera Prasad	Tripura Hills & Plains	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2024. Unusually, the registration attaches to a temple's prasad rather than to a town's confectionery — the product is defined by where it is offered.
Tripura Queen pineapple	Tripura Hills & Plains	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in March 2015. Small, deep golden and intensely aromatic compared with the Kew variety grown for canning, and now the region's main horticultural export.
Jampui mandarin orange growing	Tripura Hills & Plains	North Tripura (Jampui hills)	A crop that works only on this one ridge, because it needs the winter cold the rest of the region does not get. The November orange festival at Vanghmun is built around the harvest.
Rock carving at Unakoti and Chabimura	Tripura Hills & Plains	Unakoti and Gomati	Two bodies of monumental relief sculpture cut into hillsides — Unakoti from around the eighth to ninth centuries and Chabimura from the fifteenth to sixteenth. Both are carved where they stand, which is why neither could be moved to a museum and why both survive largely unlooted.
Terracotta and pottery	Tripura Hills & Plains	Western plain	A plains craft shared with the delta, supplying the earthen pitchers that the Hojagiri dancers stand on among everything else.
Mangalore tiles	Tulu Nadu	Dakshina Kannada	The Basel Mission's Georg Plebst opened the first factory at Mangaluru in 1865. Within decades the tile was the standard roof of coastal and southern India and was being shipped to Sri Lanka, Burma, East Africa and Australia. A house is still described locally by whether it has a tiled roof.
Udupi saree weaving	Tulu Nadu	जीआई टैग	A geographical indication registered in 2015–16, covering a cluster that had almost stopped weaving before a deliberate revival put looms back into working households.
Kasaragod saree weaving	Tulu Nadu	जीआई टैग	A geographical indication registered in 2010–11, held by weaver cooperatives in the border belt.
Yakshagana kirita and vesha making	Tulu Nadu	Udupi and Dakshina Kannada	A handful of workshops supply the melas. A full crown is built to a named character rather than a size, and a mela's inventory is the most valuable thing it owns.
Bhuta bronzes and ritual masks	Tulu Nadu	Dakshina Kannada and Udupi	Standing bronze figures of daivas — boar-headed Panjurli among them — were cast for shrines from at least the sixteenth century and are among the most distinctive metal sculpture in South India. Enough have left the region through the antiquities trade that shrines now commission replacements.
Pattachitra	Utkal	जीआई टैग	The temple's own painting tradition — the anasara patti that stands in for the deities during their fortnight out of sight is a pattachitra, which is the reason the craft was never merely decorative.
Palm-leaf etching	Utkal	Puri (Raghurajpur) and the Prachi valley	The same technique that produced Odisha's manuscript literature, including its music and dance treatises, turned to picture-making. The roundness of the Odia script comes from this material.
Konark stone carving	Utkal	जीआई टैग	A living craft, not a heritage one — the carvers who restore temples and make new images are from the same families and the same villages, and the Sun Temple is their reference text.
Pipili appliqué	Utkal	जीआई टैग	The town exists because the temple needs canopies, umbrellas and chariot coverings every year on a schedule. The work is done by named households with hereditary temple service rights alongside the shop trade on the Bhubaneswar–Puri road.
Cuttack silver filigree	Utkal	Cuttack	Tarakasi, worked in workshops around Cuttack's old lanes. Its most conspicuous annual output is not jewellery but the silver and gold filigree backdrops built for the city's Durga Puja pandals, which are dismantled and re-made year on year.
Sola pith work	Utkal	Puri	Supplies the deity's floral ornament and the dancer's tahia. The material weighs almost nothing and lasts almost no time, which suits an object meant for a single occasion.
Ganjapa cards	Utkal	Puri (Raghurajpur)	Hand-painted circular playing cards for a game of ten suits, made by pattachitra families. The game has all but disappeared and the cards are now made for collectors, which has begun to change what is painted on them.
Brass and bell metal	Utkal	Khordha (Balakati) and the delta towns	Utensil and lamp making for domestic and temple use, sustained by ritual demand that steel has not replaced.
Etikoppaka lacquer toys	Uttarandhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2014. The wood is a soft, close-grained white timber that takes a lathe cleanly, and the dyes are made from seeds, roots, bark and leaves — which is why the toys survived the shift to non-toxic-toy regulation better than painted competitors did.
Bobbili Veena	Uttarandhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2010. Made by a handful of families whose trade is hereditary, and now also produced in miniature as a souvenir, which is what actually pays for the workshop.
Budithi bell and brass metal craft	Uttarandhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2007. A beaten-sheet tradition rather than a casting one, which is unusual in India and gives the vessels their thin walls and their weight.
Ponduru khadi	Uttarandhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2023, and organised through a khadi workers' society rather than through master weavers. The count achieved by hand here is the whole product.
Cashew processing	Uttarandhra	Srikakulam (Palasa and Kasibugga)	One of the largest cashew-processing clusters in India, drawing raw nut from the local laterite belt, from Odisha and from West Africa. The workforce is largely women on piece rates, and the shell liquid is caustic enough that hand-shelling remains skilled work.
Bamboo, cane and leaf work	Uttarandhra	Alluri Sitharama Raju and Parvathipuram Manyam	Household production for household use, sold at the weekly shandy. It is the craft economy of the ghats and it has almost no retail presence outside them.
Karvath Kathi weaving	Vidarbha	Nagpur and Bhandara (Umred, Pauni)	A handful of working looms remain at Umred and Pauni. The technique is close to the kadiyal interlocking used in the Paithani, applied to cotton rather than silk and to a very different kind of garment.
Bhandara brass	Vidarbha	Bhandara	Bhandara's name for itself is the brass town, and the trade goes back to supplying an agrarian economy that stored water and cooked in metal. It has contracted sharply with stainless steel and aluminium.
Waigaon turmeric curing	Vidarbha	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in June 2016. The Waigaon variety is valued for a high curcumin content, which is a chemical claim rather than a marketing one and is the basis of the registration.
Bhiwapur chilli drying	Vidarbha	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in March 2017 — the first chilli from Maharashtra to hold one. Grown in the southern talukas of Nagpur district and sold on pungency and colour rather than size.
Wardha khadi and village industry	Vidarbha	Wardha	Institutionalised at Wardha and Sevagram from the mid-1930s, with the Magan Sangrahalaya set up in 1938 as a working museum of village industry rather than a display of one. The institutions are still operating.
Gadchiroli bamboo work	Vidarbha	Gadchiroli, Chandrapur	Bamboo here is a cash crop under community control as much as a craft material — Mendha-Lekha became the first village in India to win the right to harvest and sell its own bamboo, in 2009.
Godna tattooing	Vidarbha	Gadchiroli, Chandrapur, Gondia	A permanent, non-transferable form of ornament in communities that historically owned little else. Almost gone among women under fifty, and now studied mostly from photographs of the oldest generation.

बुनाई और कपड़े 282

नाम	क्षेत्र	प्रकार	टिप्पणी
Karen backstrap weaving	Andaman Islands	Webi and the Karen villages near Mayabunder	Narrow-width cotton woven on a body-tensioned loom and sewn into tunics and wraps, in a Burmese Karen idiom. Practised by a community of a few thousand and not commercially produced at any scale.
Bhagalpur tussar silk	Anga & Seemanchal	जीआई टैग	Wild silk reeled and woven at Bhagalpur from cocoons reared in the surrounding forests, distinguished by its natural gold colour and irregular slub. Registered as a geographical indication, and the basis of tens of thousands of looms in and around the city.
Ghicha and matka silk	Anga & Seemanchal	Bhagalpur	Yarn spun rather than reeled from pierced or damaged cocoons, giving a coarser, textured cloth much used for furnishing and stoles.
Katihar and Purnia jute	Anga & Seemanchal	Katihar, Purnia	Jute grown, retted and milled across the interfluve — a crop that made this belt an industrial region under the Calcutta jute economy and left it exposed when that collapsed.
Farrukhabad hand block print	Antarved Doab	जीआई टैग	Large-repeat floral block printing in vegetable and mineral colours on cotton, historically for tent panels, canopies and bedcovers rather than for clothing. A registered geographical indication.
Khadi and handloom of the Doab towns	Antarved Doab	Meerut, Etawah, Kanpur	Coarse cotton weaving that survived as a nationalist industry and continues through cooperative societies in the district towns.
Kanpur leather	Antarved Doab	Kanpur	Not a textile but the region's largest cloth-adjacent industry — tanneries and saddleries along the Ganga that once shod and harnessed an imperial army and now supply a global footwear trade, at a known cost to the river.
Lucknow Chikankari	Awadh	जीआई टैग	A white-on-white surface embroidery of more than thirty named stitches, worked by hand and overwhelmingly by women in home workshops across the city and its ring of villages. Registered as a geographical indication in 2008.
Lucknow Zardozi	Awadh	जीआई टैग	Metal-thread work in gold and silver wire, sequin and salma-sitara, couched onto silk and velvet on a wooden adda frame. Registered as a geographical indication in 2013.
Mukaish (badla)	Awadh	Lucknow	Flattened metal wire twisted through the cloth in tiny dots so the fabric glints without any surface embroidery — fardi ka kaam. Very few badla-workers remain.
Kamdani	Awadh	Lucknow	Light metal-thread work on fine muslin, historically applied over chikankari on dupattas.
Handloom cotton of the Rewa and Satna belt	Bagelkhand	Rewa, Satna	Surviving small clusters weaving plain cotton yardage, gamchhas and bedcovers for local sale. Modest, undocumented and shrinking; no protected name attaches to any of it.
Kosa and tussar from the forest edge	Bagelkhand	Shahdol, Umaria, Sidhi	Tussar cocoons are reared and reeled on the sal and arjun of the forest districts, but the yarn is almost entirely woven up elsewhere — in Chhattisgarh and at Bhagalpur. The region produces the fibre and exports the value, the same pattern as its coal and its diamonds next door.
Manipuri handloom of Cachar	Barak Valley	Cachar	Phanek, innaphi, shawls and stoles woven on loin and fly-shuttle looms in the Manipuri and Bishnupriya Manipuri villages around Silchar and Lakhipur, with the temple-spire and lozenge border vocabulary of the Imphal tradition. Sold locally and through cooperatives; no geographical indication covers the Assam-side weaving.
Endi and cotton household weaving	Barak Valley	Cachar, Hailakandi	Plain cotton gamcha, chador and endi wraps woven on household looms — utilitarian rather than decorative, and increasingly displaced by mill cloth.
Bastar Kosa (tussar) silk	Bastar	Bastar, Kondagaon	Silk reeled from Antheraea cocoons reared on sal, saja and arjun in the local forest, woven plain or with a simple band. Chhattisgarh's Kosa geographical indication covers Champa Silk Sarees and Fabrics in Janjgir-Champa; the Bastar cloth is the same fibre without that protection.
Godna	Bastar	Across the region	Tattooing, not cloth, but functionally the region's oldest surface design — geometric marks applied to women's arms, legs and face by itinerant Badni and Ghasia tattooists, formerly at fixed points in the life cycle. The same motif vocabulary appears on Dhokra and on wall painting, which is how the designs are read across media.
Sisal fibre craft	Bastar	Kondagaon	Agave fibre stripped, dried and knotted or coiled into mats, bags and figures. A twentieth-century introduction rather than an inherited craft, and now a substantial cottage industry around Kondagaon.
Ilkal saree	Bayaluseeme	जीआई टैग	Woven on pit looms by several thousand weaver households in and around one town, with the body, border and pallu warped in different materials and joined on the loom. Registered as a geographical indication.
Guledgudda khana	Bayaluseeme	जीआई टैग	Blouse cloth woven in fixed short lengths, traditionally in silk and cotton with a dense small-figured pattern and a contrasting border. Registered as a geographical indication, and one of the very few Indian textiles defined by the single garment it is cut for.
Kasuti embroidery	Bayaluseeme	जीआई टैग	Counted-thread embroidery worked without knots and without tracing, in four stitches — gavanti, murgi, negi and menthe — so that the work reads identically on both faces of the cloth. Motifs are architectural and processional: gopuras, palanquins, elephants, lamps. Registered as a geographical indication.
Navalgund durrie	Bayaluseeme	जीआई टैग	Heavy cotton floor durries, called jamkhana locally, woven in bold geometric and peacock designs on vertical looms by a small number of households. Registered as a geographical indication and down to a handful of working weavers.
Santipur saree	Bengal Delta	जीआई टैग	Very fine cotton with a woven border, from a weaving town whose looms are documented from the fifteenth century. The type is judged on the closeness of the weave and the thinness of the yarn rather than on motif, and holds a registered geographical indication.
Dhaniakhali saree	Bengal Delta	जीआई टैग	A tighter, heavier cotton than Santipur's, woven at a higher beat so the cloth holds its shape and takes daily wear. Registered as a geographical indication. Between them, Santipur and Dhaniakhali map the two ends of what a cotton sari can be asked to do.
Fulia Tangail	Bengal Delta	Nadia (Fulia)	Jacquard-bordered cotton saris woven at Fulia by weaving families whose craft lineage runs back to the Tangail looms of the eastern delta. The technique arrived with the weavers and was rebuilt on new looms rather than copied from cloth.
Murshidabad silk	Bengal Delta	Murshidabad (Islampur, Mirzapur, Jiaganj)	Mulberry silk reared, reeled and woven in the same district — one of the few remaining Indian silk clusters that still runs the whole chain locally. It supplies the garad and korial trade and the base cloth for Murshidabad's block and batik printing.
Nakshi kantha	Bengal Delta	जीआई टैग	Worn-out cotton saris and dhotis layered and quilted together with running stitch drawn from their own borders, the stitch itself making a rippled ground and a figurative field of lotuses, fish, boats and household scenes. Registered as a geographical indication on the Indian side; the tradition's densest figurative work belongs to the eastern delta.
Baluchari	Bengal Delta	जीआई टैग	Figured silk with narrative scenes in the pallu. It is named for Baluchar, a Murshidabad village on the Bhagirathi, and moved west to Bishnupur after the trade there collapsed — a delta craft that now carries a Rarh address.
Banaras brocades and sarees	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	जीआई टैग	Silk brocade woven with zari on pit and jacquard looms, with the kadhua technique working each motif separately so nothing floats behind the cloth. A registered geographical indication covering the sari, the brocade, and several allied products.
Bhadohi handmade carpet	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	जीआई टैग	Hand-knotted wool carpets from a belt that is India's largest carpet cluster and a major exporter. A registered geographical indication.
Nizamabad black pottery	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	जीआई टैग	Not a textile but the region's other distinctive product — clay fired in a smothered kiln to a deep black and inlaid with silvery zinc-and-mercury patterns. A registered geographical indication.
Kalamkari-style Mirzapur dhurrie	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Mirzapur	Flat-woven cotton and wool dhurries in geometric patterns, made alongside the knotted carpet trade.
Muga silk	Brahmaputra Valley	जीआई टैग	A naturally golden silk from the semi-domesticated Antheraea assamensis moth, reared outdoors on som and soalu trees. It cannot be dyed to advantage and it is not bleached; it gets glossier with every wash and is expected to outlast the wearer. Assam accounts for effectively the entire world supply; small-scale rearing exists elsewhere in the northeast, but nowhere else at commercial volume.
Eri silk	Brahmaputra Valley	जीआई टैग	Spun rather than reeled, from cocoons the moth has already left — hence "peace silk" or ahimsa silk. Warm, matte and heavy; used for shawls and winter wraps. The GI registered in 2024 is specifically Bodo Eri Silk, filed by the Bodo traditional weavers of Kokrajhar and Chirang; eri in general is not itself GI-protected.
Pat silk	Brahmaputra Valley	Sualkuchi	Bright white mulberry silk, the third of Assam's silks, woven with muga into festive mekhela chadors.
Assam Gamosa	Brahmaputra Valley	जीआई टैग	Granted a GI tag in 2022, partly to protect handloom weavers from machine-made imports of an object that functions as a cultural emblem rather than a commodity.
Bodo Dokhona, Aronai and Jwmgra	Brahmaputra Valley	जीआई टैग	Bodo woven textiles registered as GIs in 2024, alongside Bodo eri silk and other items of the community's material culture.
Deity textiles and zari poshak	Braj	Mathura, Vrindavan	Silk, velvet and brocade cut and embroidered with zari for temple images, worked to a seasonal calendar. Much of the base cloth arrives from Banaras and Surat; the making-up and embroidery are local.
Bharatpur and Deeg block print	Braj	Bharatpur, Deeg	A cotton block-printing tradition on the Rajasthan side, closer in palette to Bagru than to the finer Sanganeri work, and made mostly for local wear.
Handloom cotton of Chhatarpur and Mau (Banda)	Bundelkhand	Chhatarpur, Banda	Small surviving cotton weaving clusters producing plain and checked yardage, gamchhas and bedcovers for local use. Modest work with no protected name, and shrinking.
Bundeli block-printed cotton	Bundelkhand	Chhatarpur, Tikamgarh	Hand block printing in red, black and indigo on coarse cotton for odhnis and ghaghras, historically supplying village markets rather than any court. Much of what is sold as Bundeli print today is mill-printed.
Siddi kawandi	Canara Coast	Yellapur, Haliyal, Mundgod and Joida	Quilts pieced by Siddi women from worn clothing scraps, layered and held with dense running stitch, with small contrasting patches called tikeli set into the field. They are made for household use rather than for sale, and they have been documented and exhibited as a distinct textile tradition in their own right.
Coir and rope work	Canara Coast	Karwar, Ankola, Kumta and Honnavar	Coconut husk retted in the estuaries and spun into rope for boats, nets and well gear. Synthetic line has replaced most of it and the retting pits are largely abandoned.
Bought cloth and the absent loom	Canara Coast	Region-wide	Worth stating plainly — the region has no significant surviving handloom of its own. Ilkal, Molakalmuru and Dharwad saris come up the ghat roads from the plateau, and mill cloth arrived early because the ports were here. The textile heritage is in what was worn, not in what was woven.
Chamba Rumal	Chenab Valley & Chamba	जीआई टैग	Embroidered muslin squares worked in untwisted silk floss in the double satin stitch called dohara tanka, which produces an identical image on both faces with no reverse side. Designs were drawn on the cloth by miniature painters and stitched by women of the court and town, so a Pahari painting idiom exists in silk as well as in pigment. Registered as a geographical indication in January 2007.
Gaddi wool weaving — pattu, gudma and chola cloth	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Chamba (Bharmour, Pangi, Churah)	Undyed and naturally dark sheep wool spun on the takli while walking and woven on narrow pit and frame looms into blanket cloth, shoulder wraps and the coat cloth of the chola. Almost entirely a domestic production system. The wider Himachali gudma blanket was granted a geographical indication in 2026, but as a state-level registration rather than a Chamba-specific one.
Thobi and hand-block printed cotton of the lower valleys	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Chamba	Printed cotton used for summer luanchari and head cloths, brought in from the Punjab printing towns and cut and worn to a local pattern rather than made here.
Champa silk saree and fabrics	Chhattisgarh Plains	जीआई टैग	Kosa, a tussar silk from the wild moth Antheraea mylitta reared outdoors on saja, sal and arjun. It is registered as a geographical indication. The yarn is uneven by nature, which is why kosa cloth has a slub and a matte surface where mulberry silk is smooth and bright.
Raigarh kosa	Chhattisgarh Plains	Raigarh	The second weaving centre, working the same wild silk with its own border vocabulary. Raigarh's silk and its Kathak gharana grew under the same twentieth-century court patronage.
Cotton handloom of the rice belt	Chhattisgarh Plains	Bilaspur, Janjgir and Dhamtari	Plain and checked cotton in narrow widths on pit looms, made for local wear. Much of the surviving capacity has been turned over to kosa, where the margins are.
Thirubuvanam silk saree	Chola Nadu	जीआई टैग	A heavy pure-silk sari with a korvai contrast border woven in by interlocking two warps, so the border does not come away from the body. Woven in a village that grew up beside a Chola temple of the same name. Registered as a geographical indication in 2018-19.
Koorainadu saree	Chola Nadu	Mayiladuthurai (Koorainadu)	The bridal koorai cotton and silk-cotton sari, still woven on pit looms in and around Koorainadu, and still bought specifically for weddings rather than for wear. Widely used, unregistered.
Ayyampettai and Swamimalai zari silk	Chola Nadu	Thanjavur	The delta's second silk cluster, working largely as job weavers for showrooms elsewhere — one of the reasons its output is usually sold under another town's name.
Kuchai tasar	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Seraikela-Kharsawan, West Singhbhum	Silk reeled from Antheraea mylitta cocoons reared on arjun and asan in the plateau forest. Jharkhand is the largest tasar-producing state in India, and Kuchai is its best-known rearing and reeling cluster. No geographical indication of its own.
Sohrai and Khovar wall painting	Chota Nagpur Plateau	जीआई टैग	Not cloth, but the region's registered surface-design tradition — see the crafts entry below. Registered as a geographical indication in 2020, the first from the region.
Lac bangle and ornament work	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Khunti, Ranchi	Lac resin, secreted by an insect farmed on kusum and palas trees, worked into bangles and inlay. Jharkhand produces the bulk of India's lac and the national research institute for it sits at Namkum in Ranchi.
Puneri Pagadi	Desh	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2009–10 — unusually, a headwear registered as a craft rather than a cloth. The shape is built over a form from a single length of fabric and holds itself without pins.
Khan cloth	Desh	Worn in Kolhapur and Sangli, woven in north Karnataka	The heavy cotton-silk blouse fabric with a hard border, cut for the choli worn under a nauvari. It is woven at Ilkal and Guledgudda across the Karnataka line and consumed here, which is the ordinary condition of textiles on this border — the loom is on one side, the wearer on the other.
Ghongadi	Desh	Satara, Sangli, Solapur dryland	A coarse black blanket woven from Deccani sheep wool on a pit loom by Dhangar shepherd households, water resistant, used as bedding, raincoat and floor. Its wool is too coarse for the fashion market, which has kept it a working object rather than a craft revival.
Solapur chaddar and terry towel	Desh	जीआई टैग	Both registered as geographical indications in 2004–05. They belong to the Solapur belt on the boundary between this region, Marathwada and north Karnataka, and were built by Telugu-speaking Padmashali weaver migrants — a cluster that reads across the line rather than into Desh.
Sanganeri hand block print	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	जीआई टैग	Fine floral and butti printing on a white or pale ground, with the design carried by outline blocks and small filler blocks in sequence. The delicacy is possible because Sanganer's water was soft; the trade settled there for that reason and not for any other.
Bagru hand block print	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	जीआई टैग	Printing on a harda-treated ivory ground using dabu mud resist with indigo and madder, in bolder and more geometric motifs than Sanganer's. The Chhipa printers work in a single quarter of the village and dry the cloth on open ground beside it.
Bandhani and leheriya	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Jaipur, Sikar	Tie-resist dyeing — thousands of points tied off by hand for bandhani, the cloth rolled into a rope and bound at intervals for leheriya's diagonal stripe. Jaipur's leheriya is a monsoon and Teej cloth, and the five-colour panchranga version is specific to the city. The Geographical Indication registered in 2023 covers Jodhpur's bandhej rather than the work done here.
Gota patti	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Jaipur	Flat metallic ribbon cut into shapes and applied to cloth with a running stitch, so the ornament sits on the surface rather than being embroidered into it. Far cheaper than zardozi to make and far quicker, which is why it spread from court dress to ordinary wedding wear.
Bodo and Mech household weaving	Dooars & Terai	Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri forest fringe	Cotton and eri woven on a throw-shuttle loom in every household, producing dokhona, aronai scarves and shawls with geometric and floral bands built into the weave. The output is for the family, not for a market, which is why the designs stayed local.
Rajbanshi cotton gamcha and patani	Dooars & Terai	Jalpaiguri and the western Dooars	Coarse handloom cotton in checks and stripes, woven on pit looms in village clusters. The same cloth is towel, turban, sling and ritual offering depending on how it is folded.
Sitalpati	Dooars & Terai	The Rajbanshi belt of the western Dooars and Cooch Behar	Mats split and woven from the outer skin of the mutha cane, graded by how fine the split is — the best are cool to the touch and flexible enough to roll into a tube. Applications for geographical-indication protection have been pursued for the Cooch Behar mats.
Bhotiya wool weaving	Garhwal	Chamoli (Niti, Mana), Uttarkashi (Bagori, Dunda)	Sheep and goat wool spun on a drop spindle and woven on a backstrap or pit loom into pankhi, thulma, and the dan or chutka floor rug in bold geometric registers. The trade the weaving belonged to ended in the early 1960s; the weaving survived by turning into a cooperative craft economy.
Hemp and bhimal fibre	Garhwal	Across the middle hills	Hemp stem retted and twisted into rope, sacking and coarse footwear; bhimal bark used for cord and, wet, as a hair wash. Both are field-margin plants, and both were household manufacture rather than a trade.
Wool from the Rath and Salan flocks	Garhwal	Pauri, Tehri	Coarse local wool spun and woven for household use in the middle hills. It is scratchier than Bhotiya wool and was never a trade good, which is why it has no market name.
Garo dakmanda (Meghalaya Garo Textile)	Garo Hills	जीआई टैग	Handwoven wrap cloth in cotton, with the pattern concentrated in a band along one edge. Granted a geographical indication in 2024, alongside Lakadong turmeric, Lyrnai pottery and Garo chubitchi.
Daksari and ceremonial weaving	Garo Hills	West Garo Hills	The heavier and more elaborately bordered end of the same loom tradition, made for weddings, Wangala and clan occasions.
Kunbi weave	Goa & Gomantak	Salcete, Quepem and Canacona	A coarse handwoven cotton in a small red-and-white or blue check, the only indigenous Goan handloom of record. Commercial weaving of it had almost stopped by the late twentieth century and what exists now is revival production, much of it woven outside Goa to Goan patterns.
Goan crochet and lace	Goa & Gomantak	Bardez and Salcete	Filet crochet and cutwork taught through convent schools from the nineteenth century, used on altar cloths, church linen and household napery. It survives in parish workrooms and in a handful of older households rather than as a trade.
Coir and palm-leaf work	Goa & Gomantak	Coastal Bardez, Salcete and Canacona	Coconut husk retted in brackish backwater and spun into rope for fishing gear and khazan bund work, and palm leaf plaited into roofing and basketry. Nylon has taken most of the rope market.
Kota Doria	Hadoti	जीआई टैग	A cotton-and-silk open weave whose unit is the khat — a square check of fourteen threads, eight cotton and six silk, repeated in both directions. Registered as a geographical indication, held by the Kota Doria Development Hadauti Foundation.
Masuria	Hadoti	जीआई टैग	The older name of the same cloth, and the record of its origin: the weavers are said to have been brought to Kota from the Deccan in the seventeenth century, and the fabric carried the name of Mysore long before it carried the name of Kota.
Printed lugda and odhni	Hadoti	Kota, Bundi, Jhalawar	Everyday block-printed cotton in dark grounds with small repeating motifs, worn as the rural head cloth. Increasingly screen-printed and bought from mills rather than printed locally.
Panipat handloom durrie and khes	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Panipat	Flat-woven cotton and wool floor coverings and double-cloth wraps, historically hand-woven on pit looms with a panja — a metal claw used to beat the weft down tight — and now overwhelmingly produced on powerlooms in Panipat's home-textile industry, which supplies a large share of India's exported furnishings. A geographical indication application for the Panipat durrie was filed in January 2025 and was still in the pre-examination stage at the registry.
Phulkari and bagh	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	जीआई टैग	Floss-silk darning stitch worked from the reverse of a coarse handspun khaddar cloth, counting threads so the pattern emerges on the front. When the ground is completely covered it is called a bagh. The geographical indication for phulkari is registered jointly for Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan — one of the few Indian GIs that already refuses to pick a state.
Chope and subhar	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Across the region	Ritual phulkari types made for a bride by her mother's family, worked in a two-sided stitch so the cloth has no reverse. They are given, not sold, which is why they rarely appear in the market.
Moirang Phee	Imphal Valley	जीआई टैग	Cloth carrying the Moirang Pheejin border — a stepped triangular motif taken from the teeth of Pakhangba, the serpentine deity of Meitei tradition. Registered as a geographical indication, and named for the town of Moirang beside Loktak.
Wangkhei Phee	Imphal Valley	जीआई टैग	A sheer white cotton cloth with fine transparent woven patterning, made in the Wangkhei locality of Imphal and historically supplied to the palace. Worn by women for ceremonial occasions and registered as a geographical indication.
Shaphee Lanphee	Imphal Valley	जीआई टैग	A shawl worked with needle embroidery on loin-loom cloth, historically presented to men of standing and to hill chiefs. It is a gift object as much as a garment, and it is registered as a geographical indication.
Phanek mayek naibi	Imphal Valley	Across the valley	The bordered phanek, the everyday dress of the valley, worked in fine geometric embroidery along the lower edge. No GI, made in tens of thousands of households, and the most-worn textile in the region.
Lasingphee	Imphal Valley	Across the valley	A thick quilted cloth made by beating and layering cotton, historically used as a winter cover — the valley's answer to a cold January in a place with no wool tradition.
Basohli Pashmina	Jammu Duggar	जीआई टैग	Hand-spun and hand-woven pashmina shawls, stoles and woollen goods made in and around Basohli, largely by women working on domestic looms. Registered as a geographical indication in 2023 — a Jammu-side pashmina tradition distinct from the Kashmir Valley trade with which it is usually confused.
Loi and pattu weaving	Jammu Duggar	Udhampur, Reasi, Ramban	Coarse undyed sheep-wool blanket cloth woven on narrow pit and frame looms in the foothill villages, cut into shoulder wraps and floor rugs. Unbranded, unregistered and still made for household use rather than for sale.
Gabba and namda on the northern edge	Jammu Duggar	Ramban, Udhampur	Appliquéd and felted floor coverings, a Kashmir Valley craft that reaches down the highway corridor and is made in small quantity on the Duggar side.
Sandur Lambani embroidery	Kalyana Karnataka	जीआई टैग	Counted-thread embroidery on layered cotton with mirror, shell, coin and appliqué patchwork, worked by Lambani women of the Sandur tandas. Registered as a geographical indication, held by the craft centre at Sandur that organised the work into a marketable form in the 1980s.
Ilkal saree	Kalyana Karnataka	जीआई टैग	Recorded here because it is the daily dress of the region even though the looms are outside it. The GI belongs to the weaving town, not to the market.
Kambli	Kalyana Karnataka	Kalaburagi, Yadgir, Raichur	Coarse black or brown wool blankets woven on pit looms by shepherd households from the wool of Deccani sheep. Used as a sleeping mat, a rain cape and a load pad, and increasingly displaced by synthetic sheeting.
Kangra and Chamba pattu	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Kangra, and the Dhauladhar villages	Plain-weave woollen wrap cloth in undyed and vegetable-dyed yarn with narrow banded borders, woven on pit and frame looms from local sheep wool. It is a household textile rather than a market one, which is why it has never had the commercial identity that the Kullu shawl built.
Gaddi woollens	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Dhauladhar slope and the Chamba approaches	Coarse blanket, coat and rope cloth spun and woven by the transhumant households themselves from the fleece of their own flocks, waulked to felt the surface so it sheds rain.
Tibetan carpet weaving	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Dharamshala and the exile settlements	Hand-knotted wool carpets on the Tibetan senna-loop knot, an industry rebuilt in exile after 1960 as a livelihood scheme and now one of the settlements' main craft exports.
Kashmir Pashmina	Kashmir Valley	जीआई टैग	Cloth hand-spun on a yinder wheel from the dehaired undercoat of Changthangi goats reared on the Ladakh plateau, then hand-woven on a pit loom. The fibre is roughly 12–16 microns, too fine and too short for a power spindle to handle without breaking, which is the whole reason the craft stayed manual. The geographical indication attaches to the hand-spinning and hand-weaving done in the valley, not to the place the fibre is grown — a distinction that matters to everybody upstream of it.
Kani shawl	Kashmir Valley	जीआई टैग	A twill-tapestry shawl woven with dozens or hundreds of small eyeless wooden bobbins — kanis — one weft line at a time, following a coded written notation called the talim that a reader chants aloud to the weaver. A full-field kani shawl can take two to three years on the loom. The talim is why the design does not have to be memorised or drawn on the warp.
Sozni embroidery	Kashmir Valley	जीआई टैग	Needle embroidery in fine untwisted thread worked so tightly that the pattern reads as woven. In the do-rukha form the piece is worked to be identical on both faces, sometimes in different colourways, so the shawl has no reverse.
Kashmir hand-knotted carpet	Kashmir Valley	जीआई टैग	Silk or wool pile knotted on a vertical loom to a talim read aloud, in the Persian design vocabulary that arrived with the fifteenth-century craft migration. Knot counts are quoted per square inch and a genuine piece carries a hand-knotted, not machine-tufted, back.
Tilla dozi	Kashmir Valley	Srinagar	Gold- or silver-coloured metal thread couched onto wool or silk in bold running scrolls, used on pheran collars and cuffs and on bridal wear. Bolder and more sparing than Awadhi zardozi, and worked without a frame in many workshops.
Crewel and chain stitch	Kashmir Valley	Srinagar and Budgam	Loops of worsted wool worked with an ari hook onto a cotton or jute ground, filling large areas fast. It is the furnishing craft — curtains, cushion covers, wall hangings — and the one most exposed to machine-made imitation.
Namda	Kashmir Valley	Srinagar, Baramulla, Anantnag	Felted, not woven: raw wool is laid, soaked, soaped and rolled underfoot until the fibres mat into a sheet, then embroidered in chain stitch. Cheap, warm and traditionally the floor covering of an ordinary house; the craft nearly collapsed and has been the subject of a recent revival effort.
Pattu and raffal	Kashmir Valley	The side valleys	Coarse hand-woven local sheep wool, made up into pherans and blankets for daily use. It is what most of the valley actually wore, as against the shawl the valley exported.
Khandesh cotton, unwoven	Khandesh	Jalgaon, Dhule, Nandurbar	The region is a major raw-cotton producer with a dense concentration of ginning and pressing factories dating from the nineteenth-century cotton boom, and almost no weaving. The lint has always left — for Bombay, Surat and later for mills elsewhere — which is the single reason Khandesh has no textile craft to its name.
Bhil and Pawra beadwork and silver	Khandesh	Nandurbar, Dhule	Beaded neckwork and heavy cast silver — hansli collars, thick anklets and coin necklaces — made by local smiths for the hill communities, and part of a material culture continuous across the Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat lines.
Kurdai and papad, a courtyard industry	Khandesh	Jalgaon, Dhule	Not a textile, but the region's actual cottage manufacture — wheat-starch kurdai and lentil papad dried on cloth in the pre-monsoon sun by women's groups and sold through the year. It occupies the economic niche that weaving occupies elsewhere.
Ryndia (eri silk)	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	जीआई टैग	Eri silk spun from cocoons the moth has already left, hand-spun and handwoven, and dyed with lac, turmeric, iron-rich mud and bark. Umden–Diwon in Ri Bhoi was designated Meghalaya's first eri silk village in 2021, and Ryndia was granted a geographical indication in 2025.
Khasi handloom products	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	जीआई टैग	The wider handwoven output of Khasi, Bhoi and Jaintia weavers — shawls, jainsem and dhara lengths, and the checked cottons — granted a geographical indication in 2025.
Pnar checked weaving	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	West Jaintia Hills	The Jaintia loom tradition, worked in stronger colour and larger check than the Khasi plateau's, and used for both everyday wrap cloth and Behdienkhlam dress.
Kinnauri shawl	Kinnaur & Spiti	जीआई टैग	Handwoven wool with a dense geometric border in extra-weft, worked in a limited palette of red, black, yellow, green and white against a natural ground. The border patterns are named, the sequence in which they appear is fixed, and a weaver can place a shawl by its border. Registered as a geographical indication.
Kinnauri pattu and dohru cloth	Kinnaur & Spiti	Kinnaur	The heavy plain-woven body cloth from which the wrap garments are made, produced on narrow pit and frame looms in strips that are then joined. Undyed sheep wool in grey, brown and cream does most of the work.
Thigma	Kinnaur & Spiti	Spiti and upper Kinnaur	Tie-resist dyeing on woollen cloth — the fabric is bound tightly at points before dyeing so undyed rings and dots emerge, usually in concentric arrangements on a maroon or ochre ground. The technique belongs to the Ladakh–Spiti Tibetan textile world rather than to the Pahari one, and is another place where the region's boundary shows in a material.
Yak-hair and goat-hair weaving	Kinnaur & Spiti	Spiti	Coarse black cloth, ropes, sacks and tent panels woven from the outer hair, with the soft undercoat kept back for finer work. It is the utility end of the same pastoral economy that produces the shawl.
बलरामपुरम साड़ियाँ और वस्त्र	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	जीआई टैग	1700 के दशक के अंत में त्रावणकोर के संरक्षण में यहाँ बसे बुनकरों द्वारा थ्रो-शटल पिट करघों पर बुना गया हथकरघा सूती कपड़ा। सबसे बेहतरीन कसवु इन्हीं करघों से आता है।
चेन्दमंगलम धोतियाँ और सेट मुंडु	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	जीआई टैग	पुराने पालियम परिवार की बुनकर बस्ती में बुना जाता है, जिसकी पहचान पुलियिलकर है — किनारे के ठीक भीतर चलती एक पतली गहरी रेखा।
कुतम्पुल्ली साड़ियाँ	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	जीआई टैग	कोच्चि राजघराने द्वारा कर्नाटक से लाए गए देवांग चेट्टियार समुदाय द्वारा बुनी जाती हैं; इनमें कसवु का काम भारी और किनारे अधिक बूटेदार होते हैं।
कासरगोड साड़ियाँ	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	जीआई टैग	चटख चारखाने और धारियाँ, एक विशिष्ट चमक के साथ, जो दक्षिण केरल की बजाय तटीय कर्नाटक के अधिक क़रीब लगती हैं।
Bhavani Jamakkalam	Kongu Nadu	जीआई टैग	Thick woven cotton carpets and blankets in bold stripes and checks, made at Bhavani since the late nineteenth century on pit looms — the weaver sits in a pit with the warp at floor level, which is what lets a single person handle a heavy wide beat. Registered as a geographical indication in 2005–06.
Kovai Cora Cotton	Kongu Nadu	जीआई टैग	Cotton sarees with silk zari borders, handloom-woven with Sirumugai as the main production centre. Registered as a geographical indication in 2014–15.
Salem Silk (Salem Venpattu)	Kongu Nadu	जीआई टैग	Silk woven in and around Salem, registered as a geographical indication in 2007–08. The trade sits alongside a much larger power-loom sector making silk-blend dress material.
Tiruppur knitwear	Kongu Nadu	Tiruppur	Not a heritage textile but the largest knitted-garment cluster in India — spinning, knitting, dyeing, printing and stitching within a few kilometres of one another, growing out of a local banian trade from the 1970s onward. It is the reason a town of this size has a customs house and a currency-exchange street.
Karur home textiles	Kongu Nadu	Karur	Table linen, curtains, kitchen cloth and bed linen woven and made up for export, a cluster built on the handloom trade of the Amaravathi towns and converted almost entirely to made-ups.
Chennimalai and Erode handloom	Kongu Nadu	Erode	Cotton bedsheets, towels and dhotis from a dense weaving belt along the Noyyal and Bhavani, sold through the Erode wholesale market, which trades cloth on fixed weekly days the way it trades turmeric.
Kotpad handloom	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	जीआई टैग	Cotton dyed with the root bark of aal (Morinda) by Mirgan weavers, giving a maroon-to-deep-brown range and, with an iron modifier, black. The yarn is pre-treated for weeks in castor oil, ash and cow dung before it will take the dye at all, and the colour deepens rather than fades with washing. No synthetic dye is used. Motifs are small and drawn from the surrounding villages — fish, crab, temple, axe, conch. Registered as a geographical indication.
Habaspuri	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	जीआई टैग	A cotton sari woven in the Kalahandi lowland with Kondh-derived motifs — temple spire, fish, flower — set in a narrow contrasting border. Nearly extinct in the mid-twentieth century and revived from a handful of surviving weavers. Registered as a geographical indication.
Kapdaganda embroidery	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Rayagada and Kalahandi (Niyamgiri)	Not a woven textile but a surface one — hand embroidery on plain cloth, counted by eye. Its motifs are read locally as hills, streams, paths and fields, though the reading is a description of the country rather than a fixed code.
Uppada Jamdani Sarees	Kosta Andhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2008. Jamdani is a supplementary-weft technique in which the motif is worked in by hand as the cloth is woven, thread by thread, with no shuttle carrying it across — so the pattern is part of the weave rather than embroidered onto it. Two weavers work one loom, and a saree can take months.
Mangalagiri Sarees and Fabrics	Kosta Andhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2010. A dense, plain-bodied cotton with a zari border woven by the nizam technique, famously produced with no gaps in the weave — the fabric's reputation rests on tightness rather than on ornament, and it is the cloth institutional buyers order in bulk.
Machilipatnam Kalamkari	Kosta Andhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2007. Block-printed with hand-drawn detail, coloured with mordants and natural dyes rather than pigments, and finished by repeated river washing. It is the block-printed kalamkari; the freehand pen kalamkari of Srikalahasti is a separate craft with a separate registration and belongs to the interior, not to this coast.
Venkatagiri Sarees	Kosta Andhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2009. Very fine cotton with jamdani-style motifs and a light zari border, developed under estate patronage. Venkatagiri town now falls in Tirupati district, so the weave sits exactly on this region's inland boundary.
Narasapur Crochet Lace	Kosta Andhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2020. Hand-crocheted cotton lace introduced by missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century, worked at home by tens of thousands of women, and sold almost entirely into export furnishing markets — a craft with no domestic tradition behind it and a global customer in front of it.
Chirala and Vetapalem cottons	Kosta Andhra	Bapatla	Plain and checked handloom cotton woven along the coast south of the Krishna, sold as everyday cloth and as furnishing. No registration, and a cluster under heavy pressure from powerloom competition.
Kullu Shawl	Kullu & Mandi	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication. Woven on pit and frame looms in local sheep wool, merino, angora and sometimes pashmina, with the patterned end-borders that define it worked by hand while the plain body is not. The patterned style is generally credited to Bushahri weavers from the Kinnaur side who settled in the valley in the first half of the twentieth century; before that the Kullu wrap was plain. Cooperative societies, beginning with the Bhutti weavers in 1944, turned a household craft into an industry employing thousands.
Kullu pattu and household woollens	Kullu & Mandi	Kullu and Seraj	Plain and lightly banded wrap cloth, blankets and coat material spun and woven at home from the family's own fleece. The undyed grey and brown ground is the natural colour of the sheep, not a dye choice.
Kinnauri-derived border weaving	Kullu & Mandi	Kullu valley	The geometric border grammar itself, which came over the Sutlej divide with Kinnauri weavers and was adapted to Kullu's coarser yarn and wider loom. Kinnaur's own shawl tradition is a separate registered craft belonging to the neighbouring region.
Thulma and pankhi	Kumaon	Pithoragarh (Munsiyari, Dharchula), Bageshwar	Sheep wool spun on a drop spindle and woven in narrow strips on a backstrap or pit loom, then joined. The thulma is thick and heavily napped for bedding; the pankhi is finer and worn. Both were trade goods before they were craft products.
Dan and chutka	Kumaon	Pithoragarh (Johar, Darma, Byans)	Bhotiya floor rugs and pile carpets in strong geometric registers, woven from local wool with natural and, more recently, chemical dyes. Motifs are shared with the Tibetan plateau, which is where the design vocabulary came over the passes with everything else.
Rangwali pichhora cloth	Kumaon	Almora, Nainital, Pithoragarh	Traditionally drawn by hand on plain cloth with turmeric and red pigment for a specific woman and a specific occasion; now mostly screen-printed and sold ready-made, with the hand-drawn version surviving in conservative households and in revival work.
Munsiyari and Johar wool	Kumaon	Pithoragarh	The wool of the high-valley flocks, historically supplemented by pashmina and raw wool brought over the passes from Tibet. When the passes closed the raw material supply halved overnight, and weavers turned to mill yarn brought up from the plains.
Kutch Embroidery	Kutch	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2013 under the name Kutch Embroidery. The registration covers a family of distinct community styles, not a single stitch, which is unusual and is the whole point.
Kutch Ajrakh	Kutch	जीआई टैग	Resist-and-mordant block printing in indigo, madder and iron black, printed on both faces of the cloth. Registered as a geographical indication in 2024 after years of imitation by screen printers elsewhere.
Kachchh Shawl	Kutch	जीआई टैग	A registered geographical indication covering the woollen shawls and dhablas woven by Kutchi Vankar weavers, including the twin-panel construction joined by the machi-kandha seam.
Bandhani	Kutch	Bhuj, Mandvi, Anjar	Tie-resist dyeing in which the cloth is pinched and bound with thread by hand, thousands of times, before dyeing. Practised by Khatri families in Kutch and by the same community in Jamnagar and Sindh.
Mashru	Kutch	Mandvi and Bhujodi	A satin-faced cloth with a silk warp and a cotton weft, so that silk lies against the outside and cotton against the skin. It survives on a handful of looms; most of the mashru sold now is powerloom.
Kharad	Kutch	Kukma	A thick floor rug woven from camel, goat and sheep wool on a loom light enough to be carried by pack animal. Two families are still weaving it, against ten in the 1990s.
Raw pashm from the Changthangi goat	Ladakh & Zanskar	Changthang — Rupshu, Kharnak, Korzok, and the eastern plateau	The undercoat that the goat grows against a winter at 4,500 m and sheds in spring. It is combed out by hand, not shorn, so the long coarse guard hair stays on the animal; the fibre is around 12–15 microns and a goat yields a few hundred grams of raw pashm, roughly halved again by dehairing. Almost all of it leaves the region unspun. The geographical indication that governs the finished cloth is a Kashmir one, attached to spinning and weaving rather than to the herd.
Nambu	Ladakh & Zanskar	Throughout, particularly Zanskar and Sham	Hand-woven sheep-wool cloth, made on a narrow backstrap or frame loom in strips a hand's width or two wide, then seamed into robes and blankets. The narrow strip is a portable loom's constraint, and the seams down a goncha are the sign of a hand-woven one.
Thigma	Ladakh & Zanskar	Leh and the Indus valley	Resist tie-dye on nambu: the cloth is bound at points with thread before dyeing so it comes out in concentric rings and diamonds, in madder, walnut and indigo-derived colours. Used for shawls, robe linings and the ceremonial cloths hung at weddings.
Yak-hair tent cloth	Ladakh & Zanskar	Changthang	The rebo, the black tent, is woven from yak hair in loose strips and sewn together. The weave is deliberately open, so smoke from the hearth escapes; when it rains or snows the hair swells and the cloth closes itself. It is a fabric engineered to change porosity with the weather.
Coir yarn and matting	Lakshadweep	Kavaratti, Kadmat, Kalpeni and the Amindivi islands	Not a fabric for wearing but the islands' only spun fibre — coconut husk retted in the lagoon shallows for months, beaten, and spun into yarn on hand or mechanised ratts. The administration runs coir factories on several islands, and the fibre is the one manufactured export the territory has ever had.
Bawan Buti weaving	Magadh	जीआई टैग	A cotton and tussar sari carrying fifty-two hand-woven motifs — Buddhist symbols among them, including the wheel, the bodhi leaf and the lotus — worked by extra-weft on a pit loom in a single village. A registered geographical indication.
Nalanda and Gaya handloom cotton	Magadh	Nalanda, Gaya	Plain cotton woven for dhoti, gamchha and sari on village pit looms, much reduced but not extinct.
Tussar (kosa) cocoon rearing	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Balaghat, Seoni, Dindori, Mandla, Anuppur	Antheraea mylitta reared outdoors on sal, saja and arjun rather than indoors on mulberry. The region is one of India's main cocoon sources and almost none of its weaving; the value is added downstream.
Coarse cotton lugda weaving	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Scattered, Balaghat and Mandla	Plain unbleached cotton in narrow widths on pit looms, made for local wear rather than sale, and now largely displaced by mill cloth.
Cannanore home furnishings	Malabar	जीआई टैग	Jacquard-woven cotton furnishing cloth — bed linen, curtains, upholstery — produced on handlooms in and around Kannur, overwhelmingly for export, through weavers' cooperative societies. Registered as a geographical indication in 2009–10, and the largest surviving handloom economy in Kerala.
Kannur handloom mundu and thorthu	Malabar	Kannur	The everyday cloth the same looms make for the local market — plain mundu, checked kaili and the thin absorbent thorthu towel that every household in the region owns half a dozen of.
Kodava chele	Malnad	Kodagu	The red-and-gold waist sash worn with the kupya, historically bought in from weaving towns outside the region rather than made here. It is the one piece of cloth in the Kodava wardrobe that must be right, and it is the one piece Kodagu has never woven.
Ujjain Batik (Bherugarh)	Malwa Plateau	जीआई टैग	Wax-resist dyeing worked by Chhipa printer families in the Bherugarh cluster on the edge of Ujjain. Molten wax is applied by block or pen, the cloth is dyed cold, and the cracking of the wax gives the veined lines that identify the technique. Registered as a geographical indication.
Malwa block-printed cotton	Malwa Plateau	Ujjain, Ratlam, Mandsaur	Hand block printing in vegetable and mineral dyes carried on by Chhipa households in the river towns — smaller and less documented than the printing traditions on either side of it, and steadily losing ground to screen printing.
Handloom cotton of the plateau towns	Malwa Plateau	Ujjain, Dhar, Mandsaur	Plain and striped cotton yardage for everyday wear, historically the plateau's largest textile output and now almost entirely displaced by mill and powerloom cloth from Indore and Burhanpur.
Paithani	Marathwada	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2010 as Paithani Sarees and Fabrics. Pure silk warp and weft with a zari that was historically drawn gold and is now silver gilt; the pallu and border are built by hand, thread by thread, with no design floats on the reverse.
Himroo	Marathwada	Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar	A figured cloth of silk and cotton woven on a jacquard-fitted pit loom, with the pattern carried by an extra weft. Local tradition ties its arrival to the fourteenth-century capital transfer to Daulatabad. A handful of workshops remain and most of what is sold as Himroo is power-loom cloth.
Mashru	Marathwada	Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar	A satin-weave cloth with a silk warp floating on the face and a cotton weft against the skin, so the garment shines outside and breathes inside. Made across the Deccan and Gujarat; nearly gone here.
Ghongadi	Marathwada	Beed, Dharashiv, Latur	A coarse black blanket woven by Dhangar shepherds from the wool of their own Deccani sheep, on a horizontal pit loom. Rainproof when new, and still the standard field blanket in the Balaghat uplands.
Godhadi	Marathwada	Region-wide	A quilt run up from worn cotton saris layered and hand-stitched in long running lines. Domestic, unsigned, and the reason very little cloth is ever thrown away in a village house.
Kandangi saree	Marava & Ramnad	जीआई टैग	Woven on pit looms in and around Karaikudi in unbleached, heavily sized cotton, with the border and body in strongly contrasting colours. Registered as a geographical indication in 2019-20.
Chettinad cotton yardage	Marava & Ramnad	Sivaganga	Checked and striped cotton woven in the same cluster and sold as furnishing and shirting, much of it under buyers' own labels.
Bandhani	Marwar & the Thar	जीआई टैग	Tie-resist dyeing in which thousands of points are tied off with thread by hand — often by women, with a fingernail grown long for the purpose — before dyeing. Pattern density is the measure of quality.
Leheriya	Marwar & the Thar	Jaipur, Jodhpur	Diagonal wave-stripe resist dyeing done by rolling the cloth into a rope and binding it at intervals. Worn especially in the monsoon and at Teej.
Sanganeri hand block print	Marwar & the Thar	जीआई टैग	Fine, delicate floral block printing on a white or pale ground, historically for the finer end of the market.
Bagru hand block print	Marwar & the Thar	जीआई टैग	Earthier printing on a dyed ground using mud-resist (dabu) and natural indigo and madder, with bolder motifs than Sanganer.
Kota Doria	Marwar & the Thar	जीआई टैग	An almost weightless cotton-silk with a fine square check (khat) formed by alternating thread counts. Woven on pit looms in and around Kaithun.
Thewa	Marwar & the Thar	जीआई टैग	Sheet gold worked into an openwork design and fused onto coloured glass — a technique held within a single family lineage for over 250 years.
Akola dabu print	Mewar	Chittorgarh	Mud-resist block printing by the Chhipa community at Akola on the Berach, using a paste of clay, gum and wheat chaff to mask the cloth before indigo dyeing. The Mewar version leans darker and coarser than Bagru's and is traditionally sold as odhnis and ghagra lengths at local fairs rather than through export buyers.
Pichwai cloth	Mewar	जीआई टैग	Painted and sometimes gold-worked cotton hangings, sized in fixed proportions to hang behind the Shrinathji image. The subject is set by the festival rather than by the painter, which is why the same scenes recur across two centuries of work.
Bhilwara suiting	Mewar	Bhilwara	Not a craft tradition — a twentieth-century industrial one. Bhilwara became the country's largest producer of polyester-blend suiting fabric, and the mills there now clothe far more people than every hand craft in the region combined.
Sujini embroidery	Mithilanchal	जीआई टैग	A running-stitch quilting on layered old cloth, outlined in chain stitch, made originally as a wrap for a newborn. Revived from the 1980s by women's groups, and now carries narrative panels about the lives of the women who stitch them. A registered geographical indication.
Khatwa applique	Mithilanchal	जीआई टैग	Cut-and-stitched applique on cotton, historically for canopies, tents and shamiyanas — figures and motifs applied in contrasting colour.
Handloom cotton of the Mithila villages	Mithilanchal	Madhubani, Darbhanga	Plain coarse cotton woven for dhoti, sari and gamchha in village pit looms, much reduced by mill cloth but still the source of ritual textiles.
Mizo Puanchei	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in August 2019 along with four other Mizo cloths. Three joined panels, supplementary-weft motifs, and a colour scheme built on red, black and white. Motif names recorded in weaving documentation include disul and halkha for contrast bands, hruih for black transverse stripes, siniar for the triangle-and-diamond field, and sakri zangzia, read as the marking on a tiger's back.
Pawndum	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	जीआई टैग	Registered in 2019. The dark banded cloth of the trousseau and the funeral. Its official GI spelling is Pawndum; puandum is the common transliteration.
Ngotekherh	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	जीआई टैग	Registered in 2019. Black-banded white cloth, historically unisex, now largely a women's festival puan.
Tawlhlohpuan	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	जीआई टैग	Registered in 2019. The warrior's cloth of four interlaced black bands, still woven in Thenzawl and bought as a formal gift of respect.
Hmaram	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	जीआई टैग	Registered in 2019. The short white-on-black waist cloth, now more often displayed than worn.
Thenzawl handloom cloth	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Serchhip (Thenzawl)	Not a cloth but a place — the town where several thousand fly-shuttle looms turned household weaving into the region's main non-farm rural industry. Most puans sold in Aizawl are woven here.
Monpa Textile	Monpa & Tawang Belt	जीआई टैग	Woollen and yak-hair weaving on backstrap and frame looms, using natural dyes and a geometric border vocabulary, made up into shingka, jackets, cloaks and blankets. Granted a geographical indication in January 2024.
Monpa carpets	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Tawang and Bomdila	Hand-knotted woollen carpets and rugs in the Tibetan idiom — dragon, snow lion, phoenix and geometric medallion — produced at the government craft centres as well as in households, and used on monastery floors and seating platforms as much as sold.
Sherdukpen and Sartang weaving	Monpa & Tawang Belt	West Kameng	Foothill weaving with its own stripe and motif system, worked on backstrap looms in Rupa, Shergaon and the Sartang villages. Not covered by the Monpa Textile registration.
Chakhesang shawl	Naga Hills	जीआई टैग	Warp-striped cotton shawls in a fixed repertoire of designs, woven on the loin loom by Chakhesang women. Registered as a geographical indication in 2017, on an application by the Chakhesang Women Welfare Society — the only Naga textile with the protection so far.
Ao tsüngkotepsu	Naga Hills	Mokokchung	Red and black bands with a median white panel painted in tree sap and soot with the figures that record achievement. The painting, not the weaving, carries the meaning, and it was done by a specialist.
Angami loramhoushu and lohe	Naga Hills	Kohima	The Angami repertoire runs from plain white and black everyday cloths to heavily restricted status shawls; the difference between two of them can be a single band, and everyone in the village can read it.
Sumi avikuho	Naga Hills	Zunheboto	A Sumi shawl whose band structure and colour placement mark rank and entitlement rather than taste.
Lotha and Rengma shawls	Naga Hills	Wokha and Tseminyu	Series in which each successive Feast of Merit given by a household entitles it to an additional design element, so the cloth accumulates the family's record over a lifetime.
Konyak and Phom cloths	Naga Hills	Mon and Longleng	Bolder, wider-banded work from the northern ridges, worn with brass, bead and boar-tusk ornament rather than with fine weave detail.
Kasavu cotton, bought rather than woven	Nanjil Nadu	Kanyakumari	The gold-bordered cotton worn at every festival here is woven in the Travancore handloom villages up the coast and sold across Nagercoil and Marthandam. The region consumes the textile tradition of its neighbour without having reproduced it.
Palmyra and screw pine plaiting	Nanjil Nadu	Kanyakumari	Mats, baskets, winnows and the head pads the fish carriers use, plaited from palmyra leaf and screw pine. A household craft rather than a market one, and mostly practised by women.
Nicobari mat (Chatrai-hileuoi)	Nicobar Islands	जीआई टैग	Pandanus and palm leaf split, cured and plaited into sleeping and floor mats. Registered as a geographical indication in December 2024. Mat plaiting rather than weaving is the islands' fibre craft, and the same skill produces the thatch and wall panels of the houses.
Maheshwari sarees and fabrics	Nimar	जीआई टैग	A silk-warp, cotton-weft fabric woven on pit and frame looms at Maheshwar, with a reversible border worked so that neither face is the wrong side. Established under Ahilyabai Holkar's patronage in the eighteenth century, near-extinct by the 1970s, and revived from 1979 by the Rehwa Society, which now runs a weaving workshop of roughly a hundred and thirty weavers alongside a school and clinic. Registered as a geographical indication.
Burhanpur powerloom and zari cloth	Nimar	Burhanpur	The residue of a Mughal-era fine-cotton and gold-thread industry that shipped through Surat. Burhanpur is now among the largest powerloom concentrations in the state, which is a different business on the same site.
Handloom cotton of the valley towns	Nimar	Khargone, Barwani	Everyday cotton yardage and gamchhas woven in the cotton-growing districts, largely displaced by mill cloth and surviving mainly where a cooperative kept the looms working.
Parsi gara embroidery	North Konkan	Mumbai	Satin-stitch embroidery on silk, worked so densely that the ground almost disappears, originally commissioned from Chinese workshops through the Canton trade and later embroidered by Parsi and local hands in Bombay and Surat. Very few full antique garas remain in circulation; most are inherited and cut down.
Bombay mill cloth	North Konkan	Girangaon — Parel, Lalbaug, Byculla, Worli	The region's real textile history is industrial. The first cotton mill opened in Bombay in 1854; at peak the city ran well over a hundred, employing a quarter of a million people drawn largely from the Konkan coast and the Desh. The 1982 strike ended the industry, and the compounds became malls and towers.
Vadval and Kunbi checked cotton	North Konkan	Palghar and Vasai	Coarse checked cotton in red, green and black, the everyday cloth of Kunbi, Vadval and East Indian women before mill prints displaced it. It survives mainly as ceremonial and revival wear.
Mysore Silk	Old Mysore	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication. The chain is unusually complete for an Indian textile — mulberry grown, cocoons reeled and sold at the Ramanagara and Sidlaghatta markets, silk twisted and woven, and the state corporation's own mill at Mysuru stamping each saree with a code and a hologram, because counterfeiting the name has been a live problem since the 1990s.
Molakalmuru silk	Old Mysore	जीआई टैग	A registered geographical indication from just beyond the region's northern edge, listed here because the contrast is the point — heavier figured borders than the Mysore style, and the line where one taste ends and the other begins runs through the shops that stock both.
Devanga and Padmashali handloom cotton	Old Mysore	Mandya, Chamarajanagar, Tumakuru	The everyday cotton weaving of the canal belt, largely displaced by power looms but still producing towels, panche and the coarse cotton used for temple offerings.
Madurai Sungudi	Pandya Nadu	जीआई टैग	Cotton resist-dyed by tying thousands of tiny knots — a single sari can carry more than twenty thousand — each of which resists the dye and leaves a dot. Brought by Saurashtrian weavers who settled in Madurai under Nayak patronage. Registered as a geographical indication on 12 December 2005, under application number 21 — among the earliest Indian registrations. The spelling Chungudi seen in shops is the same textile, not a second one.
Sholavandan and Madurai cotton handloom	Pandya Nadu	Madurai	Plain and checked cotton yardage from the villages along the Vaigai, much of it now sold as generic "Madurai cotton" without any mark of origin.
Sivakasi and Rajapalayam textile printing	Pandya Nadu	Virudhunagar	The offset and screen-printing capacity built up for match labels and firework wrappers spilled into textile printing, which is why a dry town with no weaving tradition prints a great deal of cloth.
Nocte weaving	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Tirap	Loin-loom weaving in banded red, black and white, used for shawls and wraps. Not separately registered as a geographical indication at the time of writing.
Wancho weaving	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Longding	Narrow-panel weaving used for loincloths, belts and bags, worked in strong contrasting bands. It has been overshadowed by the community's wood carving, which is the tradition that carries the GI.
Tangsa weaving	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Changlang	Diamond-patterned cloth and bags in mixed colours, dyed with plant material and woven on a body- tensioned loom. It appears in national handloom listings of Arunachal's geographical indications; because the registration record for it is not something this entry can confirm directly, no GI claim is made here.
Tibetan handmade carpet	Patkai & Tirap Belt	जीआई टैग	Hand-knotted woollen carpets woven in the Tibetan settlements established in Arunachal from the 1960s and 1970s, including the one at Miao. The Arunachal Pradesh handmade carpet was granted a geographical indication in January 2024. It is a fifty-year-old craft in a two-thousand-year-old place, and it is now one of the belt's few reliable cash crafts.
Phulkari	Punjab Doabs	जीआई टैग	Darn stitch in untwisted floss silk worked from the back of a coarse hand-spun khaddar ground, so the embroiderer counts threads blind and the pattern appears on the face. Named types include the bagh, fully covered; the thirma, worked on white ground and associated with older women and widows; the chope, worked in a double-running stitch that reads the same on both sides and given by the maternal grandmother at a wedding; the darshan dwar, with gateway motifs, offered at a shrine; and the sainchi of the Malwa districts, which is figurative and shows village scenes, animals, wrestlers and trains. Registered as a geographical indication.
Khes	Punjab Doabs	Across the region, historically strongest in Malwa	A thick reversible cotton cloth in double weave, chequered or striped, used as a wrap, a bedcover and a dowry item. It was woven on village pit looms in every large village until mill cloth displaced it, and its weight is its whole argument in a plain that gets genuinely cold in January.
Darri	Punjab Doabs	Across the region	Flat-woven cotton floor rug in bold stripes and geometric blocks, woven by women on a horizontal frame, accumulated as part of a dowry and used for seating at every gathering including the langar hall.
Nala	Punjab Doabs	Across the region	The woven drawstring for a salwar, made on a small hand frame or finger-braided in silk and cotton with tasselled ends. A minor object made with disproportionate care, given as a gift and worked in named patterns.
Amritsar woollens and shawls	Punjab Doabs	Amritsar	Amritsar became a shawl-weaving centre in the nineteenth century when Kashmiri weavers moved down to the plains during famine years in the Valley, and it later became one of north India's largest woollen textile and blanket manufacturing centres. The craft origin and the mill industry occupy the same city.
Baluchari	Rarh	जीआई टैग	A silk saree whose entire argument is in its anchal — a large end panel woven with figurative narrative scenes in supplementary weft, historically Ramayana and Mahabharata episodes but also nawabi court scenes, women smoking hookahs, and men in horse carriages. It originated at Baluchar in Murshidabad, collapsed under colonial competition, and was rebuilt at Bishnupur in the twentieth century by the artist Subho Thakur working with the master weaver Akshay Kumar Das, who brought jacquard technique back with him. It received a geographical indication in 2011.
Swarnachari	Rarh	Bankura (Bishnupur)	The gold-and-silver-thread version of the same weave, developed later and now the wedding form. It is a variant of Baluchari rather than a separate tradition.
Bishnupuri silk and tussar	Rarh	Bankura	Mulberry and tussar silk reeled and woven across the Bishnupur belt, much of it as plain-ground yardage that feeds the Baluchari and Swarnachari looms and the block-printing trade.
Nakshi kantha	Rarh	जीआई टैग	Old cotton sarees layered and quilted together with running stitch, the thread pulled from their own borders, with figurative motifs worked freehand across the surface. Registered as a geographical indication for West Bengal; Birbhum's villages around Bolpur are among the principal producing clusters.
Santiniketan batik and leather	Rarh	जीआई टैग	Wax-resist dyeing and hand-tooled vegetable-tanned leather developed as a teaching craft at Kala Bhavana and commercialised through the cooperatives around Sriniketan. Santiniketan leather goods carry a registered geographical indication.
Dharmavaram handloom pattu sarees	Rayalaseema	जीआई टैग	Mulberry silk with broad gold-zari borders woven on jacquard-fitted pit looms, in a cluster of several thousand looms. Registered as a geographical indication in 2013–14. The town also weaves the heavy silk used to dress temple images.
Srikalahasti Kalamkari	Rayalaseema	जीआई टैग	Cotton cloth drawn on freehand with a bamboo pen, using mordants and natural dyes, in narrative panels of temple subjects. Registered as a geographical indication in 2004–05. It is a painted textile, not a printed one, and the distinction from Machilipatnam's block-printed kalamkari on the coast is fundamental.
Yemmiganur and Adoni cotton durries	Rayalaseema	Kurnool	Thick cotton floor-spreads and coarse cottons woven on pit looms in the Tungabhadra towns, sustained by institutional and export orders. Not GI-protected.
Venkatagiri — a neighbour, not a local cloth	Rayalaseema	जीआई टैग	Included to place it correctly. Venkatagiri's fine jamdani-technique cotton, GI-registered in 2011–12, belongs to the coastal Nellore weaving tradition rather than to the dryland interior, even though modern district boundaries now put the town in the same administrative unit as Tirupati.
Bareilly zari and zardozi	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Bareilly	Metal-thread embroidery on an adda frame, supplying the wedding and export trade — one of the largest zari clusters in Uttar Pradesh after Lucknow and Varanasi.
Rampur applique and velvet work	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Rampur	Court-derived applique and metal-thread work on velvet, historically for canopies, cushions and processional trappings.
Tharu handloom	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Udham Singh Nagar, Pilibhit	Coarse cotton weaving and grass matting made within Tharu households, with geometric borders in indigo and madder.
Jamnagari Bandhani	Saurashtra	जीआई टैग	Tie-resist dyeing in which the cloth is pinched into thousands of points and tied with thread before dyeing, so the tied points resist and stay undyed. Jamnagar's version is prized for very fine, closely spaced dots and for a particular red; the local claim is that the town's water gives the alizarin red its depth, which is why dyed cloth was historically sent here from elsewhere to be finished. Registered as a geographical indication in 2016.
Rajkot Patola	Saurashtra	जीआई टैग	Single-ikat silk, in which only the weft is resist-dyed to the pattern before weaving and the warp is plain. This is a genuinely different craft from the double-ikat Patan patola of North Gujarat, where warp and weft are both pre-dyed and must be aligned thread by thread on the loom. Rajkot's single ikat is faster, cheaper and forgiving of a millimetre of drift; Patan's is neither. Registered as a geographical indication in 2018.
Tangaliya Shawl	Saurashtra	जीआई टैग	Woven by the Dangasia community on a pit loom, with raised dots formed by twisting extra weft thread around a group of warp threads as the cloth is woven, so the beadwork effect is structural rather than embroidered on afterwards. Registered as a geographical indication in 2009, and worked by only a few hundred weavers.
Kathiawadi hand embroidery	Saurashtra	Across the peninsula	Rabari, Ahir, Mahajan and Kanbi embroidery styles, each with its own stitch vocabulary, mirror size and motif set. The registered Kutch Embroidery geographical indication covers the neighbouring region's version of the same grammar; the Saurashtra styles are documented but unregistered.
Jetpur screen printing	Saurashtra	Rajkot (Jetpur)	A dyeing and screen-printing town on the Bhadar whose units print an enormous volume of cotton saree cloth, much of it historically made to designs for West African markets. It is an industrial craft rather than a heritage one, and it is what keeps the peninsula's dyeing skills commercially alive.
Adi Textile	Siang & Adi Belt	जीआई टैग	Loin-loom weaving in wool and cotton, dyed with forest-plant dyes, producing the galuk, gale and gadu. Granted a geographical indication in January 2024 in a batch of twelve Arunachal products.
Galo Textile	Siang & Adi Belt	जीआई टैग	The Galo weaving tradition, with its own motif set and colour conventions, registered as a separate geographical indication in the same January 2024 batch — the two communities' weaves are related but the state's own filings treat them as distinct.
Gekong-galong loin loom	Siang & Adi Belt	Across the belt	The loom itself, documented under this name in the technical literature — a set of sticks, a backstrap and a breast beam, portable enough to be rolled up and carried, which is why weaving survived where furniture did not.
Apatani Textile	Siang & Adi Belt	जीआई टैग	Woven on a portable loin loom, in a narrow palette of black, white and a few line colours, and quite unlike the Adi and Galo weaves next door. Registered as a geographical indication in January 2024. It belongs to the Apatani specifically, not to the belt at large.
Dhaka cloth	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Gangtok	A handloom cotton with geometric supplementary-weft patterning, woven with the motifs counted rather than drawn, so no two lengths repeat exactly. It is the cloth of the topi and of the shawl, and it is woven on both sides of the ridge.
Lepcha backstrap weave	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Dzongu and the Teesta valley	Narrow panels woven on a body-tensioned loom in striped and banded patterns from nettle fibre, cotton and wool, then joined into a garment. The loom needs no frame, which is why it survived in scattered forest settlements.
Sikkimese hand-knotted woollen carpet	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Gangtok	Wool carpets knotted on an upright loom in Tibetan technique, with dragon, phoenix and lotus motifs, made at the state cottage industries institute and by private workshops around it.
Pangden	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Sikkim and the Kalimpong slope	The multi-striped woven apron of a married Bhutia woman, joined from three narrow loom widths, whose stripe arrangement is itself the signal.
Surat Zari Craft	South Gujarat Littoral	जीआई टैग	Metallic thread made by drawing silver or gilt wire down to hair fineness, flattening it and winding it around a silk or cotton core. Surat has been the country's principal zari supplier for centuries, which means Banarasi, Paithani and Kanchipuram borders very often begin here. Registered as a geographical indication in 2010.
Parsi gara embroidery	South Gujarat Littoral	Surat, Navsari, Udvada	Satin stitch, stem stitch, French knots and drawn-thread khakha borders worked in untwisted silk floss on silk ground. The craft nearly died in the twentieth century and survives through a small number of restorers and a revival trade; unregistered.
Surat art silk and powerloom cloth	South Gujarat Littoral	Surat	An industrial textile economy of hundreds of thousands of powerlooms producing man-made fabric, dyed and printed locally. It is not a heritage craft and is included because it is the direct commercial successor to the port's older cloth trade, and because it employs more people than every craft in this entry combined.
Sawantwadi and Kudal handloom cotton	South Konkan	Sindhudurg	A small surviving cotton-weaving activity around Sawantwadi and Kudal, producing checked lugade and towelling for local use. It is minor, and honesty requires saying so — this is not a weaving region and never developed a court textile.
Ghongdi and the ghat woollens	South Konkan	Sahyadri slope	Coarse black blankets woven by Dhangar pastoralists who bring flocks down the ghat in the dry months. They belong to the plateau economy above and arrive here with the sheep.
Berhampur Patta (Phoda Kumbha) Saree & Joda	South Odisha & Ganjam	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2010. Woven in the Berhampur weaving lanes on pit and frame looms in mulberry silk, with the phoda kumbha temple motif in the border and the saree and the men's joda treated as products of one tradition. A significant share of the output has always gone to temple and ritual use rather than to fashion retail.
Bomkai Saree & Fabrics	South Odisha & Ganjam	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2010. The weave is named for a village in this region, but the Bhulia weavers of Sonepur in western Odisha took it up, added silk and ikat and made it their commercial mainstay — so a craft with a Ganjam name is now largely a Subarnapur industry, and the cotton original is the harder one to find.
Gopalpur Tussar Fabrics — not this Gopalpur	South Odisha & Ganjam	जीआई टैग	Included to head off a standing confusion. The GI-registered Gopalpur tussar comes from Gopalpur in Jajpur district in the Mahanadi delta, not from Gopalpur-on-Sea in Ganjam. The two places share a name and nothing else.
Kantha	Sundarbans	जीआई टैग	Old cotton saris and dhotis layered and quilted with running stitch, thread drawn from their own borders. In the islands this is still primarily a domestic use-it-up craft rather than a market one, and the Nakshi Kantha geographical indication registered on the Indian side covers the wider Bengal tradition it belongs to.
Handloom cotton from the market towns	Sundarbans	Nadia and Hooghly, sold at Canning and Basanti	The Sundarbans has almost no weaving of its own; cloth comes down from the Santipur and Dhaniakhali belt through the market towns. It is a consuming region rather than a producing one, and this is one of the few crafts where that is true.
Pochampally Ikat	Telangana	जीआई टैग	Warp, weft or double ikat in silk and cotton, in which the yarn is tie-resisted and dyed to a plan before weaving, so the pattern emerges as the cloth is made and the motif edges feather slightly. Registered as a geographical indication in 2004–05, with a separate logo registration in 2017–18. Puttapaka, a few kilometres away, is the double-ikat village.
Telia Rumal	Telangana	जीआई टैग	A square double-ikat cloth in a fixed palette of madder red, black and white, whose yarn is worked with oil and an ash alkali over days before dyeing. It began as an export cloth for the Arabian Sea trade, worn as a turban or waistcloth, and its geographical indication was registered in 2020–21.
Gadwal saree	Telangana	जीआई टैग	A cotton or silk-cotton body joined to a silk border and pallu by an interlocking weft technique, so the two fibres meet in a seam that is woven rather than stitched. The joining is the skill; the zari is the decoration. Registered as a geographical indication in 2010–11.
Narayanpet saree	Telangana	जीआई टैग	Small-check cotton and silk with a contrast temple border, woven on a warp set up for several sarees at once so almost no thread is wasted at the changeover. Registered as a geographical indication in 2012–13.
Siddipet Gollabhama	Telangana	Siddipet	A cotton saree carrying an extra-weft figure of a milkmaid with a pot on her hip, repeated along the border and in the pallu. The motif is woven in by hand with a separate small shuttle for each figure, which is why the count per saree is a price.
Warangal durries	Telangana	जीआई टैग	Thick cotton floor-spreads woven on pit looms in interlocked weft blocks, historically for temples and wedding halls. Registered as a geographical indication in 2017–18.
Kancheepuram Silk	Tondaimandalam	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2005–06. Woven by several thousand weaving households on pit and frame looms, using mulberry silk largely reeled on the plateau to the west and zari of silk thread wrapped in silver wire and gilded. The technical signature is the korvai join.
Real Madras Handkerchief	Tondaimandalam	Chennai and the Palar towns	A checked cotton woven on this coast for the West African trade over several centuries, in which vegetable-dyed yarns deliberately bleed when washed — the effect that made "bleeding madras" a fashion in mid-twentieth-century America. It is still woven to specification for the same overseas markets.
Arani silk	Tondaimandalam	Tiruvannamalai (Arani)	A large silk weaving town on the region's south-western edge, producing lighter and cheaper silks than Kanchipuram and a great deal of the material sold under general South Indian silk labels.
Palar valley leather	Tondaimandalam	Vellore, Ranipet, Ambur	Not clothing in the traditional sense but the region's largest textile-adjacent industry — tanning and finished leather goods along the Palar, working for European footwear brands. The tanneries and the river's groundwater have a long and documented relationship.
Balaramapuram sarees and fine cotton fabrics	Travancore & Kuttanad	जीआई टैग	Handwoven unbleached cotton in very high counts with a pure zari kasavu border, produced on throw-shuttle pit looms by Shaliyar weaver families settled at Balaramapuram under Travancore patronage at the turn of the nineteenth century. Registered as a geographical indication in 2009–10.
Kasavu zari	Travancore & Kuttanad	Thiruvananthapuram, Alappuzha	The gold border itself, historically flattened silver-gilt wire wound on a silk core. Most of what is sold now is a copper or polyester substitute, and the price gap between the two is the single largest quality question in a Kerala cloth shop.
Coir matting and floor coverings	Travancore & Kuttanad	जीआई टैग	Coconut fibre spun into yarn and woven into matting on hand and power looms across the Alappuzha belt. Registered as Alleppey Coir in 2007–08.
Rignai Pachra	Tripura Hills & Plains	जीआई टैग	The women's woven ensemble, registered as a geographical indication in 2024. Woven on a loin loom in narrow joined panels with banded, named patterns, and produced overwhelmingly by women weaving at home rather than in workshops.
Tripura Risa Textile	Tripura Hills & Plains	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2024. Chest cloth, headcloth, stole and gift of honour, and the cloth given to a girl at the Risa Sormani ceremony.
Rikutu	Tripura Hills & Plains	Hill areas	The outer wrapper of the three-cloth set, woven plainer and wider than the rignai it covers.
Loin-loom cotton of the Chakma and Halam	Tripura Hills & Plains	Central and southern hills	Separate weaving traditions on the same loom technology — the Chakma keeping a distinct striped border vocabulary, the Halam a Kuki-Chin one closer to the cloths of the hills to the east.
Udupi saree	Tulu Nadu	जीआई टैग	Handwoven cotton in fine checks and stripes with a narrow contrast border, woven on pit and frame looms around Brahmavar and Kinnigoli. The craft had nearly stopped before a revival effort restarted the looms; it holds a geographical indication registered in 2015–16.
Kasaragod saree	Tulu Nadu	जीआई टैग	Bright checks and stripes with a distinctive sheen, woven in the Kasaragod belt by weaver families whose technique reads as coastal Karnataka rather than Kerala. Registered as a geographical indication in 2010–11.
Basel Mission khaki drill	Tulu Nadu	Mangaluru	The mission's weaving establishment at Balmatta industrialised handloom cotton here in the nineteenth century and developed a hard-wearing dyed drill cloth that was taken up for uniforms. The looms are gone; the cloth outlived them.
Khandua saree and fabrics	Utkal	जीआई टैग	Silk tie-and-dye ikat with woven Gita Govinda text, temple and elephant motifs, in a characteristic deep red and dull orange. Registered as a geographical indication.
Dhalapathar parda and fabrics	Utkal	जीआई टैग	A heavy handwoven cotton in broad bands, developed as curtain and furnishing cloth rather than as apparel. Registered as a geographical indication and made by a very small number of remaining looms.
Gopalpur tussar fabrics	Utkal	जीआई टैग	Tussar silk woven in the Brahmani belt — this is the Jajpur village of that name, not the beach town on the southern coast. Registered as a geographical indication.
Pipili appliqué cloth	Utkal	जीआई टैग	Not a weave but a cut-and-stitch textile — coloured cloth shapes laid onto a ground cloth in lotus, parrot, elephant and creeper forms. Its original product is temple canopy, umbrella and chariot covering, and the domestic market for lampshades and bags came afterwards. Registered as a geographical indication.
Ponduru Khadi	Uttarandhra	जीआई टैग	Registered as a geographical indication in 2023. Spun on the charkha from a short-staple cotton grown locally, with the raw cotton cleaned and aligned using the jawbone of a fish before spinning — a step no machine has replaced, and the reason the yarn reaches counts that mills cannot match on that fibre. Gandhi's association with the cloth is the standing local claim to fame and it is a well-documented one.
Bobbili and Vizianagaram cottons	Uttarandhra	Vizianagaram	Plain and check cottons woven on pit looms across the estate towns for local wear. The trade shrank hard against mill cloth and survives on cooperative purchase.
Karvath Kathi	Vidarbha	Nagpur and Bhandara, principally Umred and Pauni	A cotton sari whose name means saw-tooth, for the triangular border formed by interlocking the border and body wefts on the loom rather than by any added thread. Historically woven for wear in the Vidarbha heat — heavier in the border and very open in the body. Down to a small number of working looms.
Wardha khadi	Vidarbha	Wardha	Hand-spun, hand-woven cotton produced by institutions set up at Wardha and Sevagram from the 1930s. The cloth is ordinary; the production chain — carding, spinning and weaving all kept in the village — was the entire argument.
Coarse forest cotton	Vidarbha	Gadchiroli, Chandrapur	Undyed or indigo-dyed thick cotton woven on frame looms for the forest villages, in short widths and with minimal patterning. Largely displaced by mill cloth.

लोकगीत 584

नाम	क्षेत्र	प्रकार	टिप्पणी
Karma songs	Andaman Islands	Sadri	Sung around a karam branch planted in the village ground, by Chota Nagpur Adivasi settler communities. The songs came with the labour recruitment of a century ago and are still sung in island villages.
Karen hymns	Andaman Islands	Karen	Baptist hymnody in four parts, sung in Karen at Webi and the neighbouring villages. The community's strongest surviving oral tradition, and the one that carried its language forward.
Bhatiali and Bengali boat song	Andaman Islands	Bengali	Boatmen's songs carried from East Bengal by refugee settlers, sung in a country where the boats now go out onto open sea rather than up a river.
Pongal and temple songs	Andaman Islands	Tamil	Harvest and devotional songs kept up by Tamil settler families, largely unchanged from the mainland forms.
Andamanese song	Andaman Islands	Great Andamanese	Songs of the Great Andamanese have been recorded by linguists working with the community's remaining speakers, and archived material exists in academic collections. It is documented here as existing rather than described, because its contexts belong to a small living community and not to a visitor's itinerary.
Bisahari geet	Anga & Seemanchal	Angika	Bihula's journey down the river with her husband's body to recover his life from the snake goddess Mansa — sung over several nights with painted panels displayed in sequence.
Sohar and vivah geet	Anga & Seemanchal	Angika	Household life-cycle songs, with a gaari repertoire of ritual abuse at feasts.
Chhath geet	Anga & Seemanchal	Angika and Hindi	Offerings to the setting and rising sun, sung on the way to the Ganga ghats.
Bol Bam songs	Anga & Seemanchal	Hindi, Angika, Maithili	Devotion to Shiva, chanted and sung by pilgrims covering 105 km on foot. The repertoire now turns over yearly with the recorded music industry.
Surjapuri geet	Anga & Seemanchal	Surjapuri	Love, migration and the seasons, in a language of the Bihar-Bengal-Nepal meeting point with several million speakers and almost no institutional recognition.
Jhumar	Anga & Seemanchal	Angika and Khortha	Work and courtship, sung in circling dance form across the Bihar-Jharkhand border.
Bhatiyali and kirtan of the eastern belt	Anga & Seemanchal	Bengali	Boatmen's songs and Vaishnav devotional singing, ordinary in the Katihar and Kishanganj districts and unheard of a hundred kilometres west.
Dhola	Antarved Doab	Kauravi and Braj	A long sung romance, most often the Dhola-Maru story, performed with a shrill lead voice and a nagara. The Doab-Braj-Rajasthan version of an epic that runs across the whole of northern India.
Ragini and swang songs	Antarved Doab	Kauravi	Rural moral tales, caste and family politics and comedy, sung in a shared Haryana-Upper Doab repertoire and now circulated heavily on video platforms.
Kanwar songs	Antarved Doab	Hindi and Kauravi	Shiva devotional songs sung by walking pilgrims. The genre has changed faster than any other here — a folk form that now includes commercially recorded dance music played from trucks.
Alha	Antarved Doab	Kanauji and Bundeli	The Alha-Udal battle ballad, sung for hours in a driving cyclical metre in the southern districts.
Sohar and vivah geet	Antarved Doab	Kanauji and Kauravi	Life-cycle songs sung by women of the household, with a large gaari repertoire of ritual abuse at weddings.
Ganga bhajan and Kartik songs	Antarved Doab	Hindi	Devotional songs to the river, sung during the month-long Kartik bathing at Garhmukteshwar, Soron, Bithoor and Prayagraj.
Nautanki bols	Antarved Doab	Khari Boli and Braj	The sung verse of the Nautanki stage — doha, chaubola and daur — carrying stories of bandits, kings, lovers and, increasingly, current events.
Sohar	Awadh	Awadhi	Congratulation and blessing sung by women of the household and the neighbourhood, traditionally for the birth of a son — a fact the songs themselves make plain.
Kajri	Awadh	Awadhi	Separation — a woman waiting out the rains for a husband who has gone away to work.
Banna and banni	Awadh	Awadhi	Praise of the bridegroom and of the bride, sung by their own households in alternation.
Gaari	Awadh	Awadhi	Ritual abuse songs sung by the bride's women at the groom's party — obscene by design and protected by custom.
Marsiya and nauha	Awadh	Urdu	The martyrdom of Husain at Karbala, recited in a strict elegiac metre. Mir Anis's marsiyas are studied as literature and still performed from memory.
Alha	Awadh	Awadhi and Bundeli	The battle-ballad of Alha and Udal, sung in a driving cyclical metre for hours. It belongs to Bundelkhand and is fully at home in southern Awadh.
Birha	Awadh	Awadhi	Separation and cattle-herding life, sung solo in a high open voice by Ahir singers.
Karma geet	Bagelkhand	Bagheli and Gondi	The karam branch, the year's work, courtship and teasing between the men's and women's lines, improvised against a fixed refrain and sustained until dawn.
Saila geet	Bagelkhand	Bagheli	Boasting, the harvest, and the rhythm of the sticks themselves.
Sohar	Bagelkhand	Bagheli	Blessing sung by the women of the household. Bagheli sohar shares tunes and formulas with Awadhi sohar, which is the clearest audible evidence of the two languages' relationship.
Banna, banni and gaari	Bagelkhand	Bagheli	Praise of the bridegroom and bride, and the licensed abuse songs the bride's women sing at the groom's party.
Faag	Bagelkhand	Bagheli	Desire and seasonal turn, sung with dholak and manjira, and strongest in the western districts.
Nirgun	Bagelkhand	Bagheli and Hindi	The formless divine, the body as a rented house, and the futility of accumulation. Kabir's register.
Devi geet at Maihar	Bagelkhand	Bagheli and Hindi	Praise of Sharda, sung by parties of pilgrims climbing the Trikut steps through the night, often continuously for the whole nine days.
Dhamail	Barak Valley	Sylheti	Radha and Krishna as a frame for a wedding — courtship, separation and the bride leaving her father's house, sung by the women of both households in a clapping circle.
Bicchedi	Barak Valley	Sylheti	Separation — from a lover, from God, or from a place, with the three deliberately left indistinguishable.
Marfati and murshidi	Barak Valley	Sylheti and Bengali	The soul's relation to the murshid and to God, in a vocabulary shared with Baul singing and with almost none of its institutional structure.
Jari gaan	Barak Valley	Sylheti	The martyrdom at Karbala, sung by a standing circle of men with a lead singer, and rhythmically closer to dhamail than to any Urdu marsiya.
Padmapuran gaan	Barak Valley	Sylheti and Bengali	Behula and Lakhindar, and the goddess who controls snakebite — sung through the night by a lead reciter with a chorus, in a landscape where the snake risk peaks exactly when the water does.
Jhumur	Barak Valley	Sadri	Work, courtship and the journey from home, sung in couplets to the madal by the tea-garden communities. The songs about leaving are older than anyone still singing them.
Bhatiali	Barak Valley	Sylheti and Bengali	The boatman's song, pitched long and open because it is meant to carry over a river. It belongs to the whole Surma–Meghna lowland and thins out as soon as the ground rises.
Lachhmi Jagar	Bastar	Halbi and Bhatri	The birth, marriage and trials of Lachhmi, the rice goddess, told as a long domestic narrative in which a grain crop is a daughter. Sung by women with the dhankul bow and pot, with a chorus answering every line.
Bali Jagar and Dhankul Jagar	Bastar	Halbi	Shorter sung narratives commissioned by a household to discharge a vow, performed to the same dhankul accompaniment as the Lachhmi Jagar.
Relo	Bastar	Gondi	Courtship, teasing, work and the immediate surroundings — improvised verses on a fixed refrain, traded between two lines of dancers until one side runs out.
Ghotul songs	Bastar	Gondi and Halbi	Attachment, jealousy, work and the rules of the institution itself, sung by chelik and motiari to each other. A large body of these was recorded and published in the 1940s, which is why they survive in print far better than they now survive in practice.
Kaksar geet	Bastar	Gondi	Petition to Kaksar Deo for rain and a crop, sung by young men and women circling the shrine.
Madai songs	Bastar	Halbi and Gondi	Praise of the visiting deity, and the running commentary of one village's dancers on another's — competitive, improvised, and the main way news travels between settlements in the fair season.
Bhatra marriage songs	Bastar	Bhatri	The bride's departure and the negotiation between the two households, sung antiphonally by the women of each side. Bhatri's Odia affinities are most audible in this repertoire.
Gee Gee pada	Bayaluseeme	Kannada	News, satire and moral instruction sung in a driving metre with a chorus answering on the refrain. It has carried election commentary, epidemics and famine within living memory.
Sobane pada	Bayaluseeme	Kannada	Blessing songs sung by the women of both households in alternation while the ritual proceeds.
Jokumara songs	Bayaluseeme	Kannada	Sung by women carrying the clay Jokumara figure house to house — explicitly sexual, addressed to a fertility deity, and licensed by the occasion.
Tatva pada	Bayaluseeme	Kannada	Philosophy in household metaphor. Shishunala Sharifa's songs are the best known, and are sung as devotional music, as folk music and as concert repertoire without changing a word.
Suggi hadu	Bayaluseeme	Kannada	The threshing floor, the bullock, the moneylender and the year's yield, sung in the field as work songs.
Lavani	Bayaluseeme	Marathi	Desire, absence and sharp social comment in a fast metre over the dholki, performed in the bilingual belt for audiences that follow both languages.
Bhatiyali	Bengal Delta	Bengali	Distance, longing and the river as the course of a life. The boat, the ferryman and the far bank are used without explanation as figures for death and for God.
Sari gaan	Bengal Delta	Bengali	Work and competition, with a lead singer calling and the crew answering on the stroke.
Jari gaan	Bengal Delta	Bengali	Sung narrative of the Karbala martyrdom, performed by a group with a lead reciter, in the eastern and northern delta. Distinct from the Urdu marsiya tradition and composed in Bengali metre.
Baul and Fakiri gaan	Bengal Delta	Bengali	The body as the site of the divine, and a refusal of both scripture and caste. In the delta the Fakiri strand is strong, and Lalon Shah's songs at Cheuriya in the Bhagirathi–Padma country are its largest single body.
Kabigan	Bengal Delta	Bengali	Two poets improvise against each other in verse before an audience that decides who won. Antony Firingee, a Portuguese-descended kabiyal of the early nineteenth century, is the tradition's most-told story.
Shyama sangeet	Bengal Delta	Bengali	Complaint, argument and intimacy with the goddess. Ramprasad Sen of Halisahar set the register, and the songs are sung as much at funerals and in illness as at the puja.
Bratakatha songs	Bengal Delta	Bengali	Short recited-and-sung narratives attached to household vows — for a brother, for rain, for a good harvest. They are among the few Bengali oral genres composed, transmitted and performed entirely by women.
Gambhira	Bengal Delta	Bengali	Topical satire framed as a conversation with Shiva, performed by a grandfather-and-grandson pair with a chorus. It belongs to the Malda and Chapai belt at the delta's northern edge rather than to its core.
Chhath geet	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Bhojpuri	Songs to the sun and to Chhathi Maiya, sung on the walk to the ghat and through the night. This is the festival's heartland, and the songs are among the most widely recognised in north India.
Bidesiya	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Bhojpuri	The man who leaves for Calcutta and the wife who waits. Composed by Bhikhari Thakur in the early twentieth century, when the migration he describes was at its peak.
Purvi	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Bhojpuri	Separation and eastward migration, associated with Mahendar Misir of Saran — the region's own account of what indenture and labour migration did to its households.
Kajri	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Bhojpuri	Monsoon songs of longing, sung on swings by women and, at Mirzapur, in competitive all-night sessions with professional singers.
Chaiti and Ghato	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Bhojpuri	Spring songs addressed to Rama's birth month, sung in a distinctive descending line.
Birha	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Bhojpuri	Separation, cattle, caste pride and current affairs, sung solo at volume with a chorus refrain — a folk form that became a professional stage industry.
Sohar and vivah geet	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Bhojpuri	Household life-cycle song, with a large gaari repertoire of ritual abuse aimed at the groom's party.
Nirgun	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Bhojpuri and Hindi	The formless divine and the body's impermanence, in the Kabir line — sung at cremations, including at Manikarnika itself.
Bihu naam (Bihu geet)	Brahmaputra Valley	Assamese	Spring, the kopou phool orchid, the cuckoo, and courtship conducted almost entirely in metaphor. Sung antiphonally between young men and women, and traditionally frank in a way the rest of the year is not.
Husori	Brahmaputra Valley	Assamese	Blessing songs sung by a troupe that goes from courtyard to courtyard through Bihu week, singing for the household's prosperity and being fed and given a gamosa in return.
Borgeet	Brahmaputra Valley	Brajavali	Devotion to Krishna in a form Sankardev built specifically so that ordinary people, not Sanskrit scholars, could sing it.
Zikir	Brahmaputra Valley	Assamese	The unity of God and the vanity of worldly attachment, expressed in Assamese village imagery — the boat, the river, the harvest.
Tokari geet	Brahmaputra Valley	Assamese	Devotional and moral ballads, sung solo to a two-string drone, often by a singer moving between villages.
Biya naam	Brahmaputra Valley	Assamese	Sung by the women of the household through every stage of an Assamese wedding, from the bath to the departure, with a separate song for almost every ritual.
Nao khelor geet	Brahmaputra Valley	Assamese	Rowing songs whose metre sets the stroke, from a valley where the boat was the road.
Goalpariya lokogeet	Brahmaputra Valley	Goalpariya	The songs of the western districts — including "Hastir kanya", the mahout songs about elephant handlers and the women who wait for them, brought to national attention by Pratima Barua Pandey.
Rasiya	Braj	Braj Bhasha	Radha and Krishna's teasing, quarrels and reconciliations, sung in the first person and often bawdy. The Holi rasiya of Barsana and Nandgaon are sung competitively between the two towns.
Samaj gayan padas	Braj	Braj Bhasha	Devotional verse from the Ashtachhap and Haridasi poets, sung congregationally in a dhrupad-derived style.
Hori	Braj	Braj Bhasha	Colour-play as an erotic metaphor. A genre that left the region entirely — the classical hori-thumri sung in Banaras and Lucknow is this repertoire.
Malhar and jhoola songs	Braj	Braj Bhasha	Swings, rain and separation, sung as the deities are swung in the temples.
Sanjhi songs	Braj	Braj Bhasha	Girls' songs sung over the making of sanjhi images, addressed to Radha as a young girl.
Bhent and jagran	Braj	Braj Bhasha and Hindi	Devotional night-long singing to the goddess and to Krishna, in a repertoire shared with Haryana and Rajasthan.
Alha	Bundelkhand	Bundeli	The wars of Alha and Udal for Mahoba against Prithviraj Chauhan, ending in the battle of about 1182 and the fall of the Chandela court. Fifty-two episodes in the standard reckoning, sung one at a time over a night.
Fag	Bundelkhand	Bundeli	Desire, separation and sharp domestic observation in four-line verses. Isuri's fags carry the form and are named for their addressee, Rajau.
Diwari	Bundelkhand	Bundeli	Cattle, Krishna as cowherd, and boasting between village troupes, sung between rounds of the stick dance.
Sohar	Bundelkhand	Bundeli	Blessing and congratulation sung by the women of the household, traditionally on the birth of a son.
Bidai and gaari	Bundelkhand	Bundeli	The bride's departure, and the ritual abuse songs the bride's women sing at the groom's party — licensed obscenity that everyone present treats as obligatory.
Rai geet	Bundelkhand	Bundeli	Teasing, praise of the patron, and the exchange between dancer and drummer.
Hardaul geet	Bundelkhand	Bundeli	Songs to the Bundela prince Hardaul, who is invited to every wedding in the region before any living guest is.
Halakki hadu	Canara Coast	Halakki Kannada	Work, land, marriage, birth and the community's own history, sung mainly by women and mainly unaccompanied, with a chorus answering a lead line. The repertoire is large, is held entirely in memory, and is the reason the community's oral tradition has been recorded at all.
Suggi pada	Canara Coast	Kannada	Processional songs sung house to house by men in feathered headdress as they dance and collect contributions. Each village has its own route and its own order of houses.
Sobane pada	Canara Coast	Kannada	Blessing songs sung by women through the wedding sequence — at the oil bath, the turmeric, the arrival of the groom's party — with verses that name the households involved and are adjusted for each marriage.
Yakshagana prasanga	Canara Coast	Kannada	The sung text of the dance-drama, in metrical Kannada verse drawn from the epics and the puranas. Some prasangas are centuries old and others are written now; the singer carries the whole night on them.
Dasa pada	Canara Coast	Kannada	The devotional compositions of the Haridasa poets, sung by village bhajana groups across the areca uplands and forming the standard repertoire an amateur singer here is expected to know.
Siddi drum songs	Canara Coast	Konkani, Kannada and Marathi depending on the settlement	Call-and-response singing over hand drums. Researchers have recorded only a small residue of retained African vocabulary in the ritual repertoire; the community's everyday languages today are those of the districts they live in, which is itself a record of four centuries of settlement.
Gumte pang	Canara Coast	Halakki Kannada	Cyclic verses sung in a ring to a single-headed clay drum, with the pitch bent by pressing the drum against the body. The form is closer to a rhythmic conversation than to a narrative song.
Nuala	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Gaddi (Bharmauri)	The full Shiva narrative — his marriage, his wanderings and his acceptance of the household's offering — sung by a hereditary Chelu from dusk until the village is fed at dawn.
Ghurei	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Gaddi (Bharmauri)	Courtship, the flock, and the seasons of the migration, sung by women in a slow circle.
Dangi	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Chambeali	A narrative of Gaddi lovers, carried entirely by the sung text while the dance keeps time.
Minjar songs	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Chambeali	The fair itself, the Ravi, and the offering of the minjar tassel to the river — a repertoire performed during one week of the year and almost never outside it.
Suhi Mata songs	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Chambeali	The queen who is said to have given her life so that a water channel would reach the town. The songs are sung by women and children, who are also the only participants in the procession.
Gaddi jot songs	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Gaddi (Bharmauri)	Named passes, named pastures, weather and animals lost on the crossing. The songs function partly as a route description.
Bhaderwahi wedding songs	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Bhaderwahi	Blessing, teasing and the bride's departure, sung by the women of both households in alternation.
Pangwali seasonal songs	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Pangwali	The closed months, the first crossing of the year and the return of traders — a repertoire built around isolation and its ending.
Dadaria	Chhattisgarh Plains	Chhattisgarhi	A single improvised couplet, thrown by one side and answered by the other, usually between men and women. Love, teasing, complaint and local incident. It is the region's most common song and the least recorded, because it is composed and discarded in the same minute.
Sua geet	Chhattisgarh Plains	Chhattisgarhi	Women sing to a clay parrot in a basket about husbands, in-laws and marriage. The parrot is the addressee, and that framing is what allows the songs to say publicly what could not otherwise be said.
Karma geet	Chhattisgarh Plains	Chhattisgarhi and Sadri	The rains, the tree and the young. Short cycles built to repeat for a whole night.
Bhojli	Chhattisgarh Plains	Chhattisgarhi	Sung to sprouted wheat or barley seedlings raised in baskets in a dark room for nine days and then carried in procession to water. The songs address the sprouts as a young girl being sent away.
Panthi geet	Chhattisgarh Plains	Chhattisgarhi	Nirgun verse on the formless divine and on Guru Ghasidas's Satnam teaching, sung to an accelerating drum while the dance is danced to it.
Pandwani	Chhattisgarh Plains	Chhattisgarhi	The Mahabharata told from the Pandavas' side, with Bhima as the hero rather than Arjuna — a shift that tells you a great deal about who the audience is.
Jas geet	Chhattisgarh Plains	Chhattisgarhi	Praise of the Devi, sung all night in call and response so that no single singer has to carry it.
Arpa Pairi ke Dhar	Chhattisgarh Plains	Chhattisgarhi	The rivers of the plain, named in order. Written by Narendra Dev Verma, it is now the official state song and one of the few modern Chhattisgarhi compositions that everyone can sing.
Thevaram and Thiruvasagam	Chola Nadu	Tamil	Shaiva devotion in the pann melodic modes, composed between the sixth and ninth centuries and sung by hereditary oduvars at fixed points in the temple day. Sambandar, one of the three principal authors, was born at Sirkazhi in this delta.
Thiruppavai and Thiruvempavai	Chola Nadu	Tamil	Andal's thirty Vaishnava verses and Manikkavasagar's Shaiva counterpart, sung before dawn through the coldest month, street by street, by groups walking a fixed route.
Nattupura paadal of the paddy fields	Chola Nadu	Tamil	Call-and-response work songs timed to the rhythm of transplanting a bunded field, sung by the women who do that work. The tempo is set by the task, which is why the songs shorten as the field fills.
Oppari	Chola Nadu	Tamil	Improvised sung lament performed by women at a funeral, addressing the dead directly and cataloguing what they did and failed to do. Professionally performed in some communities and entirely domestic in others.
Thalattu	Chola Nadu	Tamil	Cradle songs whose texts are frequently not about the child at all but about the singer's own household and marriage, which is what makes them a durable folklore source.
Kummi and kolattam songs	Chola Nadu	Tamil	Clapping and stick-dance songs sung by women in a ring, with the beat carried by the hands or the sticks rather than by a drum.
Villupattu	Chola Nadu	Tamil	Narrative ballad performed by a lead singer who beats a large strung bow as his percussion, with a chorus answering. Strongest in the southern districts and performed across the delta's coastal villages.
Sarhul and Jadur songs	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Kurukh, Mundari, Sadri	The sal blossom, the marriage of earth and sun, and the petition for rain. Sung in procession between the sarna grove and the village dancing ground.
Baha songs	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Santali	The first sal and mahua flowers of the year, which may not be used or worn until the naeke has offered them. Sung with the tamak' and tumdak' pair setting the pattern.
Sohrai songs	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Santali, Khortha, Kurmali	Cattle — their washing, oiling, garlanding and driving over a threshold. The songs are addressed to the animals as much as about them, and are sung by the same women who paint the walls that week.
Karam songs	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Sadri, Khortha, Kurmali, Santali	The Karam brother-and-sister narrative, sung all night around a planted karam branch by two answering groups of unmarried women.
Tusu gaan	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Kurmali, Khortha, Bangla	Tusu, addressed as a daughter of the household who is looked after for a month and then set adrift on the river with her decorated chaudal. Composed fresh each year, and the verses regularly comment on the year just passed.
Jhumair	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Sadri, Khortha, Kurmali	Work, courtship, absence and return, in short verses set to the mandar. Mardana and janani jhumair are distinguished by who dances rather than by subject.
Domkach	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Nagpuri, Khortha	Parody and licensed obscenity, performed by the women of the household for each other with roles taken across gender. Shared with Magadh and Bhojpur.
Jadopatia chakshudan song	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Santali	The journey of the departed, sung by the scroll painter as he unrolls the painting, with the eye of the figure left unfinished until the family pays. A ritual, a performance and a transaction at once.
Abhanga	Desh	Marathi	Direct address to Vitthal of Pandharpur — complaint, longing, argument and household detail rather than liturgy. The corpus runs from Dnyaneshwar in the thirteenth century to Tukaram in the seventeenth and is sung, not recited.
Jatyavarchi ovi	Desh	Marathi	Composed and sung by women at the hand quern in a two-and-a-half-line metre — about brothers, mothers, marital households and the labour itself. Thousands were recorded from Pune-district villages in the twentieth century, and the corpus is one of the largest bodies of women's oral poetry documented anywhere in India.
Povada	Desh	Marathi	Battle narrative, sung at speed by a shahir with a daf. The seventeenth-century povadas on Afzal Khan and on Tanaji at Sinhagad are near-contemporary sources as well as performances.
Bharud	Desh	Marathi	A comic or domestic scene — a quarrel, a drunkard, a bride — carrying a devotional argument underneath. The audience is expected to hear both.
Gondhal gani	Desh	Marathi	Invocation, deity genealogy and the naming of the household commissioning the performance, sung through the night to sambal and tuntune.
Lavani	Desh	Marathi	Erotic and satirical verse in a fast metre, often written by male shahirs and performed by women. The eighteenth-century Peshwa-era lavani of Honaji Bala and Ram Joshi is still the core repertoire.
Bhondla and Hadga songs	Desh	Marathi	Girls circle a chalked elephant drawn on the floor and sing a fixed cycle of songs while a covered dish of food is guessed at. The songs are teasing and domestic, and the sequence is memorised, not improvised.
Palna	Desh	Marathi	Cradle songs sung by women of the household as the child is placed in the palna for the first time.
Chirmi	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Marwari and Shekhawati	A young woman addresses the chirmi shrub — whose bright red seed is the image the song turns on — while waiting for her father and brothers to come and fetch her. Almost every version is about the men of her natal family not arriving.
Gindad and Dhamal songs	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Shekhawati	Improvised verse sung over the nagara, ranging from Krishna's Holi to the conduct of the local thakur or the price of grain. The licence to be rude is the form's entire point and is limited to the season.
Kagliyo	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Marwari and Shekhawati	A woman speaks to a crow, taking its call as the sign that news is coming from a husband or son who has gone away to trade. In a region whose men left for Calcutta and Bombay for decades at a time, this is a documentary song, not a sentimental one.
Banna and banni	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Dhundhari	Paired praise songs for the bridegroom and the bride, traded between the two families' women and frequently turning into open mockery of the other side.
Ratijaga	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Dhundhari	A sequence invoking each of the family's deities in turn, in an order specific to the lineage. It is one of the few places a household's own religious history is transmitted intact.
Khatu Shyam bhajans	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Hindi and Dhundhari	Devotion to Barbarik as Shyam, built around the epithet of the one who supports the defeated. Composed and recorded continuously since the late twentieth century, and the most commercially significant devotional repertoire in the region.
Teej and Sawan songs	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Dhundhari	Swings, leheriya, rain and a woman's return to her mother's house for the season — sung in courtyards and now also along the route of Jaipur's Teej procession.
Bhawaiya	Dooars & Terai	Rajbanshi	Separation — a woman addressing an absent moishal or gariyal, or the herder addressing the road. Long lines, slow tempo, and the characteristic broken note.
Chatka	Dooars & Terai	Rajbanshi	Teasing, courtship and comic complaint, sung fast and short.
Kushan gan	Dooars & Terai	Rajbanshi	The Ramayana retold in local idiom, with the gidal singing, narrating and playing every part to the bena fiddle and a chorus.
Jhumur	Dooars & Terai	Sadri	Work, love, and the plantation itself — recruitment, the sardar, the wage, the distance home. The plateau versions of the same tunes carry none of this.
Karam geet	Dooars & Terai	Sadri, Kurukh and Mundari	The karam branch, the fasting sister, the brother's welfare, and the coming harvest.
Tusu geet	Dooars & Terai	Sadri and Bengali	Addressed to Tusu as an unmarried girl of the household, and composed new each season — which is how current events enter the repertoire every year.
Bishahari or Padmapuran gaan	Dooars & Terai	Rajbanshi and Bengali	The Manasa narrative sung through a night with a leading singer and chorus, in a region where snakebite in a flooded paddy field was an ordinary cause of death.
Bagurumba song	Dooars & Terai	Bodo	Butterflies, birds, the river and the new year, sung to the kham and siphung while the dance holds the cloth wide.
Jagar	Garhwal	Garhwali	The genealogy, history and grievances of a local deity — Nagraja, Narsingh, Bhairav, Nanda — sung to summon it into the body of a medium. The text is functional rather than decorative, and length is part of the point.
Panwara	Garhwal	Garhwali	Heroic ballads of local figures — Madho Singh Bhandari, Tilu Rauteli, Jitu Bagdwal — sung to a driving rhythm. These are the region's history as it was actually transmitted before it was written down.
Khuded	Garhwal	Garhwali	A married woman's longing for her natal village, sung while grass-cutting or grinding. Khud means precisely that ache, and the genre exists because village exogamy sent women over a ridge they could then rarely cross.
Bajuband	Garhwal	Garhwali	A sung exchange between a young man and a young woman, each verse answering the last, named after the armlet offered as a token. The form is competitive and improvised, and the audience judges the answers.
Mangal geet	Garhwal	Garhwali	Blessing songs tied to each ritual stage, sung by the women of the household without instruments.
Chaunphula and Jhumeila songs	Garhwal	Garhwali	Seasonal song danced in a circle, with texts about flowering, separation and the return of men who have gone down to work.
Basanti and Chaiti geet	Garhwal	Garhwali	Songs for the turning of the year, sung by children going door to door and by women at the first flowering of buransh and peach.
Migration songs	Garhwal	Garhwali	The emptying of the villages — the road that came, the school that closed, the house locked in the pines. Narendra Singh Negi's are the versions most people know, and they function as social commentary in a place where the census has been recording abandoned villages for decades.
Wangala drum songs	Garo Hills	Garo (A·chik)	Thanksgiving to Misi Saljong for the crop, sung over the dama and rang while the two lines advance. The words are secondary to the drum pattern, which is what actually organises the dance.
Ajea	Garo Hills	Garo (A·chik)	A ceremonial song form performed at the formal moments of a marriage and at clan gatherings, in which the singer fits the occasion and the people present into a fixed melodic frame.
Dani Doka	Garo Hills	Garo (A·chik)	A narrative and exchange form sung in alternation, with one singer answering another. Skill lies in extending the exchange without repeating, which makes it a contest as much as a song.
Doroa and Kore Doka	Garo Hills	Garo (A·chik)	Two of the named song forms in the A·chik repertoire, attached to particular occasions rather than to general performance.
Serejing	Garo Hills	Garo (A·chik)	Song accompanied on the bowed serenda, on themes of attachment and separation.
Garo hymnody	Garo Hills	Garo (A·chik)	The Baptist hymn corpus translated into and then written in A·chik from the later nineteenth century. It is quantitatively the largest body of sung Garo, it standardised a good deal of the written language, and for many speakers it is the main context in which they read A·chik at all.
Jhum-field working songs	Garo Hills	Garo (A·chik)	Call-and-response songs timed to collective labour on the a·ba, where a whole village works one household's plot in turn.
Mando	Goa & Gomantak	Konkani	Love, courtship, separation and — in a substantial minority of the surviving texts — grievance against landlords, priests and colonial officials, sung in a slow six-eight and in a Konkani heavily inflected with Portuguese.
Dulpod	Goa & Gomantak	Konkani	Village life at speed — fish sellers, gossip, drink, mothers-in-law. The dulpod exists to break the mando's formality, and the pairing is fixed.
Deknni	Goa & Gomantak	Konkani	A temple dancer and a boatman, and by extension the crossing between two worlds. Sung by Catholic performers about Hindu subjects, in a melodic idiom that borrows from both.
Dhalo songs	Goa & Gomantak	Konkani	Household, harvest, fertility and the women's own concerns, sung in call and response between two facing rows over successive nights and never with men present.
Fugdi geet	Goa & Gomantak	Konkani	Short cyclic verses that carry the accelerating breath rhythm of the dance rather than a narrative.
Voviyo	Goa & Gomantak	Konkani	Blessing and instruction sung by older women as coconut milk is applied to the bride and groom. The ceremony is Catholic and the song form is the same ovi that Konkani and Marathi Hindu women sing at the grindstone.
Kunbi geet	Goa & Gomantak	Konkani	Sowing, transplanting and harvest, sung by the community whose labour built and maintained the khazan fields.
Cantaram	Goa & Gomantak	Konkani	Current politics, migration, price rises and language policy, written fresh each season and sung to a brass band. Audiences follow the songs specifically, and a cantar can move public opinion in a way the spoken scenes do not.
Banna and banni	Hadoti	Harauti	Praise of the bridegroom and of the bride, sung in alternation by the two households.
Bindori geet	Hadoti	Harauti	Teasing and blessing of the groom as he is taken from house to house on horseback before the wedding.
Teej and Gangaur geet	Hadoti	Harauti	Women's songs for the monsoon swing and for the Gangaur procession — the seasonal calendar sung rather than written.
Chakri songs	Hadoti	Harauti	The dholak-and-manjira repertoire the Kanjar women of Kota and Baran spin to. The songs are short and cyclic because the dance is long.
Fair bhajans of Chandrabhaga and Kapil Dhara	Hadoti	Harauti and Hindi	Devotional singing carried through the night by village mandalis camped on the river bank, with the bathing at dawn as the end of the session.
Sahariya forest song	Hadoti	Sahariya speech, close to Harauti	The forest year — flowering, collection, marriage and migration for wage work. Almost none of it has been recorded or published, which is the most important fact about it.
Dingal recitation	Hadoti	Dingal, the bardic Rajasthani register	Genealogy and battle, in the Charan tradition. Suryamall Misran's Vansh Bhaskar, written at the Bundi court in the nineteenth century, is the region's monument in this form and is still recited in extract.
Ragini	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Haryanvi (Bangru)	Anything at all — an episode from the Mahabharata, a land dispute, a warning about debt, a courtship — set in a fixed metre with a refrain the audience joins.
Phaag	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Haryanvi	Spring, licence and the reversal of the usual restraints between men and women.
Sanjhi ke geet	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Haryanvi	Sung by girls to the clay goddess they are building on the wall — songs about her arrival, her ornaments, her marriage and finally her departure to the water.
Gugga ke geet	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Haryanvi, Bagri	The life and death of Gugga, the snake-god, sung by Jogi singers to the sarangi as the chhari is carried from village to village.
Nihalde	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Haryanvi	A tragic love ballad of Nihalde and Sultan, sung as a long narrative in the same idiom as the saang and frequently performed as one.
Bannaa and banni	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Haryanvi	Praise of groom and bride sung in alternation by their own households, with the teasing entirely one-sided.
Ghoomar and Teej songs	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Haryanvi, Bagri	Swings, rain, a brother's arrival to fetch his married sister home, and the homesickness of a woman married out of her own village.
Bhapang songs of Mewat	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Mewati	Satire, riddle and devotion sung over the bhapang, whose pitch is bent by pulling the gut string as the drum is struck — a single instrument that talks back to the singer.
Ougri	Imphal Valley	Meiteilon	An invocatory song of origins sung at the start of the ritual sequence, in an archaic register that ordinary modern Meiteilon does not fully cover.
Khencho	Imphal Valley	Meiteilon	A concluding ritual song of the festival cycle, sung with the pena and with fixed responses.
Khamba-Thoibi Sheireng	Imphal Valley	Meiteilon	The Moirang epic of the poor youth Khamba and the princess Thoibi. Hijam Anganghal's twentieth-century verse recension runs to tens of thousands of lines and is the longest single work in the language.
Khongjom Parva	Imphal Valley	Meiteilon	The battle of Khongjom of 1891, sung to dholak by a standing solo performer. The form was created to carry this one story and then became a genre.
Thabal Chongba songs	Imphal Valley	Meiteilon	Courtship and teasing, sung and now more often played, while a circle of young people dances by moonlight.
Khunung Eshei	Imphal Valley	Meiteilon	Village songs — transplanting, fishing, weaving and lullabies. The layer beneath both the temple and the court repertoires, and the one least written down.
Nata Sankirtana pala	Imphal Valley	Meiteilon and Brajabuli	Krishna devotion sung in a fixed sequence by a standing ensemble with pung and cymbals. Brajabuli, the literary Vaishnav idiom, sits inside a Meiteilon performance — the clearest audible trace of the eighteenth-century religious shift.
Bakh	Jammu Duggar	Dogri	Lineage history, local battles and the origin of a village deity, narrated in a slow ballad metre over a drone for several hours at a stretch.
Karak	Jammu Duggar	Dogri	Baba Jitto's refusal to give up a share of his crop and the death of his daughter Bua Kouri — a martyrdom story about land, not about religion.
Fumenie	Jammu Duggar	Dogri	Separation from the parental house, sung by the women of the bride's own family.
Jagarana	Jammu Duggar	Dogri	Blessing and admonition, sung to keep the household awake until dawn.
Geetru	Jammu Duggar	Dogri	Improvised exchange between two groups of women, often teasing and often about people present.
Chhajja song	Jammu Duggar	Dogri	Collection songs sung while the decorated chhajja is carried from door to door, asking for jaggery, sesame and coins.
Barah Massa	Jammu Duggar	Dogri	The twelve months of the year read as the twelve months of a woman's waiting. The eighteenth-century poet Kavi Dattu of Raja Ranjit Dev's court wrote the version that made the form literary in Dogri.
Gojri songs of the migration	Jammu Duggar	Gojri	Pasture, weather, lost animals and the passes — the working repertoire of the Gujjar and Bakerwal households whose year is organised around two long walks.
Sobane pada	Kalyana Karnataka	Kannada	Blessing songs sung by women of the household while the ritual is performed, with the bride's household and the groom's answering each other verse for verse.
Beesuva pada	Kalyana Karnataka	Kannada	Songs timed to the turn of the quern — marriage, a natal home left behind, the labour itself. The metre is set by the stone, which is why they scan the way they do.
Tatva pada	Kalyana Karnataka	Kannada	Philosophy argued in household images — a locked house, a leaking pot, a bullock that will not plough. Sung by wandering singers to an ektari.
Moharram rivayat	Kalyana Karnataka	Kannada and Dakhni	Karbala narrated in verse, sung around the panjas in villages through the night.
Gormati songs	Kalyana Karnataka	Lambani (Gor Boli)	Migration, cattle, a bride leaving her tanda, and the caravan trade the community once ran. Sung antiphonally by women in a circle.
Vachana gayana	Kalyana Karnataka	Kannada	The twelfth-century vachanas sung rather than read — Basavanna's ethical formulas, Akka Mahadevi's renunciation, Allama Prabhu's riddles.
Dholru	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Kangri	The arrival of spring and the naming of the household — sung door to door by hereditary singers who are paid in grain rather than coin, and who name each family they sing to.
Bhaint	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Kangri and Hindi	Praise and petition to the goddess at the Kangra Shakti shrines, sung in long night sessions.
Ainchali	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Kangri	The women's wedding cycle — the bride's bathing, her dressing, her departure — sung in sequence over several nights and keyed to the ritual step it accompanies.
Baramasa	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Kangri and Braj	A woman's longing described month by month through twelve changes of weather. The same scheme is the subject of an entire genre of Kangra painting, which is unusually direct evidence of song and image sharing a text.
Gaddi migration songs	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Gaddi	The crossing of the passes, the count of the flock, and the wife left below the snow line for five months of the year.
Jhamakda verses	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Kangri	Teasing and satire aimed at the groom's family, sung by women only, and licensed to say things nobody would say in daylight.
Nati tunes	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Instrumental, with Kangri and Pahari verses	Fixed dance cycles attached to particular villages, learned by ear and named after the place they belong to.
Vaakh	Kashmir Valley	Kashmiri	The four-line utterances attributed to Lal Ded in the fourteenth century — compressed, argumentative and unsparing about ritual. They are the earliest substantial body of Kashmiri verse and were preserved for centuries by being memorised and sung rather than written.
Shruk	Kashmir Valley	Kashmiri	The sayings of Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani, Nund Rishi, founder of the Rishi order — plain-spoken verses about labour, forest, food and restraint, in the same metre-and-idiom world as the vaakh.
Wanawun	Kashmir Valley	Kashmiri	Unaccompanied women's chorus marking each stage of the marriage — the bath, the henna, the departure — with a long held final syllable that lets the next line be pitched off it.
Rouf songs	Kashmir Valley	Kashmiri	Sung by two facing rows of women as they rock forward and back; texts run from spring and the almond blossom to teasing and to separation.
Chakri	Kashmir Valley	Kashmiri	Long narrative and devotional sequences that accelerate across a sitting, driven by tumbaknari and noet. A single chakri can run past an hour.
Ladishah	Kashmir Valley	Kashmiri	Satire on the year — prices, officials, weather, scandal — improvised in rhymed couplets to the rattle of a dhukar.
Lol	Kashmir Valley	Kashmiri	The short Kashmiri love lyric, the form associated above all with Habba Khatoon in the sixteenth century. Lol is built for one voice and a small compass, which is why it survived without any ensemble to carry it.
Bakarwal and Gujjar herding songs	Kashmir Valley	Gojri	Sung on the move between the Jammu foothills and the valley's high pastures — separation, livestock, and the passes. Gojri is a different language from Kashmiri and its song repertoire moves with the flocks rather than with the villages.
Bahinabai's ovi	Khandesh	Ahirani	Farming labour, the mind, poverty, motherhood and old age, in short unrhymed lines of concrete image and no abstraction. Composed orally by a woman who could not write, transcribed by her son and published after her death in 1951.
Jatyavarchya ovya	Khandesh	Ahirani	Brothers, natal homes, marital households and the grind itself, sung in a fixed short metre by women working in pairs.
Kanbai gani	Khandesh	Ahirani	Invitation, welcome and farewell addressed to the goddess installed in the house for a day or two, and to the rot bread offered to her.
Gher songs	Khandesh	Pawri and Bhili	Courtship, boasting, village rivalry and the movement between villages, sung over large drums by lines of dancers who walk between hamlets for days.
Lagnageet	Khandesh	Ahirani	Praise, teasing and ritual abuse exchanged between the two households across each stage of the ceremony, with a fixed sequence tied to specific rites.
Akhaji gani	Khandesh	Ahirani	Songs addressed to the household's dead as they are offered aamras, puran poli and water from a new pot — the region's principal ancestor observance.
Palna and angai	Khandesh	Ahirani	Cradle songs sung by women of the household when a child is first laid in the palna.
Powada and Varkari abhanga	Khandesh	Marathi	Marathi-language repertoire circulating in an Ahirani-speaking region — the clearest evidence of the valley's incorporation into a Marathi cultural sphere that its everyday speech sits outside.
Phawar	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Khasi and Pnar	Whatever is in front of the singer. A phawar is a couplet improvised on the spot and shouted rather than sung, answered by the crowd; it can praise, mock, mourn or make an argument, and the same performer will do all four in an afternoon.
Jingrwai Iawbei	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Khasi (Kongthong)	A mother composes a short whistled tune for each newborn, and that tune is the child's name for life — used to call them across the slopes, where a whistle carries and a shouted name does not. The practice is explained locally as an act of respect towards the clan's first ancestress, the iawbei.
Ki jingrwai shad	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Khasi	The dance-ground repertoire carried by tangmuri and drums rather than by voice — the melodies are named and fixed, and the dancers' steps are cued by them.
Behdienkhlam chants	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Pnar	Calls sung while the rot structures are carried and while the logs are driven into the Aitnar pool, addressed to the ancestors and to the sickness being driven out.
Khasi hymnody	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Khasi	The Presbyterian and Catholic hymn corpus translated into and then composed in Khasi from the mid-nineteenth century. It is quantitatively the largest body of Khasi song, it is sung in four parts by ordinary congregations, and it is where most Khasi speakers encounter their language in print.
Ki jingrwai ba khraw	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Khasi	The long narrative songs and recitations attached to clan origin accounts and to the ancestress figures — the material that stood in for written history before Roman script arrived.
Pnar wedding song	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Pnar	Exchange songs between the two families, negotiating and teasing. Because residence is with the wife's house, the departure being sung about is the groom's.
Kayang songs	Kinnaur & Spiti	Kinnauri	Sung in alternation between the men's and women's halves of the dance line, with the text carried forward one couplet at a time and answered. Praise of a village, of a deity, of a season, and a great deal of teasing.
Deity songs of the devta processions	Kinnaur & Spiti	Kinnauri and Western Pahari	The god's genealogy, its territory and its obligations, sung by the attendants who carry the palanquin. These texts function as land records as much as devotion — they name boundaries.
Losar and new-year songs	Kinnaur & Spiti	Bhoti	House-to-house singing for a good year, with fixed exchanges between the singers at the door and the household inside, and a small gift expected at the end of each.
Chhang songs	Kinnaur & Spiti	Bhoti and Kinnauri	Songs sung when the cup is offered and refused and offered again — the refusal and the insistence are both part of the text, and the ritual of pressing a drink on a guest has its own repertoire.
Fulaich flower songs	Kinnaur & Spiti	Kinnauri	Sung when the flowers are brought down from the high pastures, remembering the dead of the year and the young men who went up to gather. Grief and celebration in the same song, which is the festival's own structure.
Harvest and threshing songs	Kinnaur & Spiti	Kinnauri and Bhoti	Work songs timing collective labour — the flail, the winnowing, the carrying. Their tempo is the tempo of the task, which is why they are hard to sing off the field.
Bride's farewell	Kinnaur & Spiti	Kinnauri	The daughter leaving her natal village, sung by the women of her house. In a region of small, high, hard-to-reach villages, marrying out has always meant leaving properly.
वंचिपाट्टु	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	मलयालम	नाविकों का गीत — वंचिपाट्टु छंद में गाया जाता है, जिसके आघात चप्पू की मार से इस तरह मिलते हैं कि सौ नाविक एक साथ खींचते हैं।
ओणप्पाट्टु	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	मलयालम	महाबली के हर साल यह देखने लौटने के गीत कि उनकी प्रजा अब भी सुखी और समान है या नहीं — "मावेली नाडु वाणीडुम कालम", एक न्यायपूर्ण समाज का वर्णन, पूरे राज्य के स्कूली बच्चे गाते हैं।
वडक्कन पाट्टुकल	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	मलयालम (उत्तरी मलाबार)	उत्तर की गाथाएँ — तचोली ओतेनन और अरोमल चेकवर तथा उन्नियार्च के पुतूरम घराने की गाथा-शृंखलाएँ, जो द्वंद्वयुद्धों, कलरी के सम्मान और लड़ने वाली स्त्रियों से भरी हैं। आधुनिक मलयालम सिनेमा की अधिकांश एक्शन-मिथकीय सामग्री का स्रोत।
नादन पाट्टु	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	मलयालम	प्रश्न-उत्तर संरचना वाले श्रम-गीत, जो धान की रोपाई या बोझ खींचने की लय से बँधे होते हैं।
तिरुवातिर पाट्टु	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	मलयालम	दीपक के चारों ओर कैकोट्टिकलि नाचती महिलाओं द्वारा गाए जाते हैं — भक्तिपूर्ण, पर छेड़छाड़ और घरेलू ब्योरों से भी भरे।
मापिला पाट्टु	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	अरबी-मलयालम	प्रेम, विरह, समुद्र और व्यापार; साथ ही पडप्पाट्टु युद्ध-गीत जो स्थानीय प्रतिरोध की कथा कहते हैं।
Annanmar Kathai (Ponnar–Shankar)	Kongu Nadu	Kongu Tamil	The ballad of Ponnar and Shankar, twin brothers of a Kongu farming lineage, their sister Thangal, their cattle, their feuds and their deaths. It is the region's own epic — territorial, agrarian and specific, naming villages a listener can walk to.
Thottil pattu	Kongu Nadu	Tamil	Lullabies and blessing songs sung by women when a child is first put in the cradle.
Oppari	Kongu Nadu	Tamil	Sung lament, improvised at the body by women of the household and by specialist mourners, listing the dead person's deeds and reproaching them for leaving. The form is improvised within a fixed metre.
Kummi pattu	Kongu Nadu	Tamil	Women's clapping-circle songs about work, marriage and in-laws, sung without instruments.
Ercha pattu and vandi pattu	Kongu Nadu	Kongu Tamil	Work songs timed to the lift of a water bag from a well and to the pace of a cart on a long haul. Both genres died with the technologies they were timed to.
Kangayam maadu pattu	Kongu Nadu	Kongu Tamil	Songs in praise of a named bull — its lineage, its horns, its temper — sung by the household that reared it. Cattle here are individually named and their pedigrees remembered.
Mariamman thalattu	Kongu Nadu	Tamil	Lullaby-form songs addressed to the goddess of pox and heat, asking her to cool down, sung through the nights of the festival while the temple is kept wet.
Dhemsa geet	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Desia	Short repeated verses on courtship, the season and the village, sung by the dancing line and answered by the drummers, extended as long as the dance lasts.
Kui marriage songs	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Kui and Kuvi	Praise, refusal and the settling of terms between two households, sung in formal alternation.
Guar songs	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Sora	Addressed to the dead person directly, as one side of a conversation. The rite ends with a stone set upright in a field or a village row, and the song is what makes the stone that person's.
Dalkhai	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Kosli	Love, separation and mockery, every line closing on the refrain "dalkhai bo". Sung by women in the lowland with drums answering.
Karma geet	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Kosli and Desia	The karam branch, the brother's welfare and the coming harvest, sung all night around the planted branch.
Rela	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Desia and Parji	A refrain form built on the repeated word "rela", carried across the forest belt into Bastar, where the same device organises whole song cycles.
Ghumura song	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Odia and Kosli	Invocation of Manikeswari and of the drum itself, sung between rounds of drumming rather than over it.
Burrakatha	Kosta Andhra	Telugu	Heroic and mythological narrative, and from the 1930s onward political argument — a three-person form that could hold a village for hours and was used deliberately as a medium before broadcasting reached the countryside.
Haridasu songs	Kosta Andhra	Telugu	Devotional verses sung street by street by a walking singer carrying a brass bowl on his head, who takes grain and not money and does not stop walking while singing.
Gangireddu melam	Kosta Andhra	Telugu	Call-and-response between the handler and the decorated bull, with the animal cued to nod and bow at the right lines. It is a performance for one household's doorstep at a time.
Pelli pataalu and nalugu pataalu	Kosta Andhra	Telugu	Women's ceremonial songs sung at each stage of a wedding — oil and turmeric application, the bath, the procession — with teasing verses aimed at the other family that are protected by custom.
Boat and net songs of the delta	Kosta Andhra	Telugu	Timing songs for rowing, hauling and pushing a boat off a beach, still audible at the smaller landings.
Bhamakalapam daruvus	Kosta Andhra	Telugu	The set songs through which Satyabhama's character is built across a night — jealousy, pride, separation and reconciliation, each with its own musical setting.
Jola pata	Kosta Andhra	Telugu	Lullabies, many of them addressed to Krishna as an infant, and among the most widely retained pieces of the region's oral repertoire because they are still used for their original purpose.
Laman	Kullu & Mandi	Kullvi	Courtship, conducted as a contest — a line of men sings a verse, a line of women answers it, and the answer has to fit the metre and cap the sense. It is love poetry that is judged in public and in real time.
Nati verses	Kullu & Mandi	Kullvi, Seraji and Mandeali	Place, weather, harvest, absent lovers and local scandal, set to the fixed nati cycles and added to continuously.
Devta invocation	Kullu & Mandi	Kullvi and Seraji	The deity's origin story, the boundaries of its territory, its past judgements and its quarrels with neighbouring deities. These songs are the primary record of village history in a region that kept almost nothing in writing.
Ainchali and suhag	Kullu & Mandi	Mandeali and Kullvi	The bride's bathing, dressing and departure, sung by women in sequence over several nights, each song tied to the ritual step it accompanies.
Jhoori	Kullu & Mandi	Pahari	Love, usually illicit and usually sung about someone the audience can identify. The form belongs most strongly to the Sutlej side and is fully at home here.
Harvest and pasture songs	Kullu & Mandi	Kullvi, Seraji, Gaddi	Work rhythm, the count of animals, the crossing of a pass and the wait for a return — sung by mixed working parties and by herders alone.
Bhunda and ritual cycle songs	Kullu & Mandi	Seraji	Sacrifice, atonement and the renewal of a covenant with the deity, sung only when the observance is held, which can be once in a generation.
Rajula Malushahi	Kumaon	Kumaoni	The love of a Katyuri prince for the daughter of a Shauka trading family from the high valleys, and the journey he makes over the passes to find her. The ballad follows the trade route exactly, which is why it is also a document of the trans-Himalayan economy.
Jagar	Kumaon	Kumaoni	The genealogy, wrongs and powers of a local deity — Golu, Kalbisht, Airy, Haru, Saim — sung to bring it into a human vehicle so that it can be questioned. Functional text, sung for as long as it takes.
Nyoli	Kumaon	Kumaoni	Separation and longing, in a high unaccompanied line named after a hill bird.
Bair and bhagnaul	Kumaon	Kumaoni	Improvised competitive verse between two singers, each answering the other in metre until one runs out. Subjects range from love to theology to the failings of the other singer.
Hurkiya baul	Kumaon	Kumaoni	A heroic ballad sung by a drummer standing in the flooded field, with the transplanting crew answering the refrain and working to the beat. The labour and the song are one performance.
Chhapeli	Kumaon	Kumaoni	Courtship, sung and danced as a duet with a mirror and a handkerchief.
Jhora and chanchari	Kumaon	Kumaoni	Circle-dance songs in call-and-response, whose texts move between seasonal description, teasing and local news, and which lengthen as more dancers join.
Bedu pako baro masa	Kumaon	Kumaoni	A young man's song of longing, built on the contrast between the wild fig that fruits all year and is not eaten and the kafal that ripens for a few weeks and is. Arranged for the stage in the 1950s and now the region's unofficial anthem.
Kafal pako, main na chakho	Kumaon	Kumaoni	The tale behind a bird's call — a girl left to guard the kafal, beaten by her mother for eating what had in fact only swelled overnight in the dew, who dies and returns as a bird crying that the kafal ripened and she never tasted it. The bird is heard for exactly the weeks the fruit is on the tree.
Ghughuti rhymes	Kumaon	Kumaoni	Children's calls to the crows, sung while offering the fried dough necklaces made for the day. A rhyme with a job — the crow is being invited, and the winter is being sent off.
Duha	Kutch	Kachchhi and Gujarati	A single couplet made to carry a whole situation — a drought, a herd lost, a separation, a lineage. Sung unaccompanied or over a drone, and judged on compression rather than length.
Chhand	Kutch	Kachchhi and Dingal-influenced Gujarati	Metrical praise and genealogy in the Charan tradition, recited at speed. It survives at fairs and family occasions rather than at courts.
Kafi and kalam of the Banni	Kutch	Sindhi and Kachchhi	Sufi devotional verse, sung by Jat, Mutwa and Sumra singers from a repertoire shared with Sindh, where the same poets are sung to the same tunes.
Lagna geet	Kutch	Kachchhi	Household wedding songs sung by women through the days of the ceremony, including the songs sung while the bride's embroidered dowry pieces are displayed.
Bhajans of Jesal and Toral	Kutch	Gujarati and Kachchhi	The bandit's confession and the woman who brought it about. Several of the best-known bhajans in the Gujarati repertoire are attributed within the tradition to Toral herself, and they are sung as devotional song rather than as narrative ballad.
Mekan Dada bhajans	Kutch	Kachchhi	The eighteenth-century Kutchi saint who is remembered for going out into the Rann with a dog and a donkey to find travellers lost on the salt, and for feeding them. The songs are about rescue and about hospitality as an obligation.
Halarda and household song	Kutch	Kachchhi	Lullabies and grinding songs, sung in Kachchhi in households where the school language is Gujarati — often the only extended Kachchhi a child hears sung.
Kesar epic cycles	Ladakh & Zanskar	Ladakhi	The deeds of King Kesar of Ling — birth, trials, the winning of a kingdom and a series of campaigns — sung and narrated by a bard in instalments. The Ladakhi recensions relocate the story onto local landmarks, so a listener can point to the ridge where an episode is said to have happened.
Zhung-lu	Ladakh & Zanskar	Ladakhi	Long, slow, praise-and-blessing songs of the old court repertoire, with fixed opening formulae addressed to the mountain, the household and the assembled company before the subject is reached.
Bagston-lu — wedding songs	Ladakh & Zanskar	Ladakhi	Sung exchanges between the two households, negotiating, praising, teasing and blessing at each stage — the arrival at the gate, the serving of chhang, the departure of the bride. The songs carry the protocol, so knowing them is knowing how a marriage is conducted.
Harvest and threshing songs	Ladakh & Zanskar	Ladakhi	Work songs timed to the tread of the animals circling the threshing floor and to the rhythm of winnowing, with blessings for the grain and for the household's store.
Jabro songs of the Changthang	Ladakh & Zanskar	Ladakhi (Changskat)	Nomad dance songs about the herds, the passes, the wind and the seasonal move, sung in a line to the damnyan and to the dancers' own stamping.
Ali-yato	Ladakh & Zanskar	Ladakhi	A well-known refrain-based song form with a call-and-response structure that a whole gathering can join, which is why it has become the piece most often sung at public occasions and on radio.
Monastic liturgical chant	Ladakh & Zanskar	Classical Tibetan	Recitation of texts on a low sustained tone, with the deep overtone chanting of the senior ranks in some orders. It is memorised from books held in the monastery and is the region's oldest continuously transmitted sound.
Purgi and Balti song of the western valleys	Ladakh & Zanskar	Purgi, Balti	A repertoire that shares the Tibetic language family with Ladakhi and the devotional calendar with the Shia Muslim communities of the Suru and lower Shyok — the clearest place to hear the region's western edge as a blend rather than a boundary.
Oppana	Lakshadweep	Jeseri Malayalam and Arabic-Malayalam	Praise of the bride and of the marriage, sung by a lead voice with a clapping chorus of women.
Lava songs	Lakshadweep	Dhivehi	Refrains sung to drums while the men's rows move — praise, seafaring, and village rivalry, with each village keeping its own set.
Duff songs (Duffmuttu)	Lakshadweep	Arabic-Malayalam	Praise of the Prophet and of local saints, sung over a frame drum by a seated line of men who move only from the waist.
Kolkali pattu	Lakshadweep	Jeseri Malayalam	Timing songs for the stick dance, whose lines set the tempo the batons have to hit.
Bandiya songs	Lakshadweep	Dhivehi	Sung by women who beat time on metal water pots while dancing. Shared directly with the Maldives, where the same form is performed under the same name.
Sailors' songs	Lakshadweep	Dhivehi and Jeseri Malayalam	Work and departure songs from the sailing-odam era, when the islands' men crewed trading vessels to Malabar, Sri Lanka and the Gulf. Very little of this repertoire has been recorded and much of it is gone.
Chhath geet	Magadh	Magahi and Bhojpuri	Addressed to the setting and rising sun and to Chhathi Maiya. Sung on the walk to the water, at the ghat, and through the night vigil, by families who have often travelled a thousand kilometres to be there.
Ropni geet	Magadh	Magahi	Work, rain, and the absent husband, sung antiphonally by women standing in flooded fields — the metre follows the movement of the planting.
Sohar	Magadh	Magahi	Blessing and congratulation, sung by the women of the household and neighbourhood.
Pachra	Magadh	Magahi	Invocation of the village goddess, sung to summon possession in the medium.
Barahmasa	Magadh	Magahi	The twelve months of a woman's year, each with its own weather, work and longing — a form shared across the eastern plain.
Nirgun bhajan	Magadh	Magahi and Hindi	Songs of the formless divine, in the Kabir tradition, sung at cremations and at all-night vigils — the region's most sober repertoire.
Jhumar and jhumta	Magadh	Magahi	Love, work and the season, sung in circling dance form and shared with the Jharkhand plateau.
Karma geet	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Gondi, Baigani and Chhattisgarhi	The karma tree, the rains, and the young men and women dancing around it. Sung in short cycles that repeat for hours, because the song is a metronome for a dance that lasts until dawn.
Rela	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Gondi	Courtship, teasing and village incident, improvised over a fixed refrain that the line sings back after every couplet.
Lingo gatha	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Gondi	The freeing of the Gond gods from the cave and the founding of the saga divisions. Performed by Pardhan bards to the bana; it is a legal text as much as a poem, since it fixes who may marry whom.
Saila geet	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Gondi and Chhattisgarhi	Harvest, cattle and the return of the young men from wage work, sung to the beat of struck sticks.
Faag	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Bundeli and Bagheli	Krishna, colour and open erotic teasing, sung by men in chorus to the nagariya drum in the Narmada belt villages.
Dadaria	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Chhattisgarhi	A two-line improvised couplet thrown between men and women at work or at a fair. It crosses the Maikal into Balaghat and Dindori and is the shortest song form in the region.
Mahua ke geet	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Gondi and Baigani	Sung at the collection itself, before dawn under the trees. The songs are about the tree, the sweeping and the sharing of what falls, and they exist because the work is done in the dark and in company.
Thottam pattu	Malabar	Malayalam	How a person, an animal or a spirit became a deity — a birth, a wrong done, usually a violent death, and the elevation that followed. The song is the deity's credentials, sung before the deity appears.
Thacholi pattu	Malabar	Malayalam (north Malabar)	Thacholi Othenan of Meppayil near Vadakara — duels, cattle raids, ambushes and a code about who may be fought and how. Lokanarkavu is his family's shrine and the ballads still point to it.
Puthooram pattu	Malabar	Malayalam (north Malabar)	The Puthooram house — Aromal Chekavar, killed in a rigged ankam, and his sister Unniyarcha, who is the ballads' most formidable figure and fights her own fights. A body of oral literature in which women carry weapons and win.
Mappila pattu	Malabar	Mappila Malayalam, written in Arabi-Malayalam	Devotion, romance, the sea, separation from a husband who has sailed, and the padappattu battle narratives. Moyinkutty Vaidyar's Badarul Munir–Husnul Jamal of 1872 is the form's best-known romance.
Oppana pattu	Malabar	Mappila Malayalam	Praise of the bride, teasing of both families, and advice — sung by women in a circle with the bride seated at the centre.
Vattakali and gadhika	Malabar	Paniya and Adiya	Vattakali is a ring dance to a single drum; gadhika is a night-long healing ritual with a sung text and a possessed practitioner. Both belong to languages with no script and are among the least documented performance traditions in the state.
Dudi kottu paat	Malnad	Kodava Takk	Origin accounts, clan genealogies, land boundaries and the deeds of ancestors, sung by elders to a small hourglass drum. In a community whose records were oral, these songs did the work a document does.
Balo paat	Malnad	Kodava Takk	Sung at each stage of a wedding conducted by the elders of the two clans rather than by a priest — the songs carry the ritual, so getting them wrong is not a small matter.
Sobane pada	Malnad	Kannada	Blessing songs sung by the women of the household while the ritual proceeds.
Bhajana padagalu	Malnad	Kannada	Dasa and Shaiva devotional repertoire worked through in a fixed order by a group that meets weekly for months. The point is participation rather than performance.
Nati haadu	Malnad	Kannada	Work songs sung by lines of women bent over the gadde, timed to the rhythm of transplanting and incorporating whatever the day has produced to comment on.
Yerava and Jenu Kuruba songs	Malnad	Yerava, Jenu Kuruba	Honey gathering, the forest and the settlement, sung within the community. Very little of the repertoire has been recorded, and the languages themselves are under pressure.
Nirguni bhajan	Malwa Plateau	Malvi	Kabir's verses on the formless — the body as a rented house, the swan leaving at dawn, the futility of ritual. Malwa sings them in its own dialect and its own tunes, not in the textual Hindi of the printed editions.
Sanjha geet	Malwa Plateau	Malvi	Girls address Sanjha — a figure they build in cow dung and flowers on a courtyard wall, changing her form each evening — and sing her through courtship, marriage and departure before immersing her on the last night.
Gangaur geet	Malwa Plateau	Malvi	Gauri's marriage and her return to her mother's house, sung by women carrying the images to water.
Faag	Malwa Plateau	Malvi and Braj-inflected Hindi	Krishna and the gopis, and a licensed obscenity that appears only in this season.
Bidai and banna-banni	Malwa Plateau	Malvi	Praise of the bridegroom, teasing of his party, and the bride's departure — the last of these sung in a form that expects the household to weep.
Heenchko and jhoola songs	Malwa Plateau	Malvi	Swing songs of the monsoon month, sung by women in courtyards and under the plateau's big trees.
Maach ki rangat	Malwa Plateau	Malvi	The sung verse units that carry a Maach play's narrative. A rangat is both a tune and a metrical form, and a Maach guru is judged on how many he holds.
Jatyavarchi ovi	Marathwada	Marathi	Two-line couplets improvised by women turning a hand quern — about brothers, in-laws, the village, the deity and the work itself. The metre is set by the stone's rotation, which is why the lines are the length they are.
Bharud	Marathwada	Marathi	Devotional argument delivered in the voice of a drunkard, a snake-charmer or a possessed woman, so that the audience laughs first and understands afterwards. Written by Eknath at Paithan.
Gondhal and jogwa songs	Marathwada	Marathi	Invocation of the goddess and recitation of her deeds, sung standing, to sambal and tuntune.
Palna and angai	Marathwada	Marathi	Cradle songs sung at the fifth or twelfth-day naming, addressed to the child by the name being given.
Powada	Marathwada	Marathi	Battle narrative, delivered at speed with a daf, in a metre built for a standing crowd.
Noha and marsiya	Marathwada	Dakhni Urdu	The Karbala elegy in the Deccan register. In several Marathwada villages the Muharram taziya procession draws participation from Hindu households as well, a pattern documented across the Deccan.
Bhim Geet	Marathwada	Marathi	Songs on Ambedkar, the conversion and the Buddha, performed by shahirs and jalsa troupes. A large modern folk repertoire with a known origin date and a continuously growing corpus.
Lengi	Marathwada	Gor Boli (Lambani)	Sowing, seeking a husband, and the road — Banjara songs still carry the vocabulary of a caravan economy that ended a century and a half ago.
Villupattu — Muthupattan Kathai	Marava & Ramnad	Tamil	The ballad of a Brahmin who leaves his caste to marry into a leather-working family and is deified — sung to the beaten bow, and one of the few long Tamil oral epics still performed at full length.
Sudalai Madan and Ayyanar songs	Marava & Ramnad	Tamil	Praise and invocation of the village guardian deities whose terracotta horses stand at the field edges, sung with urumi and thappu at the annual kodai festival.
Kappal paattu and boat songs	Marava & Ramnad	Tamil	Work songs of the fishing coast, timed to a hauling rhythm, with a substantial body of verses about voyages, weather and men who did not come back.
Nagarathar bhajanai padal	Marava & Ramnad	Tamil and Sanskrit	Congregational devotional singing in the bhajana sampradaya, performed in mansion courtyards and in the nine clan temples on a fixed annual calendar.
Munajat and Tamil Islamic devotional verse	Marava & Ramnad	Tamil, historically written in Arwi	Praise of the Prophet and of local saints, in Tamil metres, historically written and printed in Arabic script. Kayalpattinam and Kilakarai were among the centres of the tradition.
Oppari	Marava & Ramnad	Tamil	Sung lament by women, improvised on the spot and addressed to the dead, accompanied on this coast by parai drumming.
Marudhu Pandiyar and Velu Nachiyar ballads	Marava & Ramnad	Tamil	Sung narratives of the eighteenth-century Sivaganga resistance, kept in oral circulation long before they entered any textbook.
Kesariya Balam	Marwar & the Thar	Marwari	A woman calls her beloved, dressed in saffron, to come home — "padharo mhare desh", come to my land. Sung in Maand and functioning as the state's unofficial anthem.
Gorbandh	Marwar & the Thar	Marwari	A song about the beaded gorbandh strung around a camel's neck, sung by women as they string it — an entire romance conducted through the ornament.
Panihari	Marwar & the Thar	Marwari	The song of women walking to the well with pots on their heads, the most consequential daily journey in a desert village, and the courtship and gossip that happen along the way.
Moomal	Marwar & the Thar	Marwari	The Jaisalmer legend of Moomal and Mahendra — a love destroyed by a misunderstanding and pride, sung as a long ballad by the Manganiyar.
Kurjan	Marwar & the Thar	Marwari	A woman addresses the kurja, the demoiselle crane that winters in the Thar, and asks it to carry a message to her husband gone away to trade. Migration and separation, in one bird.
Banna–Banni	Marwar & the Thar	Marwari, Dhundhari	Paired songs praising the bridegroom (banna) and bride (banni), traded between the two families' women, frequently teasing and occasionally merciless.
Pabuji ki Phad	Marwar & the Thar	Marwari	The epic of Pabuji, a Rathore folk deity and protector of cattle, performed across a whole night against the painted scroll by a Bhopa and Bhopi.
Gavri songs	Mewar	Bhili and Mewari	Cyclical songs framing each play in the sequence, all of them returning to the proposition that the goddess will settle whatever is wrong. The plays themselves take on theft, debt, the forest officer and the moneylender as readily as they take on demons.
Gangaur songs	Mewar	Mewari	Girls and women sing to Gauri while making and dressing her image, asking for a good husband or a long life for the one they have. The refrain most people know opens "Gor gor gomati".
Meera's padas	Mewar	Mewari-inflected Braj	Devotion to Krishna framed as an open refusal of the marriage and household role a sixteenth-century Rajput woman was assigned. The refusal is the content, not a later reading of it.
Devnarayan ki Phad	Mewar	Mewari	The birth, cattle-raiding, betrayal and deification of Devnarayan, sung by a Bhopa against a painted scroll. Longer than the Pabuji cycle and centred on a different community.
Ratijaga	Mewar	Mewari	A night-long vigil in which women sing through a sequence invoking each family deity in turn. The order of the deities is the family's own and is one of the ways a lineage's history is actually transmitted.
Hichki	Mewar	Mewari and Marwari	A woman gets the hiccups and takes it as proof that someone far away is thinking of her. The whole song is built on that one piece of folk belief.
Haveli kirtan	Mewar	Braj	Krishna's day, sung in sequence — waking, dressing, grazing, eating, returning, sleeping. The temple's musical year is fixed, so the same composition arrives at the same hour of the same day each year.
Vidyapati's padas	Mithilanchal	Maithili	Radha's longing, and Shiva as a poor and difficult husband. Six hundred years old and still sung from memory in villages that do not own a printed copy.
Nachari	Mithilanchal	Maithili	Complaint and supplication addressed to Shiva, sung in a falling melodic line.
Samdaun	Mithilanchal	Maithili	Farewell sung by the women of the bride's household as she leaves. Among the most affecting song forms in the eastern plain, and one people still weep to.
Jat-Jatin	Mithilanchal	Maithili	Migration and separation, performed as a comic duet between a wife and an absent husband — the region's oldest running commentary on the fact that its men leave to find work.
Chhath geet	Mithilanchal	Maithili and Bhojpuri	Addressed to the sun and to Chhathi Maiya, sung walking to the ghat and through the night vigil. "Kelva je phare la ghawad se" and "Ugi hey suraj dev" are sung by whole districts at once.
Sama-Chakeva songs	Mithilanchal	Maithili	Sisters sing to clay bird figures representing a brother and sister of legend, ending with the figures' ritual breaking and immersion.
Sohar	Mithilanchal	Maithili	Blessing and congratulation, sung by the women of the neighbourhood.
Salhesh gatha	Mithilanchal	Maithili	The epic of Raja Salhesh, a Dusadh hero-god, sung through the night — a caste-specific epic tradition with its own shrines, songs and painting style.
Lengkhawm zai	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Mizo	Grief, consolation and Christian hope, sung in unison by a seated room over a slow khuang drum pulse. It is the living song form of the region — the one a household will sing all night — and the tune stock is Mizo rather than Welsh, whatever the theology on top of it.
Hlado	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Mizo	Announcement and self-praise, chanted solo rather than sung, in formulaic lines naming the animal taken. Its melody is shared with the war chant.
Bawh hla	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Mizo	The warrior's own account of his success, chanted at pitch and improvised within a fixed frame.
Chai hla	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Mizo	Courtship, village life and boasting, sung by the whole circle with men and women alternating lines as they move. The festival's dance and its song repertoire are the same object.
Chheih hla	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Mizo	Improvised praise, teasing and commentary on whoever is present, composed on the spot to a repeating tune while the group claps. A form that requires an audience it can name.
Thuthmun zai	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Mizo	Condolence sung collectively — a documented older category of Mizo song whose function the lengkhawm zai later absorbed.
Intuk hla	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Mizo	Satire and ridicule, sometimes affectionate and sometimes not, used to break the weight of a long or solemn gathering.
Puma zai	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Mizo	An open refrain to which anyone could add a verse. It spread across the Lushai Hills within a few years and is remembered as the first mass cultural movement here that no institution organised.
Losar antiphonal songs	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Tshangla and Dakpa	Greeting, blessing and competitive teasing between two groups singing in alternation, with new verses fitted to a fixed tune and chhang passed through the circle.
The songs of Tsangyang Gyatso	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Tibetan	Love, longing and the difficulty of being what one is expected to be, in short quatrains attributed to the sixth Dalai Lama, who was born at Urgelling near Tawang. They circulate orally far beyond this valley.
Brokpa herding songs	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Brokpa	Weather, animals, distance and the long walk up. Sung unaccompanied in a high open voice because they were made to carry across a valley.
Wedding negotiation songs	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Tshangla	A sung exchange between the two families in which the groom's party has to answer for itself before being let in. Formalised argument, with the outcome never in doubt.
Choskar field songs	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Tshangla and Dakpa	Blessing of the standing crop, sung by the procession as it walks the field boundaries behind the monks and the volumes of scripture.
Ajilamu song sequences	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Tshangla	Narrative and comic verse carrying the plot of the masked drama, alternating between sung passages and spoken exchanges.
Li	Naga Hills	Chokri (Chakhesang)	Love, separation, the ancestors and the year's labour, sung in interlocking parts with the tati fiddle.
Field-clearing and pounding songs	Naga Hills	All Naga languages	Songs that set the tempo of collective work. The rhythm is functional — the group swings the dao or the pestle to it — and the text is usually teasing or competitive.
Morung night songs	Naga Hills	All Naga languages	Genealogy, migration, village founding and the deeds of named men, transmitted from elders to boys in the building they slept in. This was the region's history syllabus.
Feast of Merit songs	Naga Hills	All Naga languages	Praise of the giver and of the mithun, and the counting-out of what the household has given the village.
Aoleang songs	Naga Hills	Konyak	Spring, the completed sowing, courtship, and the year ahead.
Tokhu Emong songs	Naga Hills	Lotha	Thanksgiving, reconciliation between households, and the licence of a week without work.
Naga hymnody	Naga Hills	Ao, Angami, Sumi, Lotha, Konyak and others	Four-part hymns translated into each language from the late nineteenth century. They now function as folk repertoire — sung at home and at gravesides, and often the only music a whole village knows in unison.
Villupattu narratives	Nanjil Nadu	Tamil	Hero and deity stories carried in call-and-response over the struck bow, including local narratives such as Muthupattan Kathai alongside Puranic material. The chorus answers every few lines, so the audience always knows where in the story it is.
Akilathirattu Ammanai recitation	Nanjil Nadu	Tamil	The Ayyavazhi scripture, composed in the nineteenth century in ballad metre, recited and sung rather than read silently. A complete religious literature produced within one district.
Oppari	Nanjil Nadu	Tamil	Improvised lament sung by women, addressing the dead directly and cataloguing what the household has lost. Performed publicly and expected to be loud.
Kodai invocation songs	Nanjil Nadu	Tamil, with Malayalam phrasing in the western taluks	Calling the deity to the festival ground and reciting the village's own claim on her.
Onappattu	Nanjil Nadu	Malayalam	Maveli's just reign and its loss, sung around the flower carpet — the same song sung across the Ghats to the north, in a district that will keep Pongal four months later.
Work songs of the tapioca and paddy fields	Nanjil Nadu	Tamil	Timing and complaint, sung by work gangs. Largely gone with mechanisation and hired-day labour, and now heard mostly through recordings and competitions.
Mortuary feast songs	Nicobar Islands	Nicobarese	Sung through the night with the circle dance while the feast runs. The songs are part of the rite that closes a death, not a performance attached to it.
Canoe and launching songs	Nicobar Islands	Nicobarese	Work and departure songs tied to the boat, which is the most valuable object a village makes and the one it competes with.
Nicobarese hymnody	Nicobar Islands	Nicobarese	Christian hymns sung in Nicobarese, often to guitar. Because the Bible was translated into Nicobarese and published in 1970, hymn singing became one of the main channels through which the language is used in a written, standardised form.
Welcome and feast-giving songs	Nicobar Islands	Nicobarese	Songs of hospitality and obligation, in a society where feast-giving between villages and tuhets is the main way status is settled.
Singaji ke bhajan	Nimar	Nimadi	The formless divine, the worthlessness of caste distinction and of ritual display, and the discipline of the householder — composed in Nimadi in the sixteenth century by a cowherd-turned-saint and never dependent on a text.
Gangour geet	Nimar	Nimadi	Gauri's marriage, her wait, and her return to her mother's house — sung by women in procession to the water where the images are immersed.
Narmada aarti and parikrama songs	Nimar	Nimadi and Hindi	Praise of the river as mother, and the walkers' own songs — largely about distance, feet and hospitality, which is what a three-year walk is actually about.
Bhagoria dhol songs	Nimar	Bhili, Bhilali and Barela	Courtship, teasing and the market itself, sung over dhol and mandal in a circle that runs for hours without a fixed end.
Bidai and vivah geet	Nimar	Nimadi	The full wedding cycle — arrival, teasing of the groom's party, the turmeric rite and the departure — sung by women of both households in alternation.
Faag	Nimar	Nimadi	Krishna and the gopis, and the seasonal licence to sing what cannot be said the rest of the year.
Kabir nirgun	Nimar	Nimadi	The same Kabir repertoire the plateau sings, in the valley's own vocabulary — evidence that the scarp divides the dialect and not the religion.
Koli geet	North Konkan	Koli Marathi	The sea as employer and as risk — waiting for a boat, the wind turning, the price at the auction, and the woman who runs the selling end of the business while the man is at sea.
Ovi	North Konkan	Marathi	Two-line verses about a woman's parents, her brother, her labour and her married household, improvised within a fixed metre.
Umbracha Pani	North Konkan	East Indian Marathi	The water poured and the threshold crossed as the bride leaves her father's house — the East Indian community's best-known song, sung at the door itself.
Warli wedding songs to Palaghata	North Konkan	Warli	Address to the mother goddess of the marriage square, sung by the women painting the wall over several days. The song and the painting are one ritual, not two.
Shakti-Tura	North Konkan	Marathi	Rival panels arguing creation, the nature of the divine and local politics in extempore verse, through the night, until one side runs out of answers.
Malida hymns to Eliyahu Hannabi	North Konkan	Marathi and Hebrew	Praise of the prophet Elijah, sung in Marathi with Hebrew liturgical passages — the clearest surviving evidence of how far the Bene Israel had assimilated linguistically before the nineteenth century.
Ganpati aarti and the mandal repertoire	North Konkan	Marathi	Neighbourhood devotional singing twice a day for ten days, and the immersion procession songs that follow. The public form of the festival is barely a century and a half old and its repertoire is still being added to.
Male Mahadeshwara kavya	Old Mysore	Kannada	The life and miracles of Mahadeshwara, a Shaiva ascetic of the southern hills who rides a tiger. The epic runs to tens of thousands of lines and is sung by Kamsale performers who keep time on brass discs.
Manteswamy kavya	Old Mysore	Kannada	The travels of Manteswamy, a wandering teacher who challenges ritual authority and is repeatedly thrown out of respectable places. Sung by Neelagara singers to a drone and a small tambura.
Junjappa kavya	Old Mysore	Kannada	A herding hero who protects cattle, sung by pastoral communities of the dry northern taluks.
Sobane pada	Old Mysore	Kannada	Women's ritual songs sung in unison at each stage of a wedding, blessing the couple and instructing the bride, with a refrain that gives the genre its name.
Beesuva kallina pada	Old Mysore	Kannada	Work songs timed to the rotation of a hand quern, in which women sang about marriage, in-laws and their own households. The genre is effectively extinct because the machine that made it possible is gone.
Bhoomi hunnime and harvest songs	Old Mysore	Kannada	Songs to the earth sung at the field bund, with offerings made at the furrow rather than in a temple.
Tatva pada	Old Mysore	Kannada	Philosophical songs of wandering singers, set to simple recurring tunes and carrying an anti-ritual argument in ordinary village vocabulary.
Thiruppavai	Pandya Nadu	Tamil	Andal's thirty verses, composed at Srivilliputhur in this region, addressed by a girl waking her companions before dawn to keep a vow. Sung across the whole Tamil and Telugu Vaishnava world; this is where it was written.
Kavadi chindu	Pandya Nadu	Tamil	Songs in a swinging metre matched to the step of a pilgrim carrying a kavadi. The nineteenth-century poet Annamalai Reddiar gave the genre its literary form, and pilgrims still sing his lines on the road.
Karagattam paattu	Pandya Nadu	Tamil	Fast, rhymed, frequently bawdy songs sung to naiyandi melam while the dancer balances the pot — the humour is part of the offering, not a lapse from it.
Ammanai	Pandya Nadu	Tamil	Sung while tossing and catching small balls or seeds in a fixed pattern, so the metre is set by the throw. Long narrative ammanai ballads carry local histories that appear in no other source.
Oppari	Pandya Nadu	Tamil	Improvised lament sung by women at funerals, addressed to the dead and cataloguing the household they have left. In this region it is often accompanied by parai drumming.
Ulavar paattu and field songs	Pandya Nadu	Tamil	Work songs timed to the pace of a bullock or a picottah lift, including a substantial body of songs about the tank — whether it filled, who repaired it, and who took more than their share.
Villupattu narratives of Muthupattan and Sudalai Madan	Pandya Nadu	Tamil	Bow-song epics about local guardian deities and deified heroes, performed overnight, in which the deity's own story is the entertainment and the ritual at once.
Wihu song	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Tangsa	Origin, agriculture and blessing, sung in a poetic register that differs from ordinary Tangsa speech and varies between Tangsa groups. It is the most thoroughly documented song tradition in the belt.
Loku songs	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Nocte	Harvest, ancestry and the standing of the chief's household, sung responsorially with the dancing.
Oriah songs	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Wancho	Spring, sowing and communal welfare, sung across the several days of the festival with the log drum keeping time.
Manau chants	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Singpho	Origin and migration narrative recited by elders while the files of dancers move around the posts — the same text tradition held by Kachin communities across the ridge.
Work and courting songs	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Nocte, Wancho and Tangsa	Field work, absence and attachment. The everyday layer under the festival repertoire, and the one most at risk, because it has no calendar occasion to keep it in use.
Boliyan	Punjab Doabs	Punjabi	One-verse rhymed couplets called out and answered, on marriage, in-laws, longing, money and village reputation. Improvised on a fixed frame, and the sharpest of them are anonymous by design.
Tappe	Punjab Doabs	Punjabi	A very short two-line form sung to a set melody, traded between singers. The metre is so tight that a good tappa is closer to an epigram than to a song.
Suhag and ghorian	Punjab Doabs	Punjabi	Suhag are sung by the bride's household as she prepares to leave; ghorian by the groom's as his mare is readied. The two sets face each other across the wedding and are never sung by the wrong side.
Sithniyan	Punjab Doabs	Punjabi	Ritual insult songs directed by the bride's women at the groom's family, obscene by convention and protected by it.
Lohri songs	Punjab Doabs	Punjabi	Children go door to door singing for gur, sesame and money, in verses that centre on the figure of Dulla Bhatti, a sixteenth-century Punjabi outlaw remembered for rescuing girls from being sold and arranging their marriages.
Mahiya and dhola	Punjab Doabs	Punjabi	Short love couplets addressed to an absent beloved, with the first line usually a piece of scene-setting that only rhymes with the second. The form carries across the border unchanged.
Heer	Punjab Doabs	Punjabi	Waris Shah's verse romance of Heer and Ranjha, sung to its own recognisable tune. Read as a love story, as a Sufi allegory and as an attack on the social order, depending on who is singing it.
Var	Punjab Doabs	Punjabi	Heroic ballad, chiefly of battle and martyrdom in Sikh history, delivered in alternating sung and spoken passages to dhadd and sarangi.
Alahunian	Punjab Doabs	Punjabi	Women's laments sung after a death, in a form old enough to be referred to in the Sikh scripture itself.
Jugni and chhalla	Punjab Doabs	Punjabi	Two travelling refrain-forms — jugni as a wandering spirit who reports what she sees, chhalla as an address to a ring and to an absent traveller. Both are open frames into which any singer inserts new verses, which is why they never date.
Baul gaan	Rarh	Bengali	The moner manush — the person within — sought inside the body rather than in scripture or temple. The songs are deliberately riddling, and a great many of them are structured as a question the listener is left holding.
Jhumur	Rarh	Bengali (Manbhumi), Kurmali	Desire, absence and rural life, in short driving stanzas by named composers. Sung with the Nachni tradition and also on its own.
Tusu gaan	Rarh	Bengali (Manbhumi), Kurmali	Sung by unmarried girls to Tusu, treated as a daughter of the house, about her arrival, her keeping and her departure to the water. New verses are composed every year, and they carry a running commentary on prices, politics and marriage.
Bhadu gaan	Rarh	Bengali (Manbhumi)	The same structure as Tusu in a different season, associated in local tradition with a princess of the Panchkot house who died before her wedding.
Bolan gaan	Rarh	Bengali	Shaiva devotional and dramatic songs performed by processional troupes moving between Birbhum villages, mixing myth with local incident.
Sohrai and Baha songs	Rarh	Santali	Cattle, the sal flower, the ancestors and the village's own founding, sung in line at the akhra with tamak and tumdak drums.
Padavali kirtan	Rarh	Bengali, with Brajabuli forms	The Radha–Krishna cycle elaborated over hours, with the singer stepping out of the narrative to comment on it and then back in.
Alkap songs	Rarh	Bengali	Topical satire, sexual comedy and village politics, alternating with straight devotional pieces, in a form whose whole point is that nothing local is off limits.
Annamayya sankeertanalu	Rayalaseema	Telugu	Venkateswara addressed directly — praise, complaint, erotic longing and social observation, in a plain Telugu deliberately chosen over Sanskrit. Roughly 13,000 texts survive on copper plates; the melodies do not.
Vemana satakam	Rayalaseema	Telugu	Four-line verses attacking ritualism, caste pretension and hypocrisy in the plainest possible speech, each closing with the same refrain. They function as proverbs rather than as songs.
Tholu Bommalata Ramayanam	Rayalaseema	Telugu	Episodes of the Ramayana and Mahabharata sung behind the screen, broken by the exchanges of two stock comic puppets who comment on the audience as much as the story.
Kolatam paatalu	Rayalaseema	Telugu, and Tamil on the southern slope	Rhythm songs whose metre is set by the stick strike rather than the other way round.
Yerukala sodi paatalu	Rayalaseema	Yerukala and Telugu	Sung divination performed by Yerukala women with a basket and a winnowing fan — a livelihood, an oral form and a genre of household news all at once.
Gangireddu and Haridasu songs	Rayalaseema	Telugu	A decorated bull that nods to questions, led with a drum and a shehnai; and a mendicant singer who walks the streets at dawn with a brass pot on his head and must not speak, only sing.
Appagintalu	Rayalaseema	Telugu	Handing over — sung by the women of the bride's household at the moment she leaves, and the one point in a Telugu wedding where grief is formally permitted.
Lambadi geetalu	Rayalaseema	Gor Boli (Lambadi)	Seasonal and marriage songs in an Indo-Aryan language spoken in hamlets across a Dravidian dryland.
Naat and manqabat	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Urdu	Praise of the Prophet and of saints, sung solo or in chorus. Bareilly's role in the Barelvi tradition makes this the region's most widely heard sung form.
Barka Nach cycle	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Tharu	A Tharu retelling of Mahabharata episodes, sung and danced by men through the night with drum and cymbal.
Tharu jhumra and mangal geet	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Tharu	Marriage, harvest and forest life, sung antiphonally by women in the terai villages.
Kajri and jhoola	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Katehari Hindi	Monsoon separation songs, sung on swings, in the shared repertoire of the whole plain.
Sohar and vivah geet	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Katehari Hindi	Household life-cycle songs, with a well-developed gaari repertoire of ritual abuse at weddings.
Holi phag and Laat Sahab songs	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Hindi and Urdu	Satire and mock-abuse directed at authority, sung during the Laat Sahab procession — a licensed insult tradition with a colonial target and a much older form.
Alha	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Katehari and Bundeli	The Alha-Udal ballad, sung in the southern districts of the region.
Duha	Saurashtra	Kathiawadi Gujarati and Dingal	Judgement, obligation, generosity and shame, compressed into a single couplet. The form is Charani and its authority rests on the singer's lineage as much as on the verse.
Garba songs	Saurashtra	Gujarati	Addressed to the goddess as Ambe, Chamunda or Khodiyar, and increasingly to the dance itself. The older texts are slow and devotional; the tempo of the sung repertoire has risen sharply since amplification arrived.
Halardu	Saurashtra	Kathiawadi Gujarati	Sleep, cattle, and the absent father who has taken the herd out — a pastoral lullaby, not a lyrical one.
Fatana	Saurashtra	Kathiawadi Gujarati	Teasing and abuse songs directed by the bride's women at the groom's party, licensed by custom and expected to be obscene.
Marasiya	Saurashtra	Kathiawadi Gujarati	Women's laments sung in a group after a death, with a lead voice and a responding line, formerly accompanied by chest-beating. The practice is discouraged in many households now and is thinning fast.
Gangasati's bhajans	Saurashtra	Gujarati	Instruction rather than praise — fifty-two songs addressed by a woman saint of Samadhiyala to her disciple Panbai, of which "Vij ne chamkare moti parovo" is the best known.
Ras geet	Saurashtra	Gujarati	The Krishna and Dwarka cycle, sung to the stick-beat of the raas rather than to a free rhythm.
Abang	Siang & Adi Belt	Adi	Origin, migration and clan genealogy, recited in an archaic register by a miri. It is the historical record of a society that kept no written one, and the reason clan relationships across widely separated villages can still be traced.
Ponung songs	Siang & Adi Belt	Adi	The agricultural year and the myths attached to it, sung by a central miri and answered by a circle of dancing women.
Nitom	Siang & Adi Belt	Adi	Everyday life — the field, the river, absence, attachment. The category rather than a single song, and still composed in.
Oi nitom	Siang & Adi Belt	Mising	Love and longing in short couplets. Included here because it is the same genre and the same language family, sung by the community that carried Tani speech down out of these hills onto the sandbars — the clearest audible evidence of the corridor.
Ja-jin-ja	Siang & Adi Belt	Adi	Welcome, hospitality and good-humoured challenge, sung as call and response with improvised lines against a fixed refrain.
Mopin songs	Siang & Adi Belt	Galo	Invocation of Mopin Ane, the goddess the festival addresses, and petitions for a good crop and freedom from illness.
Palam	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Limbu	Courtship exchanged in improvised verse between the two halves of a dance line, each side answering the other's image. The best singers are the ones who can extend a metaphor for a dozen turns without repeating.
Maruni geet	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Nepali	Devotional and celebratory verse sung to the naumati ensemble while the maruni dancers turn.
Deusi and Bhailo	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Nepali	House-to-house blessing songs — Bhailo sung by women on the night of Laxmi Puja, Deusi by men the next night — in which the party praises the household and is paid in coin, sel roti and rice.
Selo	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Tamang	Short strophic songs of love, journey and hardship carried on the damphu's off-beat. The form absorbed twentieth-century subjects — labour migration, the road, the town — faster than any other local genre.
Asare and ropain geet	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Nepali	Work songs sung ankle-deep in a terrace, timed to the rhythm of planting, with teasing and mud-throwing built into the occasion.
Mundhum	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Limbu and Rai (Kirat)	Origin of the world, the ancestors and the proper order of ritual, recited from memory by a priest in an archaic register. It functions as scripture, genealogy and legal precedent at once.
Lepcha mun invocation	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Lepcha	Address to Kanchenjunga, to the rivers and to the first ancestors Fudongthing and Nuzaongnyu, said to have been formed from the pure snow of the peak. Almost entirely oral, and the least documented repertoire in the region.
Dohori and khyali	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Nepali	Verse duelling between two singers or two parties, extended until one side runs out of answers. It is competitive, improvised and often runs all night.
Warli wedding songs	South Gujarat Littoral	Warli	Fertility, the goddess Palghat, and the passage of the bride, sung by married women in the room where the wall image is being made. The song and the painting are one rite, not two.
Tarpa songs and Holi songs of the Dangs	South Gujarat Littoral	Dangi, Kukna, Warli	Seasonal cycle, forest and the year's work. Holi is the principal festival of the slope and its repertoire is far larger than the Diwali one.
Monajat	South Gujarat Littoral	Gujarati	Praise, remembrance of the dead and moral instruction, in Gujarati verse rather than in Avestan — the community's vernacular devotional layer.
Marsiya and nauha	South Gujarat Littoral	Urdu and Gujarati	The martyrdom at Karbala, recited in Dawoodi Bohra gatherings with Surat as a principal teaching centre.
Parsi wedding songs	South Gujarat Littoral	Parsi Gujarati	Welcome, blessing and family teasing, sung by women around the achhu michhu rite in which rice, coconut, egg and water are circled over the arriving person's head and set down or broken.
Surti garba	South Gujarat Littoral	Gujarati	The goddess and the dance, sung in a city where Kathiawadi and Surti circles run side by side in the same wards.
Naman	South Konkan	Malvani	Invocation of Ganapati, the village deity and the ground itself, sung standing, before any performance is allowed to begin. Nothing is played in a temple forecourt until it has been sung.
Jakhadi and Khele songs	South Konkan	Malvani	Comic, satirical and often obscene verses about village life, marriage and local authority, sung between dance items to the dholki. Licence to name people is part of the form and expires with the festival.
Gaulan	South Konkan	Malvani and Marathi	Krishna blocking the milkmaids on the road to the market — a fixed comic interlude with a fixed argument, performed between the invocation and the main episode.
Chitrakathi pothi narration	South Konkan	Malvani and Marathi	Episodes of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in local recension, sung to the ektari and huduk while the painted sheets are turned. The versions differ from the standard texts, which is why the surviving pothis matter.
Ovi at the quern	South Konkan	Malvani	Women's couplets on a woman's parents, her brother, the mango season and the husband who is in Mumbai — which in this region is a very large share of the repertoire.
Fishing and net songs	South Konkan	Malvani	The pull of the rampan net, the price at the auction, and the men who did not come back.
Bhajan and abhang in the mandals	South Konkan	Marathi	The Varkari devotional repertoire, sung here without the pilgrimage that carries it on the plateau — the songs came down the ghat, the walk did not.
Danda geeta	South Odisha & Ganjam	Odia, Ganjami register	Praise of Shiva and Kali, alternating with the comic exchanges of the Hadi, Sabara and Chadheya pairs. The sacred and the obscene sit in the same night's programme by design.
Dasakathia ballad	South Odisha & Ganjam	Odia	Puranic and local-heroic narrative, delivered by a singer with wooden clappers and interrupted by a second man whose job is to ask the questions the audience would ask.
Palla	South Odisha & Ganjam	Odia	The Satyapir stories, sung competitively — a lead singer and a chorus trading rhymed challenges, with the mardala setting the pace.
Ranapa geeta	South Odisha & Ganjam	Odia	Krishna and the cowherds, sung to a fast dhol pattern while the dancers are on stilts.
Sora funeral dialogue	South Odisha & Ganjam	Sora	Not a song so much as a conversation. A Sora shaman enters trance and speaks in the voice of the dead person, who argues, complains and negotiates with the living family in ordinary language. The exchanges were recorded in detail by anthropologists working in these hills and are the region's most unusual oral form by a distance.
Kondh village songs of the slope	South Odisha & Ganjam	Kui	Work and courtship, sung antiphonally between lines of men and women, with the response line carrying the rhythm rather than the melody.
Telugu jamukula katha at the southern edge	South Odisha & Ganjam	Telugu	Ballads sung to the jamukula, a small clay drum — a Telugu narrative form that reaches its northern limit in the same villages where Odia reaches its southern one.
Bonbibi Johuranama	Sundarbans	Bengali, in Perso-Arabic-heavy vocabulary	Bonbibi and her brother Shah Jangali are sent from Medina to the eighteen tides' country to make it habitable; they defeat the Brahmin tiger-lord Dakshin Rai, and then divide the forest with him rather than destroy him. The Dukhey episode — a boy left in the forest by the honey merchant Dhona as a payment to Dakshin Rai, and rescued when he calls Bonbibi's name — is the part everyone can recite.
Bonbibi Pala songs	Sundarbans	Bengali	The Johuranama set to melody and dialogue, with a chorus, harmonium and dhol. The Dukhey scenes are sung; the negotiation between Bonbibi and Dakshin Rai is largely spoken.
Bhatiyali	Sundarbans	Bengali	The river, the far bank and separation. Sung here on tidal water, where the direction of travel reverses twice a day and the song does not.
Gazir gaan	Sundarbans	Bengali	The exploits of Gazi Pir, protector of cattle and of travellers in the forest, who is shown riding a tiger. Sung with a painted scroll unrolled beside the singer.
Manasa mangal and the Behula episode	Sundarbans	Bengali	A merchant who refuses to worship the snake goddess, the death of his son on his wedding night, and Behula's raft journey with the body. A water-borne narrative in a water-borne country, and one of the oldest Bengali narrative poems still performed.
Bonbibi's brotos — women's vow songs	Sundarbans	Bengali	Short vows and songs performed by women at home while the men are in the forest, including restrictions on combing hair, cooking certain foods and leaving the house. The observance ends when the party returns.
Jelé and mouli work songs	Sundarbans	Bengali	Short call-and-response lines timed to a shared physical effort, with Bonbibi's name used as the stress syllable. Function first, devotion second, and the two are not separable in practice.
Bathukamma paatalu	Telangana	Telugu (Telangana register)	Gauri, the tank, the flowers, and a married woman's account of her natal and marital households. The refrain uyyalo carries the beat and lets an untrained circle join a song it has never heard.
Oggu Katha	Telangana	Telugu	The lives and quarrels of the shepherd deities, narrated over a full night by their own hereditary priests.
Golla Suddulu (Katamaraju Katha)	Telangana	Telugu	A war fought over grazing rights between a cattle chief and a king — a pastoral epic with a land dispute at its centre.
Rolu paatalu	Telangana	Telugu	Work songs whose metre is set by the pestle. They disappeared with the hand mill and survive mainly in collections and in stage revivals.
Peerla paatalu	Telangana	Telugu and Deccani Urdu	Laments for Hasan and Husain sung around the village alams by singers who are frequently not Muslim. The tunes are Telugu folk tunes and the vocabulary is Urdu.
Marfa	Telangana	Instrumental, with Arabic and Deccani calls	Percussion rather than song — a Hadrami Arab ensemble absorbed into the wedding economy of the old city.
Lambadi geetalu	Telangana	Gor Boli (Lambadi)	Seasonal and marriage songs in an Indo-Aryan language spoken in tandas across a Dravidian plateau — the clearest audible evidence of the caravan migration that brought the community south.
Jamba Puranam	Telangana	Telugu	The origin narrative of the Madiga community, performed by its hereditary bards for its own audiences. It is a caste's own account of itself, and it exists only in performance.
The Draupadi Amman Mahabharata cycle	Tondaimandalam	Tamil	The Mahabharata sung and enacted with Draupadi as the presiding deity rather than as a character — culminating in the fire-walk, in which vow-keepers cross a bed of embers after the war episode is performed.
Tiruppavai and Tiruvempavai in Margazhi	Tondaimandalam	Tamil	Andal's thirty verses calling her companions to a winter vow, and the Shaiva counterpart, sung walking through the streets in procession before first light. Thirty days, thirty verses, one a morning.
Gaana	Tondaimandalam	Chennai Tamil	Death, drink, poverty, the neighbourhood and the joke at the end of it, improvised over a hand-beaten rhythm. The oldest layer is funeral song; the newest is written for film, and the two are sung by the same people.
Oppari	Tondaimandalam	Tamil	Improvised lament sung by women at the body, cataloguing the dead person's life and reproaching them for leaving.
Kummi and kolattam	Tondaimandalam	Tamil	Women's clapping and stick-circle songs, sung in the courtyard and, at Navaratri, in front of the doll display.
Villuppattu of the Palar villages	Tondaimandalam	Tamil	Narrative bow song, carrying local hero and goddess stories, with the lead singer beating time on a strung bow and a chorus answering.
Vallikkummi and Murugan vow songs	Tondaimandalam	Tamil	Songs sung by kavadi-bearers on the walk to the temple, keeping the pace of the carried arch.
Vanchipattu	Travancore & Kuttanad	Malayalam	Devotional narrative set to the stroke. The metre is nathonnatha, whose long-short-short pattern maps onto the pull and recovery of an oar, so the song is a timing device before it is a text.
Padayani thappu pattu	Travancore & Kuttanad	Malayalam	Invocation and appeasement of Bhadrakali, sung antiphonally between the kolam bearers and the drummers as each mask enters the ground.
Njattupattu	Travancore & Kuttanad	Malayalam	Work rhythm and complaint, sung by a line of women planting seedlings, with the tempo setting the rate the whole line moves at.
Margamkali pattu	Travancore & Kuttanad	Malayalam	The journey and martyrdom of Thomas the Apostle in fourteen sung sections, danced by a ring of performers around a lit lamp with no instrument except the voices and the clap.
Ayyappan pattu	Travancore & Kuttanad	Malayalam	The Ayyappa narrative sung through the night by a specialist group before a lamp, with the household's pilgrims present and the season's vratham already begun.
Onappattu	Travancore & Kuttanad	Malayalam	Maveli's reign and its loss, sung by women circling the pookkalam. The lyric is about a just king in exile, which is why it survives as the one Kerala festival song with a political reading attached.
Garia song	Tripura Hills & Plains	Kokborok	Petitions to Garia for rain, a good jhum crop, healthy livestock and children, sung continuously while the dressed bamboo pole is carried from household to household over seven days.
Hojagiri song	Tripura Hills & Plains	Kokborok (Reang dialect)	The agricultural year told in sequence — sowing, weeding, harvest, husking — sung by the dancers themselves while they balance, which sets an upper limit on how hard they can breathe.
Lebang Boomani song	Tripura Hills & Plains	Kokborok	The pursuit of the lebang insect across the newly sown plot, sung against the beat of bamboo clappers.
Jhum songs	Tripura Hills & Plains	Kokborok	Work sung in time with the tool, with call-and-response between a lead voice and the line of workers. The tempo is set by the job rather than by a drum.
Dhamail	Tripura Hills & Plains	Bengali	Radha and Krishna, and the bride's household, sung by a circle of women who clap the rhythm and step together. Shared entire with Sylhet across the ranges.
Bhatiali	Tripura Hills & Plains	Bengali	The boatman's song of the Meghna floodplain, long-lined and unhurried. Sachin Dev Burman carried this idiom into Hindi film music, which is how a delta river form ended up on a national soundtrack.
Bizu songs	Tripura Hills & Plains	Chakma	Farewell to the old year and the making of pachon, sung across the three days of the festival in a language of the Indo-Aryan family written in the Chakma script.
Kirtan and Shakta padavali	Tripura Hills & Plains	Bengali	Devotional song of the plain, and at Udaipur specifically the Shakta repertoire attached to the goddess — the musical layer the Manikya court patronised alongside the older hill rites it never displaced.
Koti–Chennaya paddana	Tulu Nadu	Tulu	The Billava twin heroes, born to a woman of the community, trained in a garodi, wronged by the chieftain they served and killed young — after which they are worshipped as daivas in their own right. The epic is a charter for a whole community's shrines.
Siri paddana	Tulu Nadu	Tulu	The story of Siri and the women of her line across four generations — abandonment, a contested inheritance, and vindication. Women enter possession as these characters and speak in their voices.
Kabita	Tulu Nadu	Tulu	Antiphonal work song set to the rhythm of bending and planting, with teasing verses traded between rows of women. It disappears with the transplanter, and mechanised transplanting is removing it.
Yakshagana prasanga	Tulu Nadu	Kannada, with Tulu prasangas in the Tenkutittu repertoire	Episodes from the Mahabharata, Ramayana and Puranas, versified as a sequence of songs which the bhagavata sings and the actors argue out. Tulu-language prasangas are a twentieth-century addition and now fill houses.
Voviyo	Tulu Nadu	Konkani	Blessing and leave-taking sung by older women as coconut milk is applied to the bride and groom — a pre-Christian ritual form carrying Christian content.
Beary kolkali pattu	Tulu Nadu	Beary	Circle songs sung to the strike of sticks, in a speech that shares vocabulary with Malayalam and grammar with Tulu, and whose form is shared with the Mappila coast to the south.
Gita Govinda	Utkal	Sanskrit	Radha and Krishna's separation and union in twenty-four ashtapadis. Composed in the twelfth century by Jayadeva, of Kenduli Sasan in the Prachi valley, and sung nightly at Puri as part of the sequence that closes the temple's day.
Boita Bandana	Utkal	Odia	The launching of a boat. Women float small paper, banana-bark or pith boats carrying a lamp and betel nut on the nearest water and chant "aa ka ma bai" while doing it — a rite for a voyage nobody has made for centuries.
Chaiti Ghoda song	Utkal	Odia	The story of Basuli and the horse, sung by a pair — one singing, one interjecting — while the horse dancer moves between them.
Kuanri Punei songs	Utkal	Odia	Unmarried girls' songs and games on the full-moon night, with offerings made to the moon at moonrise and again at moonset, and the puchi game danced through the evening.
Champu and chhanda	Utkal	Odia	The thirty-four champus, each beginning with a successive letter of the alphabet, on Radha and Krishna — a poetic form built on a constraint, and one of the standing tests of an Odissi singer.
Dola songs	Utkal	Odia	Sung as village deities are carried on vimanas from village to village to meet one another at the melana ground, with colour thrown and the palanquins made to dance.
Pala	Utkal	Odia with Sanskrit quotation	A single narrative expounded, argued and joked over across a whole night, moving between sung verse and spoken commentary.
Dhimsa songs	Uttarandhra	Adivasi Oriya, Konda and Gadaba	Short repeated verses about courtship, the forest and the year's work, sung by the dancing line itself rather than by a separate singer, so the song sets the step.
Thappeta Gullu rain songs	Uttarandhra	Telugu, Uttarandhra register	Direct appeals to the goddess for rain, sung over drumming loud enough to be heard across a village. A tank-irrigated region's liturgy.
Bobbili katha	Uttarandhra	Telugu	The 1757 siege of Bobbili and its aftermath, sung as heroic narrative with named characters. Both estates involved still exist as towns, which gives the ballad an unusually specific audience.
Jamukula katha	Uttarandhra	Telugu	Heroic and genealogical narrative delivered to the growl of the jamuku pot-drum, with the lead singer interrupted and corrected by two responders.
Harikatha	Uttarandhra	Telugu, with Sanskrit verse	Puranic narrative sung in Carnatic ragas by a standing solo performer who also speaks, comments and improvises. Codified at Vizianagaram in the 1890s.
Vadabalija fishing songs	Uttarandhra	Telugu	Work songs timed to the rhythm of pushing a boat through surf and hauling a net, sung by the fishing communities of the Visakhapatnam and Srikakulam coast.
Savara ritual chant	Uttarandhra	Sora	Shamanic invocation and dialogue with the dead, in a ritual register distinct from everyday Sora. The same tradition continues north into the Gajapati and Rayagada hills.
Bhim Geet	Vidarbha	Marathi	Ambedkar, the Buddha, the conversion, and the ordinary life of the communities that made it. A modern folk repertoire with a datable origin and tens of thousands of songs, sustained by shahirs and jalsa troupes rather than by any institution.
Jatyavarchi ovi	Vidarbha	Marathi (Varhadi)	Improvised couplets on brothers, in-laws, the village and the work, in a metre set by the turning of the stone.
Rela	Vidarbha	Gondi	Call-and-response songs sung while dancing in a linked circle, with the leader setting a line and the circle answering it.
Dandar songs	Vidarbha	Gondi and Marathi	Narrative and comic songs performed by travelling male troupes over several nights, moving from village to village.
Zadipatti stage songs	Vidarbha	Zadi Boli	Songs written into the all-night plays, released and circulated separately, and often better known than the plays they came from.
Rice transplanting songs	Vidarbha	Marathi (Zadi) and Halbi	Sung by women working bent over in flooded fields, with a metre timed to the planting stroke. The work is the metronome.
Lengi	Vidarbha	Gor Boli (Lambani)	Sowing, marriage and the road, in the vocabulary of a caravan economy that ended long ago.
Palna	Vidarbha	Marathi (Varhadi)	Cradle songs sung to a child by the name being conferred on it.

जगहें 1294

नाम	क्षेत्र	प्रकार	टिप्पणी
Cellular Jail National Memorial	Andaman Islands	विरासत	Built between 1896 and 1906 as seven wings radiating from a central tower, on Bentham's panopticon principle — each wing faced the back of the next, so no prisoner could see or signal another. It held 696 single cells, each about 4.5 by 2.7 metres with a ventilator set three metres up. Three wings and the tower survive; the rest were demolished after independence. It became a national memorial in 1979.
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Dweep (Ross Island)	Andaman Islands	विरासत	The administrative headquarters of the penal settlement — church, ballroom, bakery, tennis court — abandoned after the 1941 earthquake and the Japanese occupation, and now held together by the roots of the banyans growing through it. A twenty-minute boat ride from Port Blair.
Swaraj Dweep (Havelock) and Radhanagar Beach	Andaman Islands	समुद्र तट	The islands' tourism centre, and the beach most often named the best in India. Also the base for the diving industry, which is where much of the local reef monitoring data actually comes from.
Shaheed Dweep (Neil)	Andaman Islands	समुद्र तट	Smaller and flatter than Swaraj Dweep, with a natural rock bridge at low tide and a working agricultural population — one of the few tourist islands that still grows vegetables for Port Blair.
Baratang — mud volcanoes and limestone caves	Andaman Islands	प्रकृति	Cold grey cones a metre or two high, where gas pushes liquid clay to the surface, and a limestone cave system reached by creek boat through mangrove. The land route from Port Blair runs through the Jarawa reserve on the Andaman Trunk Road, in convoy, and the Supreme Court's 2013 interim order on tourist traffic through that reserve is the reason the rules on the road are what they are.
Mount Manipur (Mount Harriet)	Andaman Islands	पहाड़	The highest point in South Andaman, with a national park on it. Renamed Mount Manipur in October 2021 for the Manipuri king and courtiers exiled here after the Anglo-Manipur war of 1891. It is also where Sher Ali Afridi, a convict, killed the Viceroy Lord Mayo in 1872 — the only assassination of a serving Viceroy of India.
Chidiya Tapu	Andaman Islands	वन्यजीव	The southern tip of South Andaman, forest running down to the sea, and the standard birding site on the islands — Andaman endemics including the Andaman woodpecker and the Andaman serpent eagle are seen here.
Mahatma Gandhi Marine National Park, Wandoor	Andaman Islands	वन्यजीव	A protected group of islands and reefs west of Port Blair, with glass-bottom boat access to Jolly Buoy and Red Skin, which are opened alternately by season so the reef gets a rest.
Barren Island	Andaman Islands	प्रकृति	India's only active volcano, about 135 km north-east of Port Blair — a three-kilometre island that is entirely a cone. Its first recorded eruption was in 1787; it was quiet for most of the twentieth century and became active again in 1991, with lava reaching the sea. Uninhabited, and visited only by boat, without landing.
Saddle Peak National Park, Diglipur	Andaman Islands	पहाड़	The territory's highest point at 732 metres, in evergreen rainforest, with a climbable trail from Kalipur. Nearby Ross and Smith Islands are joined by a sand bar at low tide, and the Kalipur beaches are turtle nesting grounds where four species come ashore.
Webi and the Karen villages	Andaman Islands	विरासत	Villages settled by Karen families brought from Burma in the 1920s as forest workers, still Karen-speaking and largely Baptist. The only community in the Andamans whose ancestry is Southeast Asian rather than Indian.
Little Andaman (Hut Bay)	Andaman Islands	प्रकृति	A flat forested island reached by ship from Port Blair, with waterfalls, a surf coast and an oil-palm plantation history. Much of the island is the Onge reserve and closed; the settled part is not a tourist circuit and access is limited.
North Sentinel Island	Andaman Islands	प्रकृति	Home of the Sentinelese, who have had no sustained contact with the outside world. The island and the waters around it are closed under law, approach is prohibited, and this entry exists to say so. It cannot be visited and should not be attempted; people have died trying.
Vikramshila	Anga & Seemanchal	विरासत	The excavated remains of the Pala monastic university founded around the eighth century — a vast cruciform stupa surrounded by monastic cells, second only to Nalanda in its time and destroyed at the end of the twelfth century. Almost empty of visitors.
Vikramshila Gangetic Dolphin Sanctuary	Anga & Seemanchal	वन्यजीव	A sixty-kilometre stretch of the Ganga between Sultanganj and Kahalgaon, the only protected area in India designated for the Gangetic dolphin. Boats go out from Sultanganj; the animals are blind and hunt by sonar.
Champanagar and Champapuri	Anga & Seemanchal	तीर्थ	The traditional capital of Anga, and a major Jain tirtha as the birthplace of Vasupujya, the twelfth tirthankara — the only tirthankara born in this region.
Sultanganj and the Ajgaibinath temple	Anga & Seemanchal	तीर्थ	A rock temple in the Ganga where pilgrims fill their water pots before setting out for Deoghar. In Sawan the town runs day and night and the road out of it becomes a single moving column.
Baidyanath Dham, Deoghar	Anga & Seemanchal	तीर्थ	One of the twelve jyotirlingas and the destination of the Shravani Mela — the endpoint of the 105-km barefoot walk from Sultanganj, and among the largest pilgrimages anywhere in the world by number of participants.
Mandar Hill	Anga & Seemanchal	तीर्थ	A granite hill identified in tradition as the churning-stick of the ocean of milk, with a spiral groove around it read as the mark of the serpent rope. Jain and Hindu shrines on the summit, and a large Makar Sankranti fair at the Papharni tank below.
Munger Fort and the Bihar School of Yoga	Anga & Seemanchal	विरासत	A river fort with Mir Qasim's brief capital inside it, and, in the same town, the Bihar School of Yoga founded in 1964 — one of the institutions through which modern postural yoga was systematised and exported worldwide.
Kahalgaon and Bateshwar Sthan	Anga & Seemanchal	तीर्थ	Rock outcrops and ghats on the Ganga near Vikramshila, with an old Shiva shrine and a river view that explains why the monastery was sited where it was.
Lachhuar and the Jamui Jain sites	Anga & Seemanchal	तीर्थ	Kshatriyakund at Lachhuar, held by the Digambara tradition to be Mahavira's birthplace, with an old temple complex in a quiet valley.
Purnia and Renu's country	Anga & Seemanchal	विरासत	The landscape of Maila Anchal — Aurahi Hingna, Renu's village, and the wetland and maize country he made the subject of the first regional novel in Hindi.
The Kishanganj tea gardens	Anga & Seemanchal	प्रकृति	Bihar's only tea belt, grown on smallholdings in the narrow neck between Nepal and Bengal, with small factories processing leaf from hundreds of farmers.
Kursela and the Kosi confluence	Anga & Seemanchal	प्रकृति	Where the Kosi finally reaches the Ganga after crossing the whole of north Bihar — a vast, shifting expanse of sand, water and diara cultivation.
Manihari Ghat	Anga & Seemanchal	शहरी	A working Ganga ferry crossing to the Sahibganj side, with a long history as a river port and a good place to see the river as a road rather than a boundary.
Triveni Sangam	Antarved Doab	तीर्थ	The confluence of the Ganga, the Yamuna and the Saraswati of tradition. The bathing point shifts with the channels each year and is re-marked; boats go out to it from the fort bank all day.
Prayagraj Fort, Akshayavat and the Ashokan pillar	Antarved Doab	विरासत	Akbar's fort of 1583 at the confluence, holding the undying banyan of tradition and an Ashokan pillar carrying both the emperor's edicts and Samudragupta's fourth-century eulogy — three empires' inscriptions on one shaft.
Anand Bhavan	Antarved Doab	विरासत	The Nehru family house, given to the Congress in 1930 and now a museum. Much of the Indian national movement was organised from these rooms.
Kaushambi	Antarved Doab	विरासत	The excavated capital of the Vatsa mahajanapada, with a huge earthen rampart and an Ashokan pillar — one of the oldest continuously identified city sites in the Ganga plain.
Bithoor	Antarved Doab	तीर्थ	Ganga ghats associated with the Valmiki ashram tradition, and the seat of Nana Saheb before 1857. Quiet for most of the year and crowded at Kartik Purnima.
Kanpur Memorial Church and the 1857 sites	Antarved Doab	विरासत	Built over the site of the 1857 killings, and unusually explicit about it. Read alongside Bithoor, it gives the two sides of the same events within twenty kilometres.
Hastinapur	Antarved Doab	विरासत	The Mahabharata capital, an excavated Painted Grey Ware site with evidence of an ancient flood, and now also a major Jain pilgrimage centre with a cluster of modern temples.
Aligarh Muslim University	Antarved Doab	विरासत	Founded by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan as MAO College in 1875 and a university since 1920. Its Strachey Hall, mosque and residential halls are the physical record of a nineteenth-century argument about education that shaped a century of Indian politics.
Kannauj	Antarved Doab	विरासत	Harshavardhan's seventh-century capital and, later, the prize three empires fought over. Today it is known for its perfume distilleries, and the ruins of the imperial city are largely under the modern town.
Sankisa	Antarved Doab	विरासत	One of the eight great Buddhist sites, where the Buddha is said to have descended from the heaven of the thirty-three gods. An Ashokan elephant capital stands on a mound in a village field, still in worship.
Deoband	Antarved Doab	विरासत	The Darul Uloom, founded in 1866, and the source of a school of Islamic thought with madrasas across South Asia and beyond.
Garhmukteshwar	Antarved Doab	तीर्थ	The Ganga ghat closest to Delhi, and the site of a very large Kartik Purnima bathing fair and cattle market.
Company Bagh and the Botanical Garden, Saharanpur	Antarved Doab	प्रकृति	A garden established in the eighteenth century and taken over as a botanical station in 1817, from which much of India's colonial-era plant introduction was organised, including the cinchona and tea trials.
Shaheed Smarak and Augharnath Temple, Meerut	Antarved Doab	विरासत	Where the revolt of 1857 began on 10 May. The temple by the old cantonment is where the sepoys are said to have been told of the greased cartridges.
Firozabad glass furnaces	Antarved Doab	शहरी	Not a monument but worth seeing — an entire town organised around glass, with furnaces, bangle-joining workshops and a wholesale market that supplies most of the country.
Bara Imambara and the Bhulbhulaiya	Awadh	विरासत	Begun by Asaf-ud-Daula in 1784 as famine relief — the account repeated locally is that labourers built by day while impoverished gentry, who could not be seen doing manual work, demolished a portion at night so the employment would last. Its central hall is vaulted without beams or pillars, and the maze above exists to carry that roof.
Rumi Darwaza	Awadh	विरासत	A sixty-foot gateway of 1784 modelled on a gate at Constantinople, which is why it carries the name Rumi. It marks the entry to the old city and appears on everything the city prints.
Chhota Imambara (Hussainabad)	Awadh	विरासत	Muhammad Ali Shah's mourning hall of 1838, hung with Belgian chandeliers and gilt, and still the focus of Muharram processions rather than a museum piece.
The Residency	Awadh	विरासत	Left deliberately in ruins since the months-long siege of 1857, shot walls and all. It is the most legible 1857 site in India, and reads very differently depending on which account you arrive with.
Ayodhya	Awadh	तीर्थ	A Sarayu-bank temple town of very long standing, the setting of the Ramayana and a centre of the Ramcharitmanas tradition. It draws pilgrims year-round and enormous crowds at Ram Navami and Deepotsav.
Naimisharanya	Awadh	तीर्थ	The forest in which the Puranas are framed as being narrated to assembled sages — the narrative device of a whole literature attached to a real grove and a circular tank near the Gomti.
Sravasti	Awadh	विरासत	The Jetavana monastery, where the Buddha is recorded as having spent more rain-retreats than anywhere else. Excavated mounds at Sahet and Mahet, with Thai, Burmese and Sri Lankan monasteries built around them.
Dargah of Syed Salar Masud Ghazi	Awadh	तीर्थ	An eleventh-century warrior's shrine whose annual Jeth mela has long drawn Hindu and Muslim pilgrims together — one of the most conspicuously shared shrines in north India, and a periodically contested one.
Dewa Sharif	Awadh	तीर्थ	The dargah of Haji Waris Ali Shah, whose Warsi order admitted followers of any faith. Its October urs runs with qawwali for ten nights.
Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary	Awadh	वन्यजीव	Terai sal forest and the Girwa river — one of the few landscapes in India holding gharial, Gangetic dolphin, tiger and swamp deer together. Part of the Dudhwa tiger reserve complex.
Malihabad mango belt	Awadh	प्रकृति	Tens of thousands of hectares of orchard producing the Dussehri, which holds a geographical indication and whose parent tree the growers can point to. Best visited in the last week of June.
La Martiniere (Constantia)	Awadh	विरासत	Claude Martin's part-palace, part-tomb, part-folly of the 1790s, now a school — and the only school in the world awarded a battle honour, for its pupils' part in the 1857 siege.
Nawabganj (Chandrashekhar Azad) Bird Sanctuary	Awadh	प्रकृति	A shallow monsoon-fed lake on the Lucknow–Kanpur road that fills with migratory waterfowl from November.
The Gomti ghats below Chowk	Awadh	शहरी	The river the city turned its back on for a century and is now building towards again. The old ghats remain the place to see Lucknow at dawn.
Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve and Fort	Bagelkhand	वन्यजीव	Sal forest, grassland meadows and sandstone cliffs around a hill fort of great antiquity, formerly the Rewa rulers' shooting preserve and declared a national park in 1968 and a tiger reserve in 1993. The fort on the plateau top carries rock-cut Vishnu images, of which the reclining Shesh Shaiya beside a spring is the best known, and is not open for general access. The reserve is divided into the Tala, Magdhi and Khitauli zones, and it was one of the source populations used to restock Panna after that reserve lost every tiger it had.
Maihar — Sharda Devi temple	Bagelkhand	तीर्थ	A hilltop shrine on Trikut hill reached by more than a thousand steps or by ropeway. Local tradition makes Alha and Udal — the Banaphar warriors of the Bundelkhandi ballad, who served the Chandela king of Mahoba — the goddess's first devotees, and holds that Alha still offers worship before dawn, which is why the shrine is said to be found already garlanded when it opens. It is one of the largest Navratri gatherings in central India, twice a year.
Rewa Fort and the Baghel Museum	Bagelkhand	विरासत	The Baghela seat above the Bichhiya, with a museum holding the Rewa court's collection — arms, sculpture and photographs — and the mounted body of Mohan, the white tiger from which every white tiger in captivity descends. Seeing the animal stuffed in a glass case is the most honest possible introduction to the story.
Mukundpur White Tiger Safari and Zoo	Bagelkhand	वन्यजीव	A state-run safari and zoo opened in 2016 near Mukundpur, established specifically around the white tiger and named for Maharaja Martand Singh. It is the only facility of its kind in the region and exists because the white tiger has become Rewa's brand.
Govindgarh	Bagelkhand	विरासत	A Rewa royal palace beside a large lake, and the centre of the Sundarja mango belt. The palace was where the captured white tiger Mohan was kept and bred, and the orchards around it are the source of the region's only GI-registered product.
Chachai Falls	Bagelkhand	प्रकृति	A single vertical drop of about 130 metres where the Bihad, a tributary of the Tamsa, leaves the Rewa plateau — usually ranked around the twenty-third highest waterfall in India. The fall exists because the river runs across flat-lying sandstone and then meets a rejuvenated knick point at the scarp edge, so it drops rather than descends.
Keoti Falls	Bagelkhand	प्रकृति	The Mahana river falling off the same scarp a short distance from Chachai. Standard figures give it about 98 metres, though some sources put it at 130; the discrepancy is unresolved and worth knowing before repeating either number.
Bahuti Falls	Bagelkhand	प्रकृति	About 145 metres on the Nihai (also called Odda), the highest waterfall in Madhya Pradesh, dropping off the north-eastern edge of the plateau into the Mauganj valley. Seasonal, and effectively dry from February.
Purwa Falls	Bagelkhand	प्रकृति	The Tamsa itself going over the scarp in a broad curtain, with a canal head above it — the closest of the Rewa falls to the city and the easiest to reach.
Sanjay-Dubri Tiger Reserve	Bagelkhand	वन्यजीव	A large, thinly visited reserve of sal forest along the Banas and the Gopad in the Son basin, contiguous with Guru Ghasidas in Chhattisgarh, which makes the combined block one of the more important tiger corridors in central India. Infrastructure is minimal, which is the point of going.
Bharhut	Bagelkhand	विरासत	The site of a Shunga-period Buddhist stupa of about the second century BCE, whose carved railing and gateway are among the earliest narrative stone sculpture in India — and are now in the Indian Museum in Kolkata, having been removed in the nineteenth century. The site itself is a low mound with almost nothing on it, which makes it a useful lesson in where regional heritage ends up.
Deur Kothar	Bagelkhand	विरासत	A group of brick and stone stupas of the Mauryan period identified in the 1980s and now protected, on the old route between the Ganga plain and the Deccan. Almost unvisited, and evidence that the plateau was a through-route for Buddhism rather than a backwater.
Chandrehe	Bagelkhand	विरासत	A tenth-century Kalachuri Shiva temple and circular monastery on a bend of the Son, built for a Shaiva ascetic order. The circular math is architecturally unusual and the setting — river, rock and nothing else — is largely as it was.
Virateshwar Temple, Sohagpur	Bagelkhand	विरासत	A large Kalachuri-period stone temple of around the tenth or eleventh century, with a tall shikhara and dense exterior carving. It is the best-preserved early temple in the Son valley and is off almost every itinerary.
Chitrakoot (Satna side)	Bagelkhand	तीर्थ	Sphatik Shila, Hanuman Dhara, Gupt Godavari and Janki Kund lie on the Madhya Pradesh side of the pilgrimage town, while Kamadgiri and Ramghat lie across the boundary. Chitrakoot is administered from two states and sits astride the Bundelkhand–Bagelkhand cultural line as well.
Rihand reservoir (Govind Ballabh Pant Sagar)	Bagelkhand	प्रकृति	One of the largest artificial lakes in India by surface area, on the Rihand in the Son basin, built in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It anchors the coal-and-thermal-power complex that now defines the eastern end of the region, and its construction displaced a large population from the valley floor.
Silchar	Barak Valley	शहरी	The valley's only large town and its transport, education and publishing centre, on the Barak's south bank. Assam University, the medical college, the Bengali-language press and the region's political life are all here, and the railway station carries the memorial to the events of 1961.
Bhasha Shahid Station Smriti Bhavan	Barak Valley	विरासत	The memorial at Silchar railway station to the eleven people killed in the police firing of 19 May 1961. It is the focus of the valley's annual Bhasha Shahid Divas observance, when the station forecourt fills before dawn.
Khaspur	Barak Valley	विरासत	The plains capital the Dimasa Kachari kings moved to from Maibang in the hills. What survives is brickwork — the Singhadwar or lion gate, the Suryadwar or sun gate, a temple and fragments of a hall — standing in cultivated land about twenty kilometres from Silchar with no reconstruction around it. A hill dynasty's attempt to become a plains court, and the reason the valley's older place names are Dimasa.
Bhuban Pahar	Barak Valley	तीर्थ	A Shiva shrine on a forested ridge south-east of Silchar, reached on foot up the hill. The Shivaratri mela draws pilgrims from across the valley and from Tripura and Bangladesh, and the climb, done overnight and in procession, is the point as much as the shrine is.
Son Beel	Barak Valley	प्रकृति	The largest wetland in Assam and one of the strangest — it is a lake through the monsoon, with boats crossing it and fishing communities working it, and by January it has drained enough to be ploughed and sown with rice. The same ground yields a fish harvest and a grain harvest in one year. Migratory waterfowl use it in winter.
Karimganj (Sribhumi) town and the Kushiyara bank	Barak Valley	शहरी	A river town on the Kushiyara, historically the valley's trade outlet downstream and still its customs and land-port centre. The Barak divides above the town into the Surma and the Kushiyara, and the plain on both banks is continuous.
Hailakandi and the Katakhal	Barak Valley	शहरी	The smallest district town, at the centre of a tea belt that runs up to the hill foot. The Katakhal drains the basin north into the Barak and floods it reliably.
Chatla haor	Barak Valley	प्रकृति	A wide seasonal depression south-west of Silchar that becomes a shallow lake each monsoon and paddy land each winter, with fisheries worked communally in the wet months. The clearest place to see how the valley's agricultural year is organised around standing water.
Barak Valley tea gardens	Barak Valley	प्रकृति	Estates opened from the 1850s across the low undulating ground between the flood basins. The valley is Assam's second tea district and its liquor is generally lighter than the Brahmaputra belt's; the estates are also the reason a large Sadri-speaking population lives here.
Badarpur	Barak Valley	विरासत	The valley's rail junction, where the line from the Brahmaputra side turns for Silchar and for the border towns, with the remains of an old riverside fort above the Barak. The point at which everything entering the valley by rail has to pass.
Maniharar Ghat and the Barak bank at Silchar	Barak Valley	शहरी	The town's river frontage, where the ferry crossings, the winter fairs and the immersion processions happen. The Barak here is wide, slow and brown, and is used rather than looked at.
Manipuri villages of the Cachar plain	Barak Valley	विरासत	Settlements around Silchar and Lakhipur established by Manipuri families displaced during the Burmese occupation of the Manipur valley in the 1820s. Two centuries on they still weave phanek on household looms, perform Raas at Kartik Purnima, and keep a language and a cuisine unrelated to the plain around them.
Chitrakote Falls	Bastar	प्रकृति	The Indravati drops about 30 m over a horseshoe lip roughly 38 km west of Jagdalpur. In full monsoon the sheet runs close to 300 m wide and is the widest fall in India; by March the same lip carries three or four separate ribbons with dry rock between them, so the site has two entirely different shapes across the year.
Tirathgarh Falls	Bastar	प्रकृति	The Munga Bahar drops over 30 m inside Kanger Valley National Park, breaking into stepped cascades rather than a single sheet. A small Shiva shrine sits at the head of the steps.
Kutumsar Cave	Bastar	प्रकृति	A limestone cave in Kanger Valley running about 1,370 m at some 35 m below the surface, with stalactite chambers and a resident population of blind cave fish. Entry is single-file and lit by hand lamp, and the cave is closed through the monsoon because it floods.
Kailash Cave	Bastar	प्रकृति	Found in 1993, about 250 m long and set some 40 m above the valley floor. Its formations ring when struck, which is where the name comes from.
Kanger Valley National Park	Bastar	वन्यजीव	Declared in 1982 and covering roughly 200 km² of sal, teak and bamboo along a narrow valley. It holds the caves, Tirathgarh, and the last substantial population of the hill myna that is Chhattisgarh's state bird.
Danteshwari Temple, Dantewada	Bastar	तीर्थ	The seat of Danteshwari, the presiding deity of the whole region, at the meeting of the Dankini and Shankhini streams. The temple is the reference point of the Bastar ritual calendar — the Dussehra cycle at Jagdalpur is conducted in her name, and the deity's palanquin travels between the two.
Barsur	Bastar	विरासत	A Nagavanshi-era temple site on the Indravati with the Battisa temple — two shrines on one platform carried on thirty-two pillars — the Mama-Bhanja temple, and two very large monolithic Ganesha figures. Evidence that this plateau carried substantial stone architecture and a court economy well before the Kakatiya rulers of Bastar.
Bhairamgarh	Bastar	विरासत	An old fort and temple site above the Indravati, and the gateway to the Indravati Tiger Reserve. Its weekly haat draws from villages on both banks.
Jagdalpur — palace, museum and haat	Bastar	शहरी	The region's only real town. The Bastar palace, the anthropological museum with its collection of Muria combs, ghotul material and Dhokra, and the daily and weekly markets around Sanjay Market are all within a short walk. The Dussehra Rath Yatra runs through the streets outside.
Indravati Tiger Reserve	Bastar	वन्यजीव	Sal and bamboo forest along the Indravati's Maharashtra flank, notable as one of the last Indian habitats of the wild buffalo, Chhattisgarh's state animal. Access is limited and seasonal.
Kondagaon craft villages	Bastar	विरासत	The working centre of the region's registered crafts — Ghadwa Dhokra casters, Lohar iron smiths and wood carvers in adjacent villages, with a craft village and market on the Raipur road.
Nagarnar	Bastar	विरासत	A potters' village whose votive terracotta horses and elephants stand in shrine yards across the region. Pieces are made to order against a vow rather than for stock.
Chhindgarh, Tokapal, Darbha and Bakawand haats	Bastar	विरासत	Weekly markets, each on its fixed day, and the single best place to understand how the region works. Salfi pots, chapda in leaf-cups, bamboo shoot, forest produce, iron tools, cloth and rice beer, plus barbering, matchmaking and dispute settlement, all in one ground for one day a week.
Dholkal Ganesha	Bastar	विरासत	A stone Ganesha figure of around the eleventh century set on a ridge in the Bailadila hills at roughly 3,000 ft, reached on foot through forest. Its position, far from any settlement, is the puzzle.
Pattadakal	Bayaluseeme	विरासत	Ten major temples in one enclosure on the Malaprabha, built in the seventh and eighth centuries in two different architectural grammars side by side — the northern Nagara curvilinear tower at Kadasiddheshwara, Jambulinga, Galaganatha and Papanatha, and the southern Dravida stepped tower at Sangameshwara, Virupaksha and Mallikarjuna. The Virupaksha was built by Queen Lokamahadevi to mark Vikramaditya II's campaign against Kanchi, and its inscriptions name the architects. Inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1987.
Badami	Bayaluseeme	विरासत	Four rock-cut caves in a red sandstone cliff above the Agastya tank — three Brahmanical and one Jain — of which Cave 3 carries a dated inscription of 578. Across the water stand the Bhutanatha temple groups and above them the fort. The whole site works because the sandstone is horizontally bedded and cuts cleanly.
Aihole	Bayaluseeme	विरासत	Over a hundred temples of the fifth to eighth centuries scattered through and around a village — the apsidal Durga temple with its colonnaded ambulatory, the flat-roofed Lad Khan, the Huchimalli and the Jain Meguti on the hill. It is usually described as an architectural laboratory, and for once the phrase is accurate.
Meguti hill inscription	Bayaluseeme	विरासत	A Sanskrit prashasti composed by the court poet Ravikirti on the Meguti temple at Aihole, dated to 634, recording Pulakeshin II's defeat of Harsha and naming Kalidasa and Bharavi as the standard against which the poet measures himself. It is one of the firmest dating anchors in Indian literary history.
Mahakuta and Banashankari	Bayaluseeme	तीर्थ	Mahakuta is a cluster of early Chalukya shrines around a spring-fed tank a few kilometres from Badami; Banashankari, closer to the town, has a large stepped tank and draws the Malaprabha valley's biggest fair.
Kudalasangama	Bayaluseeme	तीर्थ	Where the Malaprabha meets the Krishna, and the site of Basavanna's samadhi. The older Sangameshwara temple stands partly below the reservoir level and is reached by a lift built into a shaft; the modern complex above is a centre of the Sharana tradition.
Basavana Bagewadi	Bayaluseeme	तीर्थ	Basavanna's birthplace, a small town with a Chalukya-period Nandeeshwara temple and a memorial complex. Between here and Kudalasangama, this plain holds both ends of his life while the events of it happened on the plateau to the east.
Gol Gumbaz	Bayaluseeme	विरासत	The tomb of Mohammed Adil Shah, completed in 1656, whose dome is about 44 metres across inside — among the largest masonry domes ever built, and carried on eight intersecting arches that transfer its load without external buttressing. The whispering gallery at the drum returns a sound many times over, which makes it almost unusable when crowded and extraordinary when empty.
Ibrahim Rauza	Bayaluseeme	विरासत	The tomb and mosque of Ibrahim Adil Shah II on a single raised plinth, built in the early seventeenth century and far finer in its stone carving and inscriptional work than the larger Gol Gumbaz. Its proportions are frequently called the best in Deccani architecture.
Bara Kaman, Malik-e-Maidan and Upli Buruj	Bayaluseeme	विरासत	An unfinished mausoleum of twelve arches abandoned at the springing line, a very large sixteenth-century bronze cannon on a bastion, and a watchtower climbed by an external stair. Together they are the rest of the Adil Shahi city, and all three are free to walk into.
Almatti Dam	Bayaluseeme	प्रकृति	The Krishna reservoir whose canals turned the driest districts in Karnataka into cane, grape and raisin country within a generation. The garden below the dam is a local evening destination in its own right.
Gokak Falls	Bayaluseeme	प्रकृति	The Ghataprabha drops about 50 metres over a sandstone lip, with a hanging bridge across the gorge. A hydroelectric installation was built here in 1887 to power the Gokak cotton mill — among the earliest in India — and the mill and the falls have shaped the town ever since.
Saundatti Yellamma	Bayaluseeme	तीर्थ	A hilltop Renuka-Yellamma temple drawing very large crowds, particularly at the Margashirsha full moon. The dedication of girls to the goddess, historically associated with this shrine, was prohibited by the Karnataka Devadasis (Prohibition of Dedication) Act of 1982.
Kittur	Bayaluseeme	विरासत	The fort and palace ruins of the small state whose ruler Chennamma defeated a British force in October 1824 before being taken the following year. A government museum on the site holds arms and inscriptions, and the town's annual utsava marks the battle.
Belagavi Fort and Kamal Basti	Bayaluseeme	विरासत	A moated fort of the late fourteenth century holding a Jain basti with a lotus carved on its ceiling, and two mosques. Belagavi's other landmark is the 1924 Congress session ground, the only session Gandhi presided over.
Halasi	Bayaluseeme	विरासत	An early Kadamba capital in the forested western taluks, with a Bhuvaraha Narasimha temple and a set of smaller shrines. Green, wet and entirely unlike the plain twenty kilometres east.
Lakkundi	Bayaluseeme	विरासत	A village with an extraordinary concentration of later Chalukya temples and stepwells — the Kashivishveshwara with its double shrine and lathe-turned pillars, the Brahma Jinalaya, and a series of finely built wells. The masons here worked in a fine-grained schist rather than sandstone, which is why the carving is sharper than at Badami.
Gadag and Dambal	Bayaluseeme	विरासत	The Trikuteshwara complex at Gadag with its Saraswati shrine and the Veeranarayana temple where Kumaravyasa is held to have composed his Mahabharata; Doddabasappa at Dambal nearby has a stellate plan of remarkable geometric complexity.
Magadi and Attiveri	Bayaluseeme	वन्यजीव	Two shallow tank wetlands that fill after the monsoon and take large numbers of wintering waterfowl — Magadi is known for bar-headed geese, Attiveri for a wide mix of migratory duck and wader.
Bankapura and Kaginele	Bayaluseeme	विरासत	Bankapura's fort holds a peacock sanctuary and a Chalukya-period mosque and temple; Kaginele is the town associated with Kanakadasa and holds his memorial. Haveri district also contains Byadgi, whose chilli market sets the price for the crop nationally.
Hazarduari Palace	Bengal Delta	विरासत	A Greek-revival palace on the Bhagirathi, built between 1829 and 1837 to a design by Duncan Macleod of the Bengal Engineers for Nawab Nazim Humayun Jah. The name means a thousand doors, and a large number of them are false doors set into the walls. It is now a museum holding the Nizamat's arms, paintings and library.
Katra Masjid	Bengal Delta	विरासत	Murshid Quli Khan's congregational mosque and caravanserai of the early 1720s, with corner towers and a raised platform. He is buried under the entrance steps, by his own instruction, so that those entering to pray would pass over his grave.
Khoshbagh	Bengal Delta	विरासत	A walled garden cemetery on the far bank of the Bhagirathi holding the graves of Alivardi Khan, Siraj-ud-Daulah and their household. Reached by boat, and deliberately plain — the contrast with Hazarduari across the water is the point of visiting both.
Nizamat Imambara and Motijhil	Bengal Delta	विरासत	The 1847 imambara facing the palace across the Nizamat compound, and the oxbow lake at Motijhil that was the seat of the Nawabs' earlier establishment. Motijhil is a dead channel of the Bhagirathi, which is why an eighteenth- century power centre now sits beside a pond.
Baranagar terracotta temples	Bengal Delta	विरासत	The Char Bangla group and the Bhavaninath temple, built in the mid-eighteenth century under Rani Bhabani. Small, intensely carved brick temples on a riverbank with almost no visitors, and among the best terracotta panels in the delta.
Nabadwip	Bengal Delta	तीर्थ	Chaitanya's birthplace, born here in 1486, and the town where public congregational sankirtan began. It was also a centre of Navya-Nyaya logic with its own scholastic tradition. The Bhagirathi has shifted repeatedly and the town has moved with it, so the medieval site and the present town are not in the same place.
Mayapur	Bengal Delta	तीर्थ	Across the river from Nabadwip, identified in the late nineteenth century as Chaitanya's exact birth site and since developed as the international headquarters of ISKCON. It draws a very large foreign resident and pilgrim population, which makes it unlike any other pilgrimage town in the delta.
Santipur	Bengal Delta	विरासत	A weaving town and a Vaishnava centre at once — the seat of Advaita Acharya, Chaitanya's senior contemporary, and the source of the finest cotton saris in the delta. Its Ras festival runs on a scale that shuts the town.
Kalna temple complex	Bengal Delta	विरासत	Ambika Kalna's Nabakailash — one hundred and eight small Shiva temples set in two concentric rings, built in 1809 — and the Pratapeswar temple of 1849, whose terracotta panels are the densest surviving narrative brickwork in the region. Built by the Bardhaman raj family on the Bhagirathi bank.
Chandernagore	Bengal Delta	विरासत	A French settlement from 1673 that remained French until a 1949 referendum and was transferred to India in 1950, formally merging in 1954. The Strand, the Sacred Heart Church, the Dupleix residence now serving as a museum, and a street plan with French names survive. Its Jagaddhatri Puja lighting workshops supply illuminations to festivals across the country.
Chinsurah	Bengal Delta	विरासत	The Dutch station from the mid-seventeenth century, ceded to Britain under the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824. The Dutch cemetery with its brick tombs, the old Fort Gustavus site and the Armenian church nearby are what remain.
Bandel Basilica	Bengal Delta	विरासत	The Basilica of the Holy Rosary, founded by Portuguese Augustinians in 1599, sacked in 1632 and rebuilt in 1660; the original 1599 gateway still stands. A ship's mast hangs in the grounds, left as a votive offering by a captain who survived a storm — the most literal object in the delta's European inventory.
Serampore	Bengal Delta	विरासत	Danish Frederiknagore from 1755 until it was sold to Britain in 1845. St Olav's Church, the Danish Tavern and Serampore College — founded in 1818 and empowered to grant degrees by a Danish royal charter — are the fourth European layer on this stretch of river, after the Portuguese, Dutch and French. William Carey's press here printed the Bible into dozens of Indian languages and produced the first Bengali newspapers.
Kumartuli	Bengal Delta	शहरी	A few lanes of workshops in north Kolkata where the year's idols are built. Best visited between August and the first week of Durga Puja, when the frames, the clay coats and the finished images are all visible at once in different workshops on the same street.
Dakshineswar Kali Temple	Bengal Delta	तीर्थ	Built in 1855 by Rani Rashmoni, a woman of a trading caste who built it after the priesthood objected to her endowing a temple at all. Ramakrishna served as its priest for decades, which is what made it a national site rather than a local one.
Belur Math	Bengal Delta	तीर्थ	The Ramakrishna Mission headquarters on the west bank, founded by Vivekananda in 1898. Its main temple, completed in 1938, was designed so that its elevation reads as a temple, a mosque and a church from different angles — an architectural argument, made in stone, about the Mission's position.
Hooghly Imambara	Bengal Delta	विरासत	An 1861 imambara built from Haji Mohammad Mohsin's endowment, with a clock tower whose mechanism is still wound by hand and a two-storey courtyard of Quranic calligraphy. Directly across the river from the Dutch cemetery.
Chandraketugarh	Bengal Delta	विरासत	An excavated mound at Berachampa with occupation from around the third century BCE, producing terracotta plaques of a technical standard the delta did not match again for a thousand years. It sat on a channel that no longer exists, which is why a major ancient site is now in the middle of paddy fields.
Sagar Island and Kapil Muni temple	Bengal Delta	तीर्थ	The island at the Hooghly's mouth where the river meets the sea, and the site of the Gangasagar Mela at Makar Sankranti. The temple has had to be rebuilt more than once because the sea took the earlier ones.
The Varanasi ghats	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	तीर्थ	Around eighty-four stepped ghats along a five-kilometre crescent where the Ganga flows north. Dashashwamedh for the evening aarti, Manikarnika and Harishchandra for cremation, Assi at the southern end — and the best way to see them is from a boat at dawn.
Kashi Vishwanath Temple	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	तीर्थ	One of the twelve jyotirlingas, rebuilt in 1780 by Ahilyabai Holkar, and since 2021 approached through a broad corridor cut from the ghats to the temple — a change that transformed the old city's fabric and remains contested locally.
Sarnath	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	विरासत	Where the Buddha gave his first sermon. The Dhamek stupa, the excavated monastery, and in the museum the Ashokan lion capital that became the emblem of the Republic of India.
Ramnagar Fort and the Ramlila	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	विरासत	The Kashi Naresh's eighteenth-century fort across the river, and the town whose thirty-one-night Ramlila turns its streets and ponds into the sites of the epic, with audiences walking between them each evening.
Sher Shah Suri's tomb, Sasaram	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	विरासत	An octagonal sandstone mausoleum standing on a plinth in the middle of an artificial lake, completed around 1545. Among the finest pre-Mughal buildings in India, and startlingly little visited.
Rohtasgarh Fort	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	विरासत	A vast hill fort on the Kaimur plateau above the Sone, with a circuit of several kilometres, reached on foot. Held in turn by local chiefs, Sher Shah and the Mughals.
Mundeshwari Temple	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	तीर्थ	An octagonal stone temple on a hill, with an inscription read as fourth or fifth century, and claimed locally as the oldest continuously functioning Hindu temple in India. Goats are offered here and released alive.
Jagdishpur	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	विरासत	The seat of Kunwar Singh, the eighty-year-old zamindar who led the 1857 revolt in this region and won his last engagement after crossing the Ganga under fire.
Vindhyachal	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	तीर्थ	A Shakti peetha on the Ganga, with the Vindhyavasini temple and a triangular circuit taking in Ashtabhuja and Kali Khoh. Enormous crowds during Navratri.
Chunar Fort	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	विरासत	A fort on a sandstone spur above the Ganga, beside the quarries that supplied the Ashokan pillars — held by Sher Shah, Akbar and the Company in turn.
Gorakhnath Temple	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	तीर्थ	The principal seat of the Nath sampraday, the yogic order founded by Gorakhnath, with a large Makar Sankranti khichdi mela and a monastic lineage that reaches across north India and into Nepal.
Kushinagar	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	तीर्थ	Where the Buddha died. A reclining Buddha of the fifth century in the Parinirvana temple, the Ramabhar stupa over the cremation site, and monasteries built by half a dozen Buddhist countries.
Maghar	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	विरासत	Where Kabir chose to die, because popular belief held that dying at Kashi guaranteed liberation and dying at Maghar denied it. His samadhi and his mazar stand side by side in one compound, maintained by Hindus and Muslims respectively.
Chirand	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	विरासत	A Neolithic mound on the Ghaghara, occupied from around 2500 BCE, with bone tools and a long unbroken stratigraphy — one of the earliest settled sites in eastern India.
Kesariya and Lauria Nandangarh	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	विरासत	On the northern fringe — a colossal brick stupa at Kesariya, among the tallest in India, and an Ashokan pillar with a lion capital still standing in place at Lauria Nandangarh.
Kaziranga National Park	Brahmaputra Valley	वन्यजीव	Grassland and swamp on the Brahmaputra floodplain holding roughly two-thirds of the world's greater one-horned rhinoceros, plus a very high density of tigers, wild water buffalo and swamp deer. The annual flood is part of the ecology, not an interruption to it.
Majuli	Brahmaputra Valley	प्रकृति	Recognised by Guinness World Records as the largest river island in the world — around 350 km² today and shrinking — and the centre of Assam's Vaishnavite monastic culture — sattras that have kept mask-making, manuscript painting, Borgeet and Sattriya alive continuously since the 16th century.
Kamakhya Temple	Brahmaputra Valley	तीर्थ	On Nilachal Hill above Guwahati, one of the most important Shakta shrines in the subcontinent, with no image in the sanctum — the object of worship is a rock cleft and a natural spring.
Charaideo Maidams	Brahmaputra Valley	विरासत	The burial mounds of Ahom royalty, vaulted brick chambers under earth, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2024 — the first cultural site from the Northeast on the list.
Sivasagar	Brahmaputra Valley	विरासत	The Ahom capital, with the Rang Ghar amphitheatre, the multi-storey Talatal Ghar and Kareng Ghar palaces, and the tank-and-temple complex of Sivadol built by Queen Ambika in 1734.
Manas National Park	Brahmaputra Valley	वन्यजीव	A World Heritage site on the Bhutan border that lost its status to insurgency and poaching and had it restored in 2011 after the local Bodo community itself drove the recovery. Home to pygmy hog, golden langur and hispid hare.
Umananda Island	Brahmaputra Valley	तीर्थ	A Shiva temple on an island widely described as the smallest inhabited river island in the world, in the middle of the Brahmaputra at Guwahati, reached by ferry and home to a small population of golden langur.
Hajo	Brahmaputra Valley	तीर्थ	A town sacred simultaneously to Hindus (Hayagriva Madhava temple), Buddhists (who hold the same temple to be where the Buddha attained nirvana) and Muslims (Poa Mecca).
Jorhat and the tea estates	Brahmaputra Valley	प्रकृति	The centre of the Assam tea industry, with colonial planters' bungalows, the Tocklai Tea Research Institute — the oldest of its kind in the world, founded 1911 — and estates that take guests.
Deepor Beel	Brahmaputra Valley	प्रकृति	A permanent freshwater lake on Guwahati's south-west edge, a Ramsar site and the city's stormwater sink, under continuous pressure from the railway line and landfill on its margins.
Haflong	Brahmaputra Valley	पहाड़	The only hill station in Assam, at around 680 m, with Jatinga nearby — the village known for the disorienting night descent of birds during the post-monsoon fog.
Krishna Janmabhoomi and Dwarkadhish temple	Braj	तीर्थ	The Janmabhoomi complex marks the traditional birthplace; the Dwarkadhish temple of 1814, built by a Gwalior treasurer, is the busiest working temple in the city, particularly at Holi and Janmashtami.
Vishram Ghat	Braj	तीर्थ	The central ghat on the Yamuna, where the evening aarti is performed and from which the twenty-five-ghat circuit of the city is walked.
Banke Bihari Temple	Braj	तीर्थ	Vrindavan's most-visited temple, built in 1864 around an image associated with Swami Haridas. A curtain is drawn across the image every few minutes, on the belief that an unbroken gaze is more than a devotee can bear.
Nidhivan	Braj	तीर्थ	A dense grove of low intertwined tulsi-like trees where Swami Haridas lived. It is emptied of people at dusk and locked, on the belief that the divine couple dances there at night.
Radha Raman, Radha Vallabh and Govind Dev temples	Braj	विरासत	The sixteenth-century foundations of the Gaudiya and Radhavallabhi lines. Govind Dev, built in 1590 with Man Singh's patronage, is the architectural high point — a cruciform, vaulted red-sandstone temple unlike anything else in north India.
Govardhan hill and the parikrama	Braj	तीर्थ	A 21-km circuit around a low sandstone ridge, walked barefoot, and by some pilgrims by prostration over several days. The hill itself is worshipped; devotees do not climb it.
Radha Kund and Shyam Kund	Braj	तीर्थ	Twin tanks regarded in Gaudiya theology as the holiest ground in Braj. The midnight bath at Ahoi Ashtami draws enormous crowds.
Barsana and Nandgaon	Braj	तीर्थ	Radha's and Krishna's villages, each on a hill, each with a temple at the top and a long stone stair. Between them they hold the Lathmar Holi, on consecutive days, in that order.
Gokul, Mahavan and Baldeo	Braj	तीर्थ	The infancy sites east of the Yamuna, and the Dauji temple at Baldeo dedicated to Krishna's elder brother, where the Huranga Holi is played the day after the main festival.
Deeg Palace	Braj	विरासत	The Jat rulers' eighteenth-century garden palace, built around a monsoon-simulating water system with hundreds of fountains fed from two reservoirs. They are run a few days a year, and it is worth timing a visit for.
Keoladeo National Park	Braj	वन्यजीव	A man-made wetland created as a duck shoot by the Bharatpur rulers, now a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the densest concentrations of wintering waterbirds in Asia.
Bateshwar	Braj	तीर्थ	A line of more than a hundred Shiva temples along a bend of the Yamuna, with a large cattle and horse fair each Kartik — the region's Shaiva counterweight.
Government Museum, Mathura	Braj	विरासत	The single best collection of Kushan-period Mathura sculpture, including the red sandstone Buddha images made when the Buddha first began to be shown in human form.
Kusum Sarovar and Manasi Ganga	Braj	विरासत	Eighteenth-century sandstone tanks and cenotaphs built by the Bharatpur Jats on the Govardhan circuit — the finest secular architecture in Braj.
Khajuraho Group of Monuments	Bundelkhand	विरासत	Chandela temples built at the dynasty's height between roughly 950 and 1050, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986 under criteria (i) and (iii). Around twenty-odd survive of an original count usually given as eighty-five, in western, eastern and southern groups, and they are Hindu and Jain together rather than Hindu alone. Architecturally they are the clearest statement of the nagara idiom — a shikhara built up from clustered subsidiary spires so the tower reads as a mountain range rather than a cone, on a raised platform with no enclosing wall, so the building is meant to be walked around and seen whole. Kandariya Mahadeva is the largest. The erotic sculpture that draws the visitors is a fraction of the total programme.
Orchha	Bundelkhand	विरासत	The Bundela capital on a bend of the Betwa — Jahangir Mahal, Raj Mahal, the Chaturbhuj temple built to a height that makes it read as a fort, and a line of sandstone chhatris on the riverbank marking the cremation sites of the Bundela rulers. The Ram Raja temple occupies the Rani Mahal rather than the Chaturbhuj that was built for it, and Rama is worshipped there as a reigning king: the deity receives an armed guard of honour and a state salute, and the temple keeps royal rather than priestly protocol. The legend explains this by a condition attached to the image — that it would stay wherever it was first set down.
Jhansi Fort	Bundelkhand	विरासत	A granite hill fort begun by the Orchha Bundelas in the seventeenth century, later Maratha, and the centre of the 1857 fighting under Rani Lakshmibai. The walls sit directly on the rock with almost no foundation course — the hill is the foundation — which is how most Bundelkhand forts are built.
Datia Palace (Bir Singh Deo Mahal)	Bundelkhand	विरासत	A seven-storey stone palace built by Bir Singh Deo of Orchha in the early seventeenth century, never occupied and never finished internally. It is built entirely of stone and brick with no timber in the structure, and the upper floors are reached by staircases hidden inside the wall thickness.
Kalinjar Fort	Bundelkhand	विरासत	An isolated Vindhyan outcrop rising about 240 m above the plain, the Chandelas' fortress capital from the late tenth century and never taken by direct assault for centuries. The Neelkanth cave temple below the ramparts holds a large blue-black linga; rock-cut tanks inside the walls, of which Koth Tirth is the largest, are what let the fort hold out. Sher Shah Suri was mortally wounded here in 1545 while besieging its Baghela holder.
Mahoba and the Chandela tanks	Bundelkhand	विरासत	The Chandela capital of Paramardideva, and the home ground of the Alha cycle. Madan Sagar and Kirat Sagar are working eleventh-century reservoirs with granite-faced bunds, with island temple ruins standing in the water. The Kajli fair is held here the day after Raksha Bandhan.
Panna Tiger Reserve and the Ken gorge	Bundelkhand	वन्यजीव	Sandstone plateau, gorge and teak forest along the Ken. The reserve lost its entire tiger population to poaching by 2009 and was repopulated from Bandhavgarh, Kanha and Pench in one of the few reintroductions anywhere to have produced a breeding population from zero. The Ken below carries gharial and mugger, protected in the Ken Gharial Sanctuary, and the river is the donor in the Ken–Betwa interlinking scheme.
Panna diamond field	Bundelkhand	विरासत	India's only producing diamond field, worked two ways at once: the mechanised Majhgawan pipe mine south of Panna town, and several hundred shallow pits of roughly eight feet square, each leased to an individual for a small fee and dug and washed by hand. Anything found on a leased pit must by law be surrendered to the government diamond office at Panna, which auctions it and returns the proceeds to the finder less royalty.
Chitrakoot	Bundelkhand	तीर्थ	The Mandakini gorge and the Kamadgiri hill, identified as the place where Rama spent the first years of exile. The five-kilometre barefoot parikrama of Kamadgiri, the ghats at Ramghat, Gupt Godavari's water-floored caves and Sphatik Shila are the fixed points. The town sits astride the Bundelkhand–Bagelkhand boundary and is administered from both sides of it.
Deogarh	Bundelkhand	विरासत	A Betwa-side hill carrying the Gupta-period Dashavatara temple of about the sixth century — among the earliest surviving north Indian stone temples with a shikhara, and effectively the prototype of the form that reaches its height at Khajuraho five centuries later — along with more than thirty Jain temples and hundreds of loose sculptures and inscriptions.
Sonagiri	Bundelkhand	तीर्थ	A hill covered with white Digambara Jain temples, climbed barefoot, and a major site for the Jain merchant communities of the region. The count usually given is seventy-seven temples on the hill and about twenty-six below.
Garhkundar Fort	Bundelkhand	विरासत	A Khangar fort on a low hill, held before the Bundelas took the region in the fourteenth century, and the site the Bundelas' own origin story is told against. It is unrestored and largely unvisited.
Dhubela Museum	Bundelkhand	विरासत	A lakeside museum in Chhatrasal's memorial complex, holding Chandela and Bundela sculpture, arms and inscriptions collected from across the region — the best single place to see what has been recovered from the tank belt.
Charkhari	Bundelkhand	विरासत	A small Bundela state town built around a chain of interconnected lakes fed one into the next, with a hill fort above. Locally called the Kashmir of Bundelkhand — a claim about water rather than about mountains, and it says everything about what is scarce here.
Rahatgarh Fort and falls	Bundelkhand	प्रकृति	A fort on the Bina river with a seasonal fall below it, running only through and just after the monsoon.
Gokarna	Canara Coast	तीर्थ	A Shaiva pilgrimage town on a headland, built around the Mahabaleshwara temple and its Atmalinga. The legend is specific and locally load-bearing — Ravana obtained the linga from Shiva on condition that it not be set on the ground before he reached Lanka; Ganesha, appearing as a boy, contrived to have it set down at Gokarna, where it fixed itself, and Ravana's attempts to wrench it free gave it the name Mahabala. The town keeps its ritual functions intact, with Kotitirtha tank at its centre, and Gokarna is one of the places on this coast where last rites are performed.
Om Beach and the Gokarna beach walk	Canara Coast	समुद्र तट	A sequence of small laterite-headed bays south of the town — Kudle, Om, Half Moon and Paradise — linked by a cliff footpath. Om Beach takes its name from the double curve of its two joined coves. The walk between them is the point; the road reaches only the first two.
Murudeshwar	Canara Coast	तीर्थ	A temple on the Kanduka hill, on a promontory with sea on three sides, carrying a Shiva statue about 37 metres tall and a twenty-storey gopura with a lift to the top. Both are late twentieth-century constructions funded by a local industrialist. The site belongs to the same Atmalinga cycle as Gokarna — Murudeshwar, Dhareshwar, Gunavanteshwar and Sajjeshwar are each held to mark where a piece of the linga's covering fell.
Yana	Canara Coast	प्रकृति	Two black karst limestone monoliths standing out of evergreen forest — Bhairaveshwara Shikhara, about 120 metres, and the smaller Mohini Shikhara. The rock is crystalline limestone in a landscape that is otherwise laterite and gneiss, so the towers are a geological anomaly rather than a scenic one, with a cave shrine at the base of the larger.
Sirsi Marikamba temple	Canara Coast	तीर्थ	The temple of the goddess Marikamba, at the centre of Sirsi town, and the focus of the largest fair in Karnataka. The jatre is held only in alternate years, in odd-numbered years around February or March, when the image is taken out in an enormous chariot and the town's population multiplies for the better part of a week.
Banavasi	Canara Coast	विरासत	The capital of the Kadambas, the first dynasty to rule from within the Kannada country, founded by Mayurasharma in the fourth century. Its Madhukeshwara temple carries work from several later periods, and the town sits inside a loop of the Varada river. It is among the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in Karnataka, and the poet Pampa's line about remembering Banavasi is the single most quoted verse about any Kannada place.
Sonda and the Vadiraja Mutt	Canara Coast	तीर्थ	Swadi, the seat of the small Sonda kingdom, holding the Sode Vadiraja Mutt where the sixteenth-century Madhva teacher Vadiraja Tirtha's brindavana stands, together with Jain bastis and the ruins of the palace. A Jain and a Madhva centre within a few hundred metres of each other is the ordinary condition of this upland, not an exception.
Idagunji	Canara Coast	तीर्थ	The Mahaganapati temple, one of the most visited Ganesha shrines in Karnataka, with a standing two-armed image unlike the seated four-armed form found elsewhere. The Yakshagana troupe that carries the temple's name is the best known in the northern style.
Mirjan Fort	Canara Coast	विरासत	A laterite fort with wide moats and tiered wells beside the Aghanashini, associated with Chennabhairadevi of Gersoppa, who ruled this coast for more than half of the sixteenth century and whom the Portuguese called the Pepper Queen because the pepper they bought came through her ports. The fort is one of the few places where this coast's pre-colonial sea trade is legible on the ground.
Karwar and the Kali estuary	Canara Coast	शहरी	The district headquarters, at the mouth of the Kali, with offshore islands, a long beach and a naval harbour. Rabindranath Tagore stayed here in 1882 with his brother, who was a judge in the town, and wrote about the beach in his memoirs; the beach carries his name. Kurumgad and Devbagh lie offshore, and the Kaiga atomic station and the naval base are both on the same short stretch of coast.
Dandeli and the Kali Tiger Reserve	Canara Coast	वन्यजीव	Moist deciduous and semi-evergreen forest on the Kali, holding tiger, leopard, gaur, black panther sightings and four hornbill species including the great hornbill. The river is dammed at Supa and Kadra and the released flow is what the rafting season runs on. The reserve was formed by combining the Dandeli sanctuary with Anshi National Park.
Aghanashini estuary	Canara Coast	प्रकृति	One of very few rivers on this coast with no dam on its main stem, which is why its estuary still has an intact salinity gradient, mangrove, a working bivalve fishery largely worked by women, and kagga paddy in the surrounding fields. It was added to the Ramsar list of wetlands of international importance in 2024.
Jog Falls	Canara Coast	प्रकृति	The Sharavathi drops about 250 metres in four separate falls — Raja, Rani, Rocket and Roarer. It is worth being precise about where it is. The falls lie on the district boundary, and the viewpoints, the road access and the administrative responsibility are all on the Shivamogga side, so Jog is properly a Shivamogga site reached from this region rather than a site within it. Flow is controlled by the Linganamakki dam upstream, so the falls can be spectacular or nearly dry depending on release.
Unchalli, Magod and Sathodi falls	Canara Coast	प्रकृति	Three falls on the Aghanashini and Bedthi systems, all inside the region and all far quieter than Jog. Unchalli, also called Lushington falls after the officer who reported it in the 1840s, drops into a gorge reached by a forest walk; Magod is a two-stage fall on the Bedthi; Sathodi is a broad low fall in dense forest.
Bhatkal	Canara Coast	विरासत	A port town with a Jain and a Nawayath history side by side. Its older mosques are built in the local temple idiom, in stone with sloping tiled roofs and carved plinths rather than in any imported style, which makes them among the most instructive religious buildings on this coast; its Jain bastis date from the period when the town was a major pepper port.
Mundgod Tibetan settlement	Canara Coast	विरासत	Doeguling, established in the 1960s on land allotted in the semi-malnad plain, and one of the largest Tibetan settlements in India. The Drepung and Ganden monastic universities were re-founded here, so a major Tibetan scholastic institution sits in an Uttara Kannada taluk that also grows maize and cotton.
Ulavi	Canara Coast	तीर्थ	A forest village holding the samadhi of Channabasavanna, nephew of Basavanna and one of the Sharanas who fled Kalyana after the upheaval of the twelfth century. It draws Lingayat pilgrims from across northern Karnataka into what is otherwise deep Kali forest, and the caves around it are part of the pilgrimage.
Gersoppa and the Chaturmukha Basadi	Canara Coast	विरासत	The seat of the Saluva rulers of Gersoppa, on the Sharavathi above Honnavar, with a four-faced Jain basadi of granite standing in forest. The kingdom's wealth came from pepper shipped through Honnavar, and its most consequential ruler was Chennabhairadevi.
Chamba town and the Chaugan	Chenab Valley & Chamba	विरासत	Founded when Raja Sahil Varman moved his capital down from Bharmour in 920 CE and named for his daughter Champavati. The town sits on a terrace above the Ravi around the Chaugan, a level grass esplanade some 800 metres long consolidated from five smaller ones in 1890, which serves as fairground, market, sports field and the site of the Minjar. Chamba's ruling line ran unbroken for a thousand years, which is why its archive of copper-plate charters is the fullest in the western Himalaya.
Lakshmi Narayan temple complex	Chenab Valley & Chamba	तीर्थ	Six stone shikhara temples in one walled courtyard, the principal one built by Sahil Varman in the tenth century, each capped with a wooden roof and slate umbrella against the snow — a Nagara temple wearing a Himalayan hat, and the standard solution in these valleys.
Bharmour and the Chaurasi complex	Chenab Valley & Chamba	तीर्थ	The old capital, Brahmapura, at 2,200 m, with eighty-four shrines around a single paved courtyard. The Lakshana Devi temple here has a carved wooden doorframe of about the seventh century and a brass image made for Raja Meru Varman, and the courtyard's Nandi and Ganesha are brass castings of the same date. Almost nothing else of that age survives anywhere in India in continuous worship.
Chhatrari	Chenab Valley & Chamba	तीर्थ	A village between Chamba and Bharmour whose Shakti Devi temple holds a brass image cast for Meru Varman and inscribed with the name of its maker, Gugga, together with a carved wooden mandapa. Far less visited than Bharmour and of the same period.
Manimahesh Kailash and Dal lake	Chenab Valley & Chamba	तीर्थ	A 5,653 m peak treated as a form of Shiva and, by long-standing convention, not climbed. The pilgrimage goes to the glacial lake at about 4,080 m below it, reached on foot from Hadsar over roughly thirteen kilometres, and the whole yatra is compressed into a few weeks around Radhashtami.
Khajjiar	Chenab Valley & Chamba	प्रकृति	A saucer-shaped meadow at about 1,950 m ringed by deodar, with a floating island in a small lake at its centre and the twelfth-century Khajji Nag temple at its edge. It is heavily visited, and the meadow's drainage and turf have suffered for it.
Dalhousie	Chenab Valley & Chamba	पहाड़	A hill station laid out from 1854 across five ridges, with churches, a colonial mall and views to the Dhauladhar. It functions as the road gateway to Chamba from Pathankot.
Kalatop–Khajjiar Wildlife Sanctuary	Chenab Valley & Chamba	वन्यजीव	Deodar and blue-pine forest between Dalhousie and Khajjiar holding Himalayan black bear, serow, goral and a substantial bird list. Walking tracks run through it and vehicles are restricted.
Pangi and the Sach Pass	Chenab Valley & Chamba	प्रकृति	The Chenab's Himachal stretch, reached from Chamba only over the Sach Pass at 4,420 m, which is open for roughly four months a year. Killar is the administrative centre; the Mindhal Vasuki temple stands above it. When Sach is shut, Pangi is reached from Lahaul via Udaipur, or from Kishtwar down the gorge, which means the valley's practical connections run to two other regions rather than to its own headquarters.
Bhaderwah	Chenab Valley & Chamba	पहाड़	A pine-ringed bowl at about 1,600 m on the Neeru, known locally as Chhota Kashmir. The Vasuki Nag temple is the town's principal shrine, the Kailash Kund lake above it is the destination of an annual yatra, and the Padri pass road links it directly to Chamba. It is the rajmash capital of the region.
Kishtwar	Chenab Valley & Chamba	विरासत	A town on a plateau above the Chenab–Marusudar confluence at about 1,600 m, with its own large open chowgan at the centre and the shrines of Shah Farid-ud-Din and Shah Asrar-ud-Din beside it. It is the gateway to the Paddar sapphire country, to the Machail pilgrimage and, over the Sinthan pass, to the Kashmir Valley.
Machail	Chenab Valley & Chamba	तीर्थ	A village high in the Paddar valley whose Chandi temple draws an annual walking yatra of tens of thousands from Gulabgarh over roughly thirty kilometres. The pilgrimage has grown from a local observance into the largest gathering in the upper Chenab in about four decades.
Kishtwar High Altitude National Park	Chenab Valley & Chamba	वन्यजीव	A park of alpine meadow, glacier and birch above the Marusudar and Kibar valleys, holding markhor, ibex, musk deer and snow leopard. Access is on foot and limited.
Bhuri Singh Museum	Chenab Valley & Chamba	विरासत	Founded on 14 September 1908 and named for the ruling raja, largely to house the Chamba copper-plate and Sharada-script inscriptions and the fountain slabs. It holds the principal collections of Chamba rumals and Pahari painting, and it exists because a Dutch epigraphist working on the state's charters argued that they needed one.
Chamera lake	Chenab Valley & Chamba	प्रकृति	The reservoir on the Ravi below Chamba, used for boating, and the clearest example of what hydroelectric development has done to the valley floor — several such projects are strung along both the Ravi and the Chenab.
Sirpur	Chhattisgarh Plains	विरासत	The Lakshmana temple, built of brick in the seventh century by Vasata, mother of the Somavamshi king Mahashivagupta Balarjuna, and still standing with its moulded and carved brick surface largely intact. Excavation around it has exposed Buddhist viharas, a market street and Jain remains on the same site, so a single Mahanadi-bank town held Shaiva, Buddhist and Jain establishments together. Brick was used in a region with plenty of stone, which is the interesting part.
Rajim	Chhattisgarh Plains	तीर्थ	A temple town on the sandbanks where the Mahanadi, Pairi and Sondur meet. The Rajivlochan Vishnu temple and the Kuleshwar Mahadev shrine out on the riverbed are the oldest parts; the Rajim Maghi Punni Mela runs from Magh Purnima to Mahashivratri and turns the dry riverbed into a temporary town.
Ratanpur	Chhattisgarh Plains	विरासत	The Kalachuri capital of this plain from the eleventh century, with a fort, a set of tanks and the Mahamaya temple. It governed the region for centuries and is now a small town, which is roughly the story of every capital in the interior.
Bhoramdeo	Chhattisgarh Plains	विरासत	An eleventh-century Nagvanshi stone temple at the foot of the Maikal, densely carved with figurative panels, with the Madwa Mahal and Chherki Mahal shrines nearby. The comparison people reach for is Khajuraho; the more useful point is that it marks the exact line where the plain meets the hills.
Tala (Devrani–Jethani temples)	Chhattisgarh Plains	विरासत	Two ruined temples on the Maniyari, and between them the Rudra Shiva figure — a standing image roughly two and a half metres high in which every part of the body is composed of another creature: snakes for limbs, faces at the knees and belly, a lizard, a crab, peacocks. There is nothing else like it in Indian sculpture, and it is usually dated to the fifth or sixth century.
Malhar	Chhattisgarh Plains	विरासत	A site occupied continuously from around the second century BCE, with the Pataleshwar Kedareshwar temple, an inscribed Chaturbhuj Vishnu image and a long excavated sequence. It is where the plain's archaeology is deepest rather than most spectacular.
Ramgarh hill and Sitabenga cave	Chhattisgarh Plains	विरासत	A rock-cut chamber with tiered stone seating, a Brahmi inscription and an acoustic that carries a voice to the back row. It is usually dated to around the third century BCE and frequently described as one of the oldest surviving theatre spaces in India; local tradition also attaches Kalidasa's Meghaduta to the hill, which is a claim rather than a fact.
Girodpuri	Chhattisgarh Plains	तीर्थ	The birthplace of Guru Ghasidas, founder of the Satnam panth, and the site of its tallest jaitkhamb. The Magh Purnima gathering here is one of the two largest in the region.
Damakheda	Chhattisgarh Plains	तीर्थ	The seat of the Dharamdasi lineage of the Kabir panth, and the centre of a very large rural following that sings Kabir's nirgun verse in Chhattisgarhi. Its Magh gathering is a working religious assembly rather than a tourist occasion.
Achanakmar Tiger Reserve	Chhattisgarh Plains	वन्यजीव	Sal forest on the Maikal scarp, part of the Achanakmar–Amarkantak Biosphere Reserve. It is the plain's western wall and the catchment that keeps the Maniyari and the Arpa running.
Barnawapara Wildlife Sanctuary	Chhattisgarh Plains	वन्यजीव	Dry deciduous sal and teak on the Mahanadi's northern side, with a set of forest tanks that concentrate animals in the late dry season. Easily reached from Raipur, which is the main reason to know about it.
Khairagarh	Chhattisgarh Plains	विरासत	Indira Kala Sangeet Vishwavidyalaya, founded in 1956 and the first university in Asia devoted entirely to music and the fine arts, established in a small town by the ruling family who gave their palace to it.
Champa and Raigarh	Chhattisgarh Plains	शहरी	The kosa silk towns. Champa reels and weaves the registered cloth; Raigarh weaves its own and also carries the Kathak gharana built there under Raja Chakradhar Singh, commemorated every year in the Chakradhar Samaroh.
Raipur	Chhattisgarh Plains	शहरी	The plain's largest city and its transport hub, with the Mahant Ghasidas Memorial Museum — a nineteenth-century collection of the region's sculpture and ethnography, and the best single introduction to everything else on this list.
Brihadisvara Temple, Thanjavur	Chola Nadu	विरासत	Rajaraja I's temple, consecrated around 1010, with a vimana of about 60 metres built of granite in a delta that has no stone of its own. Its walls carry the most detailed royal accounts in medieval India — endowments, lamp oil quantities, the names of four hundred temple women, the weight of every donated vessel. Inscribed by UNESCO in 1987.
Brihadisvara Temple, Gangaikonda Cholapuram	Chola Nadu	विरासत	Rajendra I's temple, completed around 1035 at a capital he founded to mark a campaign that reached the Ganga. Its 53-metre vimana curves where Thanjavur's is straight-sided — the son answering the father in the same material. The city around it is gone; the temple and a stepped lion-well are what remain. Added to the UNESCO inscription in 2004.
Airavatesvara Temple, Darasuram	Chola Nadu	विरासत	Rajaraja II's temple of the mid-twelfth century, small beside the other two and far more finely carved — a front mandapa built as a stone chariot with wheels, and a set of miniature panels illustrating the lives of the Shaiva saints. Added to the inscription in 2004.
Nataraja Temple, Chidambaram	Chola Nadu	तीर्थ	The temple of Shiva as dancer, and the only major South Indian temple administered by a hereditary priestly community, the Podu Dikshitars, rather than by the state endowments department. Its Chit Sabha is roofed in gold, its Kanaka Sabha hosts the Natyanjali dance festival, and the Chidambara Rahasyam behind the curtain beside the bronze is, by design, empty space.
Ranganathaswamy Temple, Srirangam	Chola Nadu	तीर्थ	The largest functioning temple complex in the world, on an island between the Cauvery and the Kollidam at the head of the delta, with twenty-one gopurams inside seven concentric walls — the outermost of which contains a living town. Its 72-metre Rajagopuram was completed only in 1987, on foundations laid centuries earlier.
Kallanai — the Grand Anicut	Chola Nadu	विरासत	A 329-metre barrage of unhewn stone laid across the Cauvery, credited to Karikala Chola in roughly the second century, raised and reworked by British engineers in the 1830s, and still doing the job it was built for. It splits the river between the Kollidam flood channel and the delta's irrigation arm — the single decision on which everything downstream depends.
Kumbakonam and the Mahamaham tank	Chola Nadu	तीर्थ	A town of some eighteen major temples within a few square kilometres, arranged around a twenty-acre tank with sixteen mandapas on its steps and wells sunk inside the water itself. The Adi Kumbeswarar and Sarangapani temples are the two poles of the town, and Sarangapani's front mandapa is built as a chariot.
Thanjavur Maratha Palace and Saraswathi Mahal Library	Chola Nadu	विरासत	A Nayak palace taken over by the Bhonsles in 1676, containing the Durbar Hall, a bell tower, an outstanding collection of Chola bronzes, and a library begun by the Nayaks and enormously expanded by Serfoji II — some 49,000 volumes, including around 39,000 palm-leaf and paper manuscripts in Tamil and Sanskrit, plus Marathi, Telugu, Persian and European printed books. Opened to the public in 1918.
Swamimalai	Chola Nadu	विरासत	One of the six Murugan war-houses, sixty steps up an artificial mound, and the working village of bronze casters below it. Both are worth the visit; the foundries are informal and generally happy to be watched.
Thiruvaiyaru	Chola Nadu	विरासत	A temple town on the Cauvery where Tyagaraja lived and where his samadhi stands. For most of the year it is a quiet agraharam street; for five days in January it holds the largest gathering in Carnatic music.
Melattur	Chola Nadu	विरासत	A village of a few thousand people that has performed the Bhagavata Mela dance-dramas annually, in Telugu, in the street outside its temple, for roughly three and a half centuries.
Tharangambadi (Tranquebar) and Fort Dansborg	Chola Nadu	विरासत	A Danish colony from a 1620 treaty between Ove Gjedde, acting for Christian IV, and Raghunatha Nayak of Thanjavur, and Danish until it was sold to Britain in 1845. The fort, the town gate, King's Street and the Ziegenbalg mission church survive; the Tranquebar mission set up the first printing press in India to print Tamil, and produced the first Tamil translation of the New Testament.
Nagapattinam and Nagore	Chola Nadu	विरासत	A port with a two-thousand-year record — a Buddhist monastery endowed by a Srivijayan king, a Chinese-style brick tower demolished in 1867 for building material, three hundred and fifty Buddha bronzes dug out of the sand since the 1850s, and, three kilometres north, the Nagore dargah of Shahul Hamid with its five minarets, whose branch shrines stand in Penang and Singapore.
Velankanni	Chola Nadu	तीर्थ	The Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health, drawing pilgrims of every religion in numbers that rival the largest Hindu festivals here. Its eleven-day feast ends on 8 September; the tonsure, the flag hoisting and the wax votive offerings follow local temple practice closely enough that the borrowing is unmistakable.
Poompuhar (Kaveripoompattinam)	Chola Nadu	विरासत	The Chola port of the Sangam poems, described in the Silappadikaram in enough detail to reconstruct its quarters, and largely taken by the sea. Offshore surveys have found submerged structures; onshore there is a modern art gallery and a beach.
Point Calimere (Kodiakkarai) Wildlife Sanctuary	Chola Nadu	वन्यजीव	Dry evergreen forest, saline swamp and mudflat at the cape where the coast turns west, holding blackbuck, feral horses and an enormous winter congregation of greater flamingo and shorebirds on the Great Vedaranyam Swamp. A Ramsar site.
Muthupet mangroves	Chola Nadu	प्रकृति	The delta's southern lip, where the Cauvery's last distributaries meet the sea in a lagoon of Avicennia mangrove. Boats run from the forest department jetty; the mangrove is also the delta's storm buffer, which 2018 demonstrated.
Vaitheeswaran Koil	Chola Nadu	तीर्थ	A Shiva temple associated with healing and with Angaraka, and the centre of the Naadi palm-leaf reading trade — an industry of hereditary readers claiming to locate an individual's pre-written leaf. Approach with whatever scepticism you brought.
Thirunallar	Chola Nadu	तीर्थ	The Saniswaran temple, and the busiest single day in the Puducherry enclave — the Sani Peyarchi transit, when the crowd waiting to bathe in the Nala theertham runs into lakhs.
Thirubuvanam	Chola Nadu	विरासत	A late Chola temple built by Kulottunga III with a rare Sarabha shrine, in a village better known now for the heavy zari silk woven a street away from it.
Ranchi	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शहरी	The plateau's capital at about 650 m, cool enough that it served as the summer seat of the Bihar administration. The Tribal Research Institute museum at Morabadi, the Sarna sthal at Siramtoli that fills at Sarhul, and the ring of falls within a two-hour drive are the reasons to stop rather than pass through.
Netarhat	Chota Nagpur Plateau	पहाड़	A sal-covered Pat highland at about 1,100 m, the highest inhabited point on the plateau, with sunrise and sunset viewpoints and a residential school founded in 1954 that is a regional institution in its own right.
Betla National Park and Palamau Tiger Reserve	Chota Nagpur Plateau	वन्यजीव	Sal and bamboo forest on the western plateau, part of the first group of tiger reserves declared in 1973. Two Chero-era forts stand inside the forest, which is unusual — most Indian parks have no ruins in them at all.
Hundru Falls	Chota Nagpur Plateau	प्रकृति	The Subarnarekha drops about 98 m over a granite step some 45 km from Ranchi — the plateau's most visited fall, reached down a long flight of steps, and worth nothing at all between March and June.
Dassam and Jonha Falls	Chota Nagpur Plateau	प्रकृति	Dassam on the Kanchi, a broad curtain of about 40 m; Jonha, also called Gautamdhara, a hanging-valley fall reached by a few hundred steps with a small Buddhist shrine at the top. Both are half-day trips from Ranchi.
Lodh Falls	Chota Nagpur Plateau	प्रकृति	The Burha river falls about 143 m off the Pat highland edge — the highest fall on the plateau and the least visited of them, because the approach is a forest road.
Parasnath Hill (Shikharji)	Chota Nagpur Plateau	तीर्थ	At about 1,350 m the highest point in the region, and among the most important Jain pilgrimage sites anywhere — twenty of the twenty-four Tirthankaras are held to have attained liberation here. Pilgrims walk a circuit of roughly 27 km over the ridge and its shrine clusters, most of them barefoot and most of them starting before dawn. The hill also carries the sacred sites of the Santal community who live on its slopes.
Baidyanath Dham, Deoghar	Chota Nagpur Plateau	तीर्थ	One of the twelve jyotirlinga shrines, and the destination of the Shravani Mela, when pilgrims carry Ganga water on shoulder-poles about 105 km on foot from Sultanganj through July and August. Administratively this is Santhal Pargana; culturally it belongs to the Anga and Magadh pilgrimage world that feeds it, and it sits on the plateau's edge rather than in its Santal core.
Hazaribagh and the Sohrai villages	Chota Nagpur Plateau	विरासत	The painted-house belt. Villages in and around Barkagaon and Bhelwara carry Sohrai and Khovar work on their outer walls, repainted each year, and the Sanskriti museum in Hazaribagh town holds the documentation and a standing collection.
Isco rock shelters	Chota Nagpur Plateau	विरासत	Painted rock shelters in the Barkagaon valley whose motifs — concentric forms, horned animals, plant and wheel figures — recur in the Sohrai and Khovar painting done on house walls a few kilometres away. The continuity is the site's real interest.
Maluti temples	Chota Nagpur Plateau	विरासत	Around seventy-two surviving terracotta temples of an estimated hundred and eight, packed into one small village near the Bengal border, built by the Baj Basanta family between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Their brick plaques carry Ramayana scenes, hunting scenes and everyday village life, in the same idiom as the Bishnupur and Birbhum temples across the border.
Seraikela	Chota Nagpur Plateau	विरासत	A small former court town on the Kharkai, and the home of the masked Chhau that carries its name. The mask workshops, the palace and the Chaitra Parva ground are all within a few streets.
Amadubi	Chota Nagpur Plateau	विरासत	The surviving Paitkar scroll-painting village, where a handful of Chitrakar households still paint and sing the scrolls. Now run partly as a rural tourism village.
Saranda forest and the Kolhan ridges	Chota Nagpur Plateau	प्रकृति	One of the largest continuous sal forests in Asia, on banded iron formation ridges that are among the oldest exposed rock on the planet. Ho villages under the Munda-Manki system sit throughout it.
Jamshedpur	Chota Nagpur Plateau	शहरी	Founded in 1907 at the meeting of the Subarnarekha and the Kharkai and named for Jamsetji Tata in 1919 — India's first planned industrial town, laid out with tree-lined arterials before the houses were built. The reason it is here is the iron ore and the water, both within a short radius.
Bhognadih and Ulihatu	Chota Nagpur Plateau	विरासत	The village where Sido and Kanhu Murmu called the Santal Hul on 30 June 1855, and the village where Birsa Munda was born in 1875. Both are memorial sites now, and both are ordinary working villages the rest of the year.
Pandharpur	Desh	तीर्थ	The Vitthal-Rukmini temple on the Chandrabhaga, and the destination of the wari. Vitthal stands with hands on hips on a brick — the posture is the iconography — and pilgrims take darshan by touching the feet, in a queue that on Ashadhi Ekadashi runs for many hours. Chokhamela's samadhi stands at the foot of the temple steps, outside the main structure.
Alandi	Desh	तीर्थ	Dnyaneshwar's samadhi on the Indrayani, where he is recorded as having entered sanjeevan samadhi in 1296 at around twenty-one. His palkhi leaves from here for Pandharpur each Ashadh, and the town's economy is built around the pilgrim year.
Dehu	Desh	तीर्थ	Tukaram's village on the Indrayani, with the stone on which he is said to have sat and the shila temple marking his disappearance in 1650. The second palkhi starts here.
Shaniwar Wada	Desh	विरासत	The Peshwa seat, begun by Bajirao I in 1730 and occupied from 1732 until the fort's interior burned in 1828, leaving the fortification walls, the Delhi Darwaza with its elephant-proof spikes, and the foundations of the palace inside. What survives is the plan of a bureaucracy rather than the look of a palace.
Sinhagad	Desh	विरासत	The fort formerly called Kondhana, on a mesa above Pune, taken in the night action of 1670 in which Tanaji Malusare was killed. It is now also Pune's weekend walk, with pithla-bhakri and curd stalls at the top.
Shivneri	Desh	विरासत	A hill fort above Junnar where Shivaji was born in 1630, with seven successive gateways, rock-cut water cisterns and the Shivai temple the name is drawn from. Junnar below it has one of the largest concentrations of rock-cut Buddhist caves in India.
Rajgad and Torna	Desh	विरासत	Torna is recorded as the first fort taken in 1646; Rajgad, on the ridge opposite, served as the capital for roughly a quarter of a century before the seat moved to Raigad in the Konkan. Rajgad's Balekilla, Padmavati machi and Suvela machi make it the most complete surviving example of Maratha fort planning.
Pratapgad	Desh	विरासत	Built in 1656 above the Koyna valley and the site of the 1659 meeting with Afzal Khan. Its position — a fort in dense forest at the head of a pass — is the argument for why it was built where it was.
Purandar	Desh	विरासत	A double fort, Purandar and Vajragad, where the treaty of 1665 with Mirza Raje Jai Singh was concluded and where Sambhaji was born. Now partly a military area, with restricted access to sections of the upper fort.
Panhala	Desh	विरासत	The largest fort in the Deccan by circuit, with enormous granaries (the Ambarkhana) built for a long siege, and the starting point of the 1660 night escape to Vishalgad. It is inhabited — a town sits inside the walls.
Bhimashankar	Desh	तीर्थ	A jyotirlinga in the crest forest at the source of the Bhima, inside a wildlife sanctuary that protects the Indian giant squirrel, Maharashtra's state animal. Temple and forest are the same site — the sanctuary exists partly because the temple's sacred grove was never cleared.
Jejuri	Desh	तीर्थ	The hill shrine of Khandoba, reached by a long stepped ascent, where devotees throw turmeric powder by the handful until the whole hill is yellow — hence Sonyachi Jejuri, golden Jejuri. Khandoba is worshipped across caste lines and particularly by Dhangar shepherds; his consorts Mhalsa and Banai are drawn from different communities, and the shrine's mythology is explicit about it.
Mahabaleshwar and Panchgani	Desh	पहाड़	Laterite-capped plateau tops at around 1,300 m at the head of the Krishna, developed as the Bombay Presidency's hot-weather station in the 1820s. The same altitude and soil that made it a hill station make it India's principal strawberry ground.
Kaas Plateau	Desh	प्रकृति	A laterite plateau top with almost no soil, which floods in the monsoon and then flowers in successive waves of species for about three weeks after it. It is part of the Sahyadri sub-cluster of the Western Ghats World Heritage Site inscribed in 2012, and daily visitor numbers are capped by permit because footfall destroys the thing people come for.
Kolhapur — Mahalakshmi (Ambabai) temple	Desh	तीर्थ	A stone temple of Chalukyan origin, counted in the Shakta tradition as one of the principal Shakti Peethas and known locally as Ambabai rather than by the Sanskrit name. For a few days in late January and again in early November the setting sun aligns with the sanctum doorway and strikes the image — the Kiranotsav — and the town times its calendar to it.
Sangli and Miraj	Desh	शहरी	Sangli's market yard is one of India's principal turmeric markets, with underground curing pits that let it hold stock across seasons; Miraj next door makes tanpuras and sitars and taught the Kirana gharana. Modern Marathi theatre is dated to a performance staged at Sangli in 1843.
Wai	Desh	विरासत	A Krishna-bank town of seven ghats and Peshwa-period temples, including the Dholya Ganpati, laid out so the river frontage is public architecture. It has been used as a shooting location so often that Marathi and Hindi cinema audiences recognise it without knowing its name.
Bhigwan and the Ujani backwater	Desh	वन्यजीव	The shallow tail of the Ujani reservoir on the Bhima, where lesser flamingos winter in the thousands along with painted storks and glossy ibis. It is an accidental habitat — an irrigation dam built in the 1970s that produced exactly the shallow saline mudflat flamingos feed on.
Naneghat	Desh	विरासत	A rock-cut pass through the crest carrying a Satavahana-era trade route from the Konkan ports up to Junnar, with a cave bearing a long inscription of Queen Naganika and a rock-cut stone jar in which tolls were dropped — nane means coin, and the pass is named for the toll. One of the oldest surviving pieces of transport infrastructure in the Deccan.
Karla and Bhaja caves	Desh	विरासत	Rock-cut Buddhist chaitya halls of the second century BCE to second century CE cut beside the same Konkan-to-plateau trade routes, with Karla's chaitya carrying the largest surviving wooden roof ribs of any Indian cave. Their donors' inscriptions name merchants and guilds, not kings.
Radhanagari Wildlife Sanctuary	Desh	वन्यजीव	Evergreen ghat forest holding one of the largest surviving Indian bison (gaur) populations, and part of the Western Ghats World Heritage Site. The sanctuary sits on top of a bauxite-bearing plateau, which is why its boundaries have been repeatedly contested.
Amber Fort	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	विरासत	The Kachhwaha capital before Jaipur, built up from 1592 under Man Singh I on a ridge above Maota lake, with the mirrored Jai Mandir at its centre. The house's alliance with the Mughal court — sealed by marriage in 1562 and maintained by generations of command in Mughal armies — paid for this building, and is the exact policy that Mewar refused. Part of the Hill Forts of Rajasthan World Heritage inscription of 2013.
Jaipur walled city	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शहरी	Founded on 18 November 1727 by Sawai Jai Singh II and laid out by Vidyadhar Bhattacharya on a grid of nine wards with streets in fixed widths and trades allocated by street. Painted terracotta pink in 1876 for a royal visit and kept that way since by municipal rule. Inscribed as a World Heritage city in 2019 for the plan itself rather than for any single building in it.
Jantar Mantar	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	विरासत	A masonry observatory completed around 1734 — nineteen instruments built at architectural scale because Jai Singh had concluded that brass instruments were too small to be read finely. The Vrihat Samrat Yantra, a 27 m gnomon, resolves local solar time to about two seconds. The Rashivalaya, twelve separate instruments each aligned to a zodiacal sign, exists nowhere else.
Hawa Mahal	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	विरासत	Built in 1799 under Sawai Pratap Singh to a design by Lal Chand Ustad. It is a screen rather than a building — five storeys of pierced jharokhas, in places only one room deep, added to the back of the zenana so that women in purdah could watch processions in the bazaar below. The honeycomb also drives air through the structure, which is where the name comes from.
Jaigarh Fort and the Jaivana cannon	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	विरासत	The fortified arsenal on the ridge above Amber, with a working foundry inside it. The Jaivana, cast there in 1720, was among the largest wheeled cannon in the world and, so far as the record goes, was never fired in action — the arsenal existed to make the point rather than to be used.
Nahargarh Fort	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	विरासत	Built from 1734 on the ridge overlooking the new city, less a fortress than a retreat and a lookout. Its Madhavendra Bhawan, added in the 1880s, is a set of nine identical suites for nine queens, each connected to the ruler's rooms by a separate corridor so that none of them need meet.
Galtaji	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	तीर्थ	A temple complex wedged into a narrow gorge east of Jaipur, built around a spring that fills a chain of kunds. It is worked as a bathing site and is heavily colonised by rhesus macaques, which is what most visitors come for and the reason the site is under pressure.
Samode	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	विरासत	A Rajput thikana seat in the hills north of Jaipur, whose Durbar Hall and Sheesh Mahal carry some of the best surviving araish fresco work in the region — the same technique as Shekhawati's, executed for a court rather than a merchant, and maintained rather than abandoned.
Sanganer	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शहरी	A printing and papermaking town absorbed into Jaipur's southern edge. The block printers and the Kagzi papermakers work in adjoining quarters, and the town also holds the eleventh-century Sanghiji Jain temple, which is older than everything else here by six hundred years.
Bagru	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शहरी	A printing village 30 km west of Jaipur, where the Chhipa quarter still runs the full dabu sequence outdoors — printing yard, dye vats, washing, and cloth spread on open ground to dry.
Nawalgarh	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	विरासत	Founded in 1737 and the best single introduction to Shekhawati, with the densest surviving fresco work and two havelis run as museums — the Podar and the Morarka. The painted subjects here span the whole shift, from Krishna cycles to steam trains and motor cars.
Mandawa	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	विरासत	Founded in the mid-eighteenth century and now the most visited of the fresco towns, with several havelis converted to hotels. The Murmuria and Goenka frontages carry the frequently reproduced images of a train, a motorcar and European figures painted by artists who had seen none of them.
Fatehpur	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	विरासत	Founded in the fifteenth century by the Kayamkhani nawabs and later a merchant town, so its havelis sit on an older Muslim-ruled street plan. One large haveli was bought and restored from 1998 by the French artist Nadine Le Prince and is open as a cultural centre — the first serious conservation intervention in the belt.
Ramgarh Shekhawati	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	विरासत	Founded in 1791 by Poddar merchants who walked out of Churu after a dispute with its ruler and built a town of their own — an entire settlement founded by a commercial quarrel. It has the region's densest cluster of frescoed chhatris and is the least restored of the major towns.
Lakshmangarh	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	विरासत	Laid out in the early nineteenth century on a grid modelled directly on Jaipur's, beneath a fort built on a single rock outcrop. It is the clearest demonstration that the 1727 plan was understood locally as a template rather than as a one-off.
Khatushyamji	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	तीर्थ	The shrine of Barbarik as Shyam, and one of the largest pilgrimage draws in north India. The Phalgun mela brings enormous crowds on foot, and the walking pilgrim traffic from Delhi and Haryana runs through much of the year rather than only at the fair.
Salasar Balaji	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	तीर्थ	A Hanuman shrine established in the mid-eighteenth century, distinctive for depicting the deity with a beard and moustache — an iconography effectively unique to this temple. Its Chaitra and Ashwin full-moon fairs draw crowds comparable to Khatushyamji's.
Sambhar Salt Lake and Shakambhari Devi	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	प्रकृति	A shallow saline basin with no outlet, worked for salt for well over a thousand years and still producing at scale through evaporation pans served by a narrow-gauge line. It is a Ramsar site, listed in 1990, and fills with flamingos and other waterbirds when the monsoon is good. The Shakambhari temple on its edge is the kuldevi shrine of the Chauhans, and local tradition makes the lake the goddess's own doing.
Khetri	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	विरासत	A copper-mining town in the Torawati hills, worked since long before the modern smelter was built there. Its ruler Ajit Singh was the patron who suggested the name Vivekananda to the monk then called Sachchidananda, and provided the turban and the fare for the 1893 journey to Chicago.
Pilani	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	शहरी	The Birla family's home town, and the clearest case of the money coming back as institutions rather than only as buildings — a school, a museum and the engineering institute that grew out of them. It is what the Shekhawati remittance economy looks like when it is spent on the twentieth century instead of on frescoes.
Jaldapara National Park	Dooars & Terai	वन्यजीव	Tall riverine grassland on the Torsa, protected as a sanctuary from 1941 and made a national park in 2014, and holding the largest population of the greater one-horned rhinoceros in West Bengal — second in India only to Kaziranga. The grassland is maintained rather than left alone; without periodic burning and grazing it would become forest, and the rhino would go with it.
Gorumara National Park	Dooars & Terai	वन्यजीव	A small park between the Murti and Raidak, made a national park in 1994, with rhino, gaur, elephant and a set of watchtowers built over salt licks that are the standard way of seeing them. It sits inside a mosaic of tea gardens and forest villages, which is why its animals are constantly in transit across human land.
Buxa Tiger Reserve and Buxa Fort	Dooars & Terai	वन्यजीव	A reserve declared in 1983 running from riverine plain to hill forest against the Bhutan slope, containing the ruins of Buxa Fort — a hill post on the old Bhutan trade route that was later used as a detention camp during the freedom movement. The walk up from Santalabari to the fort is the usual approach.
Chapramari Wildlife Sanctuary	Dooars & Terai	वन्यजीव	A narrow block of forest on the Murti, contiguous with Gorumara, and one of the main crossing points for elephants moving between the foothill reserves. The railway line and a road both pass through it.
Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary and Sukna	Dooars & Terai	वन्यजीव	Sal forest between the Teesta and the Mahananda where the hills meet the plain, and the western anchor of the elephant range. Sukna at its edge is where the toy train begins to climb.
Totopara	Dooars & Terai	विरासत	A single settlement at the foot of the Bhutan hills, home to the Toto — one of the smallest distinct communities in India, with their own Sino-Tibetan language and, since recent decades, their own script. The village sits between the Torsa and the Hauri and has historically traded up into Bhutan as much as down into the plain.
Chilapata forest and Nalrajar Garh	Dooars & Terai	विरासत	A corridor forest between Jaldapara and Buxa, holding the brick remains of a fortification traditionally attributed to the Nal rulers and dated by local tradition to the Gupta period. It is one of very few standing pre-colonial structures in a landscape whose rivers remove everything.
Jayanti	Dooars & Terai	प्रकृति	A village on a wide white riverbed under the Buxa hills, dry enough to walk across in winter and impassable in the monsoon. The Mahakal caves in the limestone above it draw pilgrims at Shivratri.
Coronation Bridge at Sevoke	Dooars & Terai	विरासत	A single-span arch thrown across the Teesta gorge and completed in 1941, carrying the road at the exact point where the river leaves the hills. It is the hinge between the mountains and the plain, and every route to Sikkim and the Dooars passes over or under it.
Jalpesh Temple	Dooars & Terai	तीर्थ	A Shiva temple at Mainaguri whose Sravan mela draws pilgrims walking from across North Bengal with water carried from the Teesta. The present structure is a nineteenth-century rebuilding of a much older foundation.
Bindu, Jhalong and Samsing	Dooars & Terai	प्रकृति	Where the Jaldhaka comes out of the hills on the Bhutan edge — cardamom and orange slopes above, tea below, and a set of small settlements that sit at the exact transition between the ridge economy and the plantation economy.
Jaigaon	Dooars & Terai	शहरी	The market town at the main land crossing into Bhutan, facing Phuentsholing across a gate in a single street. Its bazaar is the clearest place to see the foothill trade that gave the Dooars its name still functioning.
Jalpaiguri town and the Teesta embankment	Dooars & Terai	शहरी	The old administrative and planters' town on the Teesta, with a colonial-era street grid, an embankment built after repeated floods, and the district's Rajbanshi cultural institutions.
Baikunthapur Forest	Dooars & Terai	प्रकृति	A sal forest between Siliguri and Jalpaiguri, associated in local tradition with the Ramayana and with the Baikunthapur raj family, and now an island of old forest inside a rapidly urbanising corridor.
Kedarnath	Garhwal	तीर्थ	A stone temple at about 3,580 m below the Kedarnath and Kharchkund peaks, reached by a walk of roughly 16 km from Gaurikund. The doors close around Bhai Dooj and the deity's worship moves to Ukhimath for the winter, with a lamp left burning inside. In June 2013 a glacial lake burst and a debris flow came down the Mandakini; the temple survived, and the large boulder that lodged behind it and split the flow is now itself venerated.
Badrinath and Mana	Garhwal	तीर्थ	The Alaknanda shrine at about 3,100 m, between the Nar and Narayan ridges under Neelkanth, with a hot spring at the temple steps. Its head priest is by long tradition a Namboodiri Brahmin from Kerala. Mana, three kilometres on, is the last village before the Mana pass and was a Bhotiya trading settlement before it became a viewpoint.
Gangotri and Gaumukh	Garhwal	तीर्थ	The Bhagirathi temple at about 3,100 m, and the glacier snout 18 km further up at Gaumukh where the river emerges. The winter seat of the goddess is Mukhba village near Harsil, and the image is carried down and back each year. The glacier has retreated measurably within living memory, which the temple's own records reflect.
Yamunotri and Kharsali	Garhwal	तीर्थ	The Yamuna shrine under Bandarpunch, reached by a steep walk from Janki Chatti. Its thermal spring is hot enough to cook in, and pilgrims lower rice tied in cloth into it and carry the cooked rice away as prasad. Kharsali across the river is the goddess's winter village.
Valley of Flowers and Nanda Devi National Parks	Garhwal	प्रकृति	A single UNESCO World Heritage property in two parts. The Valley of Flowers is a high hanging valley that flowers for a few weeks after the monsoon breaks and was brought to outside notice by the mountaineer Frank Smythe in 1931. The Nanda Devi Sanctuary — the ring of peaks around India's highest mountain lying wholly within the country — has been closed to visitors since the early 1980s to let it recover.
Hemkund Sahib	Garhwal	तीर्थ	A gurdwara beside a glacial lake at about 4,600 m, identified in the twentieth century with the place of meditation described in Guru Gobind Singh's account of a previous birth, and reached by a hard climb from Govindghat and Ghangaria. A Lakshman temple stands beside it, and the same path serves the Valley of Flowers.
Tungnath and Chandrashila	Garhwal	तीर्थ	The highest of the Panch Kedar shrines at roughly 3,680 m, an easy climb from Chopta through rhododendron and meadow, with the Chandrashila summit an hour above it. It closes for winter like the larger shrines and its deity moves down to Makkumath.
Panch Prayag — Vishnuprayag to Devprayag	Garhwal	तीर्थ	Five named confluences on the Alaknanda — with the Dhauliganga, Nandakini, Pindar, Mandakini and finally the Bhagirathi. At Devprayag the two head-streams join and the river is called the Ganga for the first time, which makes the Ganga one of the few great rivers with an exact address of birth.
Joshimath (Jyotirmath)	Garhwal	विरासत	The winter seat of Badrinath's worship and the site of one of the maths associated with Adi Shankara, with an ancient mulberry tree in the compound. The town sits on old landslide debris, and the subsidence and cracking recorded through the winter of 2022–23 forced evacuations and a public argument about tunnelling and construction on that slope.
Srinagar Garhwal	Garhwal	शहरी	The Panwar capital on the Alaknanda, and the town where the Garhwal school of painting was patronised. Much of the old town was destroyed by the 1894 Gohna lake burst and rebuilt; it is now a university town and the supply point for the upper valleys.
Devprayag	Garhwal	तीर्थ	A vertical town of stone houses stacked above the junction of two rivers of visibly different colours, with the Raghunath temple above them. The Tirtha Purohit families here have held pilgrim genealogies for generations, and the registers are a genealogical archive of northern India.
Tehri Lake and New Tehri	Garhwal	प्रकृति	The reservoir behind one of the world's tallest dams, which drowned the old town of Tehri, its bazaar and around a hundred villages. The displaced were resettled at New Tehri on a ridge above, and the lake is now marketed for watersports — the completed argument that Sunderlal Bahuguna spent decades losing.
Mussoorie and Landour	Garhwal	पहाड़	A ridge station developed from the 1820s, with a cantonment at Landour above it that keeps the older architecture, the deodars and the writers. Trigonometrical stations along this ridge fed the Survey of India's Himalayan work, which has been directed from the Doon below since the nineteenth century.
Dehradun and the Doon valley	Garhwal	शहरी	A valley town on old river gravel that became the country's survey, forestry and military-schooling headquarters — the Survey of India, the Forest Research Institute with its very long colonnaded building of 1929, and the Indian Military Academy. Basmati and litchi grew here before any of that, and are being built over.
Har Ki Dun and the Tons valley	Garhwal	प्रकृति	A cradle valley under Swargarohini reached from Sankri, through villages of stacked timber-and-stone houses with elaborately carved facades. In this valley Duryodhana is worshipped as a village deity and Karna has his own temple downstream — an inversion of the epic's moral order that the residents state matter-of-factly.
Hanol and Jaunsar-Bawar	Garhwal	विरासत	The seat of Mahasu Devta on the Tons, and the ritual centre of a deity whose authority runs across the Jaunsari valleys and well into the Himachal hills beyond. The temple is built in the local timber-laced idiom and the deity's four brother-forms hold defined territories, each with its own priesthood.
Auli and the Kuari pass	Garhwal	प्रकृति	Bugyal slopes above Joshimath, used for grazing in summer and skiing in winter, with the Kuari pass trek — long called the Curzon Trail after the Viceroy who walked it — running along the rim opposite Nanda Devi.
Rishikesh	Garhwal	तीर्थ	Where the Ganga leaves the hills — a town of ashrams, suspension bridges and, since the 1970s, whitewater rafting. It became internationally known after the Beatles stayed at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in 1968, and the abandoned ashram is now open to visitors.
Lansdowne	Garhwal	पहाड़	A small cantonment laid out at the end of the nineteenth century as the regimental centre of the Garhwal Rifles, and still one. Its war memorial and regimental museum record a recruitment relationship that has shaped the demography and the household economy of the whole Pauri belt.
Nokrek National Park and Biosphere Reserve	Garo Hills	प्रकृति	The highest ground in the Garo Hills, declared a national park in 1986 and added to UNESCO's World Network of Biosphere Reserves in 2009. Its significance is botanical rather than scenic — the slopes hold wild populations of Citrus indica, the Indian wild orange, which is among the most primitive citrus known and is treated as part of the ancestral gene pool of the cultivated genus. A National Citrus Gene Sanctuary was established here for exactly that reason.
Balpakram National Park	Garo Hills	प्रकृति	A tableland at about 910 m ending abruptly in a deep gorge above the Simsang. The name is rendered as the land of eternal wind, and in Garo belief this is where the spirits of the dead rest on their way onward — a landscape that is a place in the cosmology rather than a view. It was inaugurated as a national park in December 1987, holds elephant, tiger and wild water buffalo, and carries an unusual plateau flora including pitcher plants and sundews. It forms part of the Garo Hills Conservation Area on India's UNESCO tentative list.
Siju Cave (Siju Dobakkol)	Garo Hills	प्रकृति	A river cave in the limestone above the Simsang near Baghmara, with about 4.7 km of surveyed passage. It was the longest known cave in India until 1981 and now ranks around fourteenth as Meghalaya's Jaintia systems have been pushed further; it is also one of the best-studied, having been explored scientifically from 1922. Tens of thousands of bats live in it, which is why it is also called the Bat Cave.
Tura Peak	Garo Hills	पहाड़	The forested ridge rising to 872 m directly behind Tura town, which itself sits at only 349 m — a climb of over five hundred metres from the main bazaar. There is a walking trail to the top and an observatory, and the colonial Deputy Commissioner kept a summer house there for the same reason anyone climbs it now.
Simsang river	Garo Hills	प्रकृति	The river that organises the region — rising in Nokrek, running east through the hills past Williamnagar and Siju, and crossing onto the plain as the Someshwari. Almost every significant Garo settlement, cave and sanctuary sits on it or on one of its feeders.
Napak Lake and the Siju bird sanctuary	Garo Hills	वन्यजीव	A Simsang backwater below Siju that fills in the monsoon and draws waterfowl in winter, including the Siberian ducks the sanctuary was notified for.
Asanang	Garo Hills	विरासत	The ground north of Tura where the Hundred Drums Wangala Festival has been held since 1976. Empty for most of the year, and the single place where the whole of the region's dance and drum repertoire appears at once.
Chisobibra	Garo Hills	विरासत	The site where Pa Togan Nengminja Sangma led a night attack on a British camp on 12 December 1872 and was killed. The date is observed annually, and the memorial here is the principal site of Garo political memory.
Daribokgre	Garo Hills	प्रकृति	A village on the shoulder of Nokrek, the usual base for walking into the biosphere reserve and the citrus slopes, with community-run accommodation.
Wari Chora	Garo Hills	प्रकृति	A narrow gorge with clear green water in the Rongsu area, reached on foot and by boat and opened to visitors only recently. It is the sort of place the interior is full of and has almost no infrastructure for.
Baghmara and the pitcher plant reserve	Garo Hills	प्रकृति	The southern town on the Simsang, close to the border, with a small reserve protecting Nepenthes khasiana — the carnivorous pitcher plant endemic to these hills and legally protected because of collection pressure.
Rongbang Dare falls	Garo Hills	प्रकृति	A waterfall on the road out of Tura, at its fullest immediately after the monsoon.
Tura Bazar	Garo Hills	शहरी	The commercial centre of A·chik country — jhum produce, chilli, dried fish, bamboo shoot, cane goods and cloth. The dried-fish section is the place to understand what the cuisine is actually built on.
Mendipathar	Garo Hills	शहरी	A small town with an outsized fact attached to it — it holds Meghalaya's first and, so far, only railway station, opened in 2014. The Khasi and Jaintia hills have no railway at all.
Basilica of Bom Jesus	Goa & Gomantak	विरासत	Completed in 1605 and left with its laterite facade unplastered, which is why it looks unlike every other church in Old Goa. It holds the body of St Francis Xavier in a silver casket above a marble and jasper monument, brought down for public veneration in an exposition held roughly once a decade — the most recent ran from November 2024 into January 2025.
Sé Cathedral of Santa Catarina	Goa & Gomantak	विरासत	The largest church in Goa, dedicated to Catherine of Alexandria because the city was taken on her feast day in November 1510. One of its two bell towers collapsed in the eighteenth century and was never rebuilt, so the facade is deliberately asymmetric; the surviving Golden Bell is the one still rung.
Church and Convent of St Francis of Assisi, and the St Augustine tower	Goa & Gomantak	विरासत	The Franciscan church holds carved and gilded woodwork and a floor of Portuguese gravestones; the adjoining convent is the Archaeological Survey's museum. A few hundred metres away, the forty-six-metre stump of St Augustine's is all that is left of a church abandoned in 1835 and collapsed in stages afterwards — Old Goa read in reverse.
Ponda temple cluster	Goa & Gomantak	तीर्थ	Shri Manguesh at Priol, Shri Shanta Durga at Kavlem, Shri Mahalasa at Mardol, Shri Nagesh, Shri Ramnath and others within a few kilometres of each other. None of these deities originated here. They were carried inland from Cortalim, Quelossim, Verna and other Old Conquest villages in the sixteenth century, when temples there were being dismantled, into territory then outside Portuguese control. The buildings that resulted are architecturally unlike temples anywhere else in India — octagonal lamp towers, barrel-vaulted halls, balustrades and chandeliers — because they were rebuilt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by people fluent in the European vocabulary around them.
Fontainhas and Sao Tome, Panaji	Goa & Gomantak	शहरी	The Latin Quarter — narrow lanes of nineteenth-century houses in ochre, indigo and green, with overhanging balcaos, oyster-shell windows and azulejo street plaques. It is a state-notified conservation zone rather than a museum district, and most of the houses are lived in. The colour rule is not decorative folklore; lime-washed walls were repainted after each monsoon and the pigments available locally set the palette.
Fort Aguada	Goa & Gomantak	विरासत	Built from 1612 above the Mandovi mouth to stop Dutch and Maratha shipping, and named for the freshwater spring inside it that watered passing fleets — the water, not the guns, was the strategic asset. Its freestanding lighthouse dates from the nineteenth century, and the lower fort served as Goa's central jail until 2015.
Chapora Fort	Goa & Gomantak	विरासत	A laterite shell on a headland above the Chapora river, rebuilt by the Portuguese in 1717 over an earlier Bijapuri fort and changing hands repeatedly with the Marathas. Almost nothing survives inside; the reason to climb is the river mouth and the reason it is crowded is a Hindi film.
Divar Island	Goa & Gomantak	विरासत	Reached only by ferry, and quiet enough that the ferry is the point. Divar held major temples before 1510; the Church of Our Lady of Compassion stands on one of the sites, and the hill chapel's terrace looks over the whole estuary. Its Bonderam festival in August re-enacts a village boundary dispute with flags and mock fights.
Chorao Island and the Dr Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary	Goa & Gomantak	वन्यजीव	Mangrove on the Mandovi, walked on a raised boardwalk or seen from a canoe at high tide. Kingfishers, herons, egrets and winter migrants, and the clearest place to see what khazan reclamation converted and what it left.
Dudhsagar Falls	Goa & Gomantak	प्रकृति	A four-tier fall of roughly 310 metres on the Mandovi at the Goa–Karnataka boundary, inside the Bhagwan Mahavir sanctuary. The Konkan-to-Deccan railway crosses its face on a viaduct, which is why the classic photograph is taken from a train. It is at full volume from July to September and access is regulated.
Bhagwan Mahavir Wildlife Sanctuary and Mollem National Park	Goa & Gomantak	वन्यजीव	Goa's largest protected area, evergreen and moist deciduous forest on the ghat slope, holding gaur, sambar, leopard, the Malabar giant squirrel and the hornbills. It also contains Tambdi Surla, a small twelfth-century basalt Mahadeva temple of the Kadamba period — the only pre-Portuguese temple in Goa to survive intact, because it stands deep enough in the forest that nobody reached it.
Arvalem caves and waterfall	Goa & Gomantak	विरासत	Rock-cut chambers in laterite, ascribed locally to the Pandavas and by archaeologists to an early Buddhist or Brahmanical excavation, with a seasonal waterfall and the Rudreshwar temple beside them. The rock is soft enough to cut with hand tools, which is why laterite Goa has caves at all.
Usgalimal rock carvings	Goa & Gomantak	विरासत	Petroglyphs pecked into the laterite bed of the Kushavati river at Pansaimol — bulls, deer, a labyrinth, human figures and cup marks, exposed when the river is low and submerged when it is not. They are prehistoric, were only recorded in the early 1990s, and are the oldest human record in the region by a very long margin.
Chandor and the Menezes Braganza house	Goa & Gomantak	विरासत	Chandor was Chandrapura, a Kadamba capital, long before it was a Salcete village. Its Braganza house runs the length of one side of the square, divided between two branches of the family who still live in and show their own wings — a ballroom, a library, Chinese and Belgian imports, and a relic of St Francis Xavier in the family chapel. It is the clearest surviving picture of what the Goan landed household actually was.
Cabo de Rama and the southern beaches	Goa & Gomantak	समुद्र तट	A headland fort held successively by local rulers, the Bijapur Sultanate, the Marathas and the Portuguese, above a coast of small bays — Agonda, Palolem, Patnem and Galgibaga. Galgibaga and Morjim beaches are olive ridley nesting sites and are lit and fenced accordingly between November and March.
Netravali and Cotigao sanctuaries	Goa & Gomantak	प्रकृति	The southern ghat forests, quieter than Mollem. Netravali has the bubbling lake at Budbudyanchi Tali, where gas rises through a temple tank, and both hold Velip and Kunbi villages whose sacred groves — deuracho rai — are the oldest conservation institution in the region.
Mapusa Friday market	Goa & Gomantak	शहरी	The weekly market that supplies half of north Goa — chouriço, para, kokum, bottled recheado masala, banana varieties, hand-thrown pots and toddy vinegar in reused bottles. It runs every Friday morning and is the single best place to see the two kitchens buying from the same stalls.
Goa Chitra, Benaulim	Goa & Gomantak	विरासत	A privately assembled ethnographic collection of Goan agricultural and household implements — khazan tools, toddy-tapping gear, oil presses, palanquins — set beside a working organic farm. It is the only place the material culture of the working landscape is collected in one room.
Bundi Garh Palace and the Chitrashala	Hadoti	विरासत	A palace built up the face of the Taragarh hill in stages from the seventeenth century, reached by a ramp rather than stairs because elephants used it. The Chitrashala inside it holds the fullest surviving programme of Bundi wall painting — Krishna cycles, court processions and hunts worked over a blue-green ground, and the reason the school is recognisable at a glance.
Raniji ki Baori	Hadoti	विरासत	A stepwell commissioned in 1699 by Rani Nathavati, some 46 m deep, with paired stone elephants at the corners and ogee-arched galleries stepping down to the water. It is the largest of several dozen baoris in Bundi — a town that solved its water problem by building downwards rather than damming.
Taragarh Fort	Hadoti	विरासत	The fourteenth-century hill fort above the palace, largely unrestored, with tunnels and rainwater tanks cut into the rock. Rudyard Kipling described the palace complex below it, in Letters of Marque, as the work of goblins rather than of men — a line Bundi has never stopped quoting.
Kota Garh and the Maharao Madho Singh Museum	Hadoti	विरासत	The Kota palace on the Chambal bank, with the Brijnathji temple at its centre — the Kota rulers governed from the eighteenth century as deputies of Krishna, and the arrangement shows up directly in what the Kota painters were commissioned to paint. The museum holds the state's arms, howdahs and a substantial run of Kota painting.
Garadia Mahadev	Hadoti	प्रकृति	A small Shiva shrine on the lip of a gorge where the Chambal runs several hundred feet below through a narrow limestone channel. It is the clearest single view of what the river does to this plateau.
National Chambal Gharial Sanctuary	Hadoti	वन्यजीव	A 400 km river sanctuary declared in 1979, holding the largest surviving gharial population in the world along with mugger, Gangetic dolphin, smooth-coated otter and Indian skimmer. It survives because the river was considered ritually impure and the ravines were considered dangerous, so neither pilgrims nor industry settled on it.
Mukundara Hills Tiger Reserve	Hadoti	वन्यजीव	Notified in 2013 around the older Darrah sanctuary, on a long parallel ridge cut by the Mukandwara pass. Dry deciduous forest, leopard, sloth bear and a small, closely managed tiger population.
Gagron Fort	Hadoti	विरासत	A jal durg wrapped on three sides by the Ahu and Kali Sindh and on the fourth by a moat, built directly onto the rock. Inscribed in 2013 as part of the UNESCO Hill Forts of Rajasthan, and the only one of the six that depends on water rather than height.
Jhalarapatan and the Sun Temple	Hadoti	विरासत	A walled temple town on the Chandrabhaga, with a tenth-century Padmanabh (Sun) temple carrying a tall curvilinear tower and dense figural carving. The Chandrabhaga temple group on the river outside the walls is older still and is the site of the Kartik cattle fair.
Kolvi Buddhist caves	Hadoti	विरासत	Around fifty chambers cut into laterite between roughly 700 and 900 CE, with stupas built to hold a Buddha image in the chamber where relics would once have gone, and a standing Buddha some twelve feet high. Related excavations at Binayaga and Hathiagaud nearby make this the last significant Buddhist landscape in Rajasthan.
Ramgarh crater and the Bhand Deva temple	Hadoti	प्रकृति	A 3.5 km circular structure with a raised rim, identified as a meteorite impact crater and designated a National Geological Monument. A village and a tenth-century temple sit inside it — Bhand Deva, carved densely enough to be called the Khajuraho of Hadoti locally, which is a stretch about scale and fair about idiom.
Sitabari	Hadoti	तीर्थ	A grove of kunds and shrines at Kelwara, associated with Sita's forest exile and with Valmiki's ashram. The Sahariya fair held here on Jyeshtha Amavasya is the community's largest annual gathering, and functions as a marriage market and a livestock market at once.
Shergarh Fort	Hadoti	विरासत	A fort on a loop of the Parvati river, with Buddhist and Jain remains reused in its walls — evidence of a much older settlement on the site than the fort that now names it.
Bhainsrorgarh	Hadoti	विरासत	A small fort on a cliff at the meeting of the Chambal and the Bamani, on the western edge of the Hadoti country where it gives way to Mewar. Now run as a heritage hotel by the family that has held it, which is why it is intact.
Menal	Hadoti	विरासत	A group of Shiva temples of the eleventh and twelfth centuries beside a gorge on the Bundi–Chittorgarh road, with a waterfall that runs only in and just after the monsoon. Administratively Mewar, culturally the western hinge of this region.
Bhimlat Mahadev falls	Hadoti	प्रकृति	A shrine at the foot of a monsoon waterfall dropping into a pool in the sandstone. Dry by November, which is the point about surface water on this plateau — the Chambal runs all year and almost nothing else does.
Bhawani Natya Shala	Hadoti	विरासत	A theatre built in 1921 inside the Jhalawar palace complex by Maharaj Rana Bhawani Singh, laid out on the European proscenium plan he had seen in Parsi theatre — a stage with a pit and machinery, in a princely state of a few thousand square kilometres.
Kurukshetra and Brahma Sarovar	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	तीर्थ	A tank roughly a kilometre long with a masonry ghat on all four sides, and the centre of a circuit of some four dozen tirthas spread across the surrounding plain. The Mahabharata's battlefield is located here by tradition, and the town's ritual calendar is organised around solar eclipses, when hundreds of thousands bathe at the sarovar in a single day.
Jyotisar	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	तीर्थ	A banyan on the Kurukshetra–Pehowa road identified by tradition as the spot where the Bhagavad Gita was delivered. A marble chariot marks it, and the site anchors the Gita Jayanti observances each winter.
Sthaneshwar Mahadev and Sheikh Chilli's tomb, Thanesar	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	विरासत	An old Shaiva temple and tank beside a seventeenth-century Mughal-period tomb complex with a marble dome and a madrasa court, standing on the Harsha ka Tila mound — a settlement sequence running from the Kushana period onward, with the whole of north Indian history stacked in one field.
Panipat battlefields and Kala Amb	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	विरासत	Three battles that decided the control of north India were fought on this ground — in 1526, 1556 and 1761 — because the Yamuna, the Delhi road and the open plain meet here and an army coming from the north-west had nowhere else to be intercepted. Kala Amb marks the 1761 field; the Kabuli Bagh mosque was built after 1526; and the town museum sets out all three.
Dargah of Bu Ali Shah Qalandar	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	तीर्थ	The shrine of a thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Sufi poet, and the reason Panipat has a Persian and Urdu literary layer that the surrounding countryside does not. Its urs draws pilgrims from across north India.
Pehowa	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	तीर्थ	Prithudaka on the Saraswati — a town whose principal business is pind-daan for the dead, and specifically for those who died violently or without rites. Its Chaitra Chaudas fair and its long-established horse and cattle market run in the same weeks.
Rakhigarhi	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	विरासत	A Harappan settlement spread over nine mounds beside a Ghaggar palaeochannel, covering an area that puts it among the largest sites of the civilisation known — a ranking that has shifted as survey extents have been revised. Excavation has produced a planned street grid, drains, a seal workshop and cemeteries; a genome sequenced from one burial here and published in 2019 showed no Steppe pastoralist ancestry, which reframed a long-running argument. A site museum has been built at the village.
Surajkund	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	विरासत	A tenth-century amphitheatre-shaped masonry reservoir attributed to the Tomar rulers, cut into the Aravalli rock so that runoff from the ridge collects in it. The annual crafts mela is held on the ground beside it.
Sultanpur National Park	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	वन्यजीव	A shallow seasonal wetland on the Gurugram–Jhajjar road that fills with migratory waterfowl from November — bar-headed geese, flamingos, pelicans and Siberian visitors. It was designated a Ramsar site of international importance in 2021.
Morni Hills and Tikkar Taal	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	पहाड़	The region's only true hill country, a Shivalik block rising above 1,200 m with two adjacent lakes at different levels and a chir-and-oak forest. It is the exception that proves how flat everything else is.
Farrukhnagar	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	विरासत	A walled town laid out in 1732 by Faujdar Khan around a salt trade — the Sheesh Mahal, the Ghaus Ali Shah baoli and the Delhi Gate survive. The salt works that paid for it were shut down under colonial salt policy in the nineteenth century, and the town has not grown since.
Pinjore Gardens	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	विरासत	A seventeenth-century terraced Mughal garden at the foot of the Shivaliks, built on seven descending levels so a single spring-fed channel runs the whole cascade. Later held by the rulers of Patiala.
Dhosi Hill	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	विरासत	An extinct volcanic cone standing alone above the southern plain, with a crater pond and a temple complex, associated in tradition with the sage Chyavana. It is visible for tens of kilometres in a landscape with nothing else vertical in it.
Hansi and Asigarh Fort	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	विरासत	A brick fort on a mound with occupation levels running back well over a thousand years, and the town where George Thomas, an Irish adventurer, briefly ran a state of his own around 1800.
Agroha Mound	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	विरासत	An extensive mound with material from the third century BCE onwards, including a coin-issuing settlement. It is also the origin place claimed by the Agrawal merchant community, which keeps the site continuously funded.
Nuh, Firozpur Jhirka and the Mewat hills	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	प्रकृति	Aravalli ridges, bunded catchment ponds and the villages of the Meo tract. Kotla lake and the ridge road towards Alwar give the best view of a landform that is otherwise easy to miss from the highway.
Tosham Hill	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	विरासत	A rhyolite outcrop quarried since antiquity, with rock inscriptions, a rock-cut tank and a Baba Mungipa temple on top. The stone from here travelled a long way in the early historic period.
Kangla	Imphal Valley	विरासत	The old walled seat of Meitei rule on the bank of the Imphal river, with moats, ceremonial platforms, ponds and the pair of Kangla Sha — the white dragon-lion figures that guard it. It is the ritual and historical centre of the valley and is open to visitors.
Ima Keithel	Imphal Valley	शहरी	Three market halls at the centre of Imphal in which every one of several thousand stalls is held by a woman. Vegetables, fish and ngari in one, textiles and household goods in another. Stalls pass between generations, the traders are addressed as ima, and the arrangement has functioned for well over a century.
Loktak Lake	Imphal Valley	प्रकृति	The largest freshwater lake in the Northeast, and the only one whose surface is partly solid. Phumdi mats support fishing settlements, floating huts and cut rings of reed, and the lake supplies the valley's fish, its reed craft and its water. A barrage built downstream in the 1980s for hydropower holds the level far steadier than it once was, which has changed how the phumdi behave.
Keibul Lamjao National Park	Imphal Valley	वन्यजीव	The only floating national park in the world — about 40 km² of phumdi, and the last wild habitat of the sangai. The deer walks on a surface that gives under it, which produced the springing gait it is named for. The population was believed extinct in 1951 and a small group was found alive two years later.
Moirang	Imphal Valley	विरासत	The lakeside town of the Khamba-Thoibi epic and of the Thangjing shrine, and the source of the Moirang Phee weave. Its Lai Haraoba is among the most fully observed in the valley.
Shri Govindajee Temple	Imphal Valley	तीर्थ	The Vaishnav temple beside the old palace complex, with twin gilded domes and a large open hall built for Sankirtana and Raas. Raas is performed here on the appointed full moons, and the building's plan is designed around a form of worship that is danced.
Andro	Imphal Valley	विरासत	A fringe village of the Chakpa community known for hand-built pottery, for its old ritual site and for a cultural complex documenting the valley's pre-Vaishnav practice. The pottery is made without a wheel and fired in the open.
Khongjom	Imphal Valley	विरासत	A hillock east of Imphal with a memorial to the fighting of 1891, and the site referred to in the ballad form that carries its name. A memorial day is observed here each April.
Sekmai	Imphal Valley	विरासत	A village on the north-western fringe long identified with distilled rice liquor, and with its own weaving. The name functions in the valley as a designation of origin in its own right.
Kaina	Imphal Valley	तीर्थ	A wooded hillock held to be the site of the eighteenth-century dream in which the king was directed to carve the image of Govindajee from a jackfruit tree — the origin account of the valley's Vaishnav institution and of the Raas that came with it.
Loukoipat and the valley wetlands	Imphal Valley	प्रकृति	Shallow lakes and marsh remnants scattered across the floor, the surviving fragments of the much larger water body the valley once was. They carry migratory waterfowl from November.
Mapal Kangjeibung	Imphal Valley	शहरी	An open ground in the centre of Imphal used for Sagol Kangjei, and described locally as the oldest polo ground still in use anywhere. Matches are played on Manipuri ponies, which stand about twelve hands.
Manipur State Museum	Imphal Valley	विरासत	The valley's collection of textiles, ritual objects, pena and other instruments, manuscripts in Meitei Mayek and the royal boats. The most efficient single introduction to everything else in this file.
Vaishno Devi	Jammu Duggar	तीर्थ	A cave shrine at about 5,200 feet inside the Trikuta massif, where the deity is represented not by an image but by three natural rock pindis. The classical approach is a walk of roughly thirteen kilometres from Katra, now supplemented by a ropeway to the Bhairon temple above the shrine. It receives on the order of a crore of visitors in a good year, which makes it one of the most-visited religious sites in India and the single largest economic fact in the region.
Bahu Fort and Bawe Wali Mata	Jammu Duggar	विरासत	A fort on the left bank of the Tawi, attributed in local tradition to Raja Bahulochan and rebuilt in its present form by the Dogra rulers in the nineteenth century. Inside it is the Kali temple known as Bawe Wali Mata, which the city treats as its presiding deity — Tuesdays and Sundays bring queues that have nothing to do with tourism. The terraced Bagh-e-Bahu garden below it looks across the river to the old city.
Basohli	Jammu Duggar	विरासत	A small town above the Ravi, seat of a hill state from the sixteenth century, and the place where Pahari painting begins. The Rasamanjari illustrations made here around 1680 under Raja Kirpal Pal set the school's conventions — hot red grounds, flat colour, exaggerated eyes and beetle-wing inlay. The old palace is largely gone and much of the surviving painting is in museums elsewhere, which is worth knowing before travelling.
Mansar and Surinsar lakes	Jammu Duggar	प्रकृति	Two spring-fed lakes in wooded Shivalik folds, treated as a pair and often given as the origin of the name Duggar. Mansar has a Sheshnag shrine on its bank around which newly married couples take three circuits, and both are Ramsar-recognised wetlands.
Purmandal	Jammu Duggar	तीर्थ	A temple town on the Devika, a river that runs underground for most of its course and is treated locally as the Ganga's northern counterpart. Its Shivratri fair is the largest in the Samba belt, and pilgrims dig into the sand of the bed to reach the water.
Raghunath Temple complex	Jammu Duggar	तीर्थ	A cluster of seven shrines in the middle of Jammu's old bazaar, begun in 1835 under Gulab Singh and completed under Ranbir Singh. Its interior galleries are lined with niches holding lakhs of saligrams, and its library held one of the more substantial Sanskrit and Persian manuscript collections in the north-west.
Mubarak Mandi	Jammu Duggar	विरासत	The layered palace complex of the Dogra rulers above the Tawi, built and rebuilt from the early nineteenth century in a mixture of Rajasthani, Mughal and colonial Baroque idioms. It is under long-running conservation after decades of neglect, and parts remain propped rather than restored.
Amar Mahal	Jammu Duggar	विरासत	An 1890s palace built for Raja Amar Singh in the manner of a French chateau, on a bluff over the Tawi, now a museum with a Pahari miniature collection and a library.
Akhnoor	Jammu Duggar	विरासत	A Chenab-bank town with a riverside fort and, at nearby Manda, an occupation record reaching back into the Harappan period. The Akhnoor terracotta heads found here — modelled clay faces in a Gandhara-influenced manner — are the region's most important early sculpture.
Patnitop and Sanasar	Jammu Duggar	पहाड़	A deodar-covered ridge at about 2,000 m on the old Jammu–Srinagar road, and the saucer-shaped meadow of Sanasar beside it. Snow from late December, and the point where the region's climate stops being subtropical.
Sarthal Devi	Jammu Duggar	तीर्थ	A forest shrine high above the Bani valley in the upper Kathua hills, reached by a long climb through deodar and reachable by road only in the warmer months. Its fair draws the Bani and Basohli belt rather than outside pilgrims, and the surrounding forest is among the least-visited in the region.
Jhiri	Jammu Duggar	तीर्थ	A village west of Jammu where the largest rural fair in the region is held each Kartik Purnima in memory of Baba Jitto. Farmers arrive with cattle and with grain, and the Karak ballad is sung through the nights.
Shiv Khori	Jammu Duggar	तीर्थ	A natural limestone cave running about 200 m into the hill with a self-formed lingam at its end. The passage narrows enough in places that pilgrims pass one at a time.
Chenab rail bridge at Kauri	Jammu Duggar	विरासत	A steel arch carrying the railway some 359 m above the Chenab — higher above its river than any other railway bridge in the world — completed as part of the line pushed north from Udhampur. It is visible from the road approach and has become the most photographed object in the district.
Ramnagar and the kalari villages	Jammu Duggar	विरासत	A small hill town with a nineteenth-century Dogra palace carrying wall paintings in the Pahari manner, and the acknowledged home of kalari. The cheese is still made in household quantities in the villages around it.
Bidar Fort	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	A laterite plateau cut off by a triple moat hewn from the rock, rebuilt by Ahmad Shah Wali Bahmani after the capital moved here in 1425. Inside are the Rangin Mahal with its mother-of-pearl and tile inlay, the Solah Khamba mosque, the Tarkash Mahal and the Gagan Mahal. The moat is dry, quarried out of the same rock the walls stand on, and is the single most impressive thing on the site.
Mahmud Gawan Madrasa	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	A three-storeyed college built in 1472 by the Bahmani vizier Mahmud Gawan, in the Persian four-iwan plan, once faced entirely in coloured tile and holding a library said to have run to three thousand manuscripts. A magazine explosion and later damage took most of it; one minaret and a wall of surviving tilework stand, and they are enough to show what the whole building did.
Bahmani tombs at Ashtur	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	Twelve domed tombs of the Bahmani sultans in a line on the edge of the plateau, the largest of them Ahmad Shah Wali's, whose interior is painted with Persian calligraphy and floral work in gold and colour that has survived remarkably well.
Barid Shahi tombs and Chaubara	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	The Barid Shahi tombs stand in an open garden, several deliberately left without domes. The Chaubara, a round watchtower at the crossing of the old town's four roads, is the point every direction in Bidar is given from.
Naubad karez	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	A fifteenth-century qanat system cut through the laterite under the town, its line marked by a row of vertical shafts and its water still arriving by gravity. Cleared and partly restored in the 2010s after decades of use as a rubbish tip.
Basavakalyana	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	The Kalyana of the twelfth century, capital of the later Chalukyas and then of the Kalachuris, and the place where the Sharana movement assembled. The old fort and stepwells survive; the Anubhava Mantapa building on the site is a modern memorial rather than a medieval structure, and the town is now a pilgrimage centre for the tradition.
Dargah of Khwaja Bande Nawaz	Kalyana Karnataka	तीर्थ	The shrine of Sayyid Muhammad Gesu Daraz, the Chishti scholar who moved to Gulbarga in old age and died there in 1422. He wrote in Dakhni as well as Persian, which makes him a founding figure of Deccani letters as well as a saint. The complex includes a library of Persian, Arabic and Urdu manuscripts, and the urs fills the city.
Kalaburagi Fort and Jama Masjid	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	The first Bahmani capital. The mosque inside the fort, dated to the later fourteenth century, is roofed across its entire area with a field of small domes instead of being built around an open courtyard — an arrangement almost unique among Indian mosques of its period. The frequently repeated claim that it copies the great mosque at Córdoba is a comparison, not a documented lineage.
Kanaganahalli and Sannati	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	A Buddhist stupa complex on the left bank of the Bhima, excavated between 1994 and 2005, with limestone drum slabs carved in the Amaravati manner and Brahmi inscriptions naming Satavahana kings. Its most famous single object is a relief portrait of a seated king labelled "Raya Asoko" — the only known sculptural portrait of Ashoka identified by name.
Maski	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	A minor rock edict of Ashoka on a granite outcrop, and the one that settled the question of who "Devanampiya Piyadasi" was — Maski is where the edicts name him as Asoka. Found in 1915, and unglamorous to visit, which is part of its interest.
Raichur Fort	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	A doab fort fought over by Vijayanagara and Bijapur for two centuries, with cyclopean masonry in its lower courses and a Kannada inscription recording its construction in 1294. The Ek Minar ki Masjid in the town below carries a single tall Bahmani-style minaret.
Hampi	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	The capital of the Vijayanagara empire from the fourteenth century until its sack in 1565, spread across twenty-six square kilometres of granite boulder landscape on the Tungabhadra. The Vitthala temple's stone chariot and colonnades, the Virupaksha temple still in daily worship, the Krishna and Achyutaraya bazaar streets, the royal enclosure's stepped tank and the aqueduct system are all on the same site. Inscribed on the World Heritage list in 1986.
Anegundi and Tungabhadra Dam	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	Anegundi, on the north bank opposite Hampi, is older than the capital and was its first seat; the Tungabhadra dam a few kilometres downstream, completed in 1953, is what turned the doab into rice country. The two are twenty minutes apart and explain each other.
Itagi Mahadeva Temple	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	A later Chalukya temple of about 1112, called in its own inscription the emperor among temples. Its lathe- turned pillars, ceiling panels and the precision of its jointing are the high point of the Kalyana Chalukya style, and it is almost always empty.
Daroji Sloth Bear Sanctuary	Kalyana Karnataka	वन्यजीव	Scrub and boulder country declared a sanctuary in 1994 specifically for sloth bears, which come out onto the rocks at dusk in numbers that make sightings routine. Also holds leopard, pangolin and a large painted sandgrouse population.
Sandur and the Kumaraswamy temple	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	A wooded valley in the iron-bearing schist hills, with a Kalyana Chalukya-period temple to Kumaraswamy and Parvati, a small palace, and the Lambani craft centre. The contrast between the forested ridge and the mined flank of the same range is visible from the road.
Ganagapur	Kalyana Karnataka	तीर्थ	A Dattatreya shrine on the Bhima associated with Narasimha Saraswati, drawing pilgrims from Maharashtra in larger numbers than from Karnataka. The sangama of the Bhima and Amarja below the town is where most pilgrims bathe.
Yadgir and Surpur	Kalyana Karnataka	विरासत	Yadgir's hill fort has three lines of wall and a long Chalukya-to-Bahmani sequence; Surpur, an hour away, was a small chiefdom with its own painting school and a fort overlooking the Krishna backwater.
Kangra Fort	Kangra & Dhauladhar	विरासत	A long spur fort above the meeting of the Banganga and Majhi, held by the Katoch line and among the oldest continuously contested forts in northern India. Mahmud of Ghazni took its temple treasury in 1009, Jahangir's forces took the fort in 1620, Sansar Chand recovered it in 1786, and the Sikhs took it in 1809. The 1905 earthquake destroyed most of what was still standing, which is why it reads as a ruin rather than a building.
Masroor rock-cut temples	Kangra & Dhauladhar	विरासत	Around fifteen shikhara temples carved downward out of a single sandstone ridge in the eighth century — not built and not assembled, but excavated, in the manner of Ellora, with a tank cut in front reflecting the whole face. The 1905 earthquake sheared off much of the sculpture. It sits on India's UNESCO tentative list rather than the inscribed list.
Baijnath temple	Kangra & Dhauladhar	तीर्थ	A Nagara-style stone temple to Shiva as Vaidyanath, dated by its own inscriptions to 1204 and built by two merchants. It came through the 1905 earthquake essentially undamaged while masonry buildings around it fell, which is the single best argument in the valley for how the old stonework was put together.
Brajeshwari Devi temple	Kangra & Dhauladhar	तीर्थ	A Shakti shrine of very long standing at Kangra town, repeatedly plundered for the wealth pilgrims left in it, flattened in 1905 and rebuilt. Its Navratri crowds come overwhelmingly from Punjab.
Jwalamukhi	Kangra & Dhauladhar	तीर्थ	A temple with no image in it. Natural gas seeping from fissures in the rock burns as a set of small permanent flames, and the flames are the deity. The gilded roof is attributed to Mughal and later Sikh patronage.
Chamunda Devi	Kangra & Dhauladhar	तीर्थ	A goddess temple on the Baner khad below the Dhauladhar, the third of the Kangra Shakti sites and the start of a walking route up to Dharamshala over the ridge.
Dharamshala and McLeodganj	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शहरी	Two towns stacked five hundred metres apart on one slope. The lower is a Himachal district headquarters; the upper is a British-era cantonment settlement that has been the seat of the 14th Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration since 1960. The Tsuglagkhang complex, Namgyal Monastery and the Tibetan Museum are all within a few hundred metres of each other at the top.
St John in the Wilderness	Kangra & Dhauladhar	विरासत	A neo-Gothic church of 1852 in a deodar grove below McLeodganj, holding the grave of Lord Elgin, who died as Viceroy in 1863 and had asked to be buried where the country reminded him of Scotland. Its stained glass survived 1905; its spire did not.
Norbulingka Institute	Kangra & Dhauladhar	विरासत	A campus founded in 1988 to teach thangka painting, appliqué, wood carving and copper statue-making, built around Japanese-influenced gardens and named for the Dalai Lama's summer palace at Lhasa. It is a craft school functioning as an archive.
Bir and Billing	Kangra & Dhauladhar	पहाड़	Billing, the take-off meadow, sits at about 2,400 m; Bir, the landing ground, at about 1,400 m. The consistent thermals off the Dhauladhar face make it one of the most reliable paragliding sites in Asia, and it hosted the Paragliding World Cup in 2015. Bir also holds a Tibetan settlement and the Palpung Sherabling monastery.
Palampur tea gardens	Kangra & Dhauladhar	प्रकृति	Gardens laid out on the free-draining torrent fans between Palampur and Baijnath from 1849 onwards, with the Dhauladhar directly behind them. The area under tea is a fraction of its nineteenth-century extent, and most of what remains is smallholder-grown and processed at cooperative factories.
Andretta	Kangra & Dhauladhar	विरासत	A village of a few hundred people that holds an open-air theatre built by Norah Richards in the 1930s, the house and gallery of the painter Sobha Singh, and a working studio pottery. The concentration is entirely accidental and entirely durable.
Maharana Pratap Sagar (Pong reservoir)	Kangra & Dhauladhar	वन्यजीव	The reservoir behind the Pong dam on the Beas, completed in 1974 and designated a Ramsar wetland in 2002. It takes tens of thousands of wintering waterbirds, including bar-headed geese that have crossed the Himalaya to get here, and it drowned a large tract of the valley's most productive land.
Triund and the Dhauladhar crossings	Kangra & Dhauladhar	पहाड़	Triund at about 2,850 m is the standard first night out of McLeodganj; above it the Indrahar pass at roughly 4,300 m crosses to Chamba on a route Gaddi flocks have used for centuries and trekkers have used for decades.
Barot and the Uhl valley	Kangra & Dhauladhar	प्रकृति	A reservoir village on the Uhl, built for the Shanan hydroelectric scheme commissioned in the early 1930s, with a trout hatchery, a haulage trolley track climbing the ridge to Jogindernagar, and the road head for Chota Bhangal.
Sujanpur Tira	Kangra & Dhauladhar	विरासत	Sansar Chand's second seat, with a very large maidan, a hilltop fort and painted temple murals in the Kangra idiom — the closest thing to a surviving in-situ example of what the court workshops produced.
Nurpur fort and the Brij Raj Swami temple	Kangra & Dhauladhar	विरासत	A ruined fort on the western approach with a temple inside it that holds fragmentary wall paintings, and an unusual dedication in which Krishna and Meera are worshipped together.
HPCA Stadium, Dharamshala	Kangra & Dhauladhar	शहरी	A cricket ground at about 1,450 m with the Dhauladhar wall filling the sightscreen end. It is the reason a great many people first see the range at all.
Dal Lake and the floating gardens	Kashmir Valley	प्रकृति	Not open water but a shallow, worked wetland. The demb gardens are beds of matted weed and lake mud anchored on willow stakes, on which cucumber, melon and tomato are grown; the produce is sold from boats at a floating market that assembles before dawn and disperses by seven. The lake's own villages live on it, and the houseboat frontage is a narrow strip of a much older working landscape.
Mughal gardens — Shalimar, Nishat, Chashme Shahi, Pari Mahal	Kashmir Valley	विरासत	Terraced charbagh gardens laid out along the Zabarwan foot between 1619 and the 1630s, each built around a natural spring and stepped so that water falls from terrace to terrace under its own head, with no pumps. Nishat has twelve terraces for the signs of the zodiac; Shalimar's uppermost terrace was the private one.
Jamia Masjid, Nowhatta	Kashmir Valley	विरासत	Founded at the end of the fourteenth century and rebuilt several times after fire. Its prayer hall is carried on hundreds of single deodar trunks used whole as columns — a timber structural system, not a masonry one, chosen in a valley that both grows deodar and shakes.
Khanqah-e-Moula (Shah-e-Hamadan)	Kashmir Valley	तीर्थ	A wooden khanqah on the Jhelum bank associated with Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani, the fourteenth-century Sufi from Hamadan whose followers are credited with the introduction of several of the valley's crafts. The interior is a catalogue of them — khatamband ceilings, papier-mâché panels and painted woodwork.
Hazratbal	Kashmir Valley	तीर्थ	The white marble shrine on the western shore of the Dal that houses the Moi-e-Muqaddas, displayed to congregations on specific days of the Islamic calendar. The largest single gatherings in the valley happen here.
Charar-e-Sharief	Kashmir Valley	तीर्थ	The shrine of Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani, Nund Rishi, and the centre of the Rishi order — a devotional tradition with roots in both Kashmiri Shaivism and Islam. The town is also where the finest kangris are made.
Martand Sun Temple	Kashmir Valley	विरासत	An eighth-century temple built under Lalitaditya on a karewa with the whole valley below it, ruined but structurally legible — a colonnaded peristyle around a central shrine, in grey limestone, on a plan with no close parallel in the plains.
Avantipora	Kashmir Valley	विरासत	Two ninth-century temples built by King Avantivarman beside the Jhelum, buried under flood silt for centuries and excavated in the nineteenth. The burial is why their carving survived.
Pampore saffron karewa	Kashmir Valley	प्रकृति	About 3,700 hectares of terrace that turn purple for roughly a fortnight from the last week of October. Picking is done before the sun is high and the stigmas are separated the same day, indoors, by the whole household.
Wular Lake and Bandipora	Kashmir Valley	प्रकृति	One of the largest freshwater lakes in Asia and the Jhelum's flood buffer — it absorbs the spring melt and releases it slowly. Water chestnut harvesting from small boats is the lake's own economy.
Dachigam National Park	Kashmir Valley	वन्यजीव	The last stronghold of the hangul, the Kashmir stag — the only red deer in the Indian subcontinent. The park was the maharaja's game reserve, which is why an intact catchment survives so close to a city.
Gulmarg	Kashmir Valley	पहाड़	A meadow at about 2,650 m ringed by fir, with a cable car onto the Afarwat ridge above 3,900 m. Its winter snow is dry and deep because the valley's precipitation arrives cold and from the west.
Pahalgam and the Lidder valley	Kashmir Valley	पहाड़	Where the Lidder comes out of the Kolahoi glacier — pine, grazing and the shepherd tracks over to the Sindh valley. It is also a staging point for the Amarnath pilgrimage in Shravana.
Sonamarg and the Sindh valley	Kashmir Valley	प्रकृति	The last meadow before the Zoji La, at the point where the valley's forest and the Ladakh rain shadow meet within a few kilometres. The road beyond it is the valley's only land link eastward and closes with the first heavy snow.
Lolab valley	Kashmir Valley	प्रकृति	A walnut-and-rice side valley off the northern rim, less built than the Lidder and one of the places the older Kamraz speech is heard unmixed.
Verinag	Kashmir Valley	विरासत	The spring at the foot of the Pir Panjal that is taken as the source of the Jhelum, enclosed in an octagonal stone tank built under Jahangir. The whole basin's drainage begins in a pool you can walk around in a minute.
Hari Parbat and the old city	Kashmir Valley	शहरी	The hill above downtown Srinagar carries a fort and, on its slopes, the Makhdoom Sahib shrine, the Chatti Padshahi gurdwara and the Sharika temple within a short walk of one another. Below it the old city runs along the Jhelum through the bridge quarters — Zaina Kadal, Habba Kadal, Fateh Kadal — where the timber-and-brick dhajji houses, the bakeries and the harissa shops are.
Ajanta Caves	Khandesh	विरासत	Thirty rock-cut Buddhist monuments in a horseshoe gorge above the Waghur, cut in two phases — one around the second century BCE to the first century CE, the second concentrated in roughly 460–480 CE — and holding the largest surviving body of ancient Indian painting. Inscribed by UNESCO in 1983. The caves are administratively in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar district, which is Marathwada, not Khandesh; they lie on the Khandesh-facing scarp of the Ajanta range, about 59 km from Jalgaon and about 104 km from Aurangabad, and almost everyone reaches them from the Khandesh side, which is why they are so often filed here. Ellora, in the same district, is likewise Marathwada.
Toranmal	Khandesh	पहाड़	A plateau at about 1,150 m in the Satpura, the only hill station in the region, with Yashwant lake, the Gorakhnath temple and a wildlife sanctuary around it. Its Mahashivratri fair draws pilgrims from Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat alike, which is a fair description of the whole slope's orientation.
Unapdev	Khandesh	तीर्थ	A hot sulphur spring at the foot of the Satpura, discharged through a carved cow-mouth spout into a stone bathing tank, with a small temple and a fair. Nearby Sunapdev and Nunapdev complete a set of three springs on the same fault-fed system.
Patnadevi and Gautala Autramghat Sanctuary	Khandesh	प्रकृति	A temple in a wooded gorge of the Satmala range with a seasonal waterfall, inside the Gautala Autramghat sanctuary. The mathematician Bhaskara II is placed at Patan nearby by an inscription attributed to his grandson Changadeva, which makes this the working address of the man who wrote the Lilavati in 1150.
Erandol	Khandesh	विरासत	A small town holding the structure known locally as Pandavwada — a large pillared hall of medieval date, later used as a mosque, whose original identity and dating have been contested and litigated. Erandol is also the taluka for Padmalaya, a Ganesh shrine of long standing.
Changdev	Khandesh	तीर्थ	A Hemadpanti-style temple at the confluence of the Tapi and the Purna, associated with the yogi Changdev of the Varkari narrative — the figure to whom Dnyaneshwar's Changdev Pasashti is addressed. He is a different person from Changadeva the astronomer, Bhaskara II's grandson, who is connected with Patan across the district; Khandesh has two Changdevs and they are regularly conflated.
Muktainagar	Khandesh	तीर्थ	Formerly Edlabad, renamed for Muktabai, the youngest of the four siblings of the Dnyaneshwar household and a composer of abhangas in her own right, who is remembered in local tradition as having disappeared in a storm near here. A palkhi and annual observance mark the site, and it is the region's principal claim in the Varkari geography.
Yaval Wildlife Sanctuary	Khandesh	वन्यजीव	Dry deciduous teak forest on the Satpura slope, contiguous with forest in Madhya Pradesh, holding leopard, sloth bear and a substantial bird list. Its value is as a corridor rather than as a destination.
Prakasha	Khandesh	तीर्थ	A temple town on the Tapi at its confluence with the Gomai, called Dakshin Kashi locally, with a cluster of old stone temples on the bank and a Kartik bathing fair. It is the region's principal river pilgrimage.
Sarangkheda	Khandesh	विरासत	Host of one of India's largest horse fairs, held around Dattatreya Jayanti in Margashirsha, where Marwari and Kathiawari horses are traded in the thousands beside the Dattatreya temple on the Tapi. It has been promoted in recent years as the Chetak Festival.
Thalner	Khandesh	विरासत	The first capital of the Faruqi sultans of Khandesh, on the Tapi, with a group of brick-and-stone royal tombs of the fifteenth century that are among the least visited significant monuments in Maharashtra.
Asirgarh Fort	Khandesh	विरासत	A hill fort on the Satpura commanding the pass between the Tapi and Narmada valleys, called the key of the Deccan for exactly that reason. Akbar's long siege of 1600–01 ended the Faruqi sultanate and brought Khandesh into the Mughal empire.
Burhanpur	Khandesh	विरासत	Founded as the Faruqi capital in 1399 and later the Mughal headquarters for the Deccan. Its Shahi Qila, the hammam with painted ceilings, and above all the Khooni Bhandara — an early seventeenth-century underground water system of tunnels and shafts drawing groundwater to the city, parts of which still function — make it the most substantial urban heritage in the Tapi valley. Mumtaz Mahal died here in 1631 and was interred across the river before being moved to Agra.
Bhusawal	Khandesh	शहरी	A railway town rather than a historic one — one of Central Railway's largest junctions and divisional headquarters, with locomotive sheds and marshalling yards, built to move cotton and now moving bananas. It explains more about how this region works than most of its monuments.
Jalgaon	Khandesh	शहरी	The region's largest town, built on banana, cotton, oilseed and gold. Gandhi Teerth, the Gandhi Research Foundation's museum and archive on the edge of town, is an unexpectedly serious research institution for a district headquarters.
Amalner	Khandesh	विरासत	A mill town on the Bori with two claims out of proportion to its size — the Indian Institute of Philosophy, endowed there in 1916 and publisher of the Philosophical Quarterly, where Sane Guruji taught; and the vegetable-oil mill founded in 1945 as Western India Vegetable Products, which is the company that became Wipro.
Mawphlang sacred grove	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	प्रकृति	A dense, mossy, closed-canopy forest kept intact for centuries by the Lyngdoh clan of Hima Mawphlang under a prohibition on removing anything from it — no firewood, no fruit, in the strict account not even a dead leaf carried out. The result is a standing control sample of what the plateau looked like before the grass hills were made, ringed by open monolith fields where the sacrifices were performed. It is protected by taboo and community sanction rather than by forest law, and there are over a hundred such groves across the hills.
Nongriat double-decker root bridge	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	विरासत	Two jingkieng jri stacked one above the other across the same stream below Sohra, reached by a descent of roughly three thousand steps from Tyrna. The stacking is functional — the lower deck is unusable when the stream is in spate, so a second was grown above it. Bridges like these take fifteen to thirty years to become load-bearing and then last for generations, which makes them the opposite investment from a built bridge.
Mawlynnong	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	विरासत	A War Khasi village on the southern slope with its own root bridge at nearby Riwai, known nationally after a travel magazine described it as Asia's cleanest village in the early 2000s — a claim that is a media artefact rather than a survey result, but which reflects a real and organised village practice of communal cleaning directed by the dorbar.
Sohra (Cherrapunji) and Nohkalikai Falls	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	प्रकृति	The rim town that gave its name to the rainfall record, and the waterfall that drops off the escarpment beside it in a single plunge of over three hundred metres into a green pool. Sohra's tableland is bare and lateritic — a reminder that extreme rainfall on a deforested sandstone cap strips soil rather than building it.
Mawsynram and Mawjymbuin cave	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	प्रकृति	The village that holds the highest recorded annual average rainfall of any inhabited place, and a limestone cave above it in which a stalagmite has weathered into a form worshipped as a Shiva lingam. The two facts sit a few hundred metres apart and are visited together.
Nartiang monoliths	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	विरासत	The largest single concentration of standing stones in the hills — upright maw shynrang and flat maw kynthei in a grove at Nartiang, raised between roughly 1500 and 1835 by clans of the village and by lieutenants of the Jaintia rulers, including U Mar Phalyngki, to whom the tallest is attributed. They are memorials and markers of events rather than tombs, and they are the physical record of a society that did not write.
Nartiang Durga temple	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	तीर्थ	A Durga temple of long standing at Nartiang, maintained by a Brahmin priestly line and counted locally among the shakti peethas. It stands a short walk from the monolith field, and the two together show the Jaintia court's absorption of plains Hindu practice alongside indigenous rite.
Krem Liat Prah and the Shnongrim ridge caves	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	प्रकृति	At around thirty-four kilometres of surveyed passage, Krem Liat Prah is the longest cave in South Asia, and it is one of roughly a hundred and fifty known caves in the same limestone ridge. Its main trunk passage is large enough to have been named the Aircraft Hangar. The surveyed length keeps rising as adjacent systems are connected.
Mawsmai and Arwah caves	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	प्रकृति	The two lit and walkable limestone caves near Sohra, the second with visible fossils in its walls — the accessible end of a cave landscape that otherwise requires rope.
Dawki and the Umngot river	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	प्रकृति	The river that runs off the escarpment onto the plain, so clear in the dry months that boats appear suspended above the bed. It is also the working land crossing to Bangladesh, and the point where the hill economy and the plain economy physically meet.
Umiam Lake (Barapani)	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	प्रकृति	A reservoir created by damming the Umiam in 1965 for the region's first large hydro scheme, now the standing view on the road up from the plains to Shillong.
Ïewduh (Bara Bazar), Shillong	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	शहरी	One of the largest traditional markets in the Northeast, and overwhelmingly run by women — vegetables, betel, dried fish, meat, cloth and cane goods across a warren of lanes. The Khasi week traditionally ran to eight days and was named around the market cycle, which tells you where the market sat in the calendar.
Smit	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	विरासत	The ceremonial seat of Hima Khyrim, with the Iing Sad — the thatched ancestral house where the Nongkrem dance is held each November. Quiet for the rest of the year, and worth seeing empty.
Laitlum Canyons	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	प्रकृति	A grassland edge where the plateau falls away into a set of deep valleys, with a stepped footpath descending to Rasong village — the clearest single view of how abruptly this landscape ends.
Kongthong	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	विरासत	The village where each person's name is a tune whistled by their mother at birth. It was India's nomination to the UN World Tourism Organization's best-village programme in 2021, and the practice survives among only a few hundred people.
Thadlaskein lake and Jowai	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	विरासत	Jowai is the Pnar town where Behdienkhlam is held; Thadlaskein, nearby, is a man-made tank attached in local account to a sixteenth-century Jaintia general and his followers, who are said to have dug it with the ends of their bows.
Tabo Monastery	Kinnaur & Spiti	विरासत	Founded in 996 CE and in continuous use since, which makes it one of the oldest functioning Buddhist monastic complexes in the Himalaya. It is built entirely of mud brick, with no exterior ornament at all, and the interior of the main assembly hall carries life-size clay figures set against painted walls in a scheme that has survived a thousand years because the climate is dry and the building was never grand enough to be plundered. It is protected as a monument of national importance, and photography inside is restricted.
Key (Ki) Monastery	Kinnaur & Spiti	विरासत	The largest monastery in Spiti, stacked in tiers up a conical hill above the river near Kaza. Its accreted fort-like form is the result of repeated destruction and rebuilding — rooms added around and on top of what survived, rather than to a plan. It is a Gelugpa establishment and a working teaching monastery, not a monument.
Dhankar	Kinnaur & Spiti	विरासत	The old fort-monastery of Spiti, perched on a crumbling spur above the confluence of the Spiti and Pin, and the seat from which the valley was once administered. The structure is fragile enough that the community has built a new assembly hall below and limits access to parts of the old one. A short walk above it lies a glacial lake.
Kalpa and the Kinner Kailash view	Kinnaur & Spiti	पहाड़	An orchard village on a shelf high above the Sutlej, facing the Kinner Kailash wall across the gorge. The rock pillar on the massif is held to be a form of Shiva and changes colour through the day; the village below it has both an old temple complex and a Buddhist monastery within a few minutes' walk.
Chitkul and the Baspa valley	Kinnaur & Spiti	प्रकृति	The last village up the Baspa, at around 3,450 m, with wooden houses, slate roofs and a temple to the local goddess. Beyond it the valley leads towards the watershed, and the road stops. Sangla, lower down, is the valley's main settlement and the centre of its apple growing.
Kamru Fort	Kinnaur & Spiti	विरासत	A tower fort in kath-kuni above Sangla, associated with the early seat of the Bushahr rulers before the centre moved down the valley. Its stacked timber-and-stone construction and projecting balconies are the clearest example of the technique in the region after Sarahan.
Bhimakali Temple, Sarahan	Kinnaur & Spiti	तीर्थ	Two slate-roofed towers in kath-kuni standing side by side, one older and now unused, at the former seat of the Bushahr state on the shoulder above the Sutlej. It sits just outside Kinnaur district but at the exact threshold this region is about — the last great timber temple before the treeline gives out upstream.
Nako	Kinnaur & Spiti	विरासत	A village on the Hangrang plateau built around a small lake at about 3,600 m, with a group of early temples of the same mud-brick and mural tradition as Tabo. Poplars, barley terraces and flat roofs — the first place on the road up that looks unmistakably trans-Himalayan.
Pin Valley National Park	Kinnaur & Spiti	वन्यजीव	High cold-desert habitat protecting snow leopard, Siberian ibex, blue sheep and Himalayan wolf. The park and the surrounding Kibber landscape have become one of the more reliable places in the world to see a snow leopard in winter, which has produced a small, community-run wildlife tourism economy where none existed.
Kibber, Langza, Komic and Hikkim	Kinnaur & Spiti	प्रकृति	A cluster of villages on the plateau above Kaza, between roughly 4,200 and 4,500 m. Langza sits on marine fossil beds and children sell ammonites at the roadside; Hikkim runs a post office that is among the highest in the world; Komic claims one of the highest villages reachable by motor road.
Kaza	Kinnaur & Spiti	शहरी	The administrative and market centre of Spiti at about 3,800 m, split between an old village and a newer bazaar. Everything in the valley — permits, fuel, medical help, the bus out — happens here, and the town empties in winter.
Reckong Peo and Kalpa bazaar	Kinnaur & Spiti	शहरी	Kinnaur's district headquarters and its apple marketing centre, on the slope above the Sutlej. In September the town is a traffic jam of loaded trucks, and the year's income for most of the district passes through it in about six weeks.
Khab and the Spiti–Sutlej confluence	Kinnaur & Spiti	प्रकृति	Where the Spiti river, grey with rock flour, meets the Sutlej coming in from Tibet. The two waters run different colours below the bridge, and the road forks here — up the Spiti to Kaza, or on towards Shipki.
Nathpa Jhakri and Karcham Wangtoo	Kinnaur & Spiti	शहरी	Large run-of-river hydropower schemes on the Sutlej, with the water diverted through tunnels driven for kilometres inside the mountain. They are the largest single intervention in the region's landscape and its biggest source of outside employment, and the tunnel spoil, the blasting and the slope destabilisation are a standing local grievance.
अलप्पुझा बैकवाटर	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	प्रकृति	नहरों, झीलों और धान के खेतों की जाली जो समुद्र तल से नीचे है और कुट्टनाड प्रणाली में बाँधों के पीछे खेती की जाती है। इसे दोपहर में हाउसबोट से नहीं, भोर में छोटी देसी नाव से देखना सबसे अच्छा है।
मुन्नार	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	पहाड़	1,600 मी की ऊँचाई पर चाय का इलाक़ा जहाँ तीन धाराएँ मिलती हैं, जिसे 1880 के दशक में ब्रिटिश बाग़ान मालिकों ने बसाया। आसपास की ढलानों पर नीलकुरिंजी हर बारह साल में एक बार खिलती है।
फ़ोर्ट कोच्चि और मट्टानचेरी	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	विरासत	एक कहीं पुराने बंदरगाह के ऊपर पुर्तगाली, डच और ब्रिटिश परतें — परदेसी सिनेगॉग (1568), मट्टानचेरी पैलेस के भित्तिचित्र, सेंट फ्रांसिस चर्च जहाँ वास्को द गामा को पहले दफ़नाया गया था, और किनारे पर चीनी मछली-जाल।
पेरियार टाइगर रिज़र्व, थेक्कडी	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	वन्यजीव	एक जलाशय के चारों ओर बना अभयारण्य, इसलिए वन्यजीव नाव से देखे जाते हैं। हाथी, गौर और नीलगिरि लंगूर भरोसेमंद दर्शन हैं; बाघ नहीं।
पद्मनाभस्वामी मंदिर	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	तीर्थ	त्रावणकोर राजघराने का मंदिर, जिसमें देवता 18 फुट लंबे शयन रूप में हैं और तीन द्वारों से दर्शन होते हैं। 1750 में राज्य औपचारिक रूप से देवता को समर्पित कर दिया गया था, जिसके बाद शासकों ने उनके सेवक के रूप में शासन किया।
पश्चिमी घाट — अगस्त्यमला, पेरियार और आनामुडी समूह	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	प्रकृति	पश्चिमी घाट को समेटने वाले शृंखलाबद्ध यूनेस्को विश्व धरोहर स्थल का हिस्सा, जो दुनिया के आठ "सर्वाधिक तप्त" जैव-विविधता हॉटस्पॉट में से एक है और वही कारण है कि केरल में मानसून आता है।
बेकल क़िला	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	विरासत	लैटेराइट का बड़ा समुद्री क़िला, जिसमें बंदूक़ चलाने के लिए ताले के छेद जैसे प्रेक्षण छिद्र कटे हैं, और जो सुदूर उत्तर में अरब सागर के ठीक ऊपर खड़ा है।
अतिरप्पिल्ली जलप्रपात	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	प्रकृति	चालक्कुडी नदी एक चौड़े परदे के रूप में 24 मी नीचे गिरती है, और उसके पीछे उन आख़िरी नदी-तटीय वनों में से एक है जिनमें दक्षिण भारत की चारों धनेश प्रजातियाँ मिलती हैं।
वायनाड	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	पहाड़	कॉफ़ी, काली मिर्च और धान का पठार, जहाँ एडक्कल गुफाएँ हैं — कम से कम 6,000 साल पुराने शैलचित्र — और राज्य के एकमात्र बड़े आदिवासी-बहुल क्षेत्र भी यहीं हैं।
गुरुवायूर	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	तीर्थ	केरल का सबसे अधिक दर्शन किया जाने वाला कृष्ण मंदिर, जिसका अपना हाथी अभयारण्य पुन्नत्तूरकोट्ट में है। ग़ैर-हिंदुओं को गर्भगृह में प्रवेश की अनुमति नहीं है।
Marudhamalai	Kongu Nadu	तीर्थ	A Murugan hill temple on the western edge of Coimbatore, reached by a stepped climb or a bus up the hill road, and busiest on Thai Poosam and on Tuesdays. The hill itself is a spur of the Western Ghats and the view east across the plateau shows the whole flat lee of the gap.
Perur Patteeswarar temple	Kongu Nadu	विरासत	A Shiva temple on the Noyyal with a seventeenth-century Kanaka Sabha hall whose granite pillars carry deeply undercut figures — riders, dancers and mythological groups — carved almost free of their columns. Its foundation is much older than the hall; the sculpture is why people come.
Kodumanal	Kongu Nadu	विरासत	An excavated early-historic settlement on the Noyyal, occupied from roughly the third century BCE to the third century CE, with bead workshops in quartz, carnelian and beryl, iron smelting furnaces, crucible steel production and Tamil-Brahmi inscribed potsherds. It sat on the trans-peninsular route between the Malabar ports and the Coromandel, and its beads and steel went into that trade.
Sangameswarar temple, Bhavani (Kooduthurai)	Kongu Nadu	तीर्थ	A temple at the confluence of the Bhavani and the Cauvery, where the two rivers meet at a stone-stepped bank. The site is used for ancestral rites and for the Aadi Perukku observance, when the rising river is honoured at the water's edge.
Sathyamangalam Tiger Reserve	Kongu Nadu	वन्यजीव	Dry deciduous forest along the Cauvery, declared a tiger reserve in 2013, and the piece of ground that connects the Eastern and Western Ghats. Elephants use it as the link between the Nilgiri forests and the hills to the east, which is the reason it matters out of proportion to its fame.
Hogenakkal	Kongu Nadu	प्रकृति	The Cauvery narrows into a carbonatite gorge and falls in a set of chutes, with round coracles worked by boatmen who spin them deliberately in the current. The rock here is unusual — a carbonate igneous intrusion — and the falls run hardest from July to October.
Yercaud and the Shevaroy Hills	Kongu Nadu	पहाड़	A small hill station at about 1,500 m on an isolated massif above Salem, with coffee, orange and pepper on the slopes and a lake at the top. Reached by a road of twenty numbered hairpins, and far quieter than the Nilgiri stations.
Kolli Hills	Kongu Nadu	पहाड़	A flat-topped range reached by a road of some seventy hairpin bends, holding the Arappaleeswarar temple, the Agaya Gangai waterfall and a long-standing minor-millet and jackfruit farming system that has been the subject of serious conservation work.
Tiruchengode	Kongu Nadu	तीर्थ	A red rock hill carrying the Ardhanareeswarar temple, reached by a stepped climb, with the Ponnar–Shankar tradition of the Annanmar epic attached to the surrounding country. The town below is the centre of India's borewell rig industry, which is not a coincidence — the two things are both about what is under this ground.
Mettupalayam and the Nilgiri Mountain Railway	Kongu Nadu	विरासत	A metre-gauge line opened in 1899 that climbs from Mettupalayam to Udhagamandalam, using an Abt rack and pinion between Mettupalayam and Coonoor to hold a gradient of one in twelve — the steepest railway in Asia. Inscribed in 2005 as part of the Mountain Railways of India. The rack section is the interesting one, and it is where the region's slope ends and the plateau above begins.
Anamalai Tiger Reserve and the Valparai slope	Kongu Nadu	वन्यजीव	The forest block on the southern rim of the gap, rising from dry thorn at the foot to rainforest fragments around the tea estates at Valparai. The lion-tailed macaque persists in those fragments, and the road up carries forty numbered hairpins.
Dhyanalinga and the Velliangiri foothills	Kongu Nadu	तीर्थ	A consecrated linga installed in 1999 in a domed meditation hall at the foot of the Velliangiri hills, built by the Isha Foundation and open to visitors of any faith without ritual. The hills behind it carry a much older barefoot pilgrimage climb undertaken around Shivaratri.
Amaravathi confluence and Pasupatheeswarar temple, Karur	Kongu Nadu	विरासत	Karur stands where the Amaravathi meets the Cauvery and has yielded Roman coins and early-historic material; it is identified with a Chera centre named in the Sangam corpus. The Pasupatheeswarar temple is the town's principal shrine and carries inscriptions from successive dynasties.
Siruvani	Kongu Nadu	प्रकृति	A small river and reservoir in the hills west of Coimbatore, supplying the city and locally held to have the best-tasting water in India — a claim repeated so consistently that it has become part of the city's self-description. The catchment is in forest and access is restricted.
Deomali	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	पहाड़	At 1,672 m the highest point in this stretch of the Eastern Ghats, reached by a motorable road to a bare grassy top with coffee and pepper on the lower slopes. Winter dawns here are below freezing at ground level while the plain a thousand metres below is warm.
Duduma falls	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	प्रकृति	The Machkund drops about 175 m in a single fall at the point where the plateau ends. The river is dammed upstream at Jalaput for a hydro scheme jointly operated by two administrations, so the fall's volume depends on releases as much as on rain.
Chitrakonda and the Balimela reservoir	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	प्रकृति	A large reservoir on the Sileru with forested islands and long arms, and the crossing point for the Bonda hills above it. The reservoir created a fishery where the country had only stream catch, and the launch is the practical road for villages on its far side.
Bonda ghati and Mudulipada	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	विरासत	The steep massif where Remo-speaking Bonda villages sit above 900 m, reached on foot. Visits are best made at the Ankadeli market below rather than in the villages, which are not a display and are approached only with local arrangement.
Gupteswar cave	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	तीर्थ	A limestone cave shrine above the Kolab, approached by a long stair through sal forest, with a Shiva lingam inside and substantial resident bat colonies in the deeper chambers. Busiest in Sravana.
Niyamgiri range	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	पहाड़	A long flat-topped ridge whose porous cap holds water and releases it as perennial streams down every flank — which is why its slopes carry orchard crops rather than field crops. Approached from Bissamcuttack and Muniguda; the hill is a deity to the Dongria Kondh who live on it, and access is a matter of asking, not of ticketing.
Jeypore	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शहरी	The plateau's market town and the seat of the old Jeypore chiefs, whose Dussehra is still the region's largest court festival. The town is the base for Kotpad, Deomali and the surrounding haats.
Sabar Srikhetra, Koraput	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	तीर्थ	A hilltop Jagannath temple built in the early 1970s and open to visitors of any faith and any origin, unlike the parent temple at Puri. Its name claims the Sabara forest origin of the deity directly.
Bhawanipatna	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	शहरी	Kalahandi's town and the seat of the Manikeswari temple, whose Chhatar Jatra at Dussehra is the district's largest gathering. The base for Karlapat and the Ampani hills.
Kotpad	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	विरासत	A weaving village on the Jeypore–Jagdalpur road where the aal-root dye process can be seen from vat to loom. The dyeing yard, not the loom, is the thing worth watching.
Karlapat Wildlife Sanctuary	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	वन्यजीव	Moist deciduous hill forest with sambar, gaur, leopard and a good elephant presence, and the Phurlijharan fall on its edge.
Sunabeda plateau and sanctuary	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	वन्यजीव	A high tableland of grassland, sal and waterfalls at the western edge of the region, the source of the Jonk, and one of the few Odisha landscapes with open grassland at altitude.
Ranipur-Jharial	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	विरासत	A laterite outcrop carrying a circular roofless temple of sixty-four yoginis — one of only a handful of such hypaethral temples anywhere — alongside a brick Someswar Siva temple and scattered shrines. The plan is open to the sky by design, not by ruin.
Harishankar and the Gandhamardan hills	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	तीर्थ	A stream-bed shrine at the foot of the Gandhamardan range, where the water runs over bare rock in a series of slides. The range carries a dense medicinal flora and a long association with herbal knowledge.
Kolab reservoir and gardens	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	प्रकृति	The dam above Koraput, with a terraced garden below it and boating on the reservoir — the standard local outing, and a useful orientation to how the plateau's rivers were re-plumbed in the twentieth century.
Konaseema	Kosta Andhra	प्रकृति	The tract enclosed between the Gautami and Vasishta branches of the Godavari — coconut on every bund, canals instead of roads in places, ferries as ordinary transport, and villages whose ground level is barely above the water in the channel beside them. It is the most distinctive landscape on the Telugu coast and it is entirely man-managed.
Dowleswaram barrage	Kosta Andhra	विरासत	The anicut completed in 1852 that made the Godavari delta what it is, replaced in 1970 by a modern barrage carrying the engineer's name. There is a museum and a memorial at the site, and Sir Arthur Cotton is still garlanded here — a colonial engineer honoured in a way very few are, because the works are still functioning and still irrigating.
Draksharamam	Kosta Andhra	तीर्थ	The Bhimeswara temple, one of the five Pancharama Kshetras and also counted among the Shakta pithas, with an eleventh-century two-storey sanctum and an unusually large inscription corpus on its walls.
Antarvedi	Kosta Andhra	तीर्थ	A Lakshmi Narasimha temple at the point where the Vasishta Godavari meets the sea, with the confluence itself treated as the sacred object. The annual kalyanam and rathotsavam draw very large crowds to a village with one road in.
Ryali	Kosta Andhra	तीर्थ	A small temple holding a single stone image carved as Vishnu on one face and as Mohini on the reverse, so the same block is two deities depending on which side you stand. It is an unusual sculptural solution to a theological point and worth the detour for that alone.
Kolleru Lake and Atapaka	Kosta Andhra	वन्यजीव	A shallow freshwater lake in the sag between the two deltas, designated a Ramsar site in 2002, with breeding pelicans and painted storks at Atapaka. Much of the lake bed was converted into fish and shrimp ponds through the 1990s; a court-ordered demolition drive in 2006 removed a large number of them, and the tension between the lake and the ponds has not resolved.
Coringa mangroves and Hope Island	Kosta Andhra	वन्यजीव	One of the largest mangrove formations in India, at the Godavari's northern mouth, sheltered behind Hope Island — a sandspit that grew across the bay and is the reason Kakinada has a usable harbour. The creeks hold fishing cat, otter and a very large wading-bird population.
Machilipatnam and Pedana	Kosta Andhra	विरासत	The site of the East India Company's first factory on the east coast, established in 1611, and before that a Golconda port trading to Persia and Southeast Asia. The port is gone — a storm surge in 1864 destroyed it and killed tens of thousands — and what remains is a quiet town, a Dutch cemetery and the kalamkari printing units at Pedana a few kilometres inland.
Kuchipudi village	Kosta Andhra	विरासत	An ordinary delta village of a few thousand people that gave its name to a classical dance. The families who held the performing obligation still live here, there is a teaching institution, and the annual village performances are a different proposition from a city recital.
Amaravati stupa site	Kosta Andhra	विरासत	The remains of a very large Buddhist stupa on the Krishna, built and enlarged across several centuries from around the third century BCE and faced with carved limestone. The Amaravati school of sculpture — crowded, fluid, low-relief narrative — is one of the formative styles of Indian art, and much of the surviving carving is now in the British Museum and the Government Museum in Chennai rather than here. The site museum holds what remained.
Nagarjunakonda	Kosta Andhra	विरासत	An Ikshvaku-period capital and monastic complex on the Krishna, excavated and then submerged by the Nagarjuna Sagar reservoir in the 1960s. Selected monuments were dismantled and rebuilt on a hilltop that became an island, which is now reached by launch. It sits at this region's inland limit.
Vijayawada	Kosta Andhra	शहरी	The Krishna's crossing point, dominated by the Kanaka Durga temple on Indrakeeladri and the Prakasam Barrage below it. The rock-cut Undavalli caves with their monolithic reclining Vishnu, the Mogalrajapuram caves and Kondapalli fort with its toy-making village are all within a short drive.
Rajahmundry and the Papikondalu gorge	Kosta Andhra	प्रकृति	The last city on the river before the delta, with the decommissioned 1900 Havelock bridge beside its modern successors, and launches upstream into the Papikondalu gorge where the Godavari cuts through the Eastern Ghats. The boat journey is the only easy way to see the river as it was before the barrage.
Bhimavaram and the Pancharama circuit	Kosta Andhra	तीर्थ	Somarama at Gunupudi in Bhimavaram is one of the five Pancharama Kshetras, and all five — with Draksharamam, Palakollu, Samalkota and Amaravati — lie inside this region, which makes the circuit unusually compact. Bhimavaram itself is better known now as the centre of India's shrimp farming.
Pulicat lake and Nelapattu	Kosta Andhra	वन्यजीव	A shallow brackish lagoon behind a long barrier island, the second largest of its kind in India after Chilika at the other end of this coast. Nelapattu, on its inland side, holds one of the larger spot-billed pelican breeding colonies in the country, in trees inside a village.
Guntur chilli market yard	Kosta Andhra	शहरी	One of the largest chilli markets in Asia, where the Guntur Sannam variety is traded in bulk and graded by hand. It is worth visiting as an economic sight rather than a pretty one; the air in the yard is genuinely difficult and the traders are used to visitors coughing.
Great Himalayan National Park Conservation Area	Kullu & Mandi	वन्यजीव	Inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2014 for its biodiversity. It protects the entire upper catchments of the Tirthan, Sainj and Jiwa Nal — a rare case of whole headwater basins being conserved from ridge to river rather than in fragments — and holds western tragopan, musk deer, Himalayan tahr and brown bear. Entry is on foot from Gushaini and Sairopa.
Naggar Castle	Kullu & Mandi	विरासत	A fifteenth-century seat of the Kullu rajas built in kath-kuni — stone courses alternating with cedar beams, no mortar — around a courtyard on a spur above the Beas. It was the valley's capital until the seat moved down to Sultanpur, and it is the largest intact example of the building system anywhere in the region.
Nicholas Roerich Art Gallery, Naggar	Kullu & Mandi	विरासत	The house where the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich lived from the late 1920s until his death in 1947, holding his Himalayan canvases. He came to the valley after Central Asian expeditions and stayed, which is why a body of Russian modernist painting of the Himalaya exists at all.
Hidimba Devi temple, Manali	Kullu & Mandi	तीर्थ	A four-tiered timber pagoda of 1553 in a deodar grove, built over a rock outcrop that is the shrine itself. The deity is Hidimba of the Mahabharata, worshipped here as a local goddess with a following that has nothing to do with the epic.
Bijli Mahadev	Kullu & Mandi	तीर्थ	A ridge-top temple above the Beas–Parvati confluence, reached by a steep climb, where the lingam is said to be struck by lightning and repaired each time with butter. The staff on the roof is understood locally to draw the strike deliberately.
Raghunath temple and Dhalpur maidan, Kullu	Kullu & Mandi	विरासत	The temple of the Raghunath image installed in the seventeenth century as the ruling deity of Kullu, and the open ground below the town where several hundred village deities assemble for Dussehra. For one week a year the maidan is the region's parliament.
Manikaran	Kullu & Mandi	तीर्थ	A hot-spring settlement in the Parvati gorge where near-boiling sulphurous water comes out of the ground beside a cold river. A Sikh gurudwara and Hindu temples share the site, and the langar rice is cooked by lowering it into the spring rather than over a fire.
Malana	Kullu & Mandi	विरासत	A village up its own nala with its own council, its own body of custom, and a language, Kanashi, unrelated to anything spoken around it. Its deity Jamlu is the source of the village's law. Visitors are asked not to touch houses, people or objects, and the request should be taken seriously.
Chehni Kothi	Kullu & Mandi	विरासत	A tower house in Seraj built in alternating stone and cedar, among the tallest traditional timber structures surviving in the western Himalaya. It lost its upper storeys in the 1905 earthquake and is still standing, which is the argument for the technique in one object.
Jalori pass, Jibhi and the Tirthan valley	Kullu & Mandi	पहाड़	The pass at about 3,120 m divides inner from outer Seraj and is snowbound in winter. Below it, the Tirthan and Jibhi valleys are the walking approach to the national park and hold some of the best-preserved timber temples in the region.
Bhutnath temple, Mandi	Kullu & Mandi	तीर्थ	A stone Shiva temple of the early sixteenth century on the Beas bank, contemporary with the founding of Mandi town itself and the focus of the Shivratri fair.
Panchvaktra temple, Mandi	Kullu & Mandi	तीर्थ	A stone shikhara temple at the meeting of the Beas and the Suketi, holding a five-faced Shiva. It stands low enough on the bank that it has been submerged in major floods and has survived them.
Mandi town	Kullu & Mandi	शहरी	Called Chhoti Kashi for the density of its temples — dozens of them, several sixteenth-century, packed into a small riverside town that was the capital of an independent hill state until 1948. The old bazaar streets and the Sunken Garden are the centre of the Shivratri week.
Prashar Lake	Kullu & Mandi	प्रकृति	A small lake at about 2,730 m with a floating island of matted vegetation that shifts position, and a three-tiered timber pagoda temple to the sage Prashar on its bank. The temple is attributed to a Mandi raja and the carving is among the finest in the region.
Rewalsar	Kullu & Mandi	तीर्थ	A lake sacred simultaneously to Hindus, Sikhs and Tibetan Buddhists, who know it as Tso Pema and hold that Padmasambhava left from here for Tibet. Monasteries, a gurudwara and temples stand around one small body of water, and floating reed islands move on it.
Kamrunag and Shikari Devi	Kullu & Mandi	तीर्थ	Two high ridge shrines. At Kamrunag, pilgrims have for generations thrown gold, silver and coins into the lake as offerings, and nobody retrieves them. Shikari Devi's temple, on a bare summit, famously has no roof.
Basheshwar Mahadev, Bajaura	Kullu & Mandi	विरासत	A stone temple on the valley floor near Bhuntar, generally dated to around the ninth century, with deeply carved exterior panels. It is the oldest substantial building in the Kullu valley and is built in stone rather than timber, which makes it an outlier in its own landscape.
Rohtang and the Atal Tunnel	Kullu & Mandi	पहाड़	The Rohtang saddle at about 3,980 m is the climatic boundary of the region — monsoon on one side, dry trans-Himalaya on the other. The Atal Tunnel, opened in 2020 and just over nine kilometres long, passes beneath it and gave Lahaul year-round road access for the first time.
Pandoh and Larji	Kullu & Mandi	प्रकृति	Two dams in gorges on the Beas. At Pandoh, most of the river is taken into a tunnel system and delivered to the Sutlej basin to generate power — the Beas is, for part of the year, largely absent from its own bed below the dam.
Jageshwar	Kumaon	विरासत	More than a hundred stone temples of the seventh to twelfth centuries standing together in a deodar grove on the Jataganga, with the Dandeshwar group a short walk downstream. The grove is temple property, which is why a stand of very old deodar survives in a district that lost most of its forest to the timber trade. Local tradition counts the shrine among the jyotirlingas, a claim other sites contest.
Baijnath	Kumaon	विरासत	The Katyuri capital's temple group on the Gomti, with a celebrated stone Parvati image in the main shrine. The dynasty's name for its seat, Kartikeyapura, survives only in inscriptions; the temples survive in the open, beside a river the town still bathes in.
Katarmal Sun Temple	Kumaon	विरासत	A ninth-century sun temple on a ridge above the Kosi, oriented so that the early sun reaches the image, with more than forty subsidiary shrines around it. Its elaborately carved wooden doors were removed to a national collection after a theft, and the site is now quiet enough that visitors often have it to themselves.
Bageshwar	Kumaon	तीर्थ	The Bagnath temple at the meeting of the Saryu and Gomti, and the ground of the Uttarayani fair, which was the great trade meeting of the middle hills — Bhotiya wool and salt from above, plains cloth and metal from below. In January 1921 the fair became the site of the mass renunciation of coolie-begar, forced portering, when the registers were thrown into the river.
Almora	Kumaon	शहरी	The Chand capital from the 1560s, laid along a saddle with a paved bazaar running the length of it and carved wooden doorways at first-floor level down both sides. The Nanda Devi temple in the town holds the region's biggest September fair, and the town's twentieth-century roster of visitors and residents is disproportionate for its size.
Binsar	Kumaon	वन्यजीव	A banj oak sanctuary on a ridge that was the Chand rajas' summer seat, with an unbroken view along something like 300 km of the Great Himalaya from Zero Point — Chaukhamba, Trishul, Nanda Devi, Nanda Kot and Panchachuli in one arc on a clear November morning.
Kausani	Kumaon	पहाड़	A ridge village above the Kosi valley facing the Trishul–Nanda Devi wall. Gandhi stayed here in 1929 and wrote part of his commentary on the Gita; the ashram that grew around the house is named for it. Sumitranandan Pant was born in the village.
Nainital	Kumaon	पहाड़	A lake in a tectonic hollow, developed as a hill station from the early 1840s and, from 1862, the summer seat of the North-Western Provinces' government. The Naina Devi temple at the head of the lake is a Shakti Peeth. The landslip of September 1880 killed more than 150 people and produced the flat ground now called the Flats — the town's playing field is the debris.
Mukteshwar	Kumaon	पहाड़	A ridge at about 2,300 m with a Shiva temple at its crest, the cliffs called Chauli ki Jali below it, and a government veterinary research institute established here in the 1890s because the altitude and isolation suited the work.
Ranikhet	Kumaon	पहाड़	A long forested cantonment on a ridge, the regimental centre of the Kumaon Regiment, with a golf course laid out in a natural saddle and pine and oak in every direction. The recruiting relationship between these hills and the infantry is one of the region's largest single economic facts.
Champawat	Kumaon	विरासत	The Chand dynasty's first capital, with the Baleshwar temple group in a fine early stone idiom. The valley below was the range of the Champawat man-eater, a tigress credited with 436 human deaths before she was shot in 1907.
Devidhura	Kumaon	तीर्थ	The Varahi Devi temple where the Bagwal is fought each Shravan full moon between four khams, with cane shields and, formerly, stones. The stated object was to draw blood equivalent to one human life; the stones have been replaced with fruit and flowers in recent years by administrative direction.
Patal Bhuvaneshwar	Kumaon	तीर्थ	A limestone cave near Gangolihat, entered by a narrow descending passage, in which the formations are identified with an entire pantheon and read in a fixed order by the attending priest. Numbers admitted at a time are limited by the width of the passage.
Golu Devta shrines at Chitai and Ghorakhal	Kumaon	तीर्थ	The shrines of a deified local ruler who judges. Petitioners write their case on judicial stamped paper and tie it up with the thousands already hanging; those whose matter is resolved return and hang a brass bell. Both sites are curtained in paper and metal, and both are entirely in current use.
Munsiyari and the Johar valley	Kumaon	प्रकृति	A ridge town facing the five-peaked Panchachuli wall across the Gori valley, and the base of the Johar country whose Shauka families ran the Tibet trade and produced the Survey of India's Tibetan explorers. The Milam glacier lies a long walk up the valley, past villages that are still occupied only in summer.
Pithoragarh and Askot	Kumaon	शहरी	A wide green bowl of a valley — locally called a small Kashmir — with a Chand-era fort above it, and Askot above that, the old marchland seat whose name comes from the eighty forts it was said to command. This is the staging point for Darma, Byans and the Kailash Mansarovar route.
Adi Kailash and Om Parvat	Kumaon	तीर्थ	A peak and a lake in the Byans valley treated as a counterpart of Kailash on the Indian side of the crest, and a mountain face on which snow lodges in a pattern read as the syllable Om. Access is by permit and by a road that has only recently reached this far.
Pindari, Kafni and Sundardhunga glaciers	Kumaon	प्रकृति	Three glacier heads at the top of the Danpur valley, reached on foot from Loharkhet and Khati through oak, rhododendron and bugyal. The Pindar rises here and runs west — which is why the ridge above this valley is the boundary between two languages.
Jim Corbett National Park	Kumaon	वन्यजीव	India's first national park, established in 1936 in the Ramganga valley and renamed after Corbett in 1957. Sal forest, grassland chaurs and the reservoir together carry one of the densest tiger populations anywhere. The bhabar gravel below it is why the rivers here vanish and reappear.
Jauljibi and Dharchula	Kumaon	विरासत	Jauljibi sits at the meeting of the Kali and the Gori and holds a November fair that was, for centuries, the exchange point between Bhotiya traders, hill farmers and Nepali merchants. Dharchula upstream is a town divided by the river, with its counterpart on the far bank, and the two halves have traded and intermarried for as long as anyone records.
Dholavira	Kutch	विरासत	A Harappan city on an island in the salt desert, occupied for close to two thousand years and inscribed by UNESCO in 2021 as Dholavira — A Harappan City. It was laid out to a geometric plan in three parts — citadel, middle town and lower town — and built around sixteen or more stone-cut reservoirs, some seven metres deep and nearly eighty metres long, in a place with no perennial water at all. The site also produced the Dholavira signboard, ten large gypsum signs set in a wooden board and among the longest inscriptions in the Indus script.
Aina Mahal	Kutch	विरासत	The eighteenth-century mirrored palace built for Maharao Lakhpatji by Ram Singh Malam — a Kutchi sailor who was shipwrecked, spent years in Holland, and came back with glassmaking, tilework, clockmaking and enamelling. It is a European technical vocabulary applied to a Kutchi plan by a Kutchi craftsman, which is not the usual direction of that exchange. Badly damaged in 2001 and partly restored.
Prag Mahal	Kutch	विरासत	An Italianate palace of the 1860s next to the Aina Mahal, with a clock tower and a durbar hall, built for Maharao Pragmalji II. Severely damaged in the 2001 earthquake and left visibly so — worth seeing precisely because it has not been smoothed over.
Smritivan Earthquake Memorial and Museum	Kutch	विरासत	Opened in 2022 on the slope of Bhujiyo Dungar above Bhuj — a memorial to those killed on 26 January 2001, with their names inscribed around a series of water reservoirs, and a museum on the earthquake and on seismic reconstruction. It is the most direct account available of what happened here and what was rebuilt afterwards.
The White Rann at Dhordo	Kutch	प्रकृति	The salt crust of the Great Rann, walkable from Dhordo between roughly November and February. Dhordo was named Best Tourism Village by the UN World Tourism Organization in 2023, and the seasonal Rann Utsav tent city that stands here is now the single largest driver of visitor traffic to the region.
Banni grassland and Chhari Dhand	Kutch	प्रकृति	Around 2,600 km² of saline grassland grazed by Maldhari herds, with the Chhari Dhand wetland at its western edge filling in a good monsoon and drawing very large numbers of waterfowl, cranes and raptors. It is also the best place to understand how the region actually works: the vandhs, the buffalo, the night grazing and the embroidery are one economy.
Kala Dungar	Kutch	तीर्थ	At 462 m the highest point in Kutch, with a Dattatreya temple at the top and a view over the whole Great Rann. After the evening aarti cooked food is put out at a spot below the temple and jackals come in to eat it — a daily practice at this temple, and older than the road that now brings people to watch it.
Mata no Madh	Kutch	तीर्थ	The temple of Ashapura Mata, tutelary goddess of Kutch and of its ruling house. During Navratri very large numbers walk to it on foot from Bhuj and beyond, along a road organised for the purpose with water and food stations run by volunteers.
Lakhpat	Kutch	विरासत	A seven-kilometre walled town on Kori Creek with a few dozen residents inside it. It was a working port when a branch of the Indus reached the creek; the 1819 earthquake raised the Allah Bund ridge across the river's course, the water stopped arriving, and the town emptied. Gurdwara Lakhpat Sahib inside the walls commemorates Guru Nanak's halt here on his westward journey.
Narayan Sarovar and Koteshwar	Kutch	तीर्थ	A lake counted among the five sacred sarovars of Hindu tradition, with a temple group beside it, and the Koteshwar Mahadev temple a few kilometres on at the point where Kutch ends at the sea. Remote enough that most visitors combine it with Lakhpat.
Mandvi	Kutch	समुद्र तट	A port town with a working dhow yard on the Rukmavati beach where wooden cargo vessels are still built by hand, the 1929 Vijay Vilas Palace above the sea, a long open beach, and Kranti Teerth — the memorial to Shyamji Krishna Varma, built as a replica of India House in London.
Wild Ass Sanctuary	Kutch	वन्यजीव	The entire world range of the Indian wild ass, the khur, on the saline flat of the Little Rann. Also the working landscape of the Agariya salt farmers, who live on the flat for eight months of the year pumping brine into pans and raking salt.
Anjar	Kutch	तीर्थ	An old town, badly hit in 2001, holding the joint samadhis of Jesal and Toral — the bandit and the woman of the legend — which are visited as a shrine. Anjar is also a long-established centre for hand-made knives, nutcrackers and small metalwork.
Nirona	Kutch	विरासत	A village north of Bhuj holding three crafts within a few hundred metres — Rogan painting in the Khatri houses, copper-coated bell making by Luhar smiths, and lacquer turning by Wadha families. There is nowhere else in India with that density of unrelated crafts in one settlement.
Ajrakhpur	Kutch	विरासत	A village built after the 2001 earthquake by the ajrakh printers of Dhamadka, who moved when their old water supply went bad and their workshops came down. It exists because a craft needed particular water and could not find it where it had always been.
Bhujodi	Kutch	विरासत	The weaving village outside Bhuj — Vankar households at pit looms making shawls, dhablas and stoles from wool that once came off Rabari flocks in the same district. Most of the region's craft-buying traffic passes through it.
Alchi Choskor	Ladakh & Zanskar	विरासत	A temple complex of the eleventh and twelfth centuries on the Indus, built low on the valley floor rather than on a crag — which is why it was neither fortified nor rebuilt. Its wall paintings and carved wooden doorways are in a Kashmiri idiom of that period, down to the dress and jewellery of the figures, and they are the best-preserved evidence anywhere of a painting tradition that no longer survives in Kashmir itself. Photography inside is not permitted and the interiors are deliberately unlit.
Hemis	Ladakh & Zanskar	तीर्थ	The largest and wealthiest monastery in the region, of the Drukpa Kagyu order, set in a side gorge that hides it completely from the Indus valley — a siting decision that is generally credited with its survival through several periods of upheaval. Its Tsechu in the fifth Tibetan month is the region's best-known Cham festival, and a very large appliqué thangka is unfurled there once every twelve years.
Thiksey	Ladakh & Zanskar	तीर्थ	A Gelug monastery stacked up a hill in tiers of whitewashed buildings, holding a two-storey seated Maitreya installed in the twentieth century. The morning liturgy, with the long horns sounded from the roof at dawn, is open to visitors who arrive early enough.
Lamayuru	Ladakh & Zanskar	विरासत	A monastery on a spur above a basin of pale, deeply gullied lake sediment that local usage calls moonland — the floor of a lake that once filled this stretch of the valley. One of the oldest monastic sites in Ladakh, and the last one on the road down towards the Zoji La.
Leh old town and the Palace	Ladakh & Zanskar	शहरी	A nine-storey mud-brick and timber palace of the seventeenth century, built under Sengge Namgyal on the slope below the Namgyal Tsemo gonpa, with the old town's lanes of courtyard houses, the Jama Masjid and the bazaar below it. The palace is a demonstration of what can be built in unfired brick if the walls are battered and the rain never comes.
Basgo	Ladakh & Zanskar	विरासत	A ruined mud-brick citadel on a fluted spur with three Maitreya temples inside it, the oldest of the sixteenth century. Its conservation is a well-documented case of stabilising earthen architecture rather than replacing it.
Shey	Ladakh & Zanskar	विरासत	The old royal seat before Leh, with a copper-gilt Shakyamuni of the seventeenth century that is the largest of its kind in the region, and a plain below it dense with chortens.
Phugtal	Ladakh & Zanskar	तीर्थ	A monastery built into the mouth of a cliff cave above the Tsarap river in southern Zanskar, its cells stacked in a honeycomb under the overhang. There is no road to it; the approach is on foot, and everything in it was carried.
Karsha and Padum	Ladakh & Zanskar	विरासत	Zanskar's largest monastery and its main settlement, at the meeting of the Doda and the Tsarap. Padum is the point from which the valley's villages, its Gustor festival and the Chadar route are reached.
Diskit and Hunder	Ladakh & Zanskar	विरासत	Nubra's principal monastery, with a large hillside Maitreya above the Shyok, and below it the cold-desert dunes at Hunder where double-humped Bactrian camels graze — descendants of the pack animals of the Yarkand caravan trade, left behind when the route closed.
Turtuk	Ladakh & Zanskar	विरासत	A Balti-speaking village of stone-and-timber houses terraced above the Shyok, with buckwheat fields, an unusual density of apricot trees, and cold stores dug into the rock that keep grain and butter through summer. It is the clearest place to see the region's western, Muslim, Balti face.
Pangong Tso	Ladakh & Zanskar	प्रकृति	A long, narrow, brackish lake at about 4,250 m in a closed basin, so its colour shifts through the day with the angle of the light and the depth. Brackish water freezes solid in winter despite the salinity.
Tso Moriri and Korzok	Ladakh & Zanskar	वन्यजीव	A high-altitude lake and Ramsar wetland at about 4,500 m with the Changpa settlement of Korzok on its shore — one of the highest permanent villages anywhere, and a breeding site for the black-necked crane.
Hanle	Ladakh & Zanskar	प्रकृति	A monastery on a hill above a broad marsh, and on the ridge behind it the Indian Astronomical Observatory at about 4,500 m. The aridity that limits farming here produces some of the clearest and driest night skies in the world, and the surrounding area has been notified as a dark sky reserve, with villages shading their outdoor lights to keep it.
Dah and Hanu	Ladakh & Zanskar	विरासत	Brokpa villages on the lower Indus where a Dardic language, a distinct dress with flowered headgear, and an older ritual calendar survive inside a Tibetic Buddhist region. Apricot and grape grow here at the region's lowest and warmest altitudes.
Mulbekh	Ladakh & Zanskar	विरासत	A standing Maitreya some seven metres high, carved in relief on a rock face beside the Srinagar–Leh road, generally dated to the early medieval centuries. It marks, roughly, where the Buddhist monastic landscape begins as you come over from the west.
The Suru valley and Rangdum	Ladakh & Zanskar	प्रकृति	A green irrigated valley under the Nun and Kun peaks, Shia Muslim in population, running up to the isolated monastery at Rangdum on the way into Zanskar — the transition between the region's Muslim west and Buddhist south laid out along one road.
Zanskar river gorge (the Chadar)	Ladakh & Zanskar	प्रकृति	The Zanskar's lower gorge, which freezes over in January and February to make a walkable sheet — chadar means sheet — through cliffs that have no path along them. It was the valley's only winter link to the Indus, used for freight, for court cases and by schoolchildren, and it is warming and thinning.
Kavaratti	Lakshadweep	शहरी	The territory's headquarters and its only place with the feel of a town — offices, the marine aquarium, a lagoon flat enough to wade a long way out, and the Ujra mosque, whose carved ceiling is the most-cited piece of woodwork in the islands and is said locally to have been cut from driftwood.
Agatti	Lakshadweep	समुद्र तट	The island with the airstrip, laid along a narrow spit with lagoon on one side and reef on the other. Every visitor arrives here whether or not they stay, and the onward transfer to Kavaratti or Bangaram is by boat or helicopter.
Minicoy (Maliku)	Lakshadweep	विरासत	A long crescent island around a very large lagoon, divided into its avah villages, each with a village house and a boat shed. The 1885 lighthouse at the southern end can be climbed. This is the only place in India where Dhivehi is a community language.
Andrott	Lakshadweep	तीर्थ	The largest island in the territory and the only one lying east–west. It holds the Juma mosque and the tomb associated with Sheikh Ubaidullah, to whom island tradition attributes the coming of Islam; the account is local tradition rather than documented history, and is treated here as such. Andrott has no lagoon on the scale of the others and is the least tourist-facing inhabited island.
Kalpeni	Lakshadweep	समुद्र तट	Three islands around one lagoon, with a storm bank of huge coral boulders along the eastern shore thrown up by a cyclone in 1847 — the most legible piece of disaster history in the islands, still lying where the sea left it. Kalpeni is also the centre of the lacquered-stick craft.
Kadmat	Lakshadweep	समुद्र तट	A long thin island with a lagoon on the west and a diving and water-sports base, and one of the islands with an administration coir factory. Popular as a first stop for permit-holding visitors.
Bangaram	Lakshadweep	समुद्र तट	An uninhabited teardrop atoll run as a resort island, and the one place in the territory exempted from prohibition. Foreign nationals have been permitted here since 1974, when the rest of the islands were closed to them.
Pitti (Bird Island)	Lakshadweep	वन्यजीव	A bare coral cay of a few hectares, protected as a bird sanctuary, with large breeding colonies of noddies and terns. It also sits inside the bait-fishing grounds, which is the standing tension between the sanctuary and the tuna fishery.
Bitra	Lakshadweep	प्रकृति	The smallest inhabited island in the territory, with a population in the low hundreds and a large lagoon out of all proportion to its land. It was settled permanently only in the twentieth century and is normally closed to visitors.
Kiltan and Chetlat	Lakshadweep	प्रकृति	The northern Amindivi islands, small, conservative and largely off the tourist circuit. Kiltan is a scheduled port of call for the Kochi ships.
Mahabodhi Temple, Bodh Gaya	Magadh	तीर्थ	The site of the Buddha's enlightenment, with a descendant of the bodhi tree, a temple whose core is Gupta-period, and the Vajrasana slab attributed to Ashoka. A UNESCO World Heritage site, and the single most international place in India — with Thai, Japanese, Bhutanese, Tibetan, Burmese, Sri Lankan, Vietnamese and Chinese monasteries around it.
Nalanda Mahavihara	Magadh	विरासत	The excavated ruins of a monastic university that operated for around seven centuries, with viharas, temples and a scale of brick construction that makes the description "university" credible on sight. A UNESCO World Heritage site since 2016.
Rajgir	Magadh	विरासत	Ringed by five hills and the walls of the old Magadhan capital. Griddhakuta, where the Buddha taught; the Saptaparni cave, where the first Buddhist council was held after his death; hot springs still in daily use; and the Jain temples on the ridges above.
Barabar and Nagarjuni Caves	Magadh	विरासत	The oldest surviving rock-cut caves in India, cut in the third century BCE and dedicated by Ashoka and his grandson to the Ajivika ascetics. The granite interiors are polished to a mirror finish that has never been satisfactorily explained, and they carry an echo that E. M. Forster used as the pivot of A Passage to India.
Vishnupad Temple and the Phalgu ghats	Magadh	तीर्थ	The centre of the Gaya pind daan rites, built around a footprint in rock, with the dry bed of the Phalgu beside it. During Pitru Paksha the riverbed itself becomes the ritual ground.
Pawapuri	Magadh	तीर्थ	Where Mahavira died and was cremated. The Jal Mandir stands in the middle of a lotus tank said to have been formed where earth was taken for his funeral, reached by a long stone causeway.
Bihar Sharif and the Bari Dargah	Magadh	तीर्थ	The shrine of Makhdum Sharfuddin Yahya Maneri, the fourteenth-century Firdausi Sufi whose letters are a classic of Indian Sufi writing. The urs fills the town, and the khanqah has functioned continuously for seven centuries.
Maner Sharif	Magadh	विरासत	Two tombs by the Sone confluence — the Chhoti Dargah of Shah Daulat, completed in 1616, is among the finest Mughal-period buildings in eastern India, with a carved stone ceiling worth the trip on its own.
Takht Sri Harmandir Ji, Patna Sahib	Magadh	तीर्थ	One of the five takhts of Sikhism, at the birthplace of Guru Gobind Singh in 1666. The gurdwara holds relics of the Guru and draws pilgrims from Punjab and the diaspora year-round.
Kumhrar and Agam Kuan	Magadh	विरासत	What is left of Pataliputra — the excavated remains of an eighty-pillared Mauryan hall, wooden palisades preserved in the water table, and a deep well associated in tradition with Ashoka.
Bihar Museum and Patna Museum	Magadh	विरासत	Between them they hold the Didarganj Yakshi, a third-century BCE sandstone figure with the Mauryan polish intact, and the best collection of the region's Buddhist and Hindu sculpture.
Deo Sun Temple	Magadh	तीर्थ	A stone sun temple with an unusual east-facing orientation, and the site of the largest Chhath gathering in Bihar — several lakh people at one tank over two days.
Telhara and Ghosrawan	Magadh	विरासत	Excavated monastic sites in the Nalanda hinterland, less visited and less reconstructed — brick viharas and stupas standing in fields.
Rajgir hot springs and Ghora Katora	Magadh	प्रकृति	Sulphur springs on Vaibhara hill used continuously since at least the Buddha's lifetime, and a hill-ringed lake with a Buddha statue, reached on foot or by tonga.
Bhedaghat and the Dhuandhar fall	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	प्रकृति	A three-kilometre gorge where the Narmada has cut through a band of dolomitic limestone, leaving cliffs about thirty metres high that go from white to pale green to grey along their length. The Dhuandhar fall at the head of the gorge throws enough spray to be named for smoke. Boats run the gorge outside the monsoon, and on full-moon nights in winter they run after dark.
Chausath Yogini temple, Bhedaghat	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	विरासत	A circular open-air shrine of the tenth century on the cliff above the gorge, its perimeter lined with stone yogini figures in individual niches, each named in an inscription. It is one of only a handful of substantially surviving yogini temples in India, and the roofless circular plan is the form itself, not a ruin.
Madan Mahal fort	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	विरासत	A small Gond fort built onto a granite tor above the city, with rock-cut cisterns and a stable cut into the boulder. It belongs to the Garha line and is the most accessible piece of Gond royal building left.
Amarkantak	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	तीर्थ	The Maikal summit plateau at about 1,050 metres, where the Narmada and the Son rise within a few kilometres of each other and then run in opposite directions to two different oceans. The Narmada source tank sits inside a walled temple complex of Kalachuri date; Kapildhara falls and the Son source are a short walk apart from it.
Kanha Tiger Reserve	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	वन्यजीव	Sal forest broken by maidans — open grassy meadows that are the sites of villages moved out decades ago, and now the reason the park's grazing animals are so visible. Kanha holds the only surviving population of the hard-ground barasingha, which fell to a few dozen animals around 1970.
Pench Tiger Reserve	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	वन्यजीव	One teak forest along the Pench river, administered as two separate tiger reserves because a state line runs through it. The animals do not observe it; the paperwork does. It is the clearest illustration in the region of what this cultural boundary costs.
Patalkot	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	प्रकृति	A horseshoe valley roughly 1,200 to 1,700 feet below its own rim, holding a dozen or so Bharia and Gond villages that were reached only on foot until roads and power arrived in the 1990s. The valley floor keeps its own microclimate and its own herbal pharmacopoeia, and the bhumkas of Patalkot are consulted from well outside it.
Pachmarhi	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	पहाड़	The region's only hill station and the core of the Satpura Biosphere Reserve — a sandstone plateau of ravines, waterfalls and painted rock shelters, with the Mahadeo cave and Chauragarh summit above it. In Sawan several lakh pilgrims walk the Nagdwari route through the gorges.
Ramnagar Palace, Mandla	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	विरासत	A three-storey Gond palace on the Narmada built by Raja Hridayshah in the seventeenth century, now substantially ruined and largely unvisited. Together with the Mandla fort a few kilometres away it is what survives of the Garha-Mandla state's later phase.
Patangarh	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	विरासत	A Pardhan Gond village whose houses carry painted digna and bhitti work, and the home village of Jangarh Singh Shyam and of a large share of the named artists who followed him. There is no museum; the interest is the walls and the families.
Adamgarh rock shelters	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	विरासत	Painted sandstone shelters on a hill above the Narmada with a long Mesolithic sequence beneath them. They are the in-region equivalent of the far better known Bhimbetka shelters, which lie north-west near Bhopal and belong to the Malwa side of the Vindhya rather than to this region.
Muktagiri	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	तीर्थ	Fifty-two white Jain temples climbing a wooded gorge on the Satpura crest, with a seasonal waterfall at the head of the steps. A Digambara site of long standing, reached from either side of the range.
Kachargarh caves	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	तीर्थ	A large natural cave in the Dhanegaon hills that Gond tradition identifies as the place where Lingo released the gods. The Magh Purnima gathering here draws Gonds from across the whole span of the region and is the single largest occasion at which it assembles as one.
Keslapur Nagoba temple	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	तीर्थ	The shrine of Nagoba, the serpent deity of the Mesram clan, and the site of the Nagoba Jatara at the new moon of Pushya. The Bheting ceremony held there formally admits women married into the clan during the preceding year, which makes the festival a clan register as much as a rite.
Tripuri (Tewar)	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	विरासत	The mound of the Kalachuri capital west of Jabalpur, excavated in patches and mostly under fields and village. The Kalachuris of Tripuri are why this stretch of the Narmada has tenth- and eleventh-century stone temples at all.
Parassinikkadavu Muthappan Temple	Malabar	तीर्थ	The one place a Theyyam can be seen on any day of the year. Muthappan is performed here twice daily rather than on a seasonal calendar, the deity is offered toddy and dried fish, and there is no restriction on who may approach — a shrine that inverts almost every convention of temple worship in the state.
Madayi Kavu and Madayi Palli	Malabar	विरासत	A Bhagavathi kavu of the old Kolathunad on a laterite hill, and a short walk away one of the oldest mosques on the coast, rebuilt but continuously in use. The two stand within sight of each other on the same headland, which is the most economical statement of what north Malabar is.
Thaliparamba Rajarajeshwara Temple	Malabar	तीर्थ	A major Shiva temple of very long standing, with an unusually strict ritual protocol and a practice of resolving questions by prasnam — astrological inquiry — that other temples across Kerala refer to it.
St Angelo Fort, Kannur	Malabar	विरासत	Built by the Portuguese in 1505 on a headland over the sea, taken by the Dutch, sold by them to the Arakkal house in 1772 and taken by the British twelve years later. Four flags in under three centuries, on one laterite promontory, and the moat is cut into the rock.
Arakkal Museum, Kannur	Malabar	विरासत	The durbar hall of the Arakkal family, the only Muslim royal house in Kerala, who ruled from Kannur, held the Lakshadweep islands and — following the region's matrilineal custom — passed the title to the eldest member of the family regardless of sex, so a woman ruling as Arakkal Beevi was normal rather than remarkable.
Muzhappilangad Beach	Malabar	समुद्र तट	About four kilometres of hard-packed sand behind a line of black rock, firm enough to drive on, and the longest drive-in beach in the country. Best at low tide; the rock keeps the surf off.
Thalassery	Malabar	विरासत	A small town with a disproportionate record. The British fort of 1708 stands over the sea; Odathil Palli is a mosque roofed in copper with no minaret; Hermann Gundert worked at Illikkunnu, where he published the first Malayalam newspaper in 1847 and later compiled the Malayalam–English dictionary. Cricket was played here from the early nineteenth century, the first circus school in the country opened in 1901, and the biryani is named after the place.
Mahe	Malabar	शहरी	Nine square kilometres of Puducherry surrounded on all sides by Kannur district, French from 1725 until 1954, with French street names, a Tagore park and a distinct excise regime that explains the character of the road through it. M. Mukundan's novel of the town under the French is the reason many Malayalis know it at all.
Lokanarkavu	Malabar	तीर्थ	The Bhagavathi shrine near Vadakara that the Vadakkan ballads name as the family deity of the Thacholi house. Kalari practitioners still come here, and the temple is the physical anchor of a literature that is otherwise entirely oral.
Kuttichira, Kozhikode	Malabar	विरासत	The old Muslim quarter behind the beach — the Mishkal Mosque, a four-storey timber structure built by a fourteenth-century shipowning merchant and rebuilt after a Portuguese attack, the Muchundi Mosque with its Malayalam inscription in Arabic script, and the large tharavadu houses of Koya families built round courtyards. Almost none of it looks like a mosque as most of India would recognise one.
Kappad	Malabar	समुद्र तट	The beach where Vasco da Gama landed on 20 May 1498, marked by a low stone pillar. What followed changed the pepper trade and the coast's politics; the beach itself is quiet and rocky.
Beypore	Malabar	विरासत	The uru yards at the mouth of the Chaliyar, where wooden ocean-going dhows are still built on the sand, and a stone breakwater running two kilometres into the sea that the town walks along in the evening.
Edakkal Caves	Malabar	विरासत	Not a cave but a cleft on Ambukuthi hill roofed by a fallen boulder, its walls covered in engraved human figures, animals and symbols cut over a very long span, together with later inscriptions in a Brahmi-derived script. Reached by a steep climb, which is part of why the carvings survived.
Thirunelli Temple and Papanasini	Malabar	तीर्थ	A Vishnu temple in forest under Brahmagiri, reached by a road that ends there, where rites for the dead are performed at a stream on the hillside. It is the plateau's oldest continuously used site.
Muthanga and Tholpetty	Malabar	वन्यजीव	The two divisions of the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary, continuous with Bandipur and Nagarhole in Karnataka and Mudumalai in Tamil Nadu. One elephant population moves across all four, which is why the region's conservation politics are settled between three states.
Chembra Peak and Banasura Sagar	Malabar	पहाड़	Chembra rises to about 2,100 m with a small heart-shaped tarn partway up; Banasura Sagar is an earth dam whose reservoir left the tops of hills standing as islands. Chembra access is regulated and closed in the fire season.
Conolly's Plot and the Teak Museum, Nilambur	Malabar	प्रकृति	Teak planted here from 1844, under the Malabar collector after whom the plot is named and by the sub-conservator who actually did the work, when wild teak was being cut faster than it grew. It is the oldest teak plantation in the world, the trees are enormous, and a forest research museum next to it explains the timber that built the ships.
Silent Valley National Park	Malabar	प्रकृति	Contiguous rainforest reached from Mukkali, and continuous with the New Amarambalam forest behind Nilambur — which is why it belongs to this region ecologically even though it sits inside the next district south. A proposed hydroelectric dam on the Kunthipuzha was abandoned after a long public campaign and the park was declared in 1984. Lion-tailed macaque is the animal it is known for.
Kadalundi–Vallikkunnu Community Reserve	Malabar	वन्यजीव	A mangrove and mudflat estuary where the Kadalundi meets the sea, notified in 2007 as Kerala's first community reserve. Waders arrive from Central Asia between November and March and feed on the flats at low tide.
Ponnani	Malabar	विरासत	A port at the mouth of the Bharathapuzha whose Juma Masjid, a timber building without minarets, was for centuries the region's principal centre of Islamic learning — students came from across the coast and the completion of study there was a recognised qualification. The scholar who wrote the sixteenth-century Arabic chronicle of the Portuguese on this coast taught here.
Payyannur	Malabar	विरासत	A temple town at the northern edge of the region, known for the knotted gold pavithra ring made by a handful of families, and the base for the Kavvayi backwaters, a quiet island-and-channel system with no houseboat traffic.
Jog Falls	Malnad	प्रकृति	The Sharavathi drops in four separate falls — Raja, Roarer, Rocket and Rani — over a sandstone-and-basalt lip into a gorge. The flow is regulated by the Linganamakki reservoir upstream, so the falls are at full volume only in the monsoon or when water is released, and can be a trickle in April.
Agumbe	Malnad	प्रकृति	A village on the crest with a mean annual rainfall of about 7,620 mm and a west-facing viewpoint that catches the sunset over the coastal plain in the clear months. The Agumbe Rainforest Research Station, founded in 2005 by the herpetologist Romulus Whitaker, works here on king cobra ecology, including radio telemetry of relocated snakes.
Kudremukh National Park	Malnad	वन्यजीव	Shola forest and rolling grassland around a 1,894 m peak whose profile gives it its name — horse's face. Iron ore was mined inside the range until operations were wound up in the mid-2000s. The Tunga and Bhadra both rise here, at Gangamoola.
Mullayanagiri and Baba Budangiri	Malnad	पहाड़	Karnataka's highest ground at 1,930 m, with a ridge walk along grassland tops. The adjoining Baba Budangiri range takes its name from the seventeenth-century figure traditionally credited with bringing coffee seed to these hills, and holds a shrine long visited by people of more than one faith.
Sringeri	Malnad	तीर्थ	A math on the Tunga, held by tradition to be the first of the four established by Adi Shankara. The Vidyashankara temple of about 1338 has twelve pillars carved with the zodiac signs, arranged so that the sun's light falls on each in its month, and the temple fish in the river below are fed rather than caught.
Horanadu	Malnad	तीर्थ	The Annapoorneshwari temple in a deep forested valley, which serves free meals to every visitor as its central act of worship — Annapoorneshwari is the goddess of food, and the kitchen is not an adjunct here.
Belur	Malnad	विरासत	The Chennakeshava temple, begun in 1117 under Vishnuvardhana, on a star-shaped plan with bracket figures of extraordinary depth and a set of perforated stone screens. Carved in chloritic schist, which is soft when quarried and hardens on exposure — the reason the detail is finer than sandstone or granite allows. Inscribed in 2023 as part of the Sacred Ensembles of the Hoysalas.
Halebidu	Malnad	विरासत	The Hoysaleswara temple, begun about 1121 and never finished — the towers were not completed and the work stops mid-figure in places, which is precisely what makes the carving process legible. The friezes run in continuous bands of elephants, horsemen and narrative around the entire base. Inscribed in 2023 with Belur and Somanathapura.
Doddagaddavalli	Malnad	विरासत	The Lakshmi Devi temple of 1114, the earliest dated Hoysala temple, with four shrines around a common hall and a plainness that shows what the style looked like before it became ornate.
Shravanabelagola	Malnad	तीर्थ	The 17-metre monolithic figure of Bahubali on Vindhyagiri hill, carved about 981 and reached by more than six hundred rock-cut steps. The Mahamastakabhisheka, in which the statue is anointed from a scaffold, is held roughly every twelve years; the last was in 2018. The town sits on the dry eastern lip of the region, not in the wet hills.
Manjarabad Fort	Malnad	विरासत	A star-shaped fort of 1792 built under Tipu Sultan on a hill above Sakleshpur, laid out on a plan of European military derivation and visible as a complete eight-pointed star from the air.
Sakleshpur and the Bisle ghat	Malnad	पहाड़	Coffee and cardamom country on the ghat lip, with the Bisle viewpoint looking across three ranges. The railway line down to Subrahmanya runs through a long series of tunnels and viaducts and is one of the more spectacular descents in India.
Bhadra Tiger Reserve	Malnad	वन्यजीव	Deciduous and semi-evergreen forest around the Bhadra reservoir, holding tiger, gaur, elephant and a very high density of leopard. The reserve is notable for a village resettlement in the early 2000s that is generally cited as one of the few conducted with the consent of those moved.
Talakaveri and Bhagamandala	Malnad	तीर्थ	The Cauvery's source is a small tank on the Brahmagiri slope, in which the spring is said to well up at a fixed moment each October at Tula Sankramana. Bhagamandala below is the confluence of the Cauvery, Kannike and the notionally subterranean Sujyoti.
Madikeri	Malnad	शहरी	Kodagu's hill town — the fort with its later church-museum, the Omkareshwara temple of 1820 built in a frankly Islamic idiom by a Hindu ruler, the domed royal tombs at Gaddige, and Raja's Seat looking west over the valleys.
Nagarhole National Park	Malnad	वन्यजीव	Moist deciduous forest on Kodagu's eastern edge, continuous with Bandipur and Wayanad and part of one of the largest contiguous elephant and tiger landscapes in Asia. The waterside game viewing along the Kabini backwater is among the most reliable in India.
Iruppu Falls and Brahmagiri	Malnad	प्रकृति	A waterfall on the Lakshmana Tirtha below the Brahmagiri range, with a trek up into shola-grassland above it that requires a forest department permit.
Keladi and Ikkeri	Malnad	विरासत	The two successive capitals of the Keladi Nayakas, who ruled Malnad from the sixteenth century until 1763. The Aghoreshwara temple at Ikkeri is a heavy stone building mixing Hoysala, Vijayanagara and Deccani elements; the museum at Keladi holds the dynasty's palm-leaf records.
Kuppalli	Malnad	विरासत	Kuvempu's family house at Kuppalli, now the Kavimane museum, with his samadhi on the rock outcrop of Kavishaila above it. Melige, where U. R. Ananthamurthy was born, is in the same taluk about twenty kilometres away.
Heggodu	Malnad	विरासत	A village near Sagara that runs a theatre institute, a repertory company, a film society and a publishing house. Its annual culture course each October brings several hundred participants to a settlement of a few thousand people.
Linganamakki and Honnemaradu	Malnad	प्रकृति	The Sharavathi reservoir, with drowned valleys, ferry crossings and a long-running open-water camp and kayaking operation at Honnemaradu. The reservoir controls what Jog Falls does.
Mahakaleshwar Jyotirlinga, Ujjain	Malwa Plateau	तीर्थ	One of the twelve jyotirlingas, and the only one where the day opens with bhasma aarti — an ash ritual performed at about four in the morning, historically with ash from a cremation pyre and now with ash from cow-dung cakes. The lingam is described in tradition as south-facing, unlike any other jyotirlinga. The present temple is an eighteenth-century Maratha rebuilding, and the Mahakal Lok processional corridor around it opened in 2022, changing the approach entirely.
Mandu (Mandavgarh)	Malwa Plateau	विरासत	A fortified city on a 633 m spur of the Vindhyas, cut off from the plateau by ravines and looking down into the Narmada valley — about 37 km of battlemented wall with a dozen gateways. Jahaz Mahal is a long narrow palace built between two artificial tanks so that it reads as a ship; Hindola Mahal leans its walls inward at a steep batter and is called the swinging palace for it; Hoshang Shah's tomb is India's first marble building and carries an inscription recording that Shah Jahan's architects were sent to study it. It sits on India's UNESCO tentative list rather than the inscribed list.
Rani Roopmati's Pavilion, Mandu	Malwa Plateau	विरासत	A sandstone observation post at the southern lip of the Mandu plateau, built as a military lookout and later associated with Roopmati, the singer whom Baz Bahadur, the last sultan of Malwa, took as his consort. The story holds that she would not eat until she had sighted the Narmada, which is visible from the pavilion on a clear day as a thread on the valley floor. Baz Bahadur lost Mandu to Akbar's forces in 1561.
Jantar Mantar (Vedha Shala), Ujjain	Malwa Plateau	विरासत	One of the five masonry observatories built by Sawai Jai Singh II in the early eighteenth century, placed at Ujjain because the city was already the reference longitude of Indian astronomy. It remains a working institution rather than a monument — an ephemeris is still computed and published here.
Ram Ghat and the Shipra riverfront, Ujjain	Malwa Plateau	तीर्थ	The principal bathing ghat of the Simhastha, and an ordinary evening arti site for the rest of the twelve-year cycle. The Simhastha is held when Jupiter enters Leo — Simha — which is where the name comes from; the last was in 2016 and the next falls in 2028.
Kal Bhairav Temple, Ujjain	Malwa Plateau	तीर्थ	A shrine on the edge of the city where the standard offering to the deity is liquor, poured into a shallow dish held to the image and visibly taken. Licensed liquor stalls stand outside the gate, which is not an arrangement found at many temples.
Sandipani Ashram and Bhartrihari Caves, Ujjain	Malwa Plateau	तीर्थ	The site tradition names as the school where Krishna and Sudama studied, and, on the Shipra a little further out, the rock cells associated with Bhartrihari, the poet-king of the Shatakatraya. Both are modest; both are continuously used.
Rajwada and the Krishnapura Chhatris, Indore	Malwa Plateau	शहरी	The seven-storey Holkar palace at the head of the old market, begun in the 1740s, burnt twice and rebuilt, with a stone lower structure and a timber upper one. A short walk away, the Krishnapura cenotaphs stand over the Khan river — Maratha chhatris built in a plateau idiom, which is the architectural signature of the Holkar century.
Lal Bagh Palace, Indore	Malwa Plateau	विरासत	A late-Holkar residence built between the 1880s and the 1920s in a European manner, with Italianate ceilings, a copy of the Buckingham Palace gates at its entrance, and a hydraulic-lift servery. It is the clearest physical statement of what a princely state's income was spent on after it stopped being spent on war.
Kanch Mandir, Indore	Malwa Plateau	विरासत	A Jain temple whose entire interior — walls, ceiling, pillars, floor — is surfaced in mirror and coloured glass, built by the textile magnate Seth Hukumchand in the early twentieth century. The mirrorwork multiplies a single image into hundreds, which is the design intent and not an accident.
Pashupatinath Temple, Mandsaur	Malwa Plateau	तीर्थ	An eight-faced Shiva lingam recovered from the bed of the Shivna river in the twentieth century and installed in a temple built around it. Four faces above, four below, each carved with a different aspect — an iconographic form with very few parallels.
Sondani pillars, Mandsaur	Malwa Plateau	विरासत	Two inscribed victory pillars recording Yashodharman's defeat of the Huna ruler Mihirakula in the early sixth century — a claim of empire from a ruler about whom almost nothing else survives, cut into stone at the edge of a field.
Bhojshala and the Dhar fort	Malwa Plateau	विरासत	Dhar was the Paramara capital under Raja Bhoja, an eleventh-century ruler credited with a body of Sanskrit works on poetics, architecture and astronomy. The Bhojshala complex, with its Sanskrit and Prakrit inscribed slabs, is a contested site under Archaeological Survey of India protection, used for worship by both Hindu and Muslim communities on a fixed weekly schedule.
Maheshwar	Malwa Plateau	विरासत	Ahilyabai Holkar's capital on the Narmada, and geographically Nimar rather than Malwa — but the same dynasty that built it built Indore, and no account of the plateau's eighteenth century is complete without it. Listed here as a crossing, not as a claim.
Ralamandal and Janapav	Malwa Plateau	प्रकृति	The wooded hills south of Indore, and the source of the Chambal at Janapav near Mhow. Janapav is a modest hill with a big consequence: the river that drains most of the plateau starts here and runs north for a thousand kilometres.
Gandhi Sagar and the Chambal gorge	Malwa Plateau	वन्यजीव	The Chambal's first large reservoir and the sanctuary around it — dry deciduous forest, gorge walls, and one of the last strongholds of the gharial and the Indian skimmer on the river below.
Ellora Caves	Marathwada	विरासत	Thirty-four numbered caves cut into a two-kilometre basalt escarpment between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries — twelve Buddhist, seventeen Hindu, five Jain, worked in overlapping periods rather than in sequence. The site is on the old route from the Konkan ports up onto the plateau, which is why it is here at all. Cave 16, the Kailasa, was cut downward out of the living rock and is the largest monolithic excavation anywhere.
Ajanta Caves	Marathwada	विरासत	Thirty Buddhist caves in a horseshoe gorge above the Waghur, cut in two widely separated phases — a Satavahana-era group from around the second century BCE, and a Vakataka group of the late fifth century CE under Harishena. The surviving wall painting is the largest body of ancient Indian painting anywhere. Administratively the caves are in Marathwada; physically they sit on the far side of the Ajanta watershed, draining north into the Tapi, and they are 59 km from Jalgaon in Khandesh against 104 km from Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar — which is why most visitors arrive from Khandesh and why the region's claim on them is a district boundary rather than a cultural one.
Daulatabad (Devagiri) Fort	Marathwada	विरासत	A conical hill about 200 m high whose lower slopes the Yadavas cut away to leave 50 m of vertical scarp, ringed by a rock-cut moat. The only way up is a single dark gallery driven through the rock, wide enough for two, with a false side-passage to mislead attackers and a mid-way grating that could be used as a fire-pit to fill the tunnel with smoke. Built by Bhillama V around 1187; renamed and made Muhammad bin Tughluq's capital in 1327, a decision he reversed in 1334.
Bibi ka Maqbara	Marathwada	विरासत	Azam Shah's tomb for his mother Dilras Banu Begum, built 1668–69 to a design by Ata-ullah, son of the Taj Mahal's principal architect. The budget was about seven lakh rupees against the Taj's order of magnitude, and the compromise is visible as a horizontal line — marble up to dado level and around the dome, plastered basalt in between. It is the most honest building of its class in India about what it could not afford.
Aurangabad Caves	Marathwada	विरासत	Twelve Buddhist caves in two groups on the hill directly behind Bibi ka Maqbara, largely sixth and seventh century, with unusually elaborate Tantric-phase sculpture. Almost empty of visitors, ten minutes from a monument that is not.
Panchakki	Marathwada	विरासत	A seventeenth-century water mill at the dargah of Baba Shah Musafir, driven by water brought several kilometres from a hill spring through an underground earthen conduit and dropped down a shaft to turn the wheel. It ground grain for the pilgrims. The engineering is the exhibit.
Grishneshwar Temple	Marathwada	तीर्थ	The twelfth of the jyotirlingas, a kilometre from the Ellora escarpment, in red basalt with dense figure carving. The present structure was rebuilt in the eighteenth century by Ahilyabai Holkar, who rebuilt a great many temples across India in the same decades.
Paithan	Marathwada	विरासत	Pratishthana, the Satavahana capital, on the left bank of the Godavari — a town that was trading with the Roman world and is named in the Periplus. It is also the samadhi town of Sant Eknath, the home of the Paithani, and the site of the Jayakwadi dam, whose Nathsagar reservoir is the region's water supply and its bird lake.
Takht Sachkhand Sri Hazur Sahib	Marathwada	तीर्थ	One of the five takhts of Sikhism, on the Godavari bank where Guru Gobind Singh died in 1708 after installing the Guru Granth Sahib as the perpetual Guru. The gurdwara has sustained a Punjabi-speaking community in a Marathi city for three centuries, with its own Nanded-specific maryada.
Tuljapur Bhavani Temple	Marathwada	तीर्थ	The Bhavani temple on the Balaghat slope, one of the three and a half principal Shakti seats of Marathi country, and the family deity of a very large number of households. The image is a chala murti — it is physically moved and put to rest on fixed days, which is unusual for a shrine of this size.
Mahur (Mahurgad)	Marathwada	तीर्थ	The Renuka Devi hill shrine, another of the three and a half Shakti seats, and by tradition the birthplace of Dattatreya. Three separate hills carry three shrines; the pilgrimage does all of them.
Aundha Nagnath	Marathwada	तीर्थ	A jyotirlinga in a Hemadpanti-style temple on a plinth carved with a continuous frieze, the sanctum below the courtyard level. Rebuilt over an older structure; the plinth sculpture is the older work.
Parli Vaijnath	Marathwada	तीर्थ	A jyotirlinga on a hill at Parli, on a raised stone platform reached by a long flight of steps. With Grishneshwar and Aundha, it gives this one region three of the twelve — more than any comparable area in India.
Ambajogai	Marathwada	विरासत	The Yogeshwari temple town, and a literary site — Mukundraj, traditionally named as the first poet to write in Marathi, and Dasopant are both commemorated here. The Kholeshwar and Hattikhana rock-cut work on the town's edge is early and largely unvisited.
Ter (Tagara)	Marathwada	विरासत	A Satavahana-period trading town excavated for terracotta, ivory and Roman contact material, with a brick structure widely read as a converted apsidal chaitya. Also the village of Goroba the potter, whose abhangs the Varkari tradition still sings.
Naldurg Fort	Marathwada	विरासत	A basalt fort on a spur, with a dam thrown across the Bori river inside the defences and a chamber built into the dam wall. When the river runs high the overflow falls on both sides of the chamber at once, which is the reason it exists — a pleasure pavilion inside a piece of hydraulic engineering.
Killari	Marathwada	विरासत	The epicentral village of the earthquake of 30 September 1993, roughly magnitude 6.2, which killed close to ten thousand people in the small hours. It struck a stable continental interior that hazard maps had treated as effectively aseismic, and it is studied worldwide for exactly that reason.
Nathsagar and the Jayakwadi bird sanctuary	Marathwada	प्रकृति	The reservoir behind one of India's largest earthen dams, completed in the 1970s, which supplies the region's irrigation and its drinking water and fills with flamingo, pelican and migratory duck from November.
Kandhar Fort	Marathwada	विरासत	A Rashtrakuta-period fort on the plain, surrounded by a wet moat rather than built on a hill — an unusual plan for the Deccan, and evidence of what the water table used to be here.
Gangakhed and Narsi	Marathwada	तीर्थ	Gangakhed on the Godavari is associated with Janabai, the servant-poet whose abhangs are among the most direct in Marathi; Narsi in Hingoli is held by tradition to be Namdev's birthplace. Two of the Varkari canon's central voices come from within forty kilometres of each other.
Ramanathaswamy Temple, Rameswaram	Marava & Ramnad	तीर्थ	One of the twelve Jyotirlingas and the southern anchor of the Kashi–Rameswaram pilgrimage. Its outer corridor is the longest of any temple in India — roughly 400 feet on the east and west and 640 feet on the north and south, close to seven metres high, with about 1,212 pillars — built between 1763 and 1795 under Muthuramalinga Sethupati. The island has no granite, so every stone was ferried across. Twenty-two theerthams inside the temple are bathed in sequence, and the sanctum holds two lingams, of which the one Hanuman is said to have brought from Kailash is worshipped first.
Dhanushkodi	Marava & Ramnad	विरासत	A port and railhead at the tip of the spit until the night of 22–23 December 1964, when a cyclone put a surge of more than seven metres across it, destroyed the town, and swept away the Pamban–Dhanushkodi passenger train with about two hundred people aboard. The town was never rebuilt. The church, the station and the water tank stand as ruins on a sandbar with sea on both sides.
Pamban bridges	Marava & Ramnad	विरासत	Two bridges over the same channel. The 1914 rail bridge carried a Scherzer rolling-lift bascule that opened for shipping and was rebuilt in forty-six days after the 1964 cyclone by a young engineer named E. Sreedharan; it stopped carrying trains in December 2022 after corrosion. Its replacement, 2.07 km long with a 72-metre vertical lift span, opened on 6 April 2025 and is India's first vertical-lift sea bridge. The 1988 road bridge runs alongside both.
Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park	Marava & Ramnad	वन्यजीव	Twenty-one low coral islands strung between Mandapam and Tuticorin, declared in 1980 as India's first marine national park and later the core of a biosphere reserve. Coral reef, seagrass meadow, dugong, sea turtle and the chank and pearl banks that made this coast's name.
Adam's Bridge (Rama Setu)	Marava & Ramnad	प्रकृति	A forty-eight-kilometre chain of shoals, sandbars and reef running from Dhanushkodi towards Mannar, walkable in stretches at low tide and named in the Ramayana as the causeway. Geologically a series of emergent sandbanks on a shallow ridge; culturally the reason the Ramnad rulers were called guardians of the causeway.
Kanadukathan	Marava & Ramnad	विरासत	The mansion village — a grid of streets of Nagarathar courtyard houses, several open as heritage hotels and several standing empty behind locked teak doors. It is the place to understand the type: a long axial sequence of courtyards, the front one for business, the deeper ones progressively more private.
Athangudi	Marava & Ramnad	विरासत	A village of tile workshops and one very large mansion. The tile units are open to visitors and the process — glass plate, bronze die, coloured slurry, a week of curing — takes about ten minutes to watch and explains the floor of every mansion in the district.
Karaikudi	Marava & Ramnad	शहरी	The commercial centre of Chettinad, with an antiques quarter along Muneeswaran Koil Street selling architectural salvage — pillars, doors, brass, glass — much of it out of mansions that no longer exist.
Pillaiyarpatti	Marava & Ramnad	तीर्थ	A rock-cut Ganesha carved into a low outcrop, with early Tamil inscriptions on the cave wall that place the excavation in the first several centuries CE. One of the nine Nagarathar clan temples, and the busiest of them at Vinayaka Chaturthi.
Sittanavasal	Marava & Ramnad	विरासत	A Jain rock-cut temple, the Arivar Koil, with mural paintings on its ceiling and pillars — a lotus tank with elephants, fish and gatherers, and portrait figures identified with the Pandya king Srimara Srivallabha. The earliest layer is seventh century with ninth-century work over it, and the paintings are routinely ranked with Ajanta and Bagh. Above the temple are the Eladipattam rock beds, polished stone platforms cut for Jain ascetics, with Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions beside them. The patronage is Pandya; the site is here.
Thirumayam Fort	Marava & Ramnad	विरासत	A circular fort built in 1687 by Vijaya Raghunatha Sethupathi, later the seat from which the Tondaiman rulers of Pudukkottai held their country. Rock-cut Shiva and Vishnu shrines are cut into the hill inside the walls.
Ramalinga Vilasam, Ramanathapuram	Marava & Ramnad	विरासत	The Sethupathi palace, whose durbar hall carries seventeenth-century wall paintings of court scenes, processions and the rulers themselves. It is the best surviving record of what the Ramnad court actually looked like.
Kilakarai	Marava & Ramnad	विरासत	An old Tamil Muslim trading port. Its Palaiya Jumma Palli is built in the local temple idiom — granite piers, a flat corbelled roof, no dome and no minaret — with the mihrab aligned to Mecca. The community dates the foundation to the seventh century; the visible fabric is considerably later, and the claim is best reported as the community's own.
Kayalpattinam	Marava & Ramnad	विरासत	Further south along the same coast and strictly beyond this region's edge, but part of the same trading world — a Tamil Muslim town of old mosques, Arwi printing and a chank fishery, and the port Ibn Battuta and the Portuguese both knew as Kayal.
Erwadi	Marava & Ramnad	तीर्थ	The dargah of Ibrahim Shaheed, one of the largest Muslim pilgrimage centres in the Tamil country, drawing Hindu as well as Muslim visitors to its annual kandoori.
Devipattinam	Marava & Ramnad	तीर्थ	A shallow-shore bathing place where nine stones set in the water are identified with the nine planets and worshipped standing in the sea. Aadi Amavasai brings very large crowds.
Uthirakosamangai	Marava & Ramnad	तीर्थ	An old Shiva temple in a village south of Ramanathapuram, whose Nataraja is said to be carved from a single block of emerald and is uncovered only once a year at Arudra Darshan.
Kalaiyar Kovil	Marava & Ramnad	विरासत	A fortified temple town where the Sivaganga ruler was killed by East India Company troops in 1772 — the event that began the Sivaganga resistance. The Marudhu brothers' memorial stands here.
Kundrakudi	Marava & Ramnad	तीर्थ	A hilltop Murugan temple above Karaikudi, with a rock-cut cave shrine and a long flight of steps.
Manamadurai	Marava & Ramnad	शहरी	A Vaigai-bank town whose potters supply cooking and water pots across the region, working to a clay recipe blended from three specific local sources.
Amber Fort and Jaipur City	Marwar & the Thar	विरासत	Amber is part of the Hill Forts of Rajasthan World Heritage listing; the walled city of Jaipur, laid out on a nine-square grid in 1727, was inscribed separately as a World Heritage city in 2019.
Jantar Mantar	Marwar & the Thar	विरासत	Sawai Jai Singh II's masonry observatory, completed around 1734, whose Vrihat Samrat Yantra sundial is accurate to about two seconds. Instruments, not decoration.
Mehrangarh Fort	Marwar & the Thar	विरासत	A fort on a 120 m escarpment above the blue town, never taken by direct assault — the gates still carry Jaipur cannonball scars from 1808 — with one of the best-run museums in India inside it.
Jaisalmer Fort	Marwar & the Thar	विरासत	One of very few forts anywhere still inhabited — around a quarter of the old town's population lives inside the walls, which is also the source of its drainage and conservation crisis.
Chittorgarh Fort	Marwar & the Thar	विरासत	One of the largest forts in India — some 280 hectares — and the site of three recorded jauhars. Mewar's political memory is anchored here rather than in Udaipur.
Kumbhalgarh	Marwar & the Thar	विरासत	Rana Kumbha's 15th-century fort, whose perimeter wall runs some 36 km — frequently described as the second-longest continuous wall in the world. Maharana Pratap was born here.
Keoladeo National Park	Marwar & the Thar	वन्यजीव	A man-made wetland created as a duck-shooting reserve for the Bharatpur rulers, now a World Heritage site and one of the great wintering grounds for waterfowl in Asia.
Ranthambore National Park	Marwar & the Thar	वन्यजीव	Dry deciduous forest wrapped around a 10th-century fort, and the reserve where tigers are most reliably seen in daylight in India.
Udaipur and Lake Pichola	Marwar & the Thar	शहरी	The Mewar capital moved here after Chittorgarh fell — a city built around linked artificial lakes, with the City Palace running along the eastern shore.
Pushkar	Marwar & the Thar	तीर्थ	A lake town with one of very few temples to Brahma anywhere, and a livestock fair each Kartik that draws tens of thousands of camels, horses and cattle.
Ajmer Sharif Dargah	Marwar & the Thar	तीर्थ	The shrine of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, visited by Hindus and Muslims alike; the annual Urs is one of the largest gatherings in the region.
Chand Baori, Abhaneri	Marwar & the Thar	विरासत	A stepwell of about 3,500 narrow steps descending thirteen storeys in a precise inverted geometry, built in the 8th–9th century to reach water and stay cool.
Dilwara Temples, Mount Abu	Marwar & the Thar	तीर्थ	Jain temples of the 11th–13th centuries whose marble carving is worked so thin it is translucent. Plain on the outside by design.
Chittorgarh Fort	Mewar	विरासत	A fort covering some 280 hectares on a mesa standing about 180 m above the plain, reached through seven successive gates. It was besieged and taken three times — by Alauddin Khalji in 1303, by Bahadur Shah of Gujarat in 1535 and by Akbar in 1568 — and on each occasion the chronicles record a jauhar inside the walls followed by the garrison riding out. Rana Kumbha's nine-storey Vijay Stambh of the 1440s and the earlier Jain Kirti Stambh both still stand, as do the Gaumukh reservoir and the Meera temple. Part of the Hill Forts of Rajasthan World Heritage inscription of 2013.
Kumbhalgarh	Mewar	विरासत	Rana Kumbha's fifteenth-century fort on a 1,100 m ridge, with a perimeter wall running roughly 36 km along the crest — commonly cited as one of the longest continuous walls anywhere. Maharana Pratap was born here in 1540, and the fort served as Mewar's fallback capital whenever Chittorgarh was untenable. The surrounding sanctuary is one of the few places in India where the Indian wolf is regularly recorded.
Ranakpur Jain temple	Mewar	तीर्थ	The Chaumukha temple to Adinath, begun in the fifteenth century on land granted by Rana Kumbha and funded by the merchant Dharanashah. It has four entrances on four sides and something on the order of 1,440 carved pillars, no two of them repeating, arranged so that the central image is visible from every direction.
Udaipur City Palace and Lake Pichola	Mewar	शहरी	Mewar moved its capital here in 1559, into the enclosed Girwa basin, and built the palace along the eastern shore over roughly four centuries and twenty-two reigns, which is why it reads as a range of buildings rather than one. Pichola itself was dammed in the fourteenth century by a grain carrier named Pichhu and enlarged afterwards. Jag Mandir on its island sheltered the rebel Mughal prince Khurram — later Shah Jahan — in 1623; Jag Niwas, built in the 1740s, is now a hotel.
Shrinathji temple, Nathdwara	Mewar	तीर्थ	The principal seat of the Pushtimarg sect. The image was moved from Govardhan in Braj in 1672 to keep it out of reach of Aurangzeb's iconoclasm and, by the account the town tells, the cart carrying it sank at the village of Sihad and would not move, which settled the question of where it would live. The building is a haveli, not a temple: no spire, a household layout, and a day divided into eight darshans with a food offering at each.
Eklingji	Mewar	तीर्थ	The temple at Kailashpuri, 22 km north of Udaipur, whose deity is the formal sovereign of Mewar — the Maharana ruled as his Diwan. The present complex was largely rebuilt in the fifteenth century under Rana Raimal. The tenth-century Sas-Bahu temples and the ruins of Nagda, Mewar's early capital, are a short walk away.
Haldighati and Rakt Talai	Mewar	विरासत	The pass where Maharana Pratap's force met a Mughal army under Man Singh I of Amber on 18 June 1576. The ground is yellow ochre clay, which is where the name comes from. Pratap's horse Chetak has a memorial here, and the field itself is a low open bowl that repays walking rather than driving past.
Jaisamand Lake	Mewar	प्रकृति	A masonry dam completed in 1691 under Maharana Jai Singh, holding what was for two centuries among the largest artificial lakes anywhere. Marble elephants line the bund, and the islands in it are settled by Bhil villages whose access is by boat.
Menal	Mewar	विरासत	An eleventh- and twelfth-century Shaiva temple cluster of the Chahamana period, standing on the lip of a gorge where a seasonal stream drops as a waterfall through the monsoon. It is on the Chittorgarh–Bundi road and almost always empty, which is not a comment on the carving.
Rajsamand Lake and the Raj Prashasti	Mewar	विरासत	A dam built from 1662 under Maharana Raj Singh I as famine relief work. Its stepped embankment at Nauchowki carries the Raj Prashasti, a Sanskrit inscription cut across a set of large marble slabs and generally described as the longest stone inscription in India. It is a court history, carved as public infrastructure.
Kankroli	Mewar	तीर्थ	The Dwarkadhish temple on the Rajsamand embankment, one of the seven Pushtimarg seats, and the second pole of the region's Vaishnav calendar after Nathdwara. Its Jal Jhulni procession runs onto the lake itself.
Zawar	Mewar	विरासत	Mine workings in the hills south of Udaipur where zinc was smelted by downward distillation in banks of clay retorts. The retort debris has been dated to well before the technique was described anywhere in Europe, which makes this the earliest known site of industrial-scale zinc production.
Ahar	Mewar	विरासत	Two things in one place: the type site of the Ahar-Banas chalcolithic culture, excavated on the stream east of Udaipur, and the Mahasatiya, the royal cremation ground where the Mewar rulers' cenotaphs stand in rows. The small museum holds the excavated material.
Sitamata Wildlife Sanctuary	Mewar	वन्यजीव	Teak and mahua forest on the plateau edge, and the most reliable place in Rajasthan to see the Indian giant flying squirrel. It also holds the region's densest concentration of mahua trees, which is an economic fact as much as an ecological one.
Shilpgram and the Bhartiya Lok Kala Mandal	Mewar	शहरी	Two working institutions rather than monuments — a rural arts complex on the western edge of Udaipur with reconstructed dwellings from across western India, and the folk-arts museum and puppet theatre founded in 1952 that kept Rajasthani string puppetry in continuous performance.
Bijolia	Mewar	विरासत	Twelfth-century temples and rock inscriptions on the plateau, and the village that gave its name to the Bijolia peasant movement — a long agitation against levies on Mewar tenants that ran from 1897 into the 1940s and became the template for peasant organising across Rajputana.
Janaki Mandir, Janakpur	Mithilanchal	तीर्थ	A large marble temple completed in 1910 on the site tradition identifies as Sita's home, and the centre of the Nepali half of Mithila. Vivaha Panchami here draws pilgrims from both countries.
Punaura Dham	Mithilanchal	तीर्थ	The site identified in Bihar as Sita's birthplace, with a temple and tank, and a large Ram Navami fair.
The painting villages — Jitwarpur and Ranti	Mithilanchal	विरासत	Two villages where a large proportion of households paint, several of them holding national awards. Work is bought directly from the artists' homes; the walls and courtyards are painted too.
Darbhanga Raj palaces	Mithilanchal	विरासत	Nargona and Anand Bagh palaces, built by one of the largest zamindari estates in India, now partly occupied by a university. Grand, decaying, and the physical record of the wealth that funded Maithili scholarship.
Ahilya Asthan	Mithilanchal	तीर्थ	The shrine at the place identified with the Ahalya episode of the Ramayana, with an annual Ram Navami fair.
Ugratara Mahishi	Mithilanchal	तीर्थ	A Tantric Tara shrine, and the village remembered as Mandan Mishra's — where the debate with Shankaracharya is said to have been judged by Mandan's wife Bharati.
Vaishali	Mithilanchal	विरासत	The seat of the Vajji confederacy, often described as one of the earliest republics; the site of Mahavira's birth at Kundagram nearby, of the Buddha's last sermon, and of the second Buddhist council. An Ashokan pillar with a lion capital stands at Kolhua.
Kusheshwar Asthan Bird Sanctuary	Mithilanchal	प्रकृति	A wetland in the Kosi–Kamla flood basin that fills with migratory birds from November — Siberian crane records, bar-headed geese and large numbers of waterfowl.
Kosi Barrage and the embankments	Mithilanchal	विरासत	The 1963 barrage at Bhimnagar and the embankments running south from it — an engineering scheme that dramatically changed where the river floods, and whose consequences the region has argued about ever since.
Simaria Dham	Mithilanchal	तीर्थ	A Ganga ghat where a month-long kalpvas is observed in Kartik, with a tented camp on the sands — Mithila's own version of the Prayag practice.
Raj Nagar	Mithilanchal	विरासत	An early twentieth-century palace complex built by the Darbhanga Raj and wrecked by the 1934 earthquake, left as a group of ruined temples and halls in a field.
Bhimeshwar and the Kamla banks	Mithilanchal	प्रकृति	Riverbank country where the makhana ponds are densest and the harvesting can be watched between May and August.
Aizawl	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	शहरी	A city built along a ridge at a little over 1,100 m, where the streets follow contours and the buildings stack down the slope on stilts, so a house may be entered on its top floor from the road and have four storeys below it. Bara Bazar is the working market — smoked meat on racks, fermented shoot in bottles, and vegetables sold by women who have brought them in from villages that morning. Most of the city closes on Sunday.
Champhai	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	प्रकृति	The rice bowl — an unusually broad flat valley floor at around 1,600 m, terraced for irrigated paddy since 1898 in a region that otherwise farms hillsides. The eastern rim looks straight across the Tiau into the Chin Hills, and the vineyards at Hnahlan nearby supply the grape wine sold as Zawlaidi.
Phawngpui National Park (Blue Mountain)	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	प्रकृति	At 2,157 m the highest point in these hills, and named in Lai for what is on top of it — a great meadow, open grass above the forest line, held in older belief to be the ground of local deities. Protected since 1992; orchids, rhododendron, and one of the few Indian records for clouded leopard.
Vantawng Falls	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	प्रकृति	The highest waterfall in Mizoram, dropping in two stages through dense forest near Thenzawl and generally given as about 229 m. It is viewed from a platform across the gorge, because there is no way down.
Reiek	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	पहाड़	A 1,465 m cliff-sided peak an hour west of Aizawl, with a reconstructed traditional Mizo village of thatched houses at its base built to show the pre-twentieth-century settlement plan. On a clear winter day the plains of Bangladesh are visible from the top.
Murlen National Park	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	वन्यजीव	Semi-evergreen and montane forest on the Myanmar frontier, continuous in ecology with the Chin Hills across the ridge. Serow, hoolock gibbon, leopard and a heavy orchid list; one of the least-visited national parks in India.
Dampa Tiger Reserve	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	वन्यजीव	The largest protected area in Mizoram, on the western slope where the hills fall towards the plains. Lower, hotter and wetter than the ridge country, with elephant, gaur, hoolock gibbon and clouded leopard.
Palak Dil	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	प्रकृति	The largest lake in the region, in the far south in Mara country, surrounded by swamp forest and reached by a long road. Local accounts explain its origin as a village that sank; geologists prefer a landslide-dammed depression.
Tam Dil	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	प्रकृति	A small lake in a forested basin near Saitual — the mustard-field lake, by its name — with a state holiday resort on its rim and the most-photographed water in the state.
Thenzawl	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	शहरी	The weaving town. Several thousand fly-shuttle looms in household workshops turn out most of the puans sold across the region, including the four GI-registered cloths that carry Thenzawl's name in their applications. Vantawng Falls and a deer park are within a short drive.
Mizoram State Museum	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	विरासत	The clearest single place to read the region's material culture — looms, puans by type, hunting and agricultural tools, gongs, and the household objects of the pre-Christian village, arranged in a small building in the middle of Aizawl.
Rih Dil	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	प्रकृति	A heart-shaped lake about a mile long, lying across the Tiau in Myanmar's Chin State roughly 22 km from Champhai. In the pre-Christian cosmology every soul travelling to pialral passed it, which makes a lake outside India the single most important site in the old Mizo geography of the afterlife.
Hmuifang	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	पहाड़	A forested ridge about 50 km south of Aizawl whose tree cover was protected by the chiefs before any forest department existed — one of the oldest deliberate conservation decisions in the region, and now a walking and camping hill.
Lamka (Churachandpur)	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	शहरी	The market town of the Manipur hills, where Thadou, Paite, Hmar, Vaiphei, Zou, Simte, Gangte and Mizo are all in daily use within a few streets, each community maintaining its own hymnal, press and weave.
Tawang Monastery (Galden Namgey Lhatse)	Monpa & Tawang Belt	तीर्थ	Founded in 1680–81 by Merak Lama Lodre Gyatso at the behest of the fifth Dalai Lama, and among the largest Buddhist monasteries in India. A walled compound of some sixty-five residential buildings around an assembly hall holding a gilded Buddha about eighteen feet high, with a library whose Kangyur and Tengyur sets include manuscripts written in gold. It functions as a working Gelugpa institution with several hundred monks, not as a monument.
Urgelling Monastery	Monpa & Tawang Belt	तीर्थ	A small monastery a few kilometres below Tawang, and the birthplace in 1683 of Tsangyang Gyatso, the sixth Dalai Lama, whose poems are still sung across the Tibetan-speaking world. Modest, quiet and much older in significance than in appearance.
Tawang Taktsang	Monpa & Tawang Belt	तीर्थ	A cliff-side gompa on the route north of Tawang, associated in local tradition with Padmasambhava, in a stand of old-growth forest. The setting is the reason to go — the site is understood as a meditation retreat rather than a congregational monastery.
Sela Pass	Monpa & Tawang Belt	प्रकृति	The pass at about 4,170 m that separates the Tawang basin from the Kameng valleys, with a small lake below the top that freezes in winter. The road tunnel beneath it, opened in March 2024, is what now keeps the route open when the pass itself is snowed under. Above the tree line, treeless, and cold in any month.
Nuranang Falls	Monpa & Tawang Belt	प्रकृति	A high single-drop waterfall on the Nuranang below Jang, on the road between Sela and Tawang, with a small hydel station at its foot. Reliable through the year and heaviest after the monsoon.
Zemithang and the Gorsam Chorten	Monpa & Tawang Belt	तीर्थ	A broad valley on the Nyamjang Chu with the largest stupa in the belt — a whitewashed hemispherical chorten on the Nepalese pattern, circumambulated by pilgrims and the focus of the Gorsam Kora gathering. The valley flats below are one of only two black-necked crane wintering grounds in India.
Sangti Valley	Monpa & Tawang Belt	प्रकृति	A wide flat-floored valley of gravel river bed, pasture and terraced field west of Dirang, and the better known of the two black-necked crane wintering sites — though only a handful of birds arrive in most years, and riverbed disturbance has made even that unreliable. Also apple, kiwi and trout country.
Dirang Dzong and the hot springs	Monpa & Tawang Belt	विरासत	An old walled village of stone-and-timber houses built wall-to-wall above the Dirang Chu, still lived in rather than preserved, with sulphur hot springs on the river below that are used year-round. The National Research Centre on Yak is a short distance away.
Thembang	Monpa & Tawang Belt	विरासत	A fortified Monpa village on a spur above the Dirang valley, entered through two stone gates, with the houses forming the wall. It is on India's tentative list for World Heritage inscription and is run partly as a community conservation area by the village itself.
Bomdila and Gontse Gaden Rabgyel Ling	Monpa & Tawang Belt	तीर्थ	The district town on a ridge at about 2,400 m, with a Gelugpa monastery established in 1965 by the twelfth Tsona Gontse Rinpoche, a craft centre and an apple-growing hinterland. The usual overnight stop on the way up.
Rupa and Shergaon	Monpa & Tawang Belt	विरासत	Sherdukpen villages on the foothill shelf, with their own language, weaving and the Khiksaba festival in November. Historically the community moved down to the Assam plain edge for the winter and back up for the summer, and the two-settlement pattern is still visible.
Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary	Monpa & Tawang Belt	वन्यजीव	A ridge dropping from around 3,200 m to 500 m in a short horizontal distance, which is why its bird list is one of the longest in the eastern Himalaya. The Bugun liocichla, described in 2006, is known from here and almost nowhere else, and the adjoining Singchung Bugun Village Community Reserve is managed by the community the bird is named for.
Kohima War Cemetery	Naga Hills	विरासत	Terraced graves on Garrison Hill, on the ground where the Japanese advance into India was halted between April and June 1944 — part of the fighting ran across the tennis court of the Deputy Commissioner's bungalow, and the court's outline is marked in the cemetery. The memorial carries the Kohima epitaph: "When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow, we gave our today."
Khonoma	Naga Hills	विरासत	An Angami village of terraced rice fields on a defensible spur, with a fort gate, three khels and more than twenty named rice varieties on its terraces. In 1998 the village council banned hunting and logging across its land and set up the Khonoma Nature Conservation and Tragopan Sanctuary — a conservation decision taken by a village, not by a state.
Dzukou Valley	Naga Hills	प्रकृति	A high bowl at about 2,450 m carpeted in dwarf bamboo that is cropped short by frost and grazing, so the valley reads as lawn. Its lily flowers in June and July. Access is on foot from Viswema or Jakhama, and the valley is also claimed and cared for from the Manipur side.
Japfü peak	Naga Hills	पहाड़	At 3,048 m the second-highest point in Nagaland, with a rhododendron on its slopes recorded in the 1990s as the tallest of its kind. The climb is done overnight from Kigwema to reach the summit at dawn.
Mokokchung and Ungma	Naga Hills	विरासत	The Ao town and, three kilometres from it, Ungma — the largest and by tradition the oldest Ao village, from which many others were founded. Ao village government runs on a rotating council of clan elders, which is why the town has an unusually dense civic life.
Mon and the Konyak villages	Naga Hills	विरासत	The Konyak country: Angh houses with carved posts and hanging log drums, brass ornament, and the last generation of facially tattooed men, whose marks record a practice that ended in the middle of the twentieth century.
Longwa	Naga Hills	विरासत	A large Konyak village sitting directly on the international boundary — the line runs through the Angh's house, and his authority extends over villages on both sides of it. The village is the clearest single illustration that this cultural region is older than the border drawn across it.
Shirui Kashong	Naga Hills	प्रकृति	The Tangkhul peak on whose upper slopes the Shirui lily grows and nowhere else in the wild. It flowers in late May and June and has never been successfully naturalised elsewhere, which is why the village runs an annual festival around it.
Saramati	Naga Hills	पहाड़	The highest point in the region at 3,841 m, standing on the frontier watershed itself. The approach is from Thanamir village, and the climb needs permits and local guides.
Doyang reservoir and Pangti	Naga Hills	वन्यजीव	The autumn roost of the Amur falcon, which crosses from Siberia to southern Africa and stops here in enormous numbers. In 2012 tens of thousands were being netted; the village councils of Pangti and its neighbours banned the hunting outright, and the roost is now guarded by the same people who once trapped it.
Kachari ruins, Dimapur	Naga Hills	विरासत	Rows of carved monoliths in the foothill plain, left by the Dimasa Kachari kingdom before the sixteenth century. They belong to a plains-edge state, not to the hill villages, and mark the point where the two worlds met and traded.
Naga Heritage Village, Kisama	Naga Hills	विरासत	A purpose-built site 12 km from Kohima where each recognised community maintains a morung and house in its own architectural style. It is a constructed display, built in 2000 for the Hornbill Festival, and it is the easiest place to see the region's architectural differences side by side.
Diezephe craft village	Naga Hills	विरासत	A weaving and wood-carving cluster on the foothill edge near Dimapur, organised as a working craft village rather than a showroom.
Touphema	Naga Hills	विरासत	A community-owned tourist village built in traditional Angami style and run by the village itself, with the revenue going to the village rather than to an operator.
Kanyakumari point and the Bhagavathy Amman temple	Nanjil Nadu	तीर्थ	The southern tip of the peninsula, where the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean are conventionally said to meet, and a shore temple to the goddess as an unmarried girl. It is one of the few places in India where sunrise and sunset are both watched from the same stretch of rock, and around the April full moon sunset and moonrise can be seen at once.
Vivekananda Rock Memorial	Nanjil Nadu	विरासत	A memorial on a rock about 500 m offshore, inaugurated in 1970 after a long campaign led by Eknath Ranade, marking the tradition that Vivekananda meditated there in 1892 before leaving for Chicago. The same rock carries the Sripada Mandapam over what is venerated as the goddess's footprint.
Thiruvalluvar Statue	Nanjil Nadu	विरासत	A stone figure of the Tirukkural's author on the adjacent rock, unveiled on 1 January 2000 and designed by V. Ganapati Sthapati. It stands 133 feet including its base, for the 133 chapters of the text, with the 38-foot pedestal standing for the chapters on virtue — a monument whose dimensions are a citation.
Gandhi Mandapam	Nanjil Nadu	विरासत	Built where Gandhi's ashes were kept before immersion, in a form drawing on Odisha temple architecture, and designed so that on 2 October the sun falls through an opening in the roof onto the memorial stone.
Padmanabhapuram Palace	Nanjil Nadu	विरासत	Travancore's capital until 1795 and the largest surviving wooden palace complex in the subcontinent — the Thai Kottaram dating from before 1550, the Uppirikka Malika of 1745 with the treasury and mural chamber above, a clock tower with a working three-hundred-year-old movement, and a medicinal bed assembled from sixty-four timbers. It stands in Tamil Nadu and is owned and maintained by the Government of Kerala, which is this region's whole argument in one building.
Thanumalayan Temple, Suchindram	Nanjil Nadu	तीर्थ	A temple to Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma as a single presence — Sthanu, Mal and Ayan, which is where the name comes from — with a tall gopuram, granite pillars cut so that they ring at different pitches when struck, and a large monolithic Hanuman. It was administered from Travancore and its architecture and ritual read as Kerala while its inscriptions and setting are Tamil.
Nagaraja Temple, Nagercoil	Nanjil Nadu	तीर्थ	The serpent shrine that gives the town its name, with a sand floor rather than a paved one and figures identified as Mahavira and Parshvanatha on its pillars — the Jain layer of the region surviving inside a functioning Hindu temple.
Chitharal Malai Kovil	Nanjil Nadu	विरासत	Jain rock-cut reliefs and a rock-shelter shrine on Thirucharanathumalai, dating to around the ninth century and later converted to a Bhagavathy temple. Protected by the Archaeological Survey, and the clearest evidence that this hill country was Jain before it was anything else.
Mathur aqueduct	Nanjil Nadu	विरासत	A concrete trough carrying an irrigation canal across the Pahrali river valley on piers, built in 1966, about 1,250 feet long with its tallest piers around 115 feet. It is walkable along the top, and it is the most direct illustration of how the Nanjil plain is watered.
Vattakottai fort	Nanjil Nadu	विरासत	A compact granite sea fort north-east of Kanyakumari, built during the Travancore military reorganisation of the eighteenth century, with the sea on one side and the paddy plain on the other from the ramparts.
Udayagiri fort	Nanjil Nadu	विरासत	The hill fort where Eustachius De Lannoy — the Dutch commander defeated at Colachel in 1741 — was first held and where he is buried, after three decades spent rebuilding the Travancore army. Locally still called Dillanai kotta.
Colachel	Nanjil Nadu	विरासत	A working fishing harbour, and the site of the battle of 10 August 1741 in which Travancore defeated a Dutch East India Company force — among the very few clear defeats of a European naval power by an Indian state in that century.
Pechiparai and Perunchani reservoirs	Nanjil Nadu	प्रकृति	The two impoundments on the Kodayar system that irrigate the Nanjil plain. Pechiparai was completed in 1906 under Travancore, and the canal network below it is why this district grows wet paddy at all.
Muttom and Manakudy	Nanjil Nadu	समुद्र तट	A rock-shelf beach and lighthouse at Muttom on the west-facing coast, and at Manakudy the estuary where the Pazhayar meets the sea behind a bar — a bird site, a crab fishery and a sandbar that shifts every monsoon.
Aralvaimozhi gap and the Muppandal wind farms	Nanjil Nadu	प्रकृति	The break in the Western Ghats through which the southwest monsoon wind crosses to the eastern plain, now filled with one of the largest concentrations of onshore wind turbines in India. The geography that made this a trade and invasion route is the same geography that made it a power belt.
Thovalai flower market	Nanjil Nadu	शहरी	A wholesale flower market working from before dawn, supplying jasmine, chrysanthemum and garland material to temples and weddings on both sides of the Ghats. The trading is done in the dark because the flowers have to reach the buyer before the day warms.
Car Nicobar	Nicobar Islands	विरासत	A flat coral island ringed by villages, the district headquarters at Malacca, an air force station, and the centre of Nicobarese Christianity. It has no natural harbour, so everything historically came ashore through surf. The 2004 tsunami crossed much of the island and the air force station lost more than a hundred personnel and family members. Entry requires administration permission.
Nancowry Harbour	Nicobar Islands	विरासत	The deep sheltered anchorage between Camorta and Nancowry islands — the reason Danish, Austrian and British expeditions kept returning to the Nicobars from the eighteenth century onwards, and the site of a long sequence of failed European settlements defeated by malaria.
Chowra	Nicobar Islands	विरासत	A small island whose people are the group's potters, and whose standing in the islands' inter-island exchange is out of all proportion to its size. Closed to visitors.
Trinket Island	Nicobar Islands	प्रकृति	Cut into two by the 2004 tsunami and its population resettled. It is the plainest surviving physical record of what that wave did to the group, and it is not a visitor site.
Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve	Nicobar Islands	वन्यजीव	Rainforest, mangrove and reef over much of the largest island, with Campbell Bay and Galathea National Parks inside it. Habitat of the Nicobar megapode, which incubates its eggs in a mound of sand and leaf litter, and of the giant leatherback turtle, which nests on the Galathea beaches. The island's interior is Shompen territory and is not open.
Indira Point	Nicobar Islands	प्रकृति	The southernmost point of India, about 150 km from Sumatra. Its lighthouse was damaged and the point itself subsided by roughly 4.25 metres in the 2004 earthquake — the coastline of the country was permanently redrawn in a few minutes.
Galathea Bay	Nicobar Islands	प्रकृति	A river mouth and bay on the south-east of Great Nicobar, a major leatherback nesting beach, and the site of the transshipment port and township project approved for the island in the 2020s. It is the central point of contention in the islands' current politics.
Campbell Bay	Nicobar Islands	शहरी	The main settlement on Great Nicobar, with a mixed population of Nicobarese and mainland settlers, reached by ship from Port Blair or by air. The practical base for anything on the island.
Katchal	Nicobar Islands	प्रकृति	A central-group island with a plantation history and a mixed Nicobarese and settler population. It was among the most severely hit places in the 2004 tsunami.
Omkareshwar and Mandhata island	Nimar	तीर्थ	A jyotirlinga on an island in the Narmada whose outline is held to resemble the Devanagari syllable ॐ. There are two temples and an old argument about which holds the jyotirlinga — Omkareshwar on the island and Mamleshwar on the south bank — and pilgrims settle it by visiting both. The temple was rebuilt under Holkar patronage in the eighteenth century; tradition places Adi Shankara's meeting with his teacher in a cave below it, and a colossal seated statue of Shankara was installed above the site in 2023. A circuit of the island on foot is a standard observance.
Maheshwar	Nimar	विरासत	Ahilyabai Holkar's capital from 1767 until her death, and the Holkar seat until the state moved to Indore in 1818. The fort stands directly above the river with the ghats built out below it, and the weaving sheds are inside the fort walls. Identified with the Mahishmati of the Sanskrit epics, which gives the site a depth nothing above ground can show.
Asirgarh Fort	Nimar	विरासत	A hill fort on a Satpura spur commanding the pass between the Narmada and Tapti valleys — the corridor any army moving between north India and the Deccan had to use, which is why it was called the key to the Deccan. Akbar took it in 1601, and it was the last conquest of his reign.
Shahi Qila and the Burhanpur Mughal quarter	Nimar	विरासत	Burhanpur was founded in 1388 by the Faruqi sultans of Khandesh and became the Mughal headquarters for the Deccan after 1601. Mumtaz Mahal died here in 1631, and was buried at Burhanpur for about six months — the Ahukhana garden across the Tapti is the site usually named — before her body was taken to Agra. The palace retains its hamam, with ceiling painting that local tradition connects to the Taj Mahal's design.
Khooni Bhandara	Nimar	विरासत	An underground water system built in the early seventeenth century under Abdurrahim Khan-i-Khanan, tapping groundwater at the Satpura foot through tunnels with vertical inspection shafts and delivering it by gravity into masonry karanj within the city. Part of it still supplies water to households in the old town, four centuries on — which makes it a working utility rather than a monument.
Dargah-e-Hakimi	Nimar	तीर्थ	The shrine complex of Syedi Abdul Qadir Hakimuddin, and a principal pilgrimage destination for the Dawoodi Bohra community, with a large annual gathering and its own guest and kitchen infrastructure. It is the reason Burhanpur's visitor economy looks nothing like Khandwa's.
Bawangaja	Nimar	तीर्थ	A standing figure of Rishabhanatha cut directly out of the rock face of the Satpura scarp, about 84 feet high — the name means fifty-two yards, which is the traditional measure of it. It is among the tallest rock-cut statues in India and is reached by a climb from the road below.
Khandwa and its four kunds	Nimar	विरासत	The old town is laid out around four masonry tanks set at its four quarters — Bhima Kund, Padam Kund, Suraj Kund and Rameshwar Kund. The town's name is taken from the Khandava forest of the epics, and the kunds are the oldest visible structures in it.
Dada Darbar, Khandwa	Nimar	तीर्थ	The shrine of Dadaji Dhuniwale, a twentieth-century ascetic who kept a perpetual fire, and one of the largest devotional gatherings in eastern Nimar. The fire is still maintained.
Sant Singaji samadhi	Nimar	तीर्थ	The samadhi of the sixteenth-century Nimadi saint, with an annual fair that fills the surrounding fields. Bhajan mandalis come from across the valley and sing in relays through the nights of the fair.
Indira Sagar and Narmada Nagar	Nimar	प्रकृति	The largest reservoir in India by volume, impounded at Punasa on the Narmada. The scale is the point in both directions: the storage is the basis of irrigation and power across the valley, and the submergence displaced a very large number of valley-floor households, which is the origin of the movement that has shaped Nimar's politics since the 1980s.
Hanuwantiya	Nimar	प्रकृति	An island and shoreline resort on the Indira Sagar backwaters, and the site of the state's Jal Mahotsav water festival since 2016 — a tourism economy built directly on top of a reservoir that submerged farmland.
Mandleshwar and the Narmada ghat towns	Nimar	तीर्थ	Mandleshwar, Barwaha, Sanawad and the smaller ghats along the reach — administrative towns of the Holkar period that function today as halts on the Parikrama and as bathing places at the festival dates.
The Satpura slope and the Bhil and Barela country	Nimar	प्रकृति	Teak and mixed deciduous forest climbing away from the valley floor, with Bhil, Bhilala and Barela villages through it. This is where the mahua, chironji and tendu come from, and where the Bhagoria markets are held.
Elephanta Caves (Gharapuri)	North Konkan	विरासत	Rock-cut Shaiva caves on an island an hour by launch from the Gateway, dominated by the six-metre three-headed Sadashiva. The whole hall is carved downward out of the hill, so every pillar is a leftover rather than a support, and a single misjudged cut could not be undone. Inscribed by UNESCO in 1987.
Kanheri Caves	North Konkan	विरासत	More than a hundred Buddhist excavations cut into a basalt ridge over roughly a thousand years, with rock-cut cisterns, a chaitya hall and inscriptions recording donors from the trading towns of the coast. They sit inside a national park inside a city of twenty million, which is the single strangest sentence in this file.
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus	North Konkan	विरासत	The 1888 terminus of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, Victorian Gothic with Indian detail carved by students of the local art school, and still the busiest working station of its kind anywhere. Inscribed by UNESCO in 2004.
Victorian Gothic and Art Deco Ensembles of Mumbai	North Konkan	शहरी	Two facing rows around the Oval Maidan — nineteenth-century Gothic public buildings on one side, 1930s Art Deco apartment blocks and cinemas on the other, built on reclaimed land within seventy years of each other. Inscribed by UNESCO in 2018. The city holds one of the largest concentrations of Art Deco buildings in the world.
Sanjay Gandhi National Park	North Konkan	वन्यजीव	Around a hundred square kilometres of forest with a resident leopard population inside the municipal boundary, plus the Tulsi and Vihar lakes that were the city's first piped water. The leopards are studied as one of the world's clearest cases of large-carnivore coexistence with high-density human settlement.
Vasai (Bassein) Fort	North Konkan	विरासत	The walled seat of the Portuguese Northern Province, with roofless churches, a Dominican convent and gates standing in tidal scrub. It fell to a Maratha siege under Chimaji Appa in 1739 after a campaign of years, and was never reoccupied at scale, which is why the ruin is legible rather than built over.
Raigad Fort	North Konkan	विरासत	Shivaji's capital and coronation site of 1674, on a flat-topped ghat spur reached by some 1,400 steps or a ropeway. The market street, court platform and his samadhi survive on the plateau. Inscribed by UNESCO in 2025 as a component of the Maratha Military Landscapes of India.
Khanderi (Kanhoji Angre island)	North Konkan	विरासत	A low island fort off Thal, fortified by Shivaji in the face of an English blockade and later the base of the Maratha admiral Kanhoji Angre. Also inscribed in 2025 within the Maratha Military Landscapes serial property; access is limited because a working lighthouse occupies the island.
Murud-Janjira	North Konkan	विरासत	A sea fort on a rock in the bay, held by the Siddis of Janjira and never taken — Maratha, Portuguese, Dutch and British attempts all failed across some three centuries. Its walls rise straight from the water, and it keeps large freshwater tanks inside a saltwater fort, which is why a siege never worked.
Kolaba Fort, Alibag	North Konkan	विरासत	A fort in the intertidal zone off Alibag beach, built up by Shivaji from 1662 and later Angre's naval base. You can walk to it at low tide and not at high tide, which is the entire point of where it was put.
Karnala Fort and Bird Sanctuary	North Konkan	वन्यजीव	A basalt thumb of rock above the Mumbai–Goa highway with a fort on top and a small sanctuary around it, known for wintering and passage birds and for being the closest real forest walk to the city.
Matheran	North Konkan	पहाड़	A laterite-capped hill station on the ghat crest where motor vehicles are not permitted at all — access is on foot, on horseback, or by the two-foot narrow-gauge line that has been climbing from Neral since 1907. The ban is the reason the place still sounds like a hill station.
Sopara (Nala Sopara)	North Konkan	विरासत	A busy suburban town on top of one of the oldest ports on the west coast, identified with the Shurparaka of early texts. A Buddhist stupa mound excavated here yielded relic caskets and a fragment of an Ashokan edict — evidence that this coast was trading and receiving imperial edicts long before any of its present cities existed.
Banganga Tank, Walkeshwar	North Konkan	तीर्थ	A rectangular stepped tank of the twelfth century on Malabar Hill, fed by a spring, ringed by dharamshalas and small temples, and sitting a few hundred metres from some of the most expensive real estate in Asia. It is the oldest continuously used structure in the city.
The koliwadas — Worli, Versova, Sassoon Dock	North Konkan	शहरी	Working fishing villages inside the city, with their own tenure, their own festivals and a fish auction that starts before dawn. Sassoon Dock, built in the 1870s, is where to see the trawler catch land and be sold in the same hour.
Jawhar	North Konkan	पहाड़	A small upland town, seat of a former Koli princely state, with the 1930s Jai Vilas palace, waterfalls at Dabhosa and the Warli painting villages in the country around it.
The Bhayandar and Vasai salt pans	North Konkan	प्रकृति	Kilometres of shallow evaporation pans along the creeks, worked from December to May, and simultaneously the metropolitan region's largest undeveloped flood buffer. Best seen from the train window between Bhayandar and Vasai Road at any time of year.
Mount Mary Basilica and the Mahim dargah	North Konkan	तीर्थ	Two shrines whose congregations do not observe the boundaries anyone assumes. The Bandra basilica's September fair and the December urs of Makhdoom Ali Mahimi at Mahim both draw crowds of every faith, and at Mahim the city police have carried the ceremonial chadar for generations.
Amba Vilas (Mysore) Palace	Old Mysore	विरासत	The present building went up between 1897 and 1912 after fire destroyed its wooden predecessor during a royal wedding, to designs by Henry Irwin — an Indo-Saracenic composite of Hoysala, Rajput, Islamic and Gothic elements built for a court that was consciously commissioning a public monument. Roughly a hundred thousand bulbs outline it on Dasara nights and Sunday evenings, and it takes over four million visitors a year.
Chamundi Hill	Old Mysore	तीर्थ	A thousand-odd steps up a granite hill to the Chamundeshwari temple, with a black granite Nandi carved out of a single boulder on the way, dated by inscription to the seventeenth century. The goddess on the hill is the tutelary deity of the dynasty, which is why her image is what now rides in the Dasara howdah.
Srirangapatna	Old Mysore	विरासत	A river island fortified into the capital of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, and the site where Tipu was killed when the walls were breached in 1799. The Ranganathaswamy temple here is Adi Ranga, the first of the three Ranganatha shrines strung down the Cauvery; the Daria Daulat summer palace carries murals of Tipu's campaigns painted on its outer walls, and the Gumbaz holds the family tombs.
Keshava temple, Somanathapura	Old Mysore	विरासत	A Hoysala temple of 1268, three shrines on a star-shaped plan around a common pillared hall, standing complete inside its own cloistered courtyard. Inscribed in 2023 as one of the three components of the Sacred Ensembles of the Hoysalas; the other two are up in the hill country. The carving is as fine as it is because the stone is chloritic schist, soft enough to lathe and to undercut when quarried and hardening on exposure.
Shravanabelagola	Old Mysore	तीर्थ	A 57-foot monolithic Bahubali carved from a single granite outcrop around 981 CE at the instance of Chavundaraya, a Ganga minister, standing at the top of six hundred rock-cut steps on Vindhyagiri. Every twelve years the statue is anointed head to foot from a scaffold in the Mahamastakabhisheka; the last was in 2018 and the next falls in 2030.
Melukote	Old Mysore	तीर्थ	A rocky hilltop town of Cheluvanarayana Swamy, where Ramanuja is recorded as having lived for years and reorganised temple practice. Its Vairamudi festival brings out a diamond crown kept under seal for the rest of the year; the temple puliyogare is the reference version of the dish, and the town is also a centre of Sanskrit learning.
Talakadu	Old Mysore	विरासत	A group of temples on the Cauvery's south bank progressively buried under wind-driven river sand, some excavated back out and some still under the dunes. The Panchalinga Darshana, a circuit of five Shiva shrines here, is observed only in years when a rare calendrical conjunction recurs — an interval of roughly twelve years.
Krishnaraja Sagara and Brindavan Gardens	Old Mysore	विरासत	The dam that made the canal command what it is, built across the Cauvery under Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV with M. Visvesvaraya as chief engineer and completed in 1932, using a lime-and-surkhi mortar rather than cement. The terraced gardens below it, with their musical fountain, were laid out as part of the same project and remain one of the most visited places in the region.
Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary	Old Mysore	वन्यजीव	Islets in the Cauvery just below Srirangapatna, formed by an eighteenth-century check dam and notified as a sanctuary in 1940 after Salim Ali surveyed them. Painted stork, spot-billed pelican, river tern and a resident population of mugger crocodile, seen from a boat at close range.
Bandipur Tiger Reserve	Old Mysore	वन्यजीव	Dry deciduous and teak forest set aside as a game sanctuary by the Mysore state in 1931 and made one of the first Project Tiger reserves in 1973. It sits at the join of four protected areas across three linguistic regions, and the elephants move between them without reference to any of it.
Nagarahole (Rajiv Gandhi) National Park	Old Mysore	वन्यजीव	Moist deciduous forest on the Kabini backwaters, with among the highest densities of large herbivores recorded anywhere in Asia and, consequently, of tiger and leopard. The dry-season congregation on the Kabini shoreline is the single best wildlife spectacle in southern India.
Biligirirangana and Male Mahadeshwara Hills	Old Mysore	तीर्थ	Two forested ranges that carry both a wildlife reserve and a live pilgrimage. The BR Hills are the home ground of the Sholaga community; MM Hills draws lakh-scale crowds to a temple reached by a ghat road, and the Mahadeshwara epic sung by Kamsale performers belongs to this landscape and nowhere else.
Shivanasamudra	Old Mysore	प्रकृति	The Cauvery splits round an island and drops twice, as Gaganachukki and Bharachukki. The hydro-electric station commissioned here in 1902 was among the first in Asia, and its power went overland to the Kolar gold mines before anything else. The Madhya Ranga temple, the middle of the three Ranganathas, stands on the island.
Bengaluru's pete, Lalbagh and Cubbon Park	Old Mysore	शहरी	The eighteenth-century market grid — Chikkapete, Balepete, Akkipete — still trades by street and by commodity. Lalbagh was begun as a garden by Hyder Ali and extended by Tipu, and holds a granite outcrop dated to around three billion years and one of Kempe Gowda's four boundary towers. Cubbon Park and the red Attara Kacheri belong to the later administrative city.
Nandi Hills and Devarayanadurga	Old Mysore	पहाड़	Granite hills rising out of the plateau with Chola and later fortifications on top, a Tipu-era summer residence at Nandi, and — the reason people actually go — a cloud inversion at dawn in the cool months. The South Pennar rises on the Nandi massif and runs east, away from the Cauvery entirely.
Meenakshi Amman Temple	Pandya Nadu	तीर्थ	A double temple in which the goddess, not the god, is the principal deity and the one whose shrine a pilgrim approaches first — an inversion that governs the whole city's ritual year. Fourteen gopurams covered in thousands of painted stucco figures, a golden lotus tank, a thousand-pillar hall now serving as a sculpture museum, and a plan whose concentric streets the modern city still follows. Largely a seventeenth-century Nayak rebuilding of a far older foundation.
Thirumalai Nayakkar Mahal	Pandya Nadu	विरासत	Thirumalai Nayak's palace of 1636, of which only the courtyard and dance hall survive — his grandson stripped much of the complex to build at Tiruchirappalli, and the British restored what was left in the nineteenth century. The surviving colonnade carries columns some twenty metres high under a domed vault built without rafters or beams.
Alagar Koyil and Pazhamudircholai	Pandya Nadu	तीर्थ	The Kallazhagar Vishnu temple on a wooded hill twenty kilometres north-east of the city, with the Murugan shrine of Pazhamudircholai above it. Kallazhagar's ride from here to the Vaigai is the second half of the Chithirai festival.
Thiruparankundram	Pandya Nadu	तीर्थ	The first of the six Murugan war-houses, cut into a granite hill on the city's south-west edge, with a rock-cut Pandya-period sanctum. The hill also carries Jain beds and inscriptions and a dargah at its summit.
Samanar Hills, Keezhakuyilkudi	Pandya Nadu	विरासत	Jain rock beds, Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions and a series of bas-relief tirthankara figures on a low hill west of Madurai — physical evidence of the Jain presence in the Pandya country from around the second century BCE, and among the earliest datable Tamil writing anywhere.
Vandiyur Mariamman Teppakulam	Pandya Nadu	विरासत	A vast square tank with an island shrine at its centre, dug in the 1640s and connected to the Vaigai by an underground channel. Its float festival in January is one of the few occasions it is deliberately kept full.
Gandhi Memorial Museum	Pandya Nadu	विरासत	Housed in a seventeenth-century Nayak queen's palace. It holds the blood-stained dhoti Gandhi was wearing when he was shot, and it is in this city that he first adopted the single cloth, in 1921, after seeing what people here could afford to wear.
Palani Murugan Temple	Pandya Nadu	तीर्थ	A hilltop Murugan temple reached by steps, a winch railway or a ropeway, and the destination of the largest foot pilgrimage in the Tamil country at Thaipusam. Its image is traditionally held to be made of navapashana, a nine-mineral amalgam attributed to the siddha Bogar — a claim of the tradition rather than of chemistry.
Kodaikanal	Pandya Nadu	पहाड़	A plateau station founded in 1845 by American missionaries of the Madurai mission as a refuge from the plain's fevers, with a lake that is entirely artificial — dammed by Vere Levinge in 1863 — shola forest in the folds, and an international school running since 1901.
Srivilliputhur	Pandya Nadu	तीर्थ	Andal's town. Its eleven-tier gopuram is the emblem on the Tamil Nadu state seal, its palkova street is a minor industry, and the Andal temple is the origin point of the Thiruppavai.
Srivilliputhur Megamalai Tiger Reserve	Pandya Nadu	वन्यजीव	Declared in 2021, joining the grizzled giant squirrel sanctuary at Srivilliputhur with the Megamalai forests — a wet-forest block on the eastern Ghats slope holding the grizzled giant squirrel, Nilgiri tahr and elephant, and a critical catchment for the Vaigai.
Cumbum valley and Suruli Falls	Pandya Nadu	प्रकृति	A trough between two ranges, growing muscat table grapes in two crops a year, cardamom on the slopes above, and holding Suruli waterfall at its head. The road through Kumily to Kerala runs out of the valley's top end.
Mullaperiyar dam	Pandya Nadu	विरासत	An 1895 masonry dam of lime-surkhi construction that impounds a west-flowing river and sends its water east through a tunnel under the Ghats into the Vaigai catchment. The structure sits in Kerala territory and is operated under lease by Tamil Nadu, and the irrigation of five districts depends on it.
Dindigul Rock Fort	Pandya Nadu	विरासत	A Nayak fort on a bare granite dome commanding the pass between the Palani hills and the Sirumalai, later held by Mysore. The climb takes half an hour and explains the whole regional geography in one view.
Sirumalai	Pandya Nadu	पहाड़	A detached hill block of around 1,600 metres with its own banana, coffee and citrus microclimate, eighteen hairpins up from the plain and far quieter than Kodaikanal.
Alanganallur	Pandya Nadu	शहरी	A village north of Madurai whose jallikattu on the third day of Pongal is the largest and most closely watched in the state, run down a narrowing lane from a temple gate.
Usilampatti	Pandya Nadu	शहरी	A dryland town west of Madurai whose weekly livestock market is among the largest in South India — the place where the region's goat and cattle economy is actually transacted, at dawn, in cash.
Mattuthavani flower market	Pandya Nadu	शहरी	Roughly a hundred commission shops in two long passages, opening before dawn, moving around twenty tonnes of jasmine a day in season and turning over between fifty lakh and a crore of rupees daily.
Puthu Mandapam	Pandya Nadu	विरासत	Thirumalai Nayak's pillared hall outside the Meenakshi temple's east gopuram, its yali columns now enclosing a working bazaar of tailors, tailors' apprentices and cloth stalls. A seventeenth-century monument in continuous commercial use, which is why it is in better repair than most.
Pangsau Pass	Patkai & Tirap Belt	विरासत	The saddle on the international boundary at 1,136 m, about 12 km beyond Nampong. It is the lowest practicable crossing in the eastern hills, which is why the Ahom migration used it in the thirteenth century and why the Ledo Road was pushed over it in 1943 and 1944. Wartime engineers called it Hell Pass, for the gradient and the mud rather than for anything that happened there.
Jairampur cemetery	Patkai & Tirap Belt	विरासत	A Second World War burial ground on the Ledo Road, about 7 km from Jairampur and 25 km short of the pass, holding the graves of Chinese, Indian, Kachin, British and other dead — soldiers and the unnamed labourers who cut the road. It was found again in 1997 after decades under forest, and its upkeep has been intermittent ever since.
Stilwell Road, Indian section	Patkai & Tirap Belt	विरासत	The 61 km from the railhead at Ledo to the pass — the beginning of a road that ran on for well over a thousand kilometres to Kunming. It is an ordinary hill road for most of its Indian length, and the interest is in what it is rather than what it looks like.
Lake of No Return	Patkai & Tirap Belt	प्रकृति	Nawng Yang, a lake lying just beyond the watershed on the Myanmar side, visible from the ridge near the pass. Its name comes from the wartime and refugee crossings of the 1940s and the aircraft and people that did not come out of the surrounding swamp forest.
Namdapha National Park	Patkai & Tirap Belt	वन्यजीव	Around 1,985 km², running from about 200 m of lowland tropical wet evergreen forest to 4,571 m at Dapha Bum — one of the widest altitude ranges of any protected area in India, and the reason it holds four pantherine cats: tiger, leopard, clouded leopard and snow leopard. Notified a wildlife sanctuary in 1972 and a national park and tiger reserve in 1983. The Namdapha flying squirrel is known from a single specimen collected in 1981 and has not been confirmed since.
Deban	Patkai & Tirap Belt	प्रकृति	The forest rest house on the Noa-Dihing inside Namdapha, and the practical limit of vehicle access. Everything beyond it is on foot, and the river crossing is the daily fact of life for anyone working further in.
Miao and the Choephelling settlement	Patkai & Tirap Belt	शहरी	The entry town for Namdapha, and the site of a Tibetan settlement relocated here in 1975 from Changlang, running a cooperative that farms, weaves carpets and operates the settlement's businesses. A monastery, a carpet loom and a rainforest gate within a few hundred metres of one another.
Vijaynagar	Patkai & Tirap Belt	प्रकृति	A settlement beyond Namdapha near the international boundary, home to Lisu and to families of former Assam Rifles personnel settled here in the 1960s. For most of its history it has been reachable only by a multi-day walk through the park or by air, and it is among the most isolated inhabited places in India.
Khonsa	Patkai & Tirap Belt	शहरी	The Tirap headquarters town, on the ridge, and the market and administrative centre for the Nocte villages around it. The approach from the Assam plain via Deomali climbs the whole escarpment in a few kilometres.
Longding and Wakka	Patkai & Tirap Belt	विरासत	The Wancho headquarters and one of the large hilltop villages above it. Wakka is where the carved posts, log drum and morung architecture are still to be seen in a working village rather than in a museum. Oriah at Longding falls in mid-February.
Changlang town and the Namchik–Namphuk coalfield	Patkai & Tirap Belt	शहरी	The district town, and the Tertiary coal measures beside it. The coal is shallow, sub-bituminous and high in sulphur, and mining it has been intermittently permitted and intermittently halted — the single largest question about land and livelihood in the district.
Bordumsa and Innao	Patkai & Tirap Belt	विरासत	Singpho villages in the foothills, with Theravada temples and households that still cure phalap in bamboo over the hearth. This is where the tea story of the subcontinent actually begins, and it is not marked as such anywhere.
Kamhua Noknu	Patkai & Tirap Belt	विरासत	A Wancho village that has become the reference point for the documentation of the language and of the Wancho script, through work done there over the past two decades. An ordinary hill village that is also, for linguistics, a type site.
Harmandir Sahib (Darbar Sahib), Amritsar	Punjab Doabs	तीर्थ	The central shrine of Sikhism, standing in the middle of a tank at the lowest point of its complex and entered by descending steps — a deliberate inversion of the usual raised temple, and open on all four sides. The Adi Granth was installed here in 1604; the gilding dates from the early nineteenth century under Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Its langar serves tens of thousands of meals every day, more on holidays, in a continuously running kitchen staffed largely by volunteers. Facing it stands the Akal Takht, established in 1606 as the seat of temporal authority in the tradition.
Jallianwala Bagh	Punjab Doabs	विरासत	A walled garden beside the Harmandir Sahib complex where, on 13 April 1919, troops under British command fired on an enclosed crowd assembled on Vaisakhi. The narrow entrance lane and the well into which people jumped are both preserved, and bullet marks are still visible in the brickwork.
Akal Takht and the Amritsar walled city	Punjab Doabs	विरासत	The old city was founded in 1577 by the fourth Guru around the tank, laid out with trade katras and bazaars that still run by commodity — cloth in one lane, dried fruit in another, jutti in a third. The bazaars are as much the city's heritage as its monuments.
Anandpur Sahib and Virasat-e-Khalsa	Punjab Doabs	तीर्थ	The town at the Shivalik foot founded by the ninth Guru, where the Khalsa was inaugurated on Vaisakhi in 1699. Takht Sri Kesgarh Sahib stands at its centre, and the Virasat-e-Khalsa museum, opened in 2011 and designed by Moshe Safdie, is built into the ridge above it in sweeping concrete and steel forms that answer the surrounding hills.
Fatehgarh Sahib	Punjab Doabs	तीर्थ	The site associated with the execution of the two younger sons of the tenth Guru in 1705, commemorated every December by the Shaheedi Jor Mela, one of the largest gatherings in the region.
Rauza Sharif and Aam Khas Bagh, Sirhind	Punjab Doabs	विरासत	Sirhind was a major Mughal-era town on the imperial road. The Rauza Sharif is the tomb complex of the seventeenth-century Naqshbandi Sufi Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi and draws pilgrims from Afghanistan and Central Asia to its annual urs; the Aam Khas Bagh is the surviving Mughal garden and serai on the same road.
Qila Mubarak and Sheesh Mahal, Patiala	Punjab Doabs	विरासत	The fortified core of the Phulkian state of Patiala, an inward-facing complex of courts and painted apartments, with the Sheesh Mahal and its mirrored and muralled halls alongside. Patiala's court gave its name to a turban style, a salwar cut, a gharana of music and a measure of whisky.
Jagatjit Palace and the Moorish Mosque, Kapurthala	Punjab Doabs	विरासत	A princely state whose ruler built in French and Moorish idioms — a palace modelled on European chateaux, now a school, and a mosque modelled on North African precedent. It is the clearest surviving evidence of how eclectic princely Punjab's taste was.
Sultanpur Lodhi and the Kali Bein	Punjab Doabs	तीर्थ	The town where Guru Nanak worked as a storekeeper before setting out on his travels, on the banks of the Kali Bein rivulet — itself the subject of one of India's better-known community river-cleaning efforts.
Dera Baba Nanak and the Kartarpur Corridor	Punjab Doabs	तीर्थ	A border town on the Ravi from which, since November 2019, a dedicated corridor allows Indian pilgrims to visit Gurdwara Darbar Sahib at Kartarpur in Pakistan — where Guru Nanak spent his last years — and return the same day without a visa. For decades before that, pilgrims used binoculars mounted at the border to see the shrine across the fields.
Takht Sri Damdama Sahib, Talwandi Sabo	Punjab Doabs	तीर्थ	One of the five takhts of Sikhism, where the tenth Guru is held to have prepared the final recension of the Guru Granth Sahib. Its Vaisakhi gathering is among Malwa's largest.
Harike Wetland	Punjab Doabs	वन्यजीव	A large shallow wetland formed where the Beas meets the Sutlej behind a barrage, listed under the Ramsar convention and one of northern India's most important sites for wintering waterfowl. Ropar and Kanjli are the region's two other Ramsar wetlands, and all three are reservoirs — artificial habitat that became essential.
Chandigarh Capitol Complex and the Rock Garden	Punjab Doabs	शहरी	The city was planned from 1951 for a state that had lost its capital to Pakistan, with Le Corbusier responsible for the master plan and the government buildings. The Capitol Complex was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2016 as part of a transnational listing of his work. A few kilometres away, Nek Chand built the Rock Garden secretly from construction rubble, broken ceramics and industrial waste over nearly two decades — an unofficial answer to the official city, and now the more visited of the two.
Sanghol	Punjab Doabs	विरासत	An excavated mound with a Kushana-period stupa and a large find of carved railing pillars in the Mathura style, now in the site museum. Evidence that this plain was on the Buddhist network as thoroughly as it was later on every other one.
Rupnagar (Ropar) Harappan site	Punjab Doabs	विरासत	One of the first Harappan sites excavated in independent India, on the Sutlej where it leaves the hills. The Ghaggar-bed sites further south belong to the same civilisational spread and cluster along a river that has since dried.
Malerkotla	Punjab Doabs	विरासत	A former princely state with a large Muslim population and a long-standing shared shrine culture — the dargah of Haider Sheikh draws Hindu, Sikh and Muslim visitors to its annual observance. The town is also the centre of the jutti trade and of the naqqal performance tradition.
Qadian	Punjab Doabs	विरासत	A small Majha town that is the place of origin of the Ahmadiyya movement, founded there in 1889, and which still draws an international annual gathering of its followers.
Kila Raipur	Punjab Doabs	प्रकृति	A village outside Ludhiana that has hosted a rural sports meet since the 1930s — bullock-cart racing, tug of war, kabaddi and feats of strength — held over a few days each winter and known widely as the Rural Olympics.
Bishnupur temple town	Rarh	विरासत	The Malla capital, and the densest concentration of terracotta temple architecture anywhere. The Rasmancha is a pyramidal brick structure built to hold the images of the town's temples together during the Ras festival; the Jor Bangla, Shyam Rai and Madan Mohan temples carry moulded brick panels covering nearly every exterior surface; and the Dalmadal, a large wrought-iron cannon, sits in the open near the fort gate. The town is on India's tentative list for World Heritage nomination.
Santiniketan	Rarh	विरासत	The school Rabindranath Tagore founded in 1901 and the university it became in 1921, built as open-air classrooms under trees on a laterite plain. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in September 2023 — unusually, as a living institution rather than as a monument. Kala Bhavana's buildings carry murals by Nandalal Bose and Benode Behari Mukherjee, and Ramkinkar Baij's outdoor sculptures stand where he made them.
Joydev Kenduli	Rarh	तीर्थ	A village on the Ajay claimed in Bengali tradition as the birthplace of Jayadeva, author of the Gita Govinda — a claim contested by a village of similar name in Odisha. Its three-day mela at Makar Sankranti is the largest gathering of Bauls anywhere, with singing running through the night in temporary akhras along the river bank.
Tarapith	Rarh	तीर्थ	A shakta shrine on the Dwarka river with an adjoining cremation ground, associated with the nineteenth-century ascetic Bamakhepa. It is one of the most heavily visited temples in Bengal and one of the few where the cremation ground is central to the practice rather than adjacent to it.
Bakreswar	Rarh	तीर्थ	A temple complex around a cluster of hot springs, several of them above 60 °C, counted among the shakti pithas. The springs are the reason the site exists.
Susunia Hill	Rarh	विरासत	A hill with a rock inscription of the ruler Chandravarman, generally dated to about the fourth century and among the earliest inscriptions known from Bengal, plus a spring, a rock-climbing face used for training, and a distinctive flora.
Mama Bhagne Pahar	Rarh	प्रकृति	A field of balanced granite boulders at Dubrajpur, one very large one apparently resting on a smaller one — uncle and nephew, hence the name. A Shiva temple sits among them, and the rocks are a rare vertical feature in a flat district.
Ayodhya Hills	Rarh	पहाड़	A plateau outlier of the Chota Nagpur range, with sal forest, waterfalls at Bamni and Turga, and a pumped storage hydroelectric scheme using two reservoirs at different heights. It is the region's hill station and the Chhau and Jhumur heartland at the same time.
Charida mask village	Rarh	विरासत	A single village street at Baghmundi where a large number of households make Chhau masks and nothing else. The work is visible from the road — pulp drying, faces being painted, headdresses assembled — and the village supplies troupes across the tract.
Garh Panchkot	Rarh	विरासत	The ruined seat of the Panchkot raj at the foot of Panchet hill, with temples in the Odishan deul form, abandoned after a Maratha raid in the eighteenth century and never rebuilt.
Mukutmanipur	Rarh	प्रकृति	The reservoir behind the Kangsabati dam, ringed by low hills and sal forest — the region's largest sheet of still water and the main reason anyone visits southern Bankura in winter.
Ichai Ghosher Deul	Rarh	विरासत	A tall brick rekha deul standing alone above the Ajay near Gaurangapur, in the Odishan tower form rather than the Bengali chala form — evidence of how far the region's builders looked for models.
Bardhaman town	Rarh	शहरी	The old Maharaja's seat, with the Curzon Gate arch on its main street and the 108 Shiva temples at Nawab Hat laid out in two concentric rings. It is also the address of the region's two GI sweets.
Raniganj and the Damodar coalfield	Rarh	विरासत	Commercial coal mining in India began here in 1774, which makes this landscape of pit heads, colliery townships and subsidence hollows the oldest industrial region in the country. Asansol and Durgapur grew out of it.
Massanjore Dam	Rarh	प्रकृति	A dam on the Mayurakshi built in the 1950s with Canadian assistance — it is still called the Canada Dam locally. It stands on the Jharkhand side of the boundary and irrigates Birbhum on the other, which is a fair summary of how this region's water works.
Kamarpukur and Jayrambati	Rarh	तीर्थ	The birth villages of Ramakrishna Paramahansa and Sarada Devi, a few kilometres apart on the Rarh's eastern edge, now maintained as pilgrimage sites by the Ramakrishna Mission. Kamarpukur's sada bode, a white sweet, carries a registered geographical indication.
Panchmura	Rarh	विरासत	The potters' village that makes the Bankura horse. Several dozen households throw, assemble and open-fire terracotta here, and the kilns are worked in the open.
Tirumala Venkateswara Temple	Rayalaseema	तीर्थ	A hill shrine on the Seshachalam range, reached by two one-way ghat roads or on foot up the Alipiri steps, and one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in the world — daily footfall is normally counted in tens of thousands and rises sharply at Brahmotsavam and Vaikunta Ekadasi. The sanctum's Ananda Nilayam vimana is gold-plated; darshan is queued through a timed-token system; head-tonsure is offered by a large proportion of pilgrims; and the temple's kitchen produces the GI-registered laddu. Annamacharya's copper plates were found in a chamber here.
Sri Kalahasti	Rayalaseema	तीर्थ	A Shiva temple on the Swarnamukhi below the Seshachalam scarp, one of the Pancha Bhoota Sthalams — the five shrines associated with the elements, this one with air, marked by a lamp in the sanctum that flickers with no draught to explain it. Best known outside the pilgrimage circuit for Rahu-Ketu ritual and for the kalamkari workshops in the town.
Lepakshi	Rayalaseema	विरासत	A Veerabhadra temple of the 1530s on a low granite outcrop, with the largest surviving body of Vijayanagara mural painting on its ceilings, an unfinished kalyana mandapa left mid-carving, a monolithic Nandi about 4.5 m tall a short distance away, and the hanging pillar — one of about seventy pillars that does not rest on the floor, under which a sheet of paper passes.
Penukonda	Rayalaseema	विरासत	Vijayanagara's capital after the defeat at Talikota in 1565 and the seat from which the empire's rump was governed for decades. A hill fort, the Gagan Mahal palace in an Indo-Islamic idiom, Jain and Hindu temples, and the Babayya dargah, which draws Hindu and Muslim pilgrims together.
Gandikota	Rayalaseema	प्रकृति	A gorge where the Penna cuts through the Erramala quartzite, with a fifteenth-century fort of the Pemmasani Nayakas on the rim — a granary, a mosque, the Madhavaraya and Ranganatha temples and a step-well inside the walls. It is heavily marketed as a canyon; what is genuinely remarkable is the fort sitting on the lip of it.
Belum Caves	Rayalaseema	प्रकृति	A limestone cave system with roughly 3.2 km of mapped passage, the longest in the Indian plains, formed by an underground stream that still runs in the deepest chamber. About a kilometre and a half is lit and open. Ventilation is poor and the deep sections are hot.
Srisailam	Rayalaseema	तीर्थ	Mallikarjuna on the Krishna in the Nallamala forest — one of the twelve jyotirlingas and, with the Bhramaramba shrine, also a Shakti Peetha, which is an unusual double. The temple's outer walls carry Vijayanagara-period narrative relief. It sits inside the Nagarjunasagar–Srisailam Tiger Reserve, the largest tiger reserve in India by area, and the Chenchu communities of the forest have a recognised ritual role here.
Ahobilam	Rayalaseema	तीर्थ	Nine Narasimha shrines scattered through a Nallamala valley — Lower Ahobilam is roadside, Upper Ahobilam is a climb, and the remaining shrines are forest walks of varying difficulty. The site is where Narasimha is held to have emerged from the pillar, and Chenchu Lakshmi, a Chenchu woman, is his consort in the local telling, which the ritual acknowledges.
Mahanandi	Rayalaseema	तीर्थ	A Shiva temple whose three tanks are fed by perennial springs rising in the temple floor, running at an almost constant volume and temperature year-round and clear enough to read the bottom. In this region a spring that never fails is itself the reason for a shrine. It is the central one of the Nava Nandi circuit.
Yaganti	Rayalaseema	तीर्थ	An Uma Maheswara temple set against a rock face with a perennial spring feeding its tank through a carved Nandi mouth, and caves in the hill behind. The monolithic Nandi is locally said to be growing; the explanation usually offered is the expansion of the silica-rich stone it is cut from.
Puttaparthi	Rayalaseema	तीर्थ	A village on the Chitravati that became an international pilgrimage destination in the twentieth century around Sathya Sai Baba, with an ashram, a university, a specialty hospital, a stadium, a planetarium and its own airport — an unusually complete institutional landscape in one of the driest districts in the country.
Horsley Hills	Rayalaseema	पहाड़	A small hill station at about 1,265 m above Madanapalle, known locally as Yenugu Mallamma Konda, with eucalyptus and gulmohar plantations and a temperature ten degrees below the plain below it. It was developed as a hot-weather retreat by the district administration in the nineteenth century.
Tadipatri	Rayalaseema	विरासत	Two Vijayanagara-period temples — Bugga Ramalingeswara, whose gopuram carries some of the densest relief carving in the region and whose spring rises inside the sanctum, and Chintala Venkataramana with its stone chariot. Both are far less visited than their carving deserves.
Gooty and Rayadurg forts	Rayalaseema	विरासत	Hill forts on granite inselbergs rising abruptly from the plain, held successively by Vijayanagara, the Bijapur sultanate, the Marathas, Hyder Ali and the Company. The climbs are steep, unshaded and unfenced.
Rollapadu Wildlife Sanctuary	Rayalaseema	वन्यजीव	Short grassland maintained specifically for the great Indian bustard, one of the last places the bird was regularly seen. It also holds lesser florican, blackbuck and wolf. The habitat is grassland, which India protects badly because it is classed as wasteland.
Ontimitta Kodandarama Temple	Rayalaseema	विरासत	A large Vijayanagara-period temple with a three-shrine sanctum in which Rama, Sita and Lakshmana are carved from a single block. Its Ramanavami kalyanam is a major regional occasion, and the poet Annamacharya and the English scholar C. P. Brown are both associated with the town.
Ameen Peer Dargah, Kadapa	Rayalaseema	तीर्थ	A Sufi shrine in the middle of Kadapa city, visited by Hindus and Muslims in roughly equal numbers, with a continuous annual urs. Shrines of this kind are the ordinary religious geography of the region rather than an exception to it.
Talakona	Rayalaseema	प्रकृति	The highest waterfall in the region, in Seshachalam forest inside the biosphere reserve, reached by a walk through dense red-sanders country. It runs from the north-east monsoon rather than the south-west, so it is best in November and December.
Orvakal and the Kurnool rock country	Rayalaseema	प्रकृति	Erosional rock formations in Erramala quartzite, and the Konda Reddy Buruju watchtower in Kurnool town — the surviving fragment of the Vijayanagara-period fort in what was briefly the state's capital between 1953 and 1956.
Rampur Raza Library	Rohilkhand & Katehar	विरासत	Founded in 1774 by Nawab Faizullah Khan and now an institution of national importance, holding tens of thousands of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu and Sanskrit, Mughal miniatures, and a seventh-century Quran fragment. Housed in the Hamid Manzil inside the fort.
Kothi Khas Bagh and the Rampur Fort	Rohilkhand & Katehar	विरासत	The Nawabs' palace complex — a large, half-forgotten early twentieth-century pile whose scale explains how much revenue a small state could concentrate.
Dargah-e-Ala Hazrat	Rohilkhand & Katehar	तीर्थ	The shrine of Ahmed Raza Khan, from whom the Barelvi school of Sunni Islam takes its name. The annual urs draws lakhs of pilgrims from across South Asia and the diaspora, and the surrounding institutions are the school's organisational centre.
The Nath temples of Bareilly	Rohilkhand & Katehar	तीर्थ	Seven Shiva temples — Alakhnath, Dhopeshwar Nath, Madhi Nath, Tapeshwar Nath, Trivati Nath, Banke Bihari and Pashupati Nath — which give the city its other name, Nath Nagri, and are circuited together by pilgrims.
Ahichhatra	Rohilkhand & Katehar	विरासत	The capital of northern Panchala, an enormous fortified mound with terracottas and Painted Grey Ware layers, and a Jain pilgrimage site connected with Parshvanatha. One of the largest unexcavated ancient city sites in India.
Jama Masjid, Badaun	Rohilkhand & Katehar	विरासत	Built in 1223 under Iltutmish, among the oldest and largest surviving congregational mosques in India, and the marker of Badaun's period as a provincial capital of the Delhi Sultanate.
Dargah of Shah Wilayat	Rohilkhand & Katehar	तीर्थ	A thirteenth-century shrine known for the scorpions in its precinct, which by long local account do not sting — visitors are handed one to hold. The urs draws pilgrims from across western Uttar Pradesh.
Pilibhit Tiger Reserve	Rohilkhand & Katehar	वन्यजीव	A narrow strip of terai sal forest and grassland along the Sharda, with one of the highest tiger densities in the country for its size and a documented record of doubling its population. Part of the transboundary landscape shared with Nepal.
Tharu villages of the Khatima and Chandan Chowki belt	Rohilkhand & Katehar	विरासत	Mud-and-thatch villages with painted walls and raised granaries, where the Tharu Barka Nach is performed in winter. Visited respectfully and by arrangement rather than as a stop on a circuit.
Govind Ballabh Pant University, Pantnagar	Rohilkhand & Katehar	विरासत	India's first agricultural university, founded in 1960 on reclaimed terai land, and the institution where the Green Revolution's wheat and rice varieties were tested and multiplied for the northern plain.
Moradabad brass market	Rohilkhand & Katehar	शहरी	The Peeli Kothi and Bartan Bazaar area, where the whole chain from casting yard to export packer sits within a few streets. Worth walking through in the morning when the workshops are open.
Sambhal and Chandausi old towns	Rohilkhand & Katehar	विरासत	Two very old market towns with Sultanate-period fabric, horn and bone workshops, and a grain and sugar trade that predates the railway.
Kakori and Shahjahanpur revolutionary sites	Rohilkhand & Katehar	विरासत	The town that produced both Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqulla Khan, hanged in 1927 for the Kakori train action; memorials to both stand in the city.
Somnath	Saurashtra	तीर्थ	A shore temple destroyed and rebuilt repeatedly over a millennium, the present structure in the Chalukya idiom completed in 1951. On the sea wall behind it stands the Baan Stambh, an arrow pillar carrying an inscription claiming an unobstructed line of ocean from that point to the Antarctic — a navigational boast rather than a survey, and the detail most visitors remember.
Dwarkadhish Temple, Dwarka	Saurashtra	तीर्थ	The Jagat Mandir, five storeys on seventy-two pillars above the Gomti creek, and one of the four Char Dham. Its flag is changed five times a day by a hereditary family, each flag paid for by a devotee and never reused. Bet Dwarka offshore was reached only by boat until the Sudarshan Setu cable-stayed bridge opened in 2024.
Girnar	Saurashtra	तीर्थ	An eroded volcanic complex rising to about 1,145 m, the highest ground in the state, climbed by a stone stairway counted traditionally at 9,999 steps. A Jain temple cluster centred on the eleventh- and twelfth-century Neminath temple sits partway up; Amba Mata, Gorakhnath and Dattatreya peaks continue above it. A ropeway opened in 2020 and has changed the profile of who makes the climb.
Ashokan Rock Edicts and Uparkot, Junagadh	Saurashtra	विरासत	One granite boulder on the Girnar road carries three inscriptions separated by seven centuries — Ashoka's fourteen major rock edicts in Prakrit, Rudradaman I's Sanskrit inscription of about 150 CE recording the repair of the Sudarshana lake dam, and a fifth-century inscription of Skandagupta recording the same dam breaking again. Rudradaman's is generally treated as the earliest substantial Sanskrit inscription known. Uparkot fort above the town holds two stepwells cut vertically into living rock, the Adi Kadi Vav and the Navghan Kuvo, and a group of rock-cut Buddhist caves.
Gir National Park and Sanctuary	Saurashtra	वन्यजीव	The only wild population of the Asiatic lion. The May 2025 census counted 891 lions across roughly 35,000 km² and eleven districts, with about 394 inside Gir and its adjoining areas and the rest in satellite populations along the coast and in the eastern hills — which means most of the population now lives outside the protected forest, among farms and villages. Maldhari cattle settlements called nesses remain inside the park.
Shatrunjaya, Palitana	Saurashtra	तीर्थ	Around nine hundred marble Jain temples packed along a twin ridge, reached by roughly 3,750 steps. Nobody sleeps on the hill — not pilgrims, not monks, not the priests — and it is cleared at dusk every day, which is why the climb starts before dawn. The temples close for the four monsoon months and reopen on Kartik Purnima. The town below was declared entirely vegetarian in 2014.
Porbandar	Saurashtra	विरासत	A trading port whose stone is the local miliolite, which is why the old town is uniformly pale. Kirti Mandir stands beside the house where Gandhi was born in 1869; the Sudama temple next to it is one of very few anywhere dedicated to Krishna's friend rather than to Krishna. The Barda hills and the Mokarsagar wetland lie immediately inland.
Velavadar Blackbuck National Park	Saurashtra	वन्यजीव	Flat saline grassland holding a dense blackbuck population, the Indian wolf, and one of the largest communal roosts of harriers recorded anywhere — thousands of birds coming down into the grass at dusk between November and February.
Lothal	Saurashtra	विरासत	A Harappan port town with a large brick basin generally interpreted as a dock connected to the Sabarmati's old channel, plus a bead workshop and a warehouse platform. It sits on the UNESCO tentative list rather than the inscribed list.
Khambhalida Caves	Saurashtra	विरासत	A small group of rock-cut Buddhist caves near Gondal, roughly fourth to fifth century, with a chaitya entrance flanked by two large weathered Bodhisattva figures identified as Padmapani and Vajrapani. They are the best-preserved Buddhist sculpture on the peninsula and are almost never crowded.
Wild Ass Sanctuary, Little Rann	Saurashtra	वन्यजीव	A seasonal salt flat that floods in the monsoon and bakes dry for the rest of the year, holding the world's only population of the Indian wild ass. Agariya families move onto the flat each dry season to pump brine into pans and rake salt, living on the surface for months at a time; the Rann supplies a large share of India's inland salt.
Marine National Park, Gulf of Kachchh	Saurashtra	प्रकृति	India's first marine national park, protecting coral, mangrove and intertidal flats along the Halar shore. Much of it is walked rather than sailed — at spring low tide the reef is exposed and visitors go out on foot with a guide.
Chotila	Saurashtra	तीर्थ	A Chamunda shrine on an isolated hill above the Ahmedabad–Rajkot road, climbed by a long stair. Like Shatrunjaya, the summit is vacated at sunset and nobody remains on it overnight.
Bhavnagar and Alang	Saurashtra	शहरी	A planned port founded in 1723 by Bhavsinhji Gohil, with the Takhteshwar temple on a rise above it and the school Gandhi attended as a student. Fifty kilometres down the coast, Alang's tidal beach holds the largest ship-breaking yard in the world, where the Gulf of Khambhat's exceptional tidal range is used to drive vessels high onto the sand.
Diu	Saurashtra	समुद्र तट	An island off the southern tip of the peninsula, Portuguese from 1535 until 1961, with a sea fort, the seventeenth-century St Paul's church, the quarried Naida caves and a shoreline of miliolite. It is administered from a union territory whose other half sits three hundred kilometres away on a different coast entirely.
Pasighat	Siang & Adi Belt	शहरी	Established in 1911 and the oldest town in Arunachal Pradesh, laid out at the point where the Siang leaves the hills and begins to braid. It is the region's market, its college town and the place the largest Solung is held. The riverfront here is where the gorge visibly ends.
Kekar Monying	Siang & Adi Belt	विरासत	A black rock face above the Siang near Rotung where Adi fighters made a stand against the British column in 1912 during the Abor Expedition. It is a memorial site of real local weight, and it is the landscape feature the region's own histories start from.
Komsing	Siang & Adi Belt	विरासत	A gorge village on the Siang where the political officer Noel Williamson was killed in 1911, the event that triggered the Abor Expedition. A memorial slab to Williamson still stands in the village, an unusually direct piece of frontier history sitting in an ordinary settlement.
Yingkiong and Tuting	Siang & Adi Belt	प्रकृति	The upper gorge road. Yingkiong is the last substantial town; Tuting, further up, is where the households turn Memba and Buddhist and where the river-running expeditions put in. Gelling, above Tuting, is the last village on the Siang.
Mechuka	Siang & Adi Belt	पहाड़	A high, flat valley on the Yargyap Chu, settled by Memba and Ramo and Bokar communities, with the Samten Yongcha monastery on a ridge above the town. The contrast with the Adi villages a day's drive downstream — architecture, food, faith, dress — is the sharpest cultural gradient in the region.
Aalo and the Siyom hanging bridge	Siang & Adi Belt	शहरी	The Galo headquarters town, at the meeting of the Siyom and the Sipu, and the centre of Mopin. The suspension bridge over the Siyom is the accessible example of the region's bridge-building idea, even where cable has replaced cane.
Basar	Siang & Adi Belt	प्रकृति	A Galo town in the Hie valley that has run the Basar Confluence, a community-organised festival, since 2016 — one of the few tourism events in the Northeast designed and administered by the village community rather than by a tourism department.
Ziro valley	Siang & Adi Belt	विरासत	The Apatani plateau: permanent irrigated rice terraces stocked with fish, worked without plough or draught animal, with bamboo and pine groves managed on the ridges above. It has been on India's UNESCO tentative list as a cultural landscape since 2014. The Dree festival falls in early July and the Ziro music festival in September.
Daporijo	Siang & Adi Belt	शहरी	The Subansiri basin's market town, Tagin and Galo, and the road junction for the whole western half of the belt. The Trans-Arunachal highway runs through it.
Malinithan	Siang & Adi Belt	विरासत	A ruined temple site at Likabali on the last foothill above the plain, with carved granite panels and sculpture excavated from the mound and dated broadly to the tenth to fourteenth centuries. It is the only substantial stone-building site in the belt, and it sits precisely where the hills meet the valley — a plains temple tradition reaching its upper limit.
Mouling National Park	Siang & Adi Belt	वन्यजीव	Around 483 km² of steep, almost trackless forest between roughly 400 and 3,000 m, holding takin, red panda, serow and clouded leopard. Access is on foot and takes days; it is among the least-visited national parks in India.
Daying Ering Memorial Wildlife Sanctuary	Siang & Adi Belt	वन्यजीव	Riverine grassland and sand islands in the braided Siang just below Pasighat, named for the Adi leader Daying Ering. Wild buffalo, hog deer and large numbers of wintering waterfowl; the habitat is the same char-and-grassland system that continues downstream into Assam.
The Siang descent, Tuting to Pasighat	Siang & Adi Belt	प्रकृति	A multi-day river descent through the gorge, run in the winter low-water window. It is the only way to see the section of the region that has no road, and it passes villages that are still supplied by cane bridge and porter.
Khangchendzonga National Park	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	प्रकृति	Inscribed in 2016 as India's first mixed World Heritage site — listed for its glacial and alpine ecology and for the sacred narratives attached to the massif in the same document. It covers roughly a quarter of Sikkim, holds snow leopard, blue sheep and red panda, and includes the Zemu glacier below Kanchenjunga.
Darjeeling Himalayan Railway	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	विरासत	An 88 km two-foot-gauge line completed in 1881, inscribed by UNESCO in 1999. It gains its height with six zigzags and three loops instead of tunnels, holding an average gradient near 1 in 28, and still runs B-class 0-4-0 saddle tank locomotives built between 1889 and 1925. Ghum, at 2,258 m, is the highest railway station in India.
Yuksom and Dubdi Monastery	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	विरासत	The place where three lamas from Tibet consecrated Phuntsog Namgyal as the first Chogyal in 1642 — the name means the meeting place of the three. Dubdi, established in 1701 on the ridge above, is the oldest monastery in Sikkim, and the Dzongri and Goecha La trek to the foot of Kanchenjunga starts from the same village.
Pemayangtse Monastery and Rabdentse	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	विरासत	A Nyingma monastery of 1705 whose top floor holds Zangdok Palri — a seven-tiered wooden model of Guru Rinpoche's celestial palace, carved over several years by a single monk. Twenty minutes' walk away are the ruins of Rabdentse, Sikkim's second capital, abandoned and now standing in forest.
Tashiding Monastery	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	तीर्थ	On a hill between the Rathong and Rangeet, and the site of the Bumchu — a sealed vase of holy water opened once a year, its level read as an indication of the year ahead and then topped up from the river and sealed again for twelve months.
Rumtek Monastery	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	तीर्थ	The Dharma Chakra Centre, built in the 1960s by the sixteenth Karmapa as the Karma Kagyu seat in exile, on a ridge facing Gangtok across a valley. Its Losar cham cycle is the most attended in Sikkim.
Namgyal Institute of Tibetology	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	विरासत	Founded in 1958 to hold Tibetan manuscripts, thangkas and ritual objects, and still one of the most serious collections of Tibetological material outside Tibet. It sits in a wooded compound with the Do-Drul chorten above it.
Tsomgo Lake and Nathu La	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	प्रकृति	A glacial lake at 3,750 m that freezes in winter, on the old caravan road to the Chola passes. Nathu La, at about 4,310 m, was the trade route to the Chumbi valley and Tibet — closed after 1962 and reopened for limited border trade in 2006. Permits are required and conditions change; check before travelling.
Lachen, Lachung and Yumthang	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	प्रकृति	Two head villages that run their own affairs through the Dzumsa, at the top of the Teesta's two source valleys. Yumthang below Lachung is a rhododendron valley with hot springs; the Gurudongmar plateau above Lachen crosses 5,000 m and is sacred to Buddhist, Sikh and Hindu visitors alike.
Tiger Hill and Observatory Hill	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	पहाड़	Tiger Hill at about 2,590 m gives the standard sunrise view of Kanchenjunga, with Everest, Lhotse and Makalu visible far to the west on a clear morning. Observatory Hill in the town centre carries the Mahakal shrine, where a Buddhist gompa and a Shaiva shrine share the same rock — the Dorje Ling monastery that stood here gave Darjeeling its name.
Himalayan Mountaineering Institute and Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	विरासत	HMI was set up in 1954 after the 1953 Everest ascent, with Tenzing Norgay as its first director of field training; its museum holds expedition equipment and its rock-climbing courses still run on Tenzing Rock. The adjoining zoological park, opened in 1958, runs conservation breeding for snow leopard and red panda.
Singalila National Park and Sandakphu	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	प्रकृति	The ridge that forms the region's western wall, walked from Manebhanjyang to Sandakphu at 3,636 m — the highest point in West Bengal, and the one place from which Kanchenjunga's "sleeping Buddha" outline and the Everest–Lhotse–Makalu group are visible in a single sweep. Red panda country, and rhododendron forest through April.
Kalimpong	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	शहरी	A ridge town that was the Indian end of the mule trade to Tibet through Jelep La until 1962 — wool down, manufactures up — and became, in that period, a publishing and schooling centre with an unusually mixed population. Durpin monastery sits above the town; the nurseries below it supply orchids, gladioli and cacti across India.
Makaibari and the Kurseong tea slope	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	प्रकृति	Kurseong sits in the middle of the oldest planted stretch of the ridge, where the first commercial factory in the district was built in 1859. Gardens here run from 900 m to 1,800 m on one hillside, which is why two sections of the same estate can be picked a fortnight apart.
Mirik and the Teesta–Rangeet confluence at Triveni	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	प्रकृति	Mirik is a lake town on the lower ridge with cardamom and tea below it; Triveni, where the Rangeet joins the Teesta, is the region's central hydrological fact and a mela site at Maghe Sankranti.
Iranshah Atash Behram, Udvada	South Gujarat Littoral	तीर्थ	The oldest continuously burning consecrated fire of the Indian Zoroastrian community. By the traditional account the fire was established at Sanjan, hidden in the Bahrot caves for twelve years during an invasion, kept at Vansda for fourteen, held at Navsari for over three centuries, moved briefly to Valsad and installed at Udvada in 1742. Non-Zoroastrians are not admitted to the fire chamber; the village around it, a single street of wooden-balconied houses, is open to everyone.
Sanjan	South Gujarat Littoral	विरासत	The traditional landing place of the first Zoroastrian refugees from Iran, marked by a twentieth-century memorial column. The account of the landing, the Qissa-i-Sanjan, was written at Navsari in 1599 — several centuries after the events it narrates — which is why its dates are disputed and why the story of sugar stirred into milk is best read as a community's account of itself rather than as a record.
Navsari	South Gujarat Littoral	विरासत	The Parsi priestly centre of the region — seat of the Bhagarsath anjuman, home to one of India's eight Atash Behrams, and to the First Dastur Meherjirana Library, founded in 1872, which holds one of the largest collections of Zoroastrian manuscripts anywhere. The Tata family's ancestral house stands in the same quarter, and Dadabhai Naoroji was born a few streets away.
Surat Castle and the old city	South Gujarat Littoral	विरासत	A sixteenth-century riverside fort on the Tapi, restored in recent years, standing at what was the busiest port in Mughal India and the embarkation point for the Hajj. The English, Dutch, French and Portuguese all kept factories here; the Dutch and Armenian cemeteries survive on the city's edge, the Dutch one dominated by a mausoleum far larger than anything the living men built.
Rander	South Gujarat Littoral	विरासत	The trading town on the north bank of the Tapi that was a port before Surat was, later settled by Sunni Vohra merchant families whose houses carry carved timber interiors and imported tilework brought back from the East African and Burmese trade.
Dandi	South Gujarat Littoral	विरासत	The tidal flat where the 1930 salt march ended and salt was lifted from the pans in defiance of the salt law. The National Salt Satyagraha Memorial opened on the site in 2019.
Bardoli	South Gujarat Littoral	विरासत	A taluka town whose 1928 no-tax campaign against a land revenue increase gave Vallabhbhai Patel the title Sardar. The Swaraj Ashram there keeps the campaign's records.
Saputara	South Gujarat Littoral	पहाड़	Gujarat's only hill station, on the Sahyadri crest at about 1,000 m, built around a small lake. The name is usually glossed as the abode of serpents, after a snake shrine on the Sarpaganga below. It is at its most characteristic in the monsoon, when the escarpment is in cloud and the falls are running, and at its least in April.
Vansda National Park	South Gujarat Littoral	प्रकृति	A small block of moist deciduous forest on the Ambika that was never commercially logged, holding teak, bamboo, giant squirrel and a heavy bird list. It is one of the few places to see what the whole slope looked like before the timber contracts.
Purna Wildlife Sanctuary and the Dangs falls	South Gujarat Littoral	प्रकृति	The state's largest standing bamboo stock, on the Purna and its tributaries. Gira falls near Waghai and Girmal falls further in run hard from July to October and are close to dry by March; Girmal is generally described as the highest fall in the state.
Moti Daman and Nani Daman	South Gujarat Littoral	विरासत	Two walled settlements on either side of the Damanganga, Portuguese from 1559 until 1961. Moti Daman holds the larger fort, the Bom Jesus church with its carved and gilded interior, and a street plan that is Portuguese rather than Gujarati; Nani Daman has the fishing harbour and the boat yards.
Silvassa and Dudhni	South Gujarat Littoral	प्रकृति	A Warli-majority enclave held by Portugal until 1954, wedged between two states and belonging culturally to neither. Dudhni on the Damanganga backwater and the tribal museum at Silvassa are the two things most visitors see; the Warli hamlets around them are the reason the enclave matters here.
Tithal and Dumas	South Gujarat Littoral	समुद्र तट	Two dark-sand beaches — the colour comes from the sediment the rivers bring off the basalt slope, not from anything the water is doing. Tithal has temples along the shore and a long evening crowd; Dumas is Surat's weekend beach and the closest one to the city.
Surat Diamond Bourse, Khajod	South Gujarat Littoral	शहरी	A trading complex opened at the end of 2023 on the city's southern edge, built to bring diamond trading from Mumbai to the city that does the cutting, and reported to be the largest office building in the world by floor area. It is worth seeing as the physical form of a trade that until then had operated from thousands of small workshops.
Wilson Hills, Dharampur	South Gujarat Littoral	पहाड़	A hilltop above Dharampur at the northern end of the same escarpment as Saputara, with a view over the Par valley and, on a clear evening, to the sea.
Sindhudurg Fort	South Konkan	विरासत	Built from 1664 on the rocky islet of Kurte off Malvan, on Shivaji's own choice of site, with a curtain wall that follows the rock rather than any plan and freshwater wells inside a sea fort. It holds impressions said to be of Shivaji's hand and foot set in lime, and a small temple to him raised by his son — one of the very few places where he is worshipped as a deity rather than commemorated. Inscribed by UNESCO in 2025 within the Maratha Military Landscapes of India.
Vijaydurg Fort	South Konkan	विरासत	A promontory fort with three lines of wall above the Vaghotan creek, and the base from which Kanhoji Angre's fleet operated. A submerged wall lies offshore, into which attacking ships are said to have been steered. Also inscribed by UNESCO in 2025 as a component of the Maratha Military Landscapes.
The Konkan petroglyphs (katal shilpa)	South Konkan	विरासत	Thousands of figures — elephants, rhinoceros, sharks, human forms, geometric designs, some tens of metres across — carved into the bare laterite plateaus around Ratnagiri, Rajapur and Lanja, mostly documented only in the last fifteen years by local researchers walking the sada. The animals depicted include species that have not lived on this coast in historical times, which is the argument for a very early date. On India's UNESCO tentative list; sites at Ukshi, Barsu and Kasheli are the accessible ones.
Amboli	South Konkan	पहाड़	A ghat-crest village at around 700 metres receiving among the highest rainfall in Maharashtra, and one of the richest amphibian and reptile localities in the Western Ghats — several species were described from here and are known from almost nowhere else. In the monsoon it is a wall of water; in February it is dry scrub, and visitors who arrive then are disappointed for structural reasons.
Malvan and the Malvan Marine Sanctuary	South Konkan	समुद्र तट	The fishing town below Sindhudurg fort, with a marine sanctuary notified in the 1980s around the rocky reefs offshore. Snorkelling and diving run out of Tarkarli and Malvan through the fair-weather season, and the reef here is one of very few in Maharashtra.
Tarkarli	South Konkan	समुद्र तट	White sand between the sea and the Karli backwater, with a sandbar where the two meet. The houseboats and homestays here are the model that the district's tourism policy has been built on since the 1990s.
Ganpatipule	South Konkan	तीर्थ	A monolithic Ganesh image on the beach, unusually facing west, with the pradakshina path running around the hill behind it rather than around the shrine. One of the busiest pilgrim beaches on the coast, and busiest at Ganesh Chaturthi and Magh.
Kunkeshwar	South Konkan	तीर्थ	A stone Shiva temple standing at the edge of the sand at Devgad, of considerable antiquity and rebuilt more than once. Its Mahashivratri yatra fills the beach, and the sea reaches the compound wall at high tide in the monsoon.
Marleshwar	South Konkan	तीर्थ	A cave shrine reached by a stepped climb beside the Dhareshwar waterfall near Sangameshwar, occupied by resident snakes that are not removed and are treated as part of the sanctity. Its yatra falls at Makar Sankranti and is described as the deity's marriage.
Thibaw Palace, Ratnagiri	South Konkan	विरासत	The house built for Thibaw, the last king of Burma, who was deported here after the annexation of upper Burma in 1885 and lived out his life in Ratnagiri, dying in 1916. A colonial administrative decision left a Burmese royal household in a Konkan district town for three decades, and the building is now a museum.
Ratnadurg Fort and Ratnagiri town	South Konkan	विरासत	A horseshoe-shaped fort on a headland above the town with a lighthouse and a Bhagawati temple inside it. Ratnagiri town also holds Tilak's birthplace, kept as a memorial.
Jaigad and Harnai	South Konkan	विरासत	Two working fishing harbours with forts above them. Harnai's evening beach auction, where the day's catch is sold on the sand as the boats come in, is the most direct fish market on this coast; Suvarnadurg lies just offshore and is itself part of the 2025 UNESCO serial inscription.
Velas	South Konkan	प्रकृति	A village at the Bankot creek mouth where a community-run programme protects olive ridley nests and releases hatchlings between roughly February and April. The hatch is unpredictable to the day, which is the honest thing to say about the festival built around it.
Sawantwadi	South Konkan	विरासत	The old capital of the Sawant Bhonsle state at the foot of the Amboli ghat, with a lake, a palace whose Durbar Hall houses a working lacquerware and ganjifa workshop, and the craft street around it.
Pinguli	South Konkan	विरासत	A village near Kudal where Thakar families keep Chitrakathi painting, string puppetry and shadow puppetry, with a small family-run museum and performance space. It is the only place in the region where all three narrative forms can still be seen performed.
Redi Ganesh and Redi beach	South Konkan	तीर्थ	A large Ganesh image uncovered in the 1970s during iron-ore mining near Redi, now a busy shrine, beside one of the least developed beaches on the coast and the mouth of the Terekhol.
Dapoli, Murud and Anjarle	South Konkan	समुद्र तट	The northern beach cluster, with the Kadyavarcha Ganpati temple on the cliff at Anjarle and the agricultural university at Dapoli that bred much of the region's planting material.
Chiplun and Parshuram	South Konkan	तीर्थ	The Vashishti valley town on the highway, with the hilltop Parshuram temple above it — the coast's origin myth in built form, since the whole Konkan is traditionally described as land Parshuram reclaimed from the sea.
Rushikulya river mouth	South Odisha & Ganjam	वन्यजीव	A three-kilometre sand spit at Purunabandha and Gokharkuda where olive ridley turtles come ashore to nest en masse. Arribada — synchronised mass nesting — happens at only a handful of beaches worldwide, and this is one of three in Odisha alongside Gahirmatha and the Devi mouth. In a good year several lakh females nest here inside about a week, with counts above six lakh recorded; in some years the event does not happen at all. The spit itself moves — the river breaches it, the longshore drift rebuilds it — so the turtles are returning to a coordinate rather than to a landform.
Gopalpur-on-Sea	South Odisha & Ganjam	समुद्र तट	A nineteenth-century port that shipped rice, and labourers, to Burma and Southeast Asia, and then lost the trade. What remains is a lighthouse, the stumps of a jetty in the surf, a few colonial-period buildings and a working fishing beach, with a modern deep-water port operating a few kilometres up the coast. The decay is legible: this is what a port town looks like a century after its reason for existing was rerouted.
Taptapani	South Odisha & Ganjam	प्रकृति	A sulphurous hot spring in the hills above Berhampur where water emerges at around 40–45 °C through a fault in the scarp, collected into a small tank beside a shrine. The forest around it is moist deciduous and several degrees cooler than the plain below.
Biranchi Narayan temple, Buguda	South Odisha & Ganjam	विरासत	An eighteenth-century sun temple built as a wooden chariot on a stone plinth by the Ghumsur ruler Srikara Bhanja, with its interior wooden ceiling and walls covered in painted Ramayana scenes. It is the largest surviving body of Odia mural painting outside a manuscript, painted on wood rather than plaster, and its condition depends entirely on the roof over it.
Jaugada	South Odisha & Ganjam	विरासत	A rock face inside the earthen ramparts of an old fort on the Rushikulya, carrying an Ashokan edict set. Like Dhauli in the delta, what is inscribed here is the pair of Separate Edicts addressed to the officials of the conquered country — and, as at Dhauli, the famous edict of remorse for the Kalinga war is not among the texts at this site.
Mahendragiri	South Odisha & Ganjam	तीर्थ	A granite massif reaching 1,501 m, standing clear of the range and visible from far out at sea. Small early stone temples associated in local tradition with the Pandavas sit near the summit, a Shivaratri fair fills the hill for a night, and the mountain is named in Sanskrit literature often enough to have been a landmark for coastal navigation.
Taratarini	South Odisha & Ganjam	तीर्थ	A twin-goddess shrine on the Kumari hills above the Rushikulya, counted among Odisha's principal Shakta sites and reached by a long stair or a ropeway. The four Tuesdays of Chaitra draw very large crowds and the surrounding villages organise transport and feeding for them.
Chilika at Rambha	South Odisha & Ganjam	प्रकृति	The lagoon's southern arm, deeper and quieter than the Puri end, with rocky islets, a colonial-period rest house and boats out to Ghantasila and Breakfast Island. Migratory waterfowl arrive from November, and the fishery here is more crab and prawn than the northern reaches.
Brahmapur (Berhampur)	South Odisha & Ganjam	शहरी	The region's commercial capital and its silk town, organised around Bada Bazar, the weaving lanes and the Budhi Thakurani shrine. It is also the labour-migration hub of coastal Odisha, and the bus and train timetables to western India are a visible part of its street life.
Paralakhemundi	South Odisha & Ganjam	विरासत	The hill-edge seat of the Gajapati family, with a large early twentieth-century palace and the institutions — press, school, association offices — from which the campaign for an Odia-speaking province was organised. The town is also the inland terminus of a narrow-gauge branch line built to move timber and passengers down to the coast.
Potagarh	South Odisha & Ganjam	विरासत	A star-shaped earth-and-brick fort near the mouth of the Rushikulya at Ganjam town, held in turn by local, French, Dutch and British interests, and the seat of the district administration when it was run from Madras. It is now largely overgrown, which is itself informative about how completely the administrative centre moved inland.
Aryapalli and Sonapur beaches	South Odisha & Ganjam	समुद्र तट	Long casuarina-backed sand beaches, one just south of Gopalpur and the other at the Bahuda mouth close to the Telugu-speaking villages. Sonapur is where the linguistic gradient is most obvious at a bus stop.
Bhanjanagar	South Odisha & Ganjam	विरासत	The old Ghumsur headquarters, called Russellkonda under the Madras administration after the officer who ran the agency that fought the Ghumsur wars of the 1830s and then suppressed Kondh human sacrifice in the hills above. A reservoir on the Rushikulya now supplies the town.
Sundarbans National Park	Sundarbans	वन्यजीव	The core of the Indian tiger reserve, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987. Entry is by boat and by permit only, there are no roads and no walking, and the wildlife is seen from the water or from a handful of fenced watchtowers. The forest on the eastern side of the international line was separately inscribed as The Sundarbans in 1997; the wider Indian wetland was designated a Ramsar site in 2019.
Sajnekhali	Sundarbans	वन्यजीव	The reserve's administrative gateway — the interpretation centre, the mangrove nursery, the crocodile and turtle enclosures, a heronry, and the office where entry permits are actually issued. There is a Bonbibi shrine inside the compound, which is where most visitors first see the deity.
Sudhanyakhali watchtower	Sundarbans	वन्यजीव	The most-used tiger-viewing point in the reserve, overlooking an artificial sweet-water pond dug so that animals have somewhere to drink in a landscape where all the surface water is salt. The pond, not the tower, is the reason anything is seen.
Dobanki canopy walk	Sundarbans	प्रकृति	A raised half-kilometre caged walkway through the canopy — the only place in the Indian Sundarbans where a visitor is on foot inside the forest, and the cage makes the reason explicit.
Netidhopani	Sundarbans	विरासत	The brick ruin of a temple deep inside the forest, locally attached to the Behula and Lakhindar story of the Manasa Mangal. Reaching it takes most of a day by boat through the creeks, and it is the region's clearest evidence that the closed forest was once settled.
Gosaba	Sundarbans	विरासत	The base for most island travel, and the site of Daniel Hamilton's cooperative estate, begun in 1903, which cleared and embanked several islands and ran its own schools, cooperative bank and dispensaries. The Beckon Bungalow, where Tagore stayed in 1932, still stands. It is the single most legible piece of the region's settlement history.
Jharkhali	Sundarbans	वन्यजीव	A tiger rehabilitation and holding centre with an enclosure for animals that cannot be returned to the forest, reachable by road rather than only by boat — which makes it the most accessible point in the region for a day visit.
Bhagabatpur Crocodile Project	Sundarbans	वन्यजीव	A hatchery for the estuarine crocodile on the Saptamukhi channel, running a captive breeding and release programme for a species the region's creeks still hold. Open to visitors in the dry season.
Sagar Island and the Kapil Muni temple	Sundarbans	तीर्थ	The largest island at the Hooghly's mouth and the site of the Gangasagar bathing fair at Makar Sankranti. The temple has been rebuilt more than once because the sea took the earlier structures, which is the plainest illustration available of how the coastline here behaves.
Ghoramara	Sundarbans	प्रकृति	A small inhabited island that has lost a large proportion of its land area to erosion over recent decades, with most of its displaced households resettled on Sagar Island. The neighbouring Lohachara island, once inhabited, is gone. It is a working village, not a viewing point, and should be visited on that basis.
Bali and Pakhiralay	Sundarbans	प्रकृति	The two settlements facing Sajnekhali across the creek, where most homestays and lodges are. Pakhiralay's name means the birds' abode, and the creek in front of it is where the local boats moor overnight.
Canning	Sundarbans	शहरी	The railhead and market town, laid out in the 1860s as Port Canning — an attempt to build a rival deep-water port on the Matla that failed when the channel silted and a cyclone destroyed the works. The town is what remains of it, and it is now the gateway everyone passes through.
Bakkhali and Frasergunj	Sundarbans	समुद्र तट	A flat, wide, grey-sand beach at the region's western edge with a casuarina belt behind it, and the nearest thing the Sundarbans has to a seaside resort. Frasergunj was laid out as a planned settlement in the early twentieth century and never grew into one.
Sundarban Tiger Reserve buffer creeks	Sundarbans	प्रकृति	The Matla, Bidyadhari, Thakuran, Gosaba and Raimangal channels and their branching creeks — a network navigable only with the tide, where the width of a channel can change by hundreds of metres between morning and afternoon.
Kalash and the seaward sandbars	Sundarbans	प्रकृति	Beaches at the forest's southern edge used as a nesting site by olive ridley turtles, with restricted access. The sandbars offshore hold large wintering populations of waders and gulls.
Ramappa (Kakatiya Rudreshwara) Temple, Palampet	Telangana	विरासत	Begun in 1213 under Kakatiya patronage and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021. Two things make it an engineering document as much as a temple: the superstructure uses porous bricks light enough to float, which cut the dead load carried by the roof, and the foundation is described as a sandbox — a pit packed with a sand-based fill on which the structure sits and which absorbs ground movement. The black dolerite bracket figures, polished to a metallic surface, are carved with a precision the sandstone body could not have taken. It is named for its sculptor rather than its deity or its patron, which is close to unique in Indian temple architecture, and it stands directly above Ramappa Cheruvu, one of the tanks of the same programme.
Warangal Fort and the Kakatiya Kala Thoranam	Telangana	विरासत	A concentric fort with an earthen outer rampart and a stone inner enclosure, at the centre of which stand four free-standing ornamental gateways of the ruined Swayambhu temple. The gateway silhouette was adopted as the state emblem in 2014. The site reads as a plan drawing left on the ground — the temple has gone and its doorframes remain.
Thousand Pillar Temple, Hanamkonda	Telangana	विरासत	A trikutalayam of 1163 with three shrines on a common star-shaped platform and a detached Nandi mandapa, in the same polished black stone as Ramappa's brackets. Dismantled and rebuilt in parts during a long conservation programme.
Golconda Fort	Telangana	विरासत	A granite hill fortified in successive layers from the Kakatiya period to the Qutb Shahi, with a water-lift system of Persian wheels raising supply to the summit and an acoustic arrangement in which a clap at the Fateh Darwaza carries to the pavilion at the top. The Kollur mines that supplied the diamond trade were not here — Golconda was the market and the treasury, which is why the name attached to the stones.
Qutb Shahi Tombs	Telangana	विरासत	A necropolis of some thirty domed tombs, mosques and step-wells for one dynasty in one enclosure below Golconda — unusual in India, where royal tombs are normally scattered. A long conservation programme has recovered the stucco and the original garden hydrology.
Charminar and Laad Bazaar	Telangana	शहरी	A four-minaret gateway of 1591 built at the crossing of the new city's two axes, with a mosque on its upper floor. Laad Bazaar runs west from it and has sold lac bangles, pearls and wedding goods for generations; Mecca Masjid, the Chowmahalla palace and the Salar Jung Museum are all within a short walk.
Bhongir (Bhuvanagiri) Fort	Telangana	विरासत	A single egg-shaped granite monolith rising about 150 m from flat country, fortified by the Western Chalukyas and later held by the Kakatiyas. The climb is on cut steps over bare rock and takes under an hour; it is now also the region's main rock-climbing site.
Pochampally and Puttapaka	Telangana	विरासत	Working weaving villages rather than monuments. Pochampally is also Bhoodan Pochampally — Vinoba Bhave's first land-gift was made here in 1951, and the name stuck. Puttapaka is one of the few places on earth weaving double ikat.
Medaram	Telangana	तीर्थ	A forest clearing that holds one of the largest religious gatherings in India for four days every second year. There is no temple — the goddesses Sammakka and Saralamma are represented by vermilion-smeared poles brought from the forest, and the priests are Koya.
Bhadrachalam	Telangana	तीर्थ	A Rama temple on the Godavari built in the seventeenth century by Kancherla Gopanna, the local revenue officer remembered as Bhadrachala Ramadasu, whose Telugu keertanas are core Carnatic repertoire. The Bhadrachalam and Nuguru tracts were transferred into Khammam district in 1959.
Alampur	Telangana	विरासत	Nine Badami Chalukyan temples of the seventh and eighth centuries at the Tungabhadra–Krishna confluence, with a Shakti Peetha attached. Several were physically relocated when the Srisailam reservoir filled. The architecture is northern nagara, not Deccan Dravidian, which makes the site an outlier on this plateau.
Pakhal, Laknavaram and Ghanpur lakes	Telangana	प्रकृति	Thirteenth-century reservoirs still holding water and still irrigating. Pakhal sits inside a wildlife sanctuary; Laknavaram is a lake among wooded islands with a suspension footbridge across it. They are the upper links of the cascade system, and their bunds are earth and stone laid eight centuries ago.
Kuntala and Pochera Falls	Telangana	प्रकृति	Waterfalls on the Kadam river in the Sahyadri-derived Deccan basalt of the north — Kuntala is the highest in the region at around 45 m. Both run hard from July to October and are worth nothing in April.
Yadadri (Yadagirigutta)	Telangana	तीर्थ	A Narasimha hill shrine rebuilt on a very large scale in black granite through the 2010s. The reconstruction replaced a cave temple with a new complex, and the older rock shrine survives inside it.
Basar Gnana Saraswati Temple	Telangana	तीर्थ	One of very few temples in India where Saraswati is the principal deity, on the bank of the Godavari. Children are brought here for aksharabhyasam, the first writing of letters, so the crowd is largely five-year-olds.
Nagarjunasagar and Ethipothala	Telangana	प्रकृति	A masonry dam across the Krishna gorge, completed in the 1960s, with a reservoir that drowned the Ikshvaku-period site of Nagarjunakonda — excavated monuments were cut and re-erected on an island in the lake, reachable by launch. The dam and the island straddle the river, with a bank on each side.
Hyderabad's rock landscape	Telangana	प्रकृति	Balancing granite tors two and a half billion years old, exposed inside and around the city at Khajaguda, Fakhruddingutta and the Deccan plateau edges. They are among the oldest exposed rock surfaces on the planet and are being quarried and built over faster than they are being protected.
Eturnagaram and Kawal	Telangana	वन्यजीव	Teak and mixed deciduous sanctuaries on the Godavari catchment, holding sloth bear, gaur on the eastern edge and a corridor population moving between the Godavari forests and Bastar.
Mamallapuram	Tondaimandalam	विरासत	Inscribed in 1984 as the Group of Monuments at Mahabalipuram. The site holds the whole Pallava sequence in one place — rock-cut cave mandapas begun under Mahendravarman I, the five monolithic rathas quarried down out of single boulders under Narasimhavarman I, the enormous open-air relief, and the structural Shore Temple of Rajasimha's reign, built of cut and stacked stone. Several monuments are unfinished, which is what makes the working method legible.
The Descent of the Ganga relief	Tondaimandalam	विरासत	A bas-relief roughly thirty metres long and thirteen high, carved across two adjacent boulders with the natural cleft between them used as the river down which the Ganga descends — a cistern above once let water run through it. Elephants, ascetics, celestials and a self-satisfied cat imitating a penitent are all carved at full scale.
Shore Temple	Tondaimandalam	विरासत	A structural temple of the early eighth century built of dressed granite blocks on the beach, with two Shiva shrines and a Vishnu shrine on one plinth. The salt wind has eaten much of the carving, which is itself the argument for why the Pallavas built inland afterwards.
Kailasanathar temple, Kanchipuram	Tondaimandalam	विरासत	Rajasimha's sandstone temple of the early eighth century, the oldest structural temple in the town, with a ring of small cells around the courtyard and traces of original paint under later plaster. It is quiet in a way none of the larger Kanchi temples is.
Ekambareswarar temple, Kanchipuram	Tondaimandalam	तीर्थ	The Shaiva anchor of the town, with a Vijayanagara-period gopura among the tallest in south India and a hall of a thousand pillars. The temple mango tree in the courtyard is treated as the presiding object of the site.
Varadaraja Perumal temple, Kanchipuram	Tondaimandalam	तीर्थ	The Vaishnava anchor, in the separate quarter historically called Little Kanchi, with a hundred-pillar hall of exceptional carving. The Athi Varadar image, carved in fig wood, is kept submerged in the temple tank and brought out for public display once in forty years — last in 2019.
Kamakshi Amman temple, Kanchipuram	Tondaimandalam	तीर्थ	The goddess temple of the town, and the reason, according to the account repeated locally, that the Shiva temples of Kanchipuram do not carry separate goddess shrines of their own — the town is said to have one Amman and this is her.
Kapaleeshwarar temple, Mylapore	Tondaimandalam	तीर्थ	The present temple is sixteenth-century Vijayanagara work, rebuilt inland after the original shore site was destroyed; the settlement itself is named in Tevaram hymns centuries earlier. Its Panguni festival brings out the images of all sixty-three Nayanmars in one procession.
Fort St George and St Mary's Church	Tondaimandalam	विरासत	The Company fort begun in 1640 on a strip of beach bought from a local ruler, around which Madras assembled. St Mary's inside it, consecrated in 1680, is the oldest Anglican church east of Suez, with tombstones and registers that constitute a primary source for the early city.
The Marina and the fishing villages behind it	Tondaimandalam	समुद्र तट	About thirteen kilometres of sand, one of the longest urban beaches in the country, and unusually wide because a nineteenth-century harbour breakwater changed how sand moves along this coast. The fishing settlements behind it are older than the city and still work the sea from the beach.
George Town, Parry's Corner and Egmore	Tondaimandalam	शहरी	The commercial old town — a grid of wholesale streets named for what they sell, with Parry's Corner at its hinge, named after a trading house established in 1788. Egmore, west of it, holds the Government Museum and its bronze gallery, and a railway station that is the departure point for the south.
Vedanthangal Bird Sanctuary	Tondaimandalam	वन्यजीव	A heronry on an irrigation tank, protected by the surrounding villages since the late eighteenth century when they obtained a formal order to that effect — one of the oldest deliberately protected bird sites in the country. Painted stork, ibis, openbill and spoonbill nest in the barringtonia trees standing in the water.
Pulicat lagoon and the Dutch cemetery	Tondaimandalam	प्रकृति	A shallow brackish lagoon, the second largest in India, with flamingo in winter and a fishing economy working from stilt platforms. The Dutch built their first Indian settlement here in the early seventeenth century, and their cemetery with its carved skeleton gateposts is what is left of it.
Puducherry — the French and Tamil quarters	Tondaimandalam	विरासत	A grid town divided by a canal, with the former European quarter of broad streets, compound walls and verandah houses on the sea side and the Tamil quarter of thinnai houses and temple streets inland. French remains an official language, the street signs are bilingual, and the bakeries and the police kepis are the least self-conscious survivals of the period.
Arikamedu	Tondaimandalam	विरासत	An excavated trading settlement on the Ariyankuppam backwater, occupied from around the first century BCE, with Roman amphorae, Arretine ware and glass alongside local pottery — direct physical evidence of the Indian Ocean trade that Kodumanal and the western ports were the other end of.
Vellore Fort and Jalakandeswarar temple	Tondaimandalam	विरासत	A sixteenth-century granite fort with a wet moat, holding a temple of exceptional Vijayanagara carving inside its walls along with later garrison buildings. The fort changed hands repeatedly through the eighteenth century and was in use as a garrison into the modern period.
The Kuttanad polders	Travancore & Kuttanad	प्रकृति	Champakulam, Kainakary, Nedumudi, Ramankary and the lettered kayal blocks — paddy fields lying one to three metres below the water on the other side of the bund you are standing on, with pump houses running through the crop season. It is one of a very small number of places on earth where field crops are grown below sea level, and the FAO recognised the system as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System in 2013.
Thanneermukkom barrier	Travancore & Kuttanad	विरासत	A shuttered regulator thrown across Vembanad Lake and commissioned in 1976 to keep tidal salt water out of the Kuttanad crop. The shutters are opened to pass the monsoon flood and closed for roughly half the year. It made the second crop possible and cost the lake its annual salt flush, which is why water hyacinth now covers much of the southern basin and the clam and prawn breeding cycles have thinned.
Vembanad Lake and Kumarakom	Travancore & Kuttanad	वन्यजीव	India's longest lake and the core of the Vembanad–Kol Ramsar site listed in 2002. The Kumarakom bird sanctuary on its eastern shore takes migrants from November, and the annual bird count here is one of the longest-running citizen surveys in the country.
Alappuzha town and the coir belt	Travancore & Kuttanad	शहरी	A port laid out with a grid of canals in the late eighteenth century under the Travancore diwan Raja Kesavadas, because cargo moved by water long before it moved by road. Mechanised coir factories followed from 1859, and the warehouses, the canal bridges and the labour history all date from that industry rather than from tourism.
Aranmula	Travancore & Kuttanad	विरासत	A Pamba-bank village holding three separate things at once — the Parthasarathy temple and its palliyodam boats, the vallasadya feast sung for by the boatmen, and the households that cast the metal mirror. It is the densest concentration of living craft and ritual on the river.
Sabarimala	Travancore & Kuttanad	तीर्थ	A forest shrine to Ayyappa at about 1,260 m inside the Periyar reserve, reached on foot from Pamba or on the longer traditional route from Erumeli. Pilgrims observe a 41-day vratham, wear black or blue, carry the irumudikettu and climb the eighteen steps. The shrine opens for Mandala pooja for 41 days from mid-November and for Makaravilakku on 14 January, and for the first five days of each Malayalam month.
Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple	Travancore & Kuttanad	तीर्थ	The temple to which Travancore itself was made over in 1750, and the institution the state then understood itself to be administering on behalf of. The deity reclines in a single view split across three doors; the ottakkal mandapam in front is cut from one block of granite. An inventory of its vaults ordered by the courts in 2011 found treasure of a scale that made international news, and one vault has not been opened.
Kuthiramalika Palace	Travancore & Kuttanad	विरासत	Swathi Thirunal's own palace beside the temple, named for the 122 carved horse brackets under its eaves. His compositions are performed in its grounds each January at the Swathi Sangeethotsavam, which is the rare case of a music festival held in the composer's house.
Napier Museum and Sree Chitra Art Gallery	Travancore & Kuttanad	विरासत	An 1880 Indo-Saracenic building by Robert Chisholm with a ventilation design that keeps the interior cool without machinery, and next to it the gallery holding the largest public collection of Raja Ravi Varma's work alongside Rajput, Mughal and Tanjore painting.
Varkala cliff and Sivagiri	Travancore & Kuttanad	समुद्र तट	The only sea cliffs on the Kerala coast, a sedimentary formation recognised as a national geological monument, with freshwater springs breaking out of the cliff face onto Papanasam beach below. On the ridge behind sits Sivagiri, Sree Narayana Guru's mutt and the destination of the yellow-clad pilgrimage at the turn of the year.
Kovalam and Poovar	Travancore & Kuttanad	समुद्र तट	Three crescent coves under a headland lighthouse at Kovalam, and 25 km south at Poovar the point where the Neyyar reaches the sea behind a sandbar, so a river, a backwater and open surf sit within a few hundred metres of each other.
Ashtamudi Lake and Munroe Island	Travancore & Kuttanad	प्रकृति	An eight-armed estuarine lake, a Ramsar site since 2002, with Munroe Island in its middle — a cluster of islets between the lake and the Kallada river where canal-width channels run behind the houses. The lake's short-neck clam fishery was certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council in 2014, the first Indian fishery to be.
Thangassery, Kollam	Travancore & Kuttanad	विरासत	A headland that passed from Portuguese to Dutch to British hands, leaving fort ruins, cemeteries and a tall red-and-white striped lighthouse. Kollam behind it is the town where most of India's cashew is shelled.
Krishnapuram Palace	Travancore & Kuttanad	विरासत	An eighteenth-century Travancore palace at Kayamkulam in the gabled, double-storey Kerala style, holding the Gajendra Moksham mural — the largest single mural panel in Kerala, over forty square metres of one continuous composition.
Mannarasala	Travancore & Kuttanad	तीर्थ	A serpent grove at Haripad with tens of thousands of stone naga images set among the trees, and an establishment led by a priestess rather than a priest. Families come to the Ayilyam observance to resolve what are understood as ancestral serpent obligations.
Ponmudi and Agasthyakoodam	Travancore & Kuttanad	पहाड़	A tea-and-shola hill station at about 1,100 m, and behind it the 1,868 m Agasthyakoodam peak inside the Agasthyamalai biosphere reserve, one of the most botanically rich blocks in the Western Ghats. Access to the peak is by permit and limited to a short season.
Ujjayanta Palace	Tripura Hills & Plains	विरासत	Built for Maharaja Radha Kishore Manikya between 1899 and 1901 in an Indo-Saracenic manner, with three domes, the tallest at 86 feet, set in a compound of about 250 acres in the middle of Agartala. Rabindranath Tagore gave it its name. It housed the state legislature from 1973 to 2011 and reopened as the state museum in 2013, with more than a thousand objects covering the whole region.
Neermahal	Tripura Hills & Plains	विरासत	A palace standing in the water of Rudrasagar lake, begun in 1921 for Maharaja Bir Bikram Kishore Manikya and finished around 1930 — twenty-four rooms of marble and sandstone in a mixed Hindu and Mughal idiom, reached only by boat. It is the largest water palace in India, and the annual water festival in August fills the lake around it with racing boats.
Unakoti	Tripura Hills & Plains	विरासत	A hillside of colossal Shaiva relief sculpture cut directly into the rock, dating mainly to the eighth and ninth centuries — a thirty-foot Shiva head known as Unakotiswara Kal Bhairav, a twenty-two-foot seated Ganesha, and Uma-Maheshwara panels across roughly 150 acres of forested slope with streams running through it. The name means one less than a crore. India added it to the UNESCO tentative list in 2022; it is not an inscribed World Heritage Site.
Tripura Sundari Temple (Matabari)	Tripura Hills & Plains	तीर्थ	Built by Maharaja Dhanya Manikya in 1501 on a low hillock in the shape of a tortoise, which is why it is also called the Kurma Pitha, and counted among the fifty-one Shakta peethas. The Kalyan Sagar tank behind it holds large soft-shell turtles and fish that are fed rather than caught. The Diwali mela here is the largest single gathering in the region's calendar.
Chabimura	Tripura Hills & Plains	विरासत	A cliff face on the Gomati at the Devtamura ridge, carved with images of Shiva, Vishnu, Kartikeya and a Mahishasuramardini Durga about twenty feet high, dated to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The site is approached by boat up the river, and the carvings are read from the water because there is no bank to stand on.
Pilak	Tripura Hills & Plains	विरासत	An archaeological area of Buddhist and Hindu stone and terracotta sculpture of roughly the eighth to twelfth centuries, scattered across fields and mounds rather than concentrated in one monument. It is the clearest physical evidence that this territory sat on a route between the Bengal delta and the Arakan coast long before any of its surviving dynastic architecture was built.
Jampui Hills	Tripura Hills & Plains	पहाड़	The highest ground in the region, topped by Betlingchhip at 939 m, with Mizo-speaking villages along the crest and mandarin orange terraces on the slopes. It is the only part of the region cold enough in winter for citrus of this kind, and the November orange festival at Vanghmun is built on that single climatic fact.
Sepahijala Wildlife Sanctuary	Tripura Hills & Plains	वन्यजीव	Mixed moist deciduous forest with a lake, a botanical garden and a zoo, about 25 km from Agartala. It is the accessible place to see Phayre's langur, the spectacled monkey that is the state's emblematic primate, along with capped langur and a heavy resident bird list.
Trishna Wildlife Sanctuary	Tripura Hills & Plains	वन्यजीव	The region's stronghold for gaur, in secondary forest and grassland in the south. Lower-profile than Sepahijala and considerably harder to reach, which is much of the reason the herds are still there.
Dumboor Lake	Tripura Hills & Plains	प्रकृति	A reservoir on the Gomati scattered with islands, formed by the dam at Dumboor and now a fishery and a migratory bird site. The river leaves it through the gorge that eventually cuts past the Chabimura carvings.
Chaturdash Devta Temple	Tripura Hills & Plains	तीर्थ	The temple of the fourteen dynastic deities, whose annual Kharchi puja in July draws a week-long fair. The images are attended by hereditary chantai priests who carry them to the Haora river to be bathed — a rite conducted by indigenous priests for a dynasty that otherwise patronised Brahminical worship, and the single clearest surviving instance of the region's two religious systems operating as one.
Bhuvaneswari Temple	Tripura Hills & Plains	विरासत	A small riverside temple on the Gomati at Udaipur, of the seventeenth century, known far beyond its size because Rabindranath Tagore set both the novel Rajarshi and the play Visarjan around it.
Kamalasagar Kali Temple	Tripura Hills & Plains	तीर्थ	A fifteenth-century Kali shrine above a large tank excavated in the Manikya period, on the western edge of the plain. The image is a stone Mahishasuramardini panel of an earlier date, reused as the temple's presiding form.
Agartala	Tripura Hills & Plains	शहरी	A planned nineteenth- and twentieth-century town on flat ground, laid out around the palace compound, with Battala and Maharajganj as its working markets and a food scene in which mui borok counters and Bengali sweet shops sit on the same street. It is the second-largest city in the North East.
Sri Krishna Matha, Udupi	Tulu Nadu	तीर्थ	Founded by Madhvacharya in the thirteenth century, with eight satellite mathas around it whose heads take charge of the deity's worship in strict rotation. The idol is viewed not through the door but through a small silver-plated nine-holed window in the wall — the Kanakana Kindi, named for the poet Kanakadasa, who by the standing account was refused entry and for whom the wall opened. The temple's kitchen has fed pilgrims continuously for centuries and is the ancestor of an entire national restaurant trade.
St Mary's Islands, off Malpe	Tulu Nadu	प्रकृति	Four small islands of columnar jointed lava — hexagonal rock pillars standing in ranks out of the sand, formed as a thick flow cooled and cracked. Declared a National Geological Monument, and one of the few places in India where the structure is exposed at sea level.
Kollur Mookambika Temple	Tulu Nadu	तीर्थ	A Ghat-foot shrine on the Souparnika river which draws more Malayali pilgrims than any other temple in Karnataka. Musicians, dancers and writers from Kerala come here for vidyarambham and to offer a first performance, so a Karnataka temple keeps a Kerala artistic calendar.
Karkala Gomateshwara	Tulu Nadu	विरासत	A monolithic Bahubali of about 42 feet, raised on a rock outcrop in 1432. The nearby Chaturmukha Basadi of 1586 is a four-faced Jain temple with identical entrances on all sides, so the building has no front.
Venur Gomateshwara	Tulu Nadu	विरासत	A second monolith, about 35 feet, raised in 1604 on the bank of the Gurupura — the smallest and least visited of the coast's Bahubali statues, standing in a village that has otherwise gone quiet.
Saavira Kambada Basadi, Moodabidri	Tulu Nadu	विरासत	The Thousand Pillar temple, begun in 1430, with no two pillars carved alike and a tiered roof built for monsoon rather than for display. Moodabidri holds eighteen basadis and a palm-leaf manuscript collection that gave it the name Jain Kashi.
Dharmasthala Manjunatha Temple	Tulu Nadu	तीर्थ	A Shiva temple owned and administered by a Jain family, the Heggades, with Vaishnava Madhva priests conducting worship and daivas guarding the site — four traditions running one institution. It feeds every visitor free, and the hereditary head historically also settled disputes brought to him.
Kateel Durgaparameshwari Temple	Tulu Nadu	तीर्थ	Built on an islet in the middle of the Nandini river, reached across water on both sides. Its Yakshagana melas tour through the season on vows made at this shrine, which makes the temple one of the largest employers of performers on the coast.
Kadri Manjunatha Temple, Mangaluru	Tulu Nadu	विरासत	A Shaiva temple holding a seated bronze Lokeshvara inscribed with a date corresponding to 968 CE — a Buddhist image in continuous worship in a Hindu shrine, with a Natha yogi matha on the hill above it. The clearest single object for the coast's habit of keeping rather than replacing.
St Aloysius Chapel, Mangaluru	Tulu Nadu	विरासत	Every wall and the whole ceiling painted in fresco and oil by the Italian Jesuit Antonio Moscheni in 1899–1900, in a plain chapel on a hill. Moscheni worked with local assistants and finished in about two years; nothing comparable exists in South India.
Kudroli Gokarnanatha Temple, Mangaluru	Tulu Nadu	तीर्थ	Consecrated in 1912 at the instance of Narayana Guru, so that the Billava community — barred from existing temples — would have one of its own with its own priests. Its Mangaluru Dasara is now the city's largest public festival. A Kerala reform movement's most conspicuous building stands in Karnataka.
Bekal Fort	Tulu Nadu	विरासत	The largest laterite sea fort on the coast, built by the Keladi Nayakas in the mid-seventeenth century, with keyhole-shaped openings cut through the parapet for musket fire and an observation tower over the water. It passed to Mysore and then to the British as part of South Canara, and only became part of a Malayalam-speaking state in 1956 — which is why this file, and not the Malabar one, carries it.
Ananthapura Lake Temple	Tulu Nadu	तीर्थ	A shrine standing in the middle of a rock-cut tank, reached by a causeway, and treated as the original seat of the deity later installed at Thiruvananthapuram. A crocodile has lived in the tank within living memory and was fed temple offerings; the one known as Babiya died in 2022.
Ullal and the Someshwara rocks	Tulu Nadu	समुद्र तट	The stretch south of the Netravati mouth, where black rock breaks the surf. Ullal was the seat of Abbakka Chowta, who held out against Portuguese attacks through the second half of the sixteenth century, and holds the dargah of Sayyid Muhammad Shareeful Madani, a major Beary pilgrimage.
Manjeshwar	Tulu Nadu	विरासत	A small town near the northern edge of Kerala that produced Govinda Pai, the first poet given the title Rashtrakavi in Kannada. His house is preserved. Nothing states the region's problem more plainly than a Kannada national poet born in what is now a Malayalam state.
Pilikula Nisargadhama, Mangaluru	Tulu Nadu	प्रकृति	A park on the city's edge holding a reconstructed guttu house, a working potter's and weaver's street and a zoo. The heritage village is the easiest place to see the plan of a matrilineal manor without being invited into one.
Jagannath temple, Puri	Utkal	तीर्थ	A twelfth-century temple in the Kalinga order, roughly 65 m high, standing inside a double enclosure with some hundred and twenty subsidiary shrines, a kitchen, a granary and a market. Entry is restricted to those of Indian-origin faiths, which the temple states plainly at the gate; the Raghunandan library roof and the outer enclosure give the view for everyone else.
Sun Temple, Konark	Utkal	विरासत	A thirteenth-century temple built as the sun god's chariot — twenty-four carved wheels along the plinth and seven horses drawing it. The main tower has fallen; the jagamohana survives, filled with sand for stability. The wheels are functioning sundials, readable by the shadow of the spokes.
Lingaraj temple, Bhubaneswar	Utkal	तीर्थ	The eleventh-century high point of the Kalinga temple order — a 55 m rekha deul with the characteristic curvilinear tower and a sequence of halls added in front of it. Non-Hindus view it from a platform outside the wall.
Mukteswar and Rajarani temples	Utkal	विरासत	Mukteswar, of the tenth century, carries a free-standing arched torana found on almost no other temple in the region; Rajarani, of the eleventh, is unusual for having no image inside and for the carved directional guardians ringing its tower. Together they are the clearest lesson in how the Kalinga style developed.
Udayagiri and Khandagiri caves	Utkal	विरासत	Jain rock-cut residential cells of the first century BCE cut into two facing sandstone hills, low-ceilinged and meant for sleeping rather than assembly. The Hathigumpha inscription of Kharavela here is the principal document for early Kalinga history.
Dhauli	Utkal	विरासत	A rock face above the Daya carrying Ashokan edicts, with an elephant carved from the living rock above them. What is inscribed here is the pair of Separate Edicts addressed to the officials of the conquered country — and the famous edict expressing remorse for the Kalinga war is not among them at this site.
Chilika lagoon	Utkal	प्रकृति	The largest brackish lagoon in Asia, around 1,100 km² in summer and larger in monsoon, with a resident population of Irrawaddy dolphins near the Satapada mouth and Nalabana island filling with migratory waterfowl in winter. A new sea mouth cut in 2000 changed the lagoon's salinity and its fishery with it.
Raghurajpur	Utkal	विरासत	A single street of houses whose verandahs are all workshops — pattachitra, palm-leaf etching, cow-dung toys, masks — with gotipua akhadas training in the same village. Designated a heritage crafts village in 2000.
Ratnagiri, Udayagiri and Lalitgiri	Utkal	विरासत	Three excavated Buddhist monastic sites on low hills within a short drive of one another — a great carved doorway and stupa at Ratnagiri, monasteries and an apsidal shrine at Lalitgiri, and a relic casket that established the antiquity of the complex. Occupied for roughly a thousand years.
Cuttack	Utkal	शहरी	The delta's old capital on the tongue between the Mahanadi and Kathajodi, with the Barabati fort moat and gate, the eleventh-century stone revetment along the Kathajodi that protected the town from flood, the filigree workshops, and the Bali Jatra ground on the riverbank.
Bhitarkanika and Gahirmatha	Utkal	वन्यजीव	Mangrove creeks holding one of India's largest saltwater crocodile populations, and the beach at Gahirmatha beyond it — among the largest known mass nesting grounds for the olive ridley turtle, whose arribada brings several hundred thousand animals ashore in a few nights when it happens.
Pipili	Utkal	विरासत	An appliqué town on the Bhubaneswar–Puri road whose shopfronts are hung floor to ceiling with canopies and umbrellas. The chariot coverings for Ratha Jatra are made here.
Kenduli Sasan and the Prachi valley	Utkal	विरासत	The village claimed as Jayadeva's, on a small river lined with early temples and sculpture. The Prachi valley is the densest concentration of pre-thirteenth-century temple remains in the region outside Bhubaneswar.
Alarnath, Brahmagiri	Utkal	तीर्थ	The Vishnu temple pilgrims go to during anasara, when the Puri deities are out of sight. It exists in the calendar as the alternative destination for a fortnight, which is an unusual thing for a temple to be.
Baladevjew temple, Kendrapara	Utkal	तीर्थ	A large Balabhadra temple with its own chariot festival and its own well-known offering, rasabali. The delta's counterweight to Puri, on a smaller scale and with far fewer visitors.
Simhachalam	Uttarandhra	तीर्थ	A hill temple to Varaha Lakshmi Narasimha whose image is covered in a thick coat of sandalwood paste for the entire year and uncovered for about twelve hours on Akshaya Tritiya. The building carries inscriptions of the Eastern Ganga rulers of Kalinga — the dynasty that built Konark — which is the clearest architectural evidence that this coast's religious networks ran north as readily as south.
Thotlakonda, Bavikonda and Pavurallakonda	Uttarandhra	विरासत	Three hilltop Buddhist monastic complexes overlooking the sea north of Visakhapatnam, with stupas, chaitya halls, viharas and rock-cut cisterns, occupied from roughly the second century BCE. They sit directly above the shipping lane, which is not a coincidence: the monasteries were supported by maritime trade and sited where they could see it.
Borra caves	Uttarandhra	प्रकृति	A limestone cave system cut by the Gosthani, with stalactite and stalagmite formations across several chambers about eighty metres below the surface. It was reported to science by William King of the Geological Survey of India in 1807, and it was in use as a local shrine long before that.
Araku valley	Uttarandhra	पहाड़	A broad valley at about 900 m surrounded by higher ridges, farmed by Adivasi households growing coffee under shade alongside pepper, millet and vegetables. The approach by rail is the point of the journey: the Kothavalasa–Kirandul line, built to move iron ore, climbs the scarp through dozens of tunnels and high bridges and is one of the more dramatic pieces of railway engineering in the country.
Lambasingi	Uttarandhra	पहाड़	A village on the Chintapalli plateau that records the lowest temperatures in Andhra Pradesh, occasionally close to zero in December and January. Its local fame rests entirely on that one measurement.
Arasavalli Suryanarayana temple	Uttarandhra	तीर्थ	One of the few sun temples in India in continuous worship rather than in ruins. It is oriented so that on Ratha Saptami mornings the rising sun's light reaches the feet of the image through the entrance openings — an alignment the temple is built around rather than a coincidence it advertises.
Srikurmam	Uttarandhra	तीर्थ	A temple to Vishnu in his tortoise form, west-facing, with two flagstaffs and several hundred inscriptions cut into its pillars and walls in Telugu, Odia and Sanskrit. The inscription wall is the substantive attraction: it is a continuous administrative and donative record of this coast across centuries.
Salihundam	Uttarandhra	विरासत	A Buddhist site on a hill above the Vamsadhara near its mouth, with a group of stupas, monastery foundations and sculpture running from early aniconic phases through to Vajrayana images. From the top the river mouth and the old port are both visible, which explains the siting.
Kalingapatnam	Uttarandhra	विरासत	The Vamsadhara's mouth and one of the oldest working ports on this coast, later a Dutch and then a British anchorage. What remains is a lighthouse, a Dutch-period cemetery, a dargah with an annual urs, a fishing beach and no port at all.
Bheemunipatnam (Bheemili)	Uttarandhra	समुद्र तट	A Dutch settlement from the seventeenth century, with a walled Dutch cemetery of unusual funerary architecture still standing above the beach. It is one of the oldest constituted municipalities in India, dating from the 1860s, and now effectively a suburb at the end of a beach road.
Visakhapatnam	Uttarandhra	शहरी	A natural deep-water harbour sheltered behind the Dolphin's Nose headland, which is why a port, a shipyard, the Eastern Naval Command and later a steel plant all ended up here rather than anywhere else on this coast. The waterfront runs from a working fishing harbour through a beach road to a decommissioned submarine kept as a museum.
Vizianagaram	Uttarandhra	विरासत	The Pusapati estate town, with an eighteenth-century fort, the Pydithalli Ammavaru temple, and the institutions the estate endowed — a music college opened in 1919 and the schools where Gurajada Apparao taught and wrote. A small town with a documented effect on Telugu music and literature out of all proportion to its size.
Bobbili	Uttarandhra	विरासत	A fort town remembered for the 1757 siege, and the place a specific musical instrument comes from. The veena workshops are in and around the town and can be visited; the fort's story is told in ballads before it is told in books.
Etikoppaka	Uttarandhra	विरासत	A village on the Varaha river where lacquer toys are turned on lathes and coloured by friction with dyed lac. The workshops are working premises, not showrooms, and the dye plants are grown or gathered nearby.
Paderu and Chintapalli	Uttarandhra	पहाड़	The administrative and market centres of the agency tracts, with weekly markets that are the best place to see what the ghats actually produce and which languages actually meet. The roads up are slow and close in heavy rain.
Deekshabhoomi	Vidarbha	तीर्थ	The ground where B. R. Ambedkar and a very large gathering, generally put at around four lakh people, took Buddhist ordination on 14 October 1956, Ashoka Vijaya Dashami, seven weeks before his death. The hemispherical stupa over the site, begun in 1978 and inaugurated in 2001, is modelled on Sanchi and is among the largest hollow stupas anywhere. It draws pilgrims year-round and several lakh on the anniversary.
Zero Mile Stone	Vidarbha	विरासत	A sandstone pillar with four stone horses, set as a reference point of the Great Trigonometrical Survey and long described as the centre of India. It is a survey convention rather than a computed geographic centroid, but the two great trunk highways do genuinely cross within a few kilometres of it, which is why Nagpur is where it is.
Sitabuldi Fort	Vidarbha	विरासत	The hill fort in the middle of Nagpur, held by the army and opened to the public only on a few fixed days in the year. It was the site of the 1817 battle between the Bhonsles and the East India Company that ended Maratha control of the Nagpur kingdom.
Ramtek	Vidarbha	तीर्थ	A hill temple complex above the plain, traditionally identified with the Ramagiri of Kalidasa's Meghaduta — the hill from which the exiled yaksha sends his cloud north. The identification is old and not provable; the view that makes the poem work is available regardless.
Nagardhan	Vidarbha	विरासत	Ancient Nandivardhana, a Vakataka capital, a few kilometres from Ramtek — excavated in recent decades and producing seals and structures from the dynasty whose Washim branch patronised the fifth-century phase at Ajanta.
Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve	Vidarbha	वन्यजीव	Maharashtra's oldest national park, notified in 1955 and made a tiger reserve with the addition of the Andhari sanctuary. Dry deciduous teak forest with a large lake and high tiger density, and among the most reliably productive reserves in India for sightings.
Pench Tiger Reserve	Vidarbha	वन्यजीव	Teak forest either side of the Pench river, continuous across the state boundary with the Madhya Pradesh side of the same reserve. These are the Seoni forests that Kipling used for the Jungle Book without ever having seen them.
Melghat Tiger Reserve	Vidarbha	वन्यजीव	Steep Satpura forest on the Gawilgarh hills, among the first nine reserves notified under Project Tiger in 1973. Low tourist pressure and difficult terrain, with a resident Korku population inside and around it.
Chikhaldara	Vidarbha	पहाड़	The only hill station in Vidarbha, at roughly 1,100 m in the Melghat, cool enough to have carried coffee plantations. Local tradition ties the name to Kichaka of the Mahabharata, whom Bhima is said to have killed and thrown into the ravine here.
Gawilgarh Fort	Vidarbha	विरासत	A large hill fort above Chikhaldara with Bahmani and Imad Shahi construction, stormed by Arthur Wellesley in 1803 during the Second Anglo-Maratha War. Largely unrestored and largely empty.
Lonar Crater	Vidarbha	प्रकृति	A hypervelocity meteorite impact crater about 1.8 km across at the rim, blasted into Deccan basalt and dated by argon-argon methods to around 576,000 years. It is one of very few impact craters anywhere formed in basalt, which is why planetary scientists use it as an analogue for Mars and the Moon. The lake at the bottom is both saline and alkaline, and stratified — a near-neutral outer body over an inner one at around pH 11, each with its own microbial community. Declared a Ramsar site in November 2020. Note that Lonar is in Buldhana district, which is Vidarbha — it is frequently and wrongly placed in Marathwada, whose boundary is about fifty kilometres away.
Markanda temples	Vidarbha	विरासत	A group of Nagara-style stone temples on the bank of the Wainganga, densely carved and heavily damaged, under long-running conservation. Locally called the Khajuraho of Vidarbha, which oversells the comparison and undersells how strange it is to find this much carved stone in the middle of teak forest.
Anchaleshwar temple and the Gond samadhis	Vidarbha	विरासत	A Shiva temple by the Jharpat river with the memorial samadhis of the Gond kings of Chandrapur beside it. The city's fortification wall, several kilometres of it with four main gates, was built under the same dynasty and still frames the old town.
Sevagram Ashram	Vidarbha	विरासत	Gandhi's base from 1936 until the mid-1940s, and therefore the address from which much of the last decade of the national movement was run. The huts are mud, bamboo and thatch, kept as they were, and the ashram is still inhabited rather than curated.
Paunar	Vidarbha	विरासत	Vinoba Bhave's Brahma Vidya Mandir on the Dham river, from which he ran the Bhoodan land-donation movement from 1951. The riverbank also carries an early sculpted stone panel of Vakataka date, which is not what most visitors come for.
Navegaon and Nagzira	Vidarbha	वन्यजीव	Two adjoining reserves around old man-made lakes, forming a tiger reserve and one of the best bird sites in central India. The Navegaon lake is itself a piece of pre-colonial engineering, not a natural water body.
The malguzari tanks	Vidarbha	प्रकृति	Several thousand earthen tanks across the eastern districts, built and maintained under a land tenure that was abolished in the 1950s, after which many silted up. They irrigate the rice, hold the fisheries and set the shape of every village in the belt. Restoration programmes have been running on them since the 2000s.
Mendha-Lekha	Vidarbha	प्रकृति	A Gond village that in 2009 became the first in India to secure community forest rights over its own forest under the Forest Rights Act, and then the right to harvest and sell its own bamboo. Its gram sabha decisions are taken by consensus rather than vote.
Shegaon	Vidarbha	तीर्थ	The samadhi temple of Gajanan Maharaj, among the largest pilgrimage destinations in Maharashtra by footfall, run with a level of organisation that has become a subject of study in itself. The Anand Sagar complex on the town's edge was built by the same trust.
Pohradevi	Vidarbha	तीर्थ	The principal pilgrimage centre of the Banjara community, centred on the samadhi of Sant Sevalal, drawing tandas from Maharashtra, Telangana, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Often called the Banjara Kashi.
Warud and Morshi orange belt	Vidarbha	प्रकृति	The densest mandarin orchards in the region, worked on the two-bahar cycle. Groundwater draw here has been heavy enough for long enough that the water table, not the market, is the limiting factor on planting.
Ambadevi temple, Amravati	Vidarbha	तीर्थ	The old goddess temple around which Amravati grew, and the reason the town has the name it has. The Navratri fair here fills the old city.

लोग 887

नाम	क्षेत्र	प्रकार	टिप्पणी
Boa Sr	Andaman Islands	Language	The last fluent speaker of Bo, one of the ten Great Andamanese languages. Her recorded speech and songs, documented in the field by linguists, are effectively the whole surviving corpus of the language, and it ended when she died.
Anvita Abbi	Andaman Islands	Linguistics	Documented the Great Andamanese languages over years of fieldwork, produced the dictionary and grammar that now stand as the primary record, and argued on the evidence that Great Andamanese constitutes a sixth independent language family in India. Padma Shri, 2013.
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar	Andaman Islands	Revolutionary and writer	Transported to the Cellular Jail in 1911 and held for about ten years. His imprisonment, and the petitions he wrote from it, remain among the most argued-over episodes in the Indian nationalist record.
Sher Ali Afridi	Andaman Islands	Convict	A convict at the settlement who killed the Viceroy, Lord Mayo, at Hopetown in February 1872 — the only assassination of a serving Indian Viceroy — and was hanged the following year.
Diwan Singh Kalepani	Andaman Islands	Doctor and Punjabi poet	An army doctor posted to the islands who organised civilian resistance during the Japanese occupation, was arrested, tortured and died in the Cellular Jail in 1944. He wrote in Punjabi and takes his pen name from the place that killed him.
Subhas Chandra Bose	Andaman Islands	Politics	Visited Port Blair in December 1943 under the Japanese occupation, raised the flag and renamed the islands Shaheed and Swaraj. What his administration could actually control there, and what the occupation did to the islands' civilians, are separate and much harder questions.
Maurice Vidal Portman	Andaman Islands	Colonial officer and photographer	Officer in charge of the Andamanese from 1879, and the maker of the large photographic and anthropometric record of the Great Andamanese held in London. The archive is invaluable and was produced by methods that would now be indefensible, which is the ordinary condition of colonial ethnography here.
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown	Andaman Islands	Anthropology	His fieldwork of 1906–08 produced The Andaman Islanders, a founding text of British social anthropology. It is read now as much for what it reveals about the discipline as for what it records about the islands.
Karna	Anga & Seemanchal	Epic figure	The Mahabharata's king of Anga — given the kingdom by Duryodhana because no one else would grant a charioteer's son a throne. The region's identity has been organised around him for two thousand years.
Phanishwar Nath Renu	Anga & Seemanchal	Novelist	From Aurahi Hingna in Purnia. Maila Anchal, published in 1954, made a region rather than a person its protagonist and created the anchalik novel in Hindi; his story Maare Gaye Gulfam became the film Teesri Kasam.
Tilka Manjhi	Anga & Seemanchal	Rebel	A Paharia leader who fought the East India Company in the Rajmahal hills and was executed at Bhagalpur — among the earliest armed resistances to Company rule, and the namesake of the city's university.
Swami Satyananda Saraswati	Anga & Seemanchal	Yoga teacher	Founded the Bihar School of Yoga at Munger in 1964, whose systematised teaching and publications shaped how postural yoga is taught across the world.
Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay	Anga & Seemanchal	Novelist	Spent much of his youth and early writing life at Bhagalpur, in his mother's family's house — the Bengali novelist most read across India, formed partly in an Angika-speaking town.
Ashok Kumar	Anga & Seemanchal	Actor	Born at Bhagalpur; among the first Indian film stars to work in a naturalistic register, with a career running from the 1930s to the 1990s.
Vasupujya	Anga & Seemanchal	Tirthankara	The twelfth Jain tirthankara, born at Champapuri, which makes this the only region with a tirthankara's birth, initiation, enlightenment and liberation all attributed to one place.
Atisha Dipankara's teachers at Vikramshila	Anga & Seemanchal	Scholars	Vikramshila's faculty trained the monk Atisha, who went to Tibet in 1042 and reorganised Buddhism there — the Pala monasteries of this stretch of the Ganga are the direct source of Tibetan monastic scholarship.
Bhagwat Jha Azad and the Angika movement	Anga & Seemanchal	Politics and language	The long campaign for Angika's recognition as a language in its own right, still unresolved, and one of several such movements in a state whose census counts most of its languages as Hindi.
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan	Antarved Doab	Reformer and educationist	Founded the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh in 1875, which became Aligarh Muslim University, and argued for modern education within the Muslim community — an argument whose consequences dominate the qasbah Doab to this day.
Harshavardhan	Antarved Doab	Ruler	Made Kannauj the capital of northern India and hosted the assemblies that Xuanzang described — the source of most of what is known about seventh-century India.
Abdul Karim Khan	Antarved Doab	Musician	From Kairana in the Upper Doab; founded the Kirana gharana of khayal singing, whose lineage runs to Sawai Gandharva, Bhimsen Joshi and Gangubai Hangal.
Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi	Antarved Doab	Journalist	Editor of Pratap at Kanpur, a central figure in Hindi journalism, and killed while trying to stop communal rioting in the city.
Harivansh Rai Bachchan	Antarved Doab	Poet	Wrote Madhushala at Allahabad in 1935 — the best-known single work of the Chhayavad-era Hindi poetry that the city's literary circle produced.
Mahadevi Verma	Antarved Doab	Poet and essayist	Born at Farrukhabad and based at Allahabad; a principal Chhayavad poet, and an essayist whose prose portraits of women's lives were unmatched in Hindi.
Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala'	Antarved Doab	Poet	Lived and died at Allahabad; broke Hindi poetry out of fixed metre and wrote its most quoted free verse.
Chandra Shekhar Azad	Antarved Doab	Revolutionary	Shot dead in Alfred Park at Allahabad in February 1931 after refusing capture; the park now carries his name.
Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru	Antarved Doab	Politics	Father and son, both lawyers at Allahabad, whose house Anand Bhavan was the working headquarters of the Congress for two decades.
Ustad Ahmad Lahauri and the Doab building trades	Antarved Doab	Architecture	The mason and builder lineages of this region supplied the Mughal building projects; the Doab towns were where stone-cutters, plasterers and glaziers were recruited from.
Sri Sri Anandamayi Ma	Antarved Doab	Religious teacher	Made her principal ashram at Prayagraj's Sangam bank, and was among the figures who turned the Magh Mela into a fixture for pan-Indian religious institutions.
Tulsidas	Awadh	Poet	Wrote the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi rather than Sanskrit, beginning at Ayodhya in 1574. It is the most recited literary work in northern India and the reason Awadhi has a canonical literature.
Malik Muhammad Jayasi	Awadh	Poet	A Sufi of Jais in Rae Bareli who wrote the Padmavat in Awadhi in the Persian masnavi form — a Muslim poet using a Hindu allegory in a vernacular Hindu literary language, and the earliest full statement of the region's synthesis.
Wajid Ali Shah	Awadh	King, poet, composer, dancer	The last Nawab of Awadh; composed thumri as Akhtar Piya, wrote and performed the Rahas dance dramas, and after the 1856 annexation carried the court's cooks, musicians and dancers into exile at Metiabruz near Calcutta.
Begum Hazrat Mahal	Awadh	Ruler and rebel	Took charge of Lucknow's defence in 1857 in the name of her son after the king was deported, refused British terms, and died in exile in Kathmandu.
Mir Anis	Awadh	Poet	Brought the Urdu marsiya to its full form in Lucknow, composing elegies of Karbala at a scale and control that made the genre a major literature rather than a devotional exercise.
Mirza Salaamat Ali Dabeer	Awadh	Poet	Anis's contemporary and rival; the two are still discussed as a pair, and partisanship between them was a Lucknow pastime.
Begum Akhtar	Awadh	Singer	Born in Faizabad; carried thumri, dadra and the Urdu ghazal from the salon tradition into recording and the concert stage, and largely defined how the ghazal is sung.
Birju Maharaj	Awadh	Kathak	Inheritor of the Kalka–Bindadin lineage, and the performer through whom the Lucknow gharana's emphasis on abhinaya became the public face of Kathak.
Josh Malihabadi	Awadh	Poet	The "poet of revolution", from the mango town of Malihabad; his memoir Yaadon ki Baraat is one of the frankest accounts of Awadhi society written from inside it.
Majrooh Sultanpuri	Awadh	Poet and lyricist	From Sultanpur; wrote Urdu ghazal and then five decades of Hindi film lyric, and was jailed in 1949 over a poem.
Naushad Ali	Awadh	Composer	Took Awadhi and Bhojpuri folk melody and Lucknow's classical training into Hindi film music, most visibly in Baiju Bawra and Mughal-e-Azam.
Ram Manohar Lohia	Awadh	Politics	Born at Akbarpur in eastern Awadh; the socialist thinker whose argument about caste and language shaped north Indian politics for a generation.
Ustad Allauddin Khan	Bagelkhand	Music	Sarod player, multi-instrumentalist and teacher; trained under Wazir Khan of Rampur, settled at Maihar as court musician, and founded the Maihar gharana. He taught Ali Akbar Khan, Annapurna Devi, Ravi Shankar, Nikhil Banerjee and Pannalal Ghosh, and founded the Maihar Band for orphaned children. Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellow in 1954, Padma Bhushan 1958, Padma Vibhushan 1971.
Annapurna Devi	Bagelkhand	Surbahar	Born at Maihar as Roshanara Khan, daughter of Allauddin Khan and widely held by musicians of her generation to have been the most accomplished of his students. She stopped performing in public early and taught for the rest of her life, which is why her reputation rests almost entirely on the testimony of other musicians.
Ali Akbar Khan	Bagelkhand	Sarod	Trained by his father at Maihar under a regime of practice that both later described in detail; took the sarod to international concert audiences from the 1950s and founded music colleges in Calcutta and California.
Ravi Shankar	Bagelkhand	Sitar	Came to Maihar in the late 1930s to study under Allauddin Khan, abandoning a performing career in Europe to do it. Everything he later did with the sitar internationally rests on that training, and he said so repeatedly.
Nikhil Banerjee	Bagelkhand	Sitar	Allauddin Khan's student at Maihar, and the Maihar gharana's most exacting sitar exponent — a player musicians cite more often than the wider public does.
Pannalal Ghosh	Bagelkhand	Flute	A student of Allauddin Khan who lengthened and rebuilt the bansuri to give it a full classical range, effectively creating the concert flute of Hindustani music.
Martand Singh	Bagelkhand	Ruler of Rewa	Captured a white tiger cub near Bandhavgarh in 1951, kept and bred it at Govindgarh, and thereby created the entire captive white tiger population of the world. He also presided over Rewa's accession and the conversion of the state's hunting preserves into what became Bandhavgarh National Park.
Nanaji Deshmukh	Bagelkhand	Rural development	Established the Deendayal Research Institute's rural development work at Chitrakoot and the Chitrakoot Gramodaya Vishwavidyalaya, a university founded in 1991 with a rural-development mandate — the region's most substantial institution-building effort, on its western boundary.
The Baghela dynasty	Bagelkhand	Rule	A Rajput line, by tradition an offshoot of the Solankis of Gujarat, that established itself at Bandhavgarh and later Rewa and gave the region its name. Rewa was the largest princely state of the Baghelkhand Agency, and the shape of the modern region still follows its borders more closely than it follows any natural boundary.
Kamala Bhattacharya	Barak Valley	Language movement	A sixteen-year-old student killed in the police firing at Silchar station on 19 May 1961. She is widely described, in the valley and in Bengali-language accounts more broadly, as the first woman killed in a movement for a mother tongue.
The eleven of 19 May 1961	Barak Valley	Language movement	Kanailal Niyogi, Chandicharan Sutradhar, Hitesh Biswas, Satyendra Deb, Kumud Ranjan Das, Sunil Sarkar, Tarani Debnath, Sachindra Chandra Pal, Birendra Sutradhar, Sukamal Purakayastha and Kamala Bhattacharya. Nine died on the day and two afterwards. The Assam Official Language Act of 1960 had made Assamese the sole official language of the state; an amendment later in 1961 provided for Bengali to be used for official purposes up to and including district level in Cachar.
Govinda Chandra	Barak Valley	Ruler	The last Kachari raja of Cachar, whose court sat at Khaspur. His death in 1830 ended the dynasty's rule on the plain and led directly to the British annexation of Cachar in 1832 and to the tea and immigration economy that followed.
Radharaman Dutta	Barak Valley	Poet and composer	The Sylhet-born composer to whom most of the standard dhamail repertoire is attributed. His songs are sung at weddings across the whole Surma–Barak plain, on both sides of the international line, largely by women who learnt them by ear and often without knowing whose they are.
Hemanga Biswas	Barak Valley	Singer, composer, folklorist	Born at Habiganj in the Sylhet plain and long resident in Assam; an Indian People's Theatre Association musician who collected folk song and wrote a political repertoire in Bengali, and one of the first to treat the tea-garden and Surma-plain song traditions as material worth notating.
Nirmalendu Chowdhury	Barak Valley	Folk singer	Carried bhatiali, jhumur and the Sylheti song repertoire onto the concert stage and onto record from the 1950s, and was among the first performers to take the plain's music outside it.
Kalika Prasad Bhattacharya	Barak Valley	Musician and researcher	Born in Silchar; founded the group Dohar in 1999 and spent two decades collecting and performing the folk repertoire of the Barak and Surma valleys, particularly dhamail. His death in a road accident in 2017 was treated in the valley as a public loss.
The Chargola exodus labourers	Barak Valley	Labour history	In May 1921 thousands of tea labourers walked off the gardens of the Chargola and Longai valleys in the border belt and set out for home during the non-cooperation agitation. It is the largest single labour action in the region's history, it is remembered by the collective act rather than by any leader's name, and it is still cited in Assam's plantation politics.
Purushottam Deo	Bastar	Ruler	The Kakatiya-line ruler of Bastar credited with instituting the Dussehra observance at the capital, fixing the chariot procession and the assembly of village deities that the seventy-five-day cycle still follows.
Gunda Dhur	Bastar	Rebellion	Of Nethanar, a leader of the 1910 Bhumkal rising against the administration of the day. The summons was circulated village to village as a mango bough with a lump of earth and a chilli — a physical message system that required no writing and no messenger who could be interrogated.
Verrier Elwin	Bastar	Anthropologist	Lived in central India for decades and published "The Muria and Their Ghotul" in 1947, the single largest body of documentation on the institution, along with volumes of Gondi and Halbi song. His work is indispensable and also the origin of most of the sensationalised second-hand accounts of the ghotul, because later writers took his material on sexual freedom out of its social frame.
W. V. Grigson	Bastar	Administrator and ethnographer	Wrote "The Maria Gonds of Bastar" (1938) while serving in the region — still the standard reference for Maria social organisation, clan structure and the gaur dance.
Lala Jagdalpuri	Bastar	Poet and folklorist	Collected and published Halbi and Bhatri folk tales, songs and the region's history in Hindi over six decades, and is the reason a Bastar reader can find the region's oral material in print in their own bookshop.
Jaidev Baghel	Bastar	Metal sculpture	A Ghadwa caster from Kondagaon who took Bastar Dhokra from ritual object to exhibited sculpture, trained a generation of casters, and did much of the groundwork that led to the craft's geographical indication.
Dharmpal Saini	Bastar	Education	Founded the Mata Rukmini Seva Ashram near Jagdalpur and built a network of residential schools for girls from forest villages across the region, at a time when almost none existed.
Pulakeshin II	Bayaluseeme	Emperor	The Chalukya ruler of Badami whose reign is fixed by the Aihole inscription of 634, which records his defeat of Harsha on the Narmada. Under him the dynasty controlled the Deccan from coast to coast and corresponded with the Sasanian court.
Ravikirti	Bayaluseeme	Poet	Composed the Aihole prashasti of 634 in Sanskrit verse, claiming for himself the standing of Kalidasa and Bharavi. The claim is immodest; the inscription is nevertheless one of the most useful dated documents in early Indian literary history.
Vikramaditya II and Lokamahadevi	Bayaluseeme	Emperor and queen	Vikramaditya II took Kanchi three times and, by his own inscriptions, spared its temples and rewarded its artisans; his queen Lokamahadevi built the Virupaksha at Pattadakal to mark it, in the southern idiom and with sculptors who knew Pallava work.
Pampa	Bayaluseeme	Poet	Born at Annigeri on this plain and generally counted the first great poet of Kannada, author of the Adipurana and the Vikramarjuna Vijaya, in which he maps the Mahabharata onto his own patron. He wrote at a court to the east, which makes him the plain's first literary export.
Ranna	Bayaluseeme	Poet	From Muduvolal in Gadag district, a bangle-seller's son who became a court poet and wrote the Gadayuddha, the Mahabharata's final duel told from Duryodhana's side. One of the three poets Kannada calls its ratnatraya.
Kumaravyasa (Gadugina Naranappa)	Bayaluseeme	Poet	Wrote the Karnata Bharata Katha Manjari — the Kannada Mahabharata in bhamini shatpadi metre — held by tradition to have been composed at the Veeranarayana temple at Gadag. It remains the most widely recited Kannada narrative poem.
Kanakadasa	Bayaluseeme	Poet, singer	Born at Bada in Haveri district into a Kuruba family, he wrote kirtanas and long narrative poems in Kannada, including the Ramadhanya Charitre, which argues the case of ragi against rice as a debate between the grains. His songs are core Karnataka devotional repertoire.
Ibrahim Adil Shah II	Bayaluseeme	Sultan, musician, author	Ruled at Vijayapura and wrote the Kitab-i-Nauras, a book of song texts in Dakhni that opens by invoking Saraswati and the Prophet in the same breath. His tomb, the Ibrahim Rauza, is the finest building his dynasty produced.
Kittur Chennamma	Bayaluseeme	Ruler	Rani of Kittur, who refused the East India Company's refusal to recognise her adopted heir and defeated a British force in October 1824 before being captured in a second assault the following year. She died in detention at Bailhongal.
Sangolli Rayanna	Bayaluseeme	Military commander	Chennamma's commander, who kept up a guerrilla campaign in the Belagavi countryside after her capture and was hanged in 1831. His memorial at Nandagad is a site of continuous public commemoration.
Shishunala Sharifa	Bayaluseeme	Poet, singer	A Muslim singer of Shishuvinahal in Haveri district whose guru was the Lingayat Govinda Bhatta, and whose tatva padas in colloquial Kannada are sung across religious lines. His songs entered mass circulation again in the late twentieth century through recordings and film.
Fakirappa Gurubasappa Halakatti	Bayaluseeme	Scholar, lawyer	A Vijayapura lawyer who spent his life and his money collecting palm-leaf vachana manuscripts from mathas and households across the region, editing and publishing them from 1923 onwards. Without that work the twelfth-century corpus would exist mainly as fragments.
Dattatreya Ramachandra Bendre	Bayaluseeme	Poet	Wrote in Dharwad Kannada, drew directly on the region's folk metres, and received the Jnanpith in 1973 for Naaku Tanti. More of his poems have been set to music as bhavageete than any other Kannada poet's.
Sawai Gandharva (Rambhau Kundgolkar)	Bayaluseeme	Hindustani vocalist	Abdul Karim Khan's disciple, who settled at Kundgol near Dharwad and taught there. His two most famous students, Gangubai Hangal and Bhimsen Joshi, went in almost opposite musical directions from the same instruction.
Gangubai Hangal	Bayaluseeme	Hindustani vocalist	Born in Dharwad and trained by Sawai Gandharva, she sang khayal in a deep, austere voice at a time when women in her position were expected to sing lighter forms, and refused to. She performed and taught from Hubballi for six decades.
Bhimsen Joshi	Bayaluseeme	Hindustani vocalist	Born at Gadag, he ran away as a boy to find a teacher and eventually found one back in his own district at Kundgol. He became the most widely heard Hindustani voice of the century and founded the Sawai Gandharva festival in his teacher's name.
Mallikarjun Mansur	Bayaluseeme	Hindustani vocalist	From Mansur village in Dharwad district, a singer of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana known for rare ragas and a dense, fast, intricate delivery — the opposite pole of the plain's musical output from the Kirana line.
Chandrashekhara Kambara	Bayaluseeme	Poet, playwright	Born at Ghodageri in Belagavi district, he built his plays and poems on North Karnataka folk forms — Doddata structure, village myth, the language of the field — and received the Jnanpith in 2010.
Girish Karnad	Bayaluseeme	Playwright, actor	Grew up in Sirsi and studied at Karnatak College in Dharwad; his plays turned folk narrative and myth into modern Kannada theatre, and he received the Jnanpith in 1998.
Chaitanya Mahaprabhu	Bengal Delta	Religious reformer	Born at Nabadwip, he made congregational singing and street procession the central act of Vaishnava practice, in a form open to people the temple would not admit. Gaudiya Vaishnavism, padavali kirtan and the jatra stage all descend from what he started here.
Krittibas Ojha	Bengal Delta	Poet	Wrote the Bengali Ramayana at Phulia in Nadia — for centuries the most widely read book in the delta, and the text through which the epic reached people who could not read Sanskrit.
Ramprasad Sen	Bengal Delta	Poet and songwriter	Created the Shyama sangeet register at Halisahar, addressing Kali as a difficult family member. His songs are still sung at deathbeds and at Kali Puja, and half a dozen of his lines function as ordinary Bengali proverbs.
Bharatchandra Ray	Bengal Delta	Poet	Court poet to Raja Krishnachandra of Krishnanagar and author of Annadamangal, the last great Mangalkavya and the most technically accomplished Bengali verse before the modern period.
Raja Rammohan Roy	Bengal Delta	Reformer and scholar	Born at Radhanagar in Hooghly. Founded the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, argued in Persian, Sanskrit, Bengali and English at once, and campaigned for the abolition of sati. He also did more than anyone to establish Bengali prose as a vehicle for argument rather than only for verse.
Michael Madhusudan Dutt	Bengal Delta	Poet	Born at Sagardari in the eastern delta. Introduced blank verse and the sonnet into Bengali and wrote Meghnadbadh Kabya, an epic that takes the Ramayana's antagonist as its tragic hero — a structural inversion no one in the language had attempted.
Nobin Chandra Das	Bengal Delta	Confectioner	Generally credited with the spongy rosogolla, made at his Bagbazar shop from 1868. His son K. C. Das later developed a vacuum-tinned version, which is how a sweet with a two-day life became an export.
Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay	Bengal Delta	Novelist	Born at Debanandapur in Hooghly. His novels of village households and their internal cruelties were the most widely read Bengali fiction of the twentieth century and have been filmed more often than any other Indian literary source.
Jagadish Chandra Bose	Bengal Delta	Physicist and plant physiologist	Demonstrated millimetre-wave radio transmission in Kolkata in the 1890s and refused to patent his devices. His later instruments for measuring plant response were built by his own workshop because nothing sensitive enough could be bought.
Rabindranath Tagore	Bengal Delta	Poet, songwriter and educator	Born at Jorasanko in Kolkata. His most productive song and short-story years were spent managing the family estates on the eastern delta's rivers, and the boat, the char and the village postmaster enter Bengali literature from that decade. His Santiniketan work belongs to Rarh; his language belongs here.
Kazi Nazrul Islam	Bengal Delta	Poet and composer	Worked and published in Kolkata, wrote several thousand songs, and is the standard second voice of Bengali song beside Tagore. Nazrul geeti runs from Islamic devotional to Shyama sangeet, written by the same man, which is the fact most often cited about him and the least often reckoned with.
Satyajit Ray	Bengal Delta	Film director, designer and writer	Made a body of films rooted in delta households and delta towns, designed his own posters and typefaces, wrote detective fiction and edited a children's magazine his grandfather had founded. His first film was shot largely on location in delta villages with a mostly untrained cast.
Salil Chowdhury	Bengal Delta	Composer	Born in the delta and trained in its choral and folk repertoire, he wrote for both the mass-song movement and commercial cinema, moving Bengali folk melodic material into orchestral film scoring.
Kabir	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Poet and mystic	A weaver of Banaras whose verse rejected both Brahminical ritual and formal Islam, and who is claimed by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs alike — his verses are in the Guru Granth Sahib. He died at Maghar, deliberately.
Ravidas	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Poet and saint	A Chamar leatherworker of Banaras whose verse became foundational for Dalit religious assertion; his birthplace at Seer Govardhanpur is a major pilgrimage centre, particularly for Punjabi Ravidassias.
Bhikhari Thakur	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Playwright and performer	A barber from Saran who wrote and performed Bidesiya and a dozen other plays about migration, dowry and caste, in Bhojpuri, for village audiences. Called the Shakespeare of Bhojpuri, and the only major Indian dramatist of his century to come from the class he wrote about.
Mahendar Misir	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Poet and composer	Created the Purvi song form, and was jailed for counterfeiting currency — a story the region tells with some relish and a good deal of sympathy.
Bharatendu Harishchandra	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Writer	From Varanasi; regarded as the founder of modern Hindi literature and of Hindi theatre and journalism, all within a life of thirty-four years.
Munshi Premchand	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Writer	Born at Lamhi outside Varanasi; wrote in Urdu and then Hindi, and made the peasant, the moneylender and the village the subject of Indian fiction. Godaan and his short stories remain the standard.
Ustad Bismillah Khan	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Musician	Born at Dumraon in Buxar and based at Varanasi; took the shehnai from temple and wedding processions to the concert platform, played at the Red Fort on the first Independence Day, and refused to leave Banaras.
Girija Devi	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Singer	Of the Banaras gharana; carried thumri, kajri, chaiti and tappa through a period when the light-classical forms were losing their patronage, and taught most of the generation that sings them now.
Pandit Ravi Shankar	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Musician	Born at Varanasi; trained at Maihar under Allauddin Khan, and became the musician through whom most of the world first heard Indian classical music.
Veer Kunwar Singh	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Rebel leader	Zamindar of Jagdishpur, who took up the 1857 revolt in his eighties, fought a campaign across three provinces, and died days after his last victory.
Rajendra Prasad	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Politics	Born at Ziradei in Siwan; president of the Constituent Assembly and the first President of India, and Gandhi's principal organiser during the 1917 Champaran satyagraha.
Jayaprakash Narayan	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Politics	From Sitab Diara on the Ghaghara; socialist, then Sarvodaya worker, then the figure around whom the movement against the Emergency organised in 1974–75.
Rahul Sankrityayan	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Scholar and traveller	From Azamgarh; travelled to Tibet four times and brought back manuscripts of Sanskrit Buddhist texts lost in India, and wrote across a dozen fields in Hindi.
Kaifi Azmi	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Poet	From Azamgarh; Urdu poet of the Progressive Writers' movement, film lyricist, and later the rebuilder of his own village as a development project.
Srimanta Sankardev	Brahmaputra Valley	Religion, literature, performing arts	Founded the Ekasarana Nam-Dharma reform movement, and in doing so created Borgeet, Ankiya Naat, Sattriya dance, the namghar as an institution and a written Assamese literary culture. Arguably no single figure shaped any Indian state's culture more comprehensively.
Madhavdev	Brahmaputra Valley	Literature and devotion	Sankardev's principal disciple, author of the Naam Ghosa, and the organiser who turned a movement into a durable institution.
Lachit Borphukan	Brahmaputra Valley	Military	Commanded Ahom forces at the battle of Saraighat in 1671, defeating a much larger Mughal force by drawing it onto the Brahmaputra and fighting it on water. The reason Assam was never absorbed into the Mughal empire.
Lakshminath Bezbaroa	Brahmaputra Valley	Literature	Titled Sahityarathi; collected Assamese folk tales as Burhi Aair Sadhu and wrote "O Mur Apunar Desh", the state song.
Jyoti Prasad Agarwala	Brahmaputra Valley	Cinema, music, poetry	Made Joymoti in 1935, the first Assamese film, and wrote the body of songs known as Jyoti Sangeet. Known as Rupkonwar.
Bishnu Prasad Rabha	Brahmaputra Valley	Music, dance, politics	Called Kalaguru; collected and reworked the folk forms of Assam's many communities and tied cultural work to political organising among peasants and tribal communities.
Gopinath Bordoloi	Brahmaputra Valley	Politics	First Chief Minister of Assam, whose resistance to the Cabinet Mission grouping plan is credited with keeping Assam in India at Partition. Awarded the Bharat Ratna posthumously.
Bhupen Hazarika	Brahmaputra Valley	Music and cinema	Singer, lyricist and film-maker whose songs carried Assamese and Brahmaputra imagery into every Indian language he was translated into. Awarded the Bharat Ratna posthumously in 2019.
Indira Goswami (Mamoni Raisom Goswami)	Brahmaputra Valley	Literature	Novelist and Jnanpith laureate who wrote about widowhood, Vaishnavite orthodoxy and violence, and later acted as a mediator in peace talks with the ULFA.
Kanaklata Barua	Brahmaputra Valley	Freedom movement	Shot dead at seventeen while leading a procession to raise the national flag over the Gohpur police station during the Quit India movement.
Pratima Barua Pandey	Brahmaputra Valley	Music	Sang the Goalpariya folk repertoire, including the mahout songs, and made a regional oral tradition nationally audible.
Hima Das	Brahmaputra Valley	Athletics	From a farming family in Nagaon district; the first Indian to win a gold medal in a track event at a World Athletics championship, in the 400 m at the 2018 World U20s.
Lovlina Borgohain	Brahmaputra Valley	Boxing	Olympic bronze medallist at Tokyo 2020, from Golaghat district.
Surdas	Braj	Poet	The blind poet of the Ashtachhap, associated with Govardhan, whose Sursagar is the largest body of Krishna verse in Braj Bhasha and is still sung as liturgy rather than read as literature.
Vallabhacharya	Braj	Philosopher and religious founder	Founded the Pushtimarg at Govardhan, established the haveli form of worship with its eight daily services, and set the temple foodway — no onion, no garlic, seasonal bhog — that the whole region now follows.
Chaitanya Mahaprabhu	Braj	Religious reformer	Came from Bengal in 1515 and identified the lost Braj sites; his six Goswami disciples settled at Vrindavan and built the temples and the theology, which is why Vrindavan has been a Bengali town for five centuries.
Swami Haridas	Braj	Musician and saint	Lived at Nidhivan, founded the Haridasi sampraday and the samaj gayan tradition, and is remembered as Tansen's teacher — the join between Braj temple music and north Indian classical music.
Raskhan	Braj	Poet	A Muslim poet who wrote some of the most quoted Krishna verse in Braj Bhasha and is buried at Mahavan. His samadhi is a pilgrimage site, and he is the region's standing answer to anyone who wants Braj to be simple.
Bihari Lal	Braj	Poet	Author of the Satsai, seven hundred couplets in Braj Bhasha that became the model for concision in Hindi poetry.
Hariram Vyas and the Ashtachhap poets	Braj	Poets and singers	The eight poets of the Pushtimarg whose padas make up the haveli repertoire, fixed to particular ragas and particular hours of the deity's day.
Maharaja Suraj Mal	Braj	Ruler	The Jat ruler of Bharatpur who built Deeg and Lohagarh and financed the sandstone tanks and cenotaphs of the Govardhan circuit — the region's principal secular builder.
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada	Braj	Religious teacher	Founded ISKCON in New York in 1966 and built the Krishna-Balaram temple at Vrindavan, which turned Braj into a destination with a global congregation and permanently changed the town's demography.
Padmakar	Braj	Poet	Among the last major poets of the Riti tradition in Braj Bhasha, working at courts across north India as the literary language began to give way to Khari Boli.
Chhatrasal	Bundelkhand	Ruler	Built a kingdom in Bundelkhand out of a long insurgency against Mughal authority, and late in life called in the Maratha Peshwa Baji Rao I against an invasion. He is said to have settled a third of his territory on the Peshwa in return — the transfer through which Jhansi, Jalaun and Sagar became Maratha, and the reason Bundelkhand's eighteenth century ends with the region parcelled among outside powers.
Rani Lakshmibai	Bundelkhand	Ruler	Born Manikarnika at Varanasi and married into Jhansi; refused the annexation of the state under the doctrine of lapse after her husband's death, led its defence in 1857, and was killed in the fighting at Gwalior in June 1858 at about thirty. She is the region's dominant modern figure and its main export to the national story.
Jhalkaribai	Bundelkhand	Soldier	A woman of the Kori community in Lakshmibai's women's regiment who is remembered for impersonating the Rani to cover her escape from the besieged fort. The account rests on Bundeli oral tradition and on Vrindavan Lal Verma's later writing rather than on contemporary record, and she has since become a major figure in Dalit commemoration across both halves of the region.
Bir Singh Deo	Bundelkhand	Ruler and builder	The Orchha ruler who built the Jahangir Mahal, the Datia palace and, by tradition, dozens of other structures across Bundelkhand. His reign is the reason the region's palace architecture is a single recognisable idiom.
Keshavdas	Bundelkhand	Poet	Court poet at Orchha and the founding theorist of the riti school of Hindi poetry — his Rasikpriya and Kavipriya set out poetics as a technical discipline and were studied as textbooks for two centuries.
Padmakar	Bundelkhand	Poet	Born at Banda; the last major riti poet, and one who moved between the courts of Sagar, Jaipur and Gwalior, which is how Bundelkhandi literary Braj travelled.
Isuri	Bundelkhand	Poet	The defining author of the Bundeli fag. His four-line Holi verses, addressed to Rajau, are still sung by name across Tikamgarh and Jhansi, and are the reason the form survived as literature rather than only as festival noise.
Lala Hardaul	Bundelkhand	Prince and folk deity	A Bundela prince, brother of Jujhar Singh of Orchha, who by tradition drank poison to prove his innocence against a charge involving his brother's wife. He is worshipped across Bundelkhand at village platforms and receives the first invitation to every wedding — an entirely local deity with no pan-Indian standing.
Mahamati Prannath	Bundelkhand	Religious founder	Founder of the Pranami sampraday, whose seat is at Panna. Chhatrasal was his disciple and patron, and the sect's Panna temples are the material result of that relationship.
Maithili Sharan Gupt	Bundelkhand	Poet	Born at Chirgaon near Jhansi; wrote in Khari Boli at a moment when serious Hindi poetry was still expected to be in Braj, and was later titled Rashtrakavi.
Vrindavan Lal Verma	Bundelkhand	Novelist	Wrote the historical novels — Jhansi Ki Rani, Mrignayani, Garh Kundar — that fixed Bundelkhand's own past in the popular Hindi imagination, working from local oral tradition as much as from record.
Subhadra Kumari Chauhan	Bundelkhand	Poet	Not from Bundelkhand, but the author of the poem that carried it — "Khoob ladi mardani, woh to Jhansi wali rani thi", the most memorised Hindi poem of the twentieth century and the single largest reason Jhansi is a national name.
Mayurasharma	Canara Coast	Founder of the Kadamba dynasty	Established rule at Banavasi and founded the first dynasty to govern from within the Kannada country rather than as a provincial arm of a power based elsewhere. The Kadamba record is the earliest point at which this region appears as a political centre in its own right.
Pampa	Canara Coast	Poet	The Adikavi of Kannada. He served a Chalukya feudatory court far to the north-east, but his verse about longing for the Banavasi country — that even goaded, his mind would still remember it — is the most quoted line in Kannada about any place, and it is about this region.
Chennabhairadevi	Canara Coast	Ruler of Gersoppa	Held this coast and its pepper trade for more than fifty years against Portuguese, Bijapuri and Vijayanagara pressure, and was known to the Portuguese as the Pepper Queen because the pepper they bought passed through her ports at Honnavar and Bhatkal.
Vadiraja Tirtha	Canara Coast	Madhva teacher and Kannada poet	Seer of the Sode mutt at Sonda, author of Sanskrit and Kannada devotional works, and the figure around whom the region's Madhva institutional life is organised. His brindavana at Sonda remains a pilgrimage centre.
Channabasavanna	Canara Coast	Sharana and religious reformer	Nephew of Basavanna and one of the Sharanas who left Kalyana after the upheaval that followed the movement's challenge to caste order. His samadhi at Ulavi, deep in the Kali forest, is the reason a Lingayat pilgrimage runs into a corner of this district that has almost no other connection to northern Karnataka.
Sukri Bommagowda	Canara Coast	Halakki folk singer	Carried a very large oral repertoire of Halakki Vokkaliga songs into recording and broadcast, and campaigned on her community's land and forest rights. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2017, and is known widely as the Halakki Kogile.
Keremane Shivarama Hegde	Canara Coast	Yakshagana performer and troupe founder	Founded the Idagunji Mahaganapati Yakshagana Mandali, the best known of the Badagutittu troupes, and moved the northern style from a purely village institution towards a documented, touring and professionally organised one. The Keremane family has led the troupe across generations.
Chittani Ramachandra Hegde	Canara Coast	Yakshagana performer	A Badagutittu artist of exceptional range, awarded the Padma Shri, and one of the performers by whom the northern style's standards of dance and improvised dialogue are still measured.
Girish Karnad	Canara Coast	Playwright, actor and film-maker	Grew up in Sirsi, and repeatedly said that the Yakshagana and company-theatre nights he watched there shaped his sense of what a play could do. Wrote Tughlaq, Hayavadana and Nagamandala, and was awarded the Jnanpith in 1998.
Jayant Kaikini	Canara Coast	Writer and lyricist	From Gokarna; writes Kannada short fiction rooted in small-town and coastal life, and has written several hundred film lyrics. His father Gourish Kaikini was a writer and journalist of the same town.
R. N. Shetty	Canara Coast	Industrialist and temple patron	Built the modern Murudeshwar complex — the Shiva statue, the twenty-storey gopura and the surrounding development — funding a pilgrimage site into national visibility from a base in this coast's own construction and hospitality economy.
Shantaram Budna Siddi	Canara Coast	Public representative	Nominated to the Karnataka Legislative Council in 2020, the first member of the Siddi community to sit in it, after decades of the community's campaigning on land, forest rights and Scheduled Tribe recognition.
Raja Meru Varman	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Ruler and patron	Commissioned the temples and brass images at Bharmour and Chhatrari that are the oldest surviving works of their kind in the western Himalaya, and under whom the Chamba state's recorded history effectively begins.
Gugga	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Metal caster	Named in the inscriptions on the brass images at Bharmour and Chhatrari as their maker — one of very few Indian sculptors of that period whose name is recorded on his own work rather than inferred.
Raja Sahil Varman	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Ruler	Moved the capital from Bharmour down to the Ravi terrace in 920 CE, named the new town for his daughter Champavati, and built the first of the Lakshmi Narayan temples.
Suhi Mata	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Legendary figure	The queen of Chamba tradition who is said to have accepted burial so that a water channel would reach the town. The fair held for her each spring is conducted by women and children alone, which makes it one of very few large Indian festivals from which men are formally absent.
Raja Umed Singh	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Ruler and patron	Built the Rang Mahal at Chamba and presided over the period in which the Chamba rumal and the Chamba school of painting took their mature form.
Nikka	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Painter	A son of Nainsukh of Guler who settled at Chamba and brought the family's naturalistic manner into the Chamba workshop, from which it passed into the drawn designs of the rumal.
Raja Bhuri Singh	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Ruler and patron	Gave his collection and his name to the museum founded at Chamba in 1908, which is why the state's charters, fountain slabs, rumals and paintings stayed in the valley instead of dispersing.
Jean Philippe Vogel	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Epigraphist	Catalogued and published the Chamba copper-plate and stone inscriptions in the first decade of the twentieth century and pressed for a museum to hold them. His Antiquities of Chamba State remains the foundation document for the region's history.
Usha Bhagat	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Craft revivalist	Led the effort from the 1970s that brought the Chamba rumal back from near-extinction, working from surviving museum pieces rather than from a living workshop, because by then there was not one.
Lalita Vakil	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Embroiderer	Chamba rumal master who ran the training that reconstructed sixteen original designs and taught the double satin stitch to a new generation of embroiderers; recognised with the Nari Shakti Puraskar.
Shah Farid-ud-Din	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Sufi	The saint whose shrine stands beside the Kishtwar chowgan and around whom the town's Muslim devotional life is organised; his urs is the largest annual gathering in Kishtwar town itself.
Vijay Sharma	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Painter and conservator	A Chamba-based painter who reconstructed the Pahari miniature technique from the ground up — grinding mineral pigment, preparing wasli paper — and who has trained the drawing side of the rumal revival.
Guru Ghasidas	Chhattisgarh Plains	Religious teacher	Born at Girodpuri; founded the Satnam panth on a nirgun teaching of one formless name, with the white jaitkhamb as its emblem. The Panthi dance, its songs and a large part of the plain's social geography descend directly from his teaching.
Teejan Bai	Chhattisgarh Plains	Pandwani	From Ganiyari near Durg; took up the standing, acted-out Kapalik style of Pandwani at a time when women performed the seated style if they performed at all, and made it the form's public face. Awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 2019.
Habib Tanvir	Chhattisgarh Plains	Theatre	Born in Raipur; founded Naya Theatre and built it around Nacha performers acting in Chhattisgarhi rather than around trained urban actors. Charandas Chor (1975) is the result and remains the clearest case of an Indian village form entering the modern repertoire on its own terms.
Pandit Sundarlal Sharma	Chhattisgarh Plains	Poet and social reformer	Wrote Chhattisgarhi Danleela in 1898, conventionally taken as the first modern literary work in the language, and so the point at which Chhattisgarhi acquired a written literature distinct from its performed one.
Devdas Banjare	Chhattisgarh Plains	Panthi dance	The dancer and choreographer who took Panthi from Satnami village performance onto national and international stages without stripping out its doctrinal content. Awarded the Padma Shri.
Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh	Chhattisgarh Plains	Poet	Taught at Digvijay College in Rajnandgaon for the last years of his life and wrote his major long poems there, including Andhere Mein. A central figure of modern Hindi poetry, working from a small town in this plain.
Padumlal Punnalal Bakshi	Chhattisgarh Plains	Essayist and editor	From Khairagarh; edited the journal Saraswati and effectively established the modern Hindi essay as a form. His prose is the reason this region has a place in Hindi literary history at all.
Raja Chakradhar Singh	Chhattisgarh Plains	Ruler and musicologist	Ruler of Raigarh and a serious percussionist and writer on dance; his patronage produced the Raigarh Kathak gharana and treatises including Nartan Sarvaswa. The Chakradhar Samaroh at Raigarh continues in his name.
R. H. Richharia	Chhattisgarh Plains	Rice science	Directed rice research at Raipur and, through systematic village-by-village collection, documented on the order of nineteen thousand rice landraces from this plain — the reason its genetic diversity is a recorded fact rather than an impression.
Surujbai Khande	Chhattisgarh Plains	Bharthari singing	The best-known singer of the Bharthari epic in Chhattisgarhi, who kept the night-long sarangi-accompanied form in live performance when it had almost no other exponents.
Narendra Dev Verma	Chhattisgarh Plains	Poet	Wrote Arpa Pairi ke Dhar, the song that names the plain's rivers in order and is now the official state song — the one modern Chhattisgarhi composition most people can sing from memory.
Rajaraja Chola I	Chola Nadu	King	Built the Thanjavur Brihadisvara temple and, more consequentially for historians, had its endowments, staffing and accounts cut into its walls — the reason the Chola state is documented in a detail almost no other medieval Indian polity matches.
Rajendra Chola I	Chola Nadu	King	Campaigned to the Ganga and founded Gangaikonda Cholapuram to mark it, sent the naval expedition of 1025 against Srivijaya, and confirmed his father's grant to the Buddhist monastery at Nagapattinam on the copper plates now known as the Leiden or Anaimangalam charter.
Karikala Chola	Chola Nadu	King	Credited in tradition and in later inscriptions with the Grand Anicut and with embanking the Cauvery. The attribution is not securely datable, but the structure is, and it works.
Kambar	Chola Nadu	Poet	From Therazhundur in the delta; wrote the Kamba Ramayanam, the Tamil retelling of the Ramayana that displaced every earlier one and is still the standard against which Tamil narrative verse is measured.
Tyagaraja	Chola Nadu	Composer	Born at Tiruvarur, lived at Thiruvaiyaru, and composed several hundred surviving kritis in Telugu that became the core of the Carnatic vocal repertoire. He is also the reason the region has an annual festival built on a death anniversary rather than a temple calendar.
Muthuswami Dikshitar	Chola Nadu	Composer	Born at Tiruvarur; composed in Sanskrit, in slow tempi, in a style shaped by veena playing and by an unusual interest in Western band tunes, which he set as nottuswarams.
Syama Sastri	Chola Nadu	Composer	Born at Tiruvarur; the eldest of the three, and the one who wrote least and hardest — his swarajatis are studied as rhythmic set pieces rather than performed as showpieces.
The Thanjavur Quartet	Chola Nadu	Dance and music	Chinnayya, Ponnayya, Sivanandam and Vadivelu, brothers at the court of Serfoji II, who fixed the Bharatanatyam concert order and the adavu syllabus and wrote much of its repertoire. Vadivelu went to the Travancore court and is credited with establishing the violin in Carnatic music; Chinnayya went to Mysore.
Serfoji II	Chola Nadu	Ruler and scholar	The last effective Bhonsle ruler of Thanjavur, educated by the missionary Christian Friedrich Schwartz; collected manuscripts and European printed books on a scale that made the Saraswathi Mahal Library what it is, wrote a Kuravanji, and ran a hospital that kept case notes.
Bangalore Nagarathnamma	Chola Nadu	Musician, scholar and patron	Built the samadhi shrine over Tyagaraja's grave at Thiruvaiyaru at her own cost in 1925, published a censored eighteenth-century Telugu poem by a woman writer and fought the resulting obscenity case, and secured women's right to sing at the aradhana.
T. N. Rajarathinam Pillai	Chola Nadu	Nagaswaram	Took the temple nagaswaram onto the concert platform and the gramophone record, and popularised the longer pari instrument that is now standard.
Papanasam Sivan	Chola Nadu	Composer	Born at Polagam near Thiruvaiyaru; wrote several hundred Carnatic compositions in Tamil at a time when the concert repertoire was almost entirely Telugu and Sanskrit, and wrote for early Tamil cinema as well.
Kalki Krishnamurthy	Chola Nadu	Writer	Born in Thanjavur district; wrote Ponniyin Selvan, the serialised novel about Rajaraja's accession that is the reason most Tamil readers have any picture of the Chola court at all, and campaigned for Carnatic music's public institutions.
Karaikal Ammaiyar	Chola Nadu	Poet and saint	One of the sixty-three Nayanmars and among the earliest Tamil poets whose work survives; her verses ask for and describe a body stripped to bone, and she is depicted that way in bronze.
Oothukkadu Venkata Kavi	Chola Nadu	Composer	From Oothukkadu in the delta; composed a large body of Sanskrit and Tamil pieces built around Krishna, many of them rhythmically intricate enough that they are now standard dance repertoire.
Sido Murmu and Kanhu Murmu	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Rebellion	Brothers from Bhognadih who called the Santal Hul on 30 June 1855, mobilising tens of thousands of Santals across the Damin-i-Koh. Their brothers Chand and Bhairav and their sisters Phulo and Jhano are named in the same accounts. The rising was suppressed by 1856, and the Santhal Parganas were constituted as a separate administrative district in its aftermath.
Birsa Munda	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Religious reformer and rebellion	Born at Ulihatu in the Ranchi plateau. Preached a reformed practice among the Munda, was recognised by followers as Dharti Aba, and led the Ulgulan of 1899–1900 in defence of khuntkatti land tenure. He died in Ranchi jail on 9 June 1900 at twenty-five. The Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908, which still governs land transfer on the plateau, followed from the movement.
Raghunath Murmu	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Script and language	Devised Ol Chiki, a thirty-letter alphabet for Santali, in 1925, and spent his life writing primers, grammars, plays and poetry in it and teaching it village by village. It is one of very few purpose-built scripts anywhere that its intended community actually adopted; Santali entered the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution in 2003.
Lako Bodra	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Script and language	Devised Warang Chiti for the Ho language and campaigned for its use, a generation after Raghunath Murmu did the same for Santali. Ho is now taught in Warang Chiti in parts of Kolhan and Odisha.
Jaipal Singh Munda	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Sport and public life	From Khunti; captained India's hockey team to the Olympic gold medal at Amsterdam in 1928, and later sat in the Constituent Assembly, where he argued the Adivasi case during the drafting of the Constitution.
Ram Dayal Munda	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Linguistics and music	Mundari linguist, ethnomusicologist and Vice-Chancellor of Ranchi University; worked on Munda language documentation in India and the United States, and did as much as anyone to bring Nagpuri and Mundari song onto a public stage as music rather than as folklore.
Bulu Imam	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Documentation and conservation	Recorded the Sohrai and Khovar painting of the Hazaribagh villages from 1991 onward, connected its motifs to the painted rock shelters of the same valley, and set up the Sanskriti museum at Hazaribagh. The geographical indication registered in 2020 rests on that documentation.
Mukund Nayak	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Music	A Nagpuri singer and jhumair exponent from the Ranchi plateau who carried Sadri song from the akhra to the recording studio and the concert stage, and trained a generation of performers.
Dnyaneshwar (Dnyanadev)	Desh	Poet-philosopher	Wrote the Dnyaneshwari at Nevasa in 1290 — a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita in Marathi ovi metre, at a time when philosophical writing was expected to be in Sanskrit. Writing it in the spoken language made Marathi a scriptural medium; his samadhi at Alandi is the origin of the senior palkhi.
Namdev	Desh	Poet-saint	A tailor by community, born at Narsi in what is now Marathwada and closely associated with Pandharpur, he composed abhangas and travelled north; sixty-one of his compositions are included in the Guru Granth Sahib, which makes him one of very few figures common to the Marathi and Sikh canons.
Chokhamela	Desh	Poet-saint	Born at Mehuna Raja and resident at Mangalvedha, he belonged to the Mahar community, then placed among the untouchable castes, and was initiated by Namdev. He was killed when a wall he was building collapsed. His abhangas address Vitthal directly and speak plainly about being kept outside the temple; his samadhi stands at the foot of the temple steps at Pandharpur rather than within the shrine, and the Varkari tradition's claim of devotional equality and the social exclusion he describes are both part of its record.
Janabai	Desh	Poet-saint	A domestic servant in Namdev's Pandharpur household, of the Shudra Dasi community, who composed several hundred surviving abhangas — many of them about grinding, sweeping and drawing water, with Vitthal described as helping with the work.
Tukaram	Desh	Poet-saint	A Kunbi grain trader of Dehu whose abhangas are the most quoted Marathi verse in existence — direct, self-doubting, often angry, and written in the plainest available speech. Accounts record his manuscripts being thrown into the Indrayani; his disappearance in 1650 is commemorated at Dehu.
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj	Desh	Ruler	Born at Shivneri and crowned at Raigad in 1674, he built a state out of the plateau's fort geography and a revenue administration that assessed land directly rather than through intermediaries. The fort system, the naval stations below the ghats and the Marathi-and-Sanskrit administrative vocabulary he commissioned are the durable parts.
Bajirao I	Desh	Peshwa, commander	Moved the Maratha state's centre of gravity to Pune, built Shaniwar Wada from 1730, and conducted the fast cavalry campaigns that carried Maratha power to the Narmada and beyond. He died at Raverkhedi on the Narmada, aged thirty-nine, on campaign.
Jyotirao Phule	Desh	Social reformer, writer	Opened a school for girls at Pune in 1848 and a school for Mahar and Mang children soon after, opened his household water tank to all castes, and founded the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873. Gulamgiri (1873) is the first sustained anti-caste polemic written in Marathi.
Savitribai Phule	Desh	Teacher, poet	Born at Naigaon in Satara district; taught in the first schools she and Jyotirao opened, making her among the first Indian women to teach professionally, published the poetry collection Kavya Phule in 1854, and ran a home for widows and abandoned children. She died nursing patients in the plague epidemic at Pune.
Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur	Desh	Ruler, reformer	Issued an order in 1902 reserving half the posts in the Kolhapur state administration for non-Brahmin communities — among the earliest such measures anywhere in India — funded hostels by community so rural students could study in the city, and patronised both wrestling and music, including Abdul Karim Khan and the Kolhapur talims.
Karmaveer Bhaurao Patil	Desh	Educationist	Founded the Rayat Shikshan Sanstha in 1919 on an earn-and-learn model in which students worked to pay for their own schooling. It became one of the largest educational institutions in Asia and put schools into dryland talukas that had none.
Pandita Ramabai	Desh	Scholar, reformer	A Sanskrit scholar who converted to Christianity, wrote The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887), and established the Mukti Mission at Kedgaon in Pune district as a residential community for widows and famine orphans. She also translated the Bible into Marathi from the original languages.
Abdul Karim Khan	Desh	Hindustani vocalist	Settled at Miraj under Sangli patronage and taught there; the Kirana gharana's emphasis on slow, note-by-note swara elaboration and its adoption of Carnatic-influenced phrasing largely date from his work.
Bal Gandharva	Desh	Actor-singer	Born at Nagthane in Sangli district; played the female leads of Marathi Sangeet Natak at a time when women did not act, and set the styles of saree, jewellery and speech that middle-class Maharashtrian women then copied — a stage performer who shaped how his audience dressed.
Baburao Painter	Desh	Film-maker, painter	Founded the Maharashtra Film Company at Kolhapur in 1919, built his own cameras, and made Kolhapur a production centre; V. Shantaram, who went on to found Prabhat and later Rajkamal, began in his workshop.
Man Singh I	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Ruler and general	Ruler of Amber and one of Akbar's senior commanders, who built the Amber palace and led the Mughal force at Haldighati against Maharana Pratap in 1576. His career is the alliance strategy that this region took and Mewar rejected, and both regions' architecture reflects which choice was made.
Sawai Jai Singh II	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Ruler, astronomer and planner	Founded Jaipur in 1727, built five masonry observatories across north India, and had a set of astronomical tables compiled and presented to the Mughal emperor. He tested imported European tables against his own instruments and found them wanting, which is why the instruments are the size they are.
Vidyadhar Bhattacharya	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Planning and architecture	The Bengali-origin official who laid out Jaipur's grid, working from the shilpa shastra proportions and the site's constraints together. The two displaced wards on the north side are his solution to a hill that would not move, and the plan is why the city was inscribed as World Heritage.
Sawai Ram Singh II	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Ruler and photographer	Had the city painted pink in 1876 for the Prince of Wales's visit, founded the Maharaja's School of Arts, and was a serious photographer whose glass-plate negatives — including portraits made inside the zenana, which no outsider could have taken — survive in the City Palace collection.
Sawai Madho Singh II	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Ruler	Travelled to England in 1902 with two silver urns of Ganga water made for the voyage. They are each cast from thousands of melted silver coins and are recognised as the largest silver vessels in the world; they stand in the City Palace.
Kripal Singh Shekhawat	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Ceramics and painting	The painter at the centre of the revival of Jaipur blue pottery from the 1960s, who brought a miniature painter's drawing to a body that had been reduced to a few repeating motifs, and trained the generation of workshops now working in the city.
Ghanshyam Das Birla	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Business and public endowment	From Pilani, and the most consequential figure of the Shekhawati merchant migration's second generation. He built the industrial group from Calcutta and put a substantial part of the proceeds into institutions in the town he came from.
Jamnalal Bajaj	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Business and the freedom movement	Born at Kashi ka Bas in the Sikar tract and adopted into a merchant family at Wardha, he became treasurer of the Congress and funded much of the movement's working infrastructure. Gandhi described him as a fifth son.
Gayatri Devi	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Public life and education	Maharani of Jaipur, who founded a girls' school in the city in 1943 at a time when almost no daughters of the local elite were formally educated, and later won a Lok Sabha seat from Jaipur with one of the largest margins recorded anywhere.
Bhairon Singh Shekhawat	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Politics	From a village in the Sikar district; three times Chief Minister of Rajasthan and later Vice-President of India, and the political figure through whom Shekhawati's rural politics reached the national stage.
Kanhaiyalal Sethia	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Literature	Poet in Rajasthani and Hindi from Sujangarh in Churu district. "Dharti Dhoran Ri" is the poem most Rajasthanis can quote, and his work is the strongest twentieth-century case for Rajasthani as a literary language rather than a dialect.
Durga Lal	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Kathak	A dancer of the Jaipur gharana whose technical clarity in tatkar and layakari made the school's case nationally against the more widely known Lucknow style. He died at forty-two, mid-career.
Devendra Jhajharia	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Athletics	From a village in Churu district; javelin thrower and the first Indian to win two Paralympic gold medals, in 2004 and 2016, having lost an arm to an electrical accident as a child.
Thakur Panchanan Barma	Dooars & Terai	Social reform and law	Lawyer and legislator who organised the Rajbanshi Kshatriya Samiti from 1910, campaigning for education, self-respect and a caste status the colonial census had denied. He remains the central public figure of Rajbanshi identity, and the university at Cooch Behar carries his name.
Abbasuddin Ahmed	Dooars & Terai	Singing	Took Bhawaiya from the cart road and the herding ground onto gramophone records in the 1930s, and in doing so fixed a village repertoire in a form that could travel. Almost every later Bhawaiya singer works from what he recorded.
Pratima Barua Pandey	Dooars & Terai	Singing	Sang the Goalporia repertoire — the eastern continuation of the same Bhawaiya belt — and carried the mahout and moishal songs of the foothill plain to a national audience. Awarded the Padma Shri in 1991.
Debesh Roy	Dooars & Terai	Fiction	Lived and worked in Jalpaiguri; his novel Tistaparer Brittanta built a full account of life along the Teesta's banks — char cultivators, forest villages and the small-town Bengali world above them — and won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990.
Samaresh Majumdar	Dooars & Terai	Fiction	Born in the tea-garden country of the Dooars, and the novelist who put its plantations, forests and small towns into mainstream Bengali fiction rather than leaving them as scenery.
Charu Chandra Sanyal	Dooars & Terai	Medicine and ethnography	A Jalpaiguri physician who spent decades documenting the Rajbanshi of North Bengal, producing the first sustained ethnographic account of the community written from inside the district.
Dhaniram Toto	Dooars & Terai	Language and education	Developed a writing system for Toto, his own community's language, working from Totopara and in collaboration with a linguist over more than a decade; the script was introduced in 2015 and later encoded in Unicode. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2023.
Mola Ram	Garhwal	Painter, poet and historian	The central figure of the Garhwal school of painting and the writer who recorded its lineage back to the artist who arrived with Suleiman Shikoh. He also wrote the Garhwal court's history in verse, which makes him both the region's painter and one of its earliest historians.
Chandra Singh Garhwali	Garhwal	Soldier and political activist	Havildar-Major of the Garhwal Rifles who, at Qissa Khwani Bazaar in Peshawar in April 1930, refused to order his platoon to fire on unarmed Khudai Khidmatgar demonstrators. He was court-martialled and imprisoned, and spent the rest of his life in Congress and peasant politics.
Gabar Singh Negi	Garhwal	Soldier	Rifleman of the 39th Garhwal Rifles, awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously for the attack at Neuve Chapelle in March 1915. His memorial at Chamba is the focus of an annual fair, and his name is the one Garhwali recruitment has been built on for a century.
Sridev Suman	Garhwal	Journalist and freedom fighter	Campaigner against the Tehri princely state's forced-labour and press restrictions. He died in Tehri jail after a hunger strike lasting well over two months, and his death made the Tehri praja mandal movement unstoppable.
Gaura Devi	Garhwal	Village leader	Head of the women's group at Reni village in Chamoli. In March 1974, with the men of the village drawn away to a compensation meeting, she led the women of Reni to stand between the contractor's axemen and the forest above the Alaknanda. The image of that stand is what the word Chipko now means internationally.
Chandi Prasad Bhatt	Garhwal	Environmentalist	Founded the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Mandal at Gopeshwar and turned a local demand for forest raw material for village cooperatives into the Chipko movement's organising base. Awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1982 and the Gandhi Peace Prize.
Sunderlal Bahuguna	Garhwal	Environmentalist	Chipko's long-distance walker and publicist, who carried the argument out of Chamoli, and then spent decades opposing the Tehri dam, including repeated long fasts. He lost that fight and the reservoir was filled; the ecological objections he raised are now standard in Himalayan project appraisals.
Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna	Garhwal	Politics	From Pauri Garhwal. Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and a Union minister, and the politician through whom Garhwal's demands were argued in Lucknow and Delhi for a generation before statehood.
Narendra Singh Negi	Garhwal	Singer and songwriter	The most widely heard Garhwali voice of the last fifty years, with a catalogue that runs from love and seasonal songs to explicit political satire aimed at sitting governments. His songs did more to keep the language in the ears of migrant Garhwalis than any institution has.
Chandra Kunwar Bartwal	Garhwal	Poet	Wrote a dense, image-led Hindi poetry of the Garhwal landscape and died at twenty-eight; almost all of it was published after his death.
Bachendri Pal	Garhwal	Mountaineer	From Nakuri village in Uttarkashi. In 1984 she became the first Indian woman to reach the summit of Everest, and she then spent decades running training expeditions for women out of Jamshedpur.
Tilu Rauteli	Garhwal	Warrior of local tradition	A young woman of the Chauhan lineage of Gural, remembered in panwara ballads as having ridden to war in her father's place and died in her teens. The historical record is thin and the ballad record is thick; the state now gives an award in her name.
Pa Togan Nengminja Sangma	Garo Hills	Resistance leader	Led a night attack with a small band on a British camp at Chisobibra on 12 December 1872, during the annexation of the Garo Hills, and was killed. He is the central figure of Garo historical memory and the date is observed annually.
Sonaram R. Sangma	Garo Hills	Land-rights campaigner	Took the Garo case against colonial interference with a·king lands through petition and litigation in the early twentieth century rather than by arms — the legal counterpart to Togan Sangma's resistance, and the reason the a·king system survived into the modern land record at all.
Ramke Watre Momin and Omed Watre Momin	Garo Hills	Educators	The first Garo Christians, who from the 1860s opened schools in the hills and worked on putting A·chik into Roman script. Whatever one makes of the mission, they are the reason Garo has a written form and a literate public.
Williamson A. Sangma	Garo Hills	Public life	Led the long campaign for a separate hill state and became Meghalaya's first Chief Minister when it was created in 1972.
Purno A. Sangma	Garo Hills	Public life	From the Garo Hills; served as Speaker of the Lok Sabha in the 1990s, the first person from the Northeast to hold the office.
Milton S. Sangma	Garo Hills	Historian	Wrote the standard scholarly histories of the Garos and of the hills, assembling the oral, colonial and administrative record into a single account produced from inside the community.
Abbe Faria (Jose Custodio de Faria)	Goa & Gomantak	Priest and early scientist of hypnosis	Born at Candolim, ordained in Rome, and the man who argued in Paris that what Mesmer called animal magnetism was in fact suggestion operating on a willing subject — the foundation of the modern account of hypnosis. He also appears as a character in Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo. His statue stands beside the old secretariat in Panaji.
Francisco Luis Gomes	Goa & Gomantak	Physician, economist and parliamentarian	Elected from Goa to the Portuguese parliament in Lisbon, wrote on political economy, and published Os Brahmanes, a novel arguing against racial hierarchy in colonial rule. He is the case against reading Goa's colonial century as politically silent.
Shenoi Goembab	Goa & Gomantak	Writer and language activist	Vaman Raghunath Varde Valaulikar, who wrote the first modern Konkani prose, essays and drama and argued systematically that Konkani was an independent language rather than a dialect of Marathi. The case he made in print in the 1920s and 1930s is the one that eventually succeeded administratively in 1987 and 1992.
Tristao de Braganca Cunha	Goa & Gomantak	Nationalist	Founded the Goa Congress Committee in 1928 and wrote The Denationalisation of Goans, an argument that colonial education had detached Goans from their own culture. He was tried and imprisoned in Portugal for it.
Kesarbai Kerkar	Goa & Gomantak	Hindustani vocalist	From Keri in Goa, and among the foremost singers of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana. Her recording of the raga Bhairavi piece "Jaat Kahan Ho" was included on the Voyager Golden Record in 1977 — the only Indian classical vocal on it.
Mogubai Kurdikar	Goa & Gomantak	Hindustani vocalist	From Kurdi in Sanguem, trained in the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana, and the teacher of her daughter Kishori Amonkar. The village she came from was submerged by the Salaulim dam and reappears each summer when the reservoir drops.
Kishori Amonkar	Goa & Gomantak	Hindustani vocalist	Trained by her mother Mogubai Kurdikar, and the singer who took the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana furthest from its inherited form while remaining inside it.
Lata Mangeshkar	Goa & Gomantak	Singer	Born in Indore into a family from Mangeshi in Ponda — the surname is the village and the temple. Her father Deenanath Mangeshkar was a Marathi stage singer and actor, and the family's Goan temple connection is why the Mangeshi shrine carries her name in every account of it.
Ravindra Kelekar	Goa & Gomantak	Konkani writer	Essayist, translator and one of the leaders of the campaign for Konkani's official status. Awarded the Jnanpith in 2006, the first for Konkani.
Damodar Mauzo	Goa & Gomantak	Konkani novelist and short-story writer	From Majorda; wrote Karmelin and a body of short fiction about Salcete village life, and was awarded the Jnanpith in 2021.
Charles Correa	Goa & Gomantak	Architect	Designed the Kala Academy at Panaji — an open, sectioned concrete building oriented to the Mandovi that functions as Goa's principal performance venue — along with work across India on low-rise, high-density housing and climate-responsive form.
Mario Miranda	Goa & Gomantak	Cartoonist and illustrator	From Loutolim; drew Goan and Bombay life in dense crowd scenes for four decades, and effectively fixed the visual shorthand by which the rest of India pictures a Goan village.
Wendell Rodricks	Goa & Gomantak	Fashion designer and historian of dress	From Colvale; researched and revived the Kunbi sari as a contemporary garment, wrote Moda Goa on the region's dress history, and set up a costume museum project in his own village.
Dayanand Bandodkar	Goa & Gomantak	Politics	Goa's first Chief Minister after 1961, from a mining family, and the leading advocate of merging Goa into Maharashtra. The 1967 Opinion Poll rejected that proposal; he resigned, contested again, and returned to office.
Rao Deva Hada	Hadoti	Ruler	Took Bundi in 1241 and gave the region both its ruling clan and its name — Hadoti is simply the Hada country.
Rao Ratan Singh of Bundi	Hadoti	Ruler	Bundi's Mughal-service ruler, under whom the state's territory reached its greatest extent and after whose death Kota was detached from it as a separate state for his son.
Rao Madho Singh	Hadoti	Ruler	The first ruler of Kota as an independent state. The split from Bundi is the single event behind the two painting schools: the same idiom, two courts, and within a generation two distinguishable manners.
Rani Nathavati Solanki	Hadoti	Patron	Commissioned Raniji ki Baori during her son's reign — the largest of Bundi's stepwells, and the clearest piece of evidence that water architecture in this region was built as public work and signed as such.
Maharao Bhim Singh I of Kota	Hadoti	Ruler	Turned the Kota state formally over to Krishna as Brijnathji, ruling as the deity's deputy. It reorganised the court calendar and it is why Kota's painters spent as much time on Krishna subjects as on hunts.
Rao Umed Singh of Bundi	Hadoti	Ruler and patron	The patron under whom the Chitrashala programme was carried out, and under whom the Bundi mural idiom moved from the painted page to the wall.
Zalim Singh Jhala	Hadoti	Administrator	Kota's faujdar and effective ruler for close to half a century, who kept the state out of the Maratha and early British wars by treaty and cultivated a reputation for revenue administration. Jhalawar was carved out for his descendants in 1838, which is why a fourth state exists in a region that had three.
Maharao Ram Singh II of Kota	Hadoti	Ruler and patron	The last great patron of the Kota school, who had himself painted in enormous processional and hunting scenes and kept a workshop running well into the photographic era.
Suryamall Misran	Hadoti	Poet	Charan poet at the Bundi court and author of the Vansh Bhaskar, a vast Dingal chronicle of the Hada houses. It is the region's principal literary monument and the fullest surviving example of bardic Rajasthani in the nineteenth century.
Maharaj Rana Bhawani Singh of Jhalawar	Hadoti	Ruler and patron	Built the Bhawani Natya Shala in 1921 — a European-plan proscenium theatre with stage machinery, in a princely state most people could not find on a map. He wrote and staged productions in it himself.
Vinod Kumar Bansal	Hadoti	Education	An engineer at a Kota synthetics mill who began coaching students for the engineering entrance examination in the 1980s and formalised it into an institution. What followed turned a plateau town of half a million into the country's single largest destination for adolescent migration, with everything that has cost.
Bu Ali Shah Qalandar	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Sufi poet	A Qalandari Sufi settled at Panipat whose Persian verse and shrine made the town a devotional and literary centre. His dargah remains the region's largest Sufi site.
Pandit Lakhmi Chand	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Saang poet and performer	Called Surya Kavi in the region. He wrote and performed the saang texts that became the standard repertoire of Haryanvi folk theatre, and did more than any other single figure to give the language a body of literature it never got in print.
Sir Chhotu Ram	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Peasant politics	Born at Garhi Sampla in Rohtak. Built the Punjab Unionist Party's rural base and drove debt-relief and land-alienation legislation aimed at protecting cultivators from moneylenders — the legislative origin of the region's modern agrarian politics.
Pandit Jasraj	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Hindustani vocal music	Born at Pili Mandori in Hisar district. Trained first as a tabla accompanist and turned to vocal music; became the defining voice of the Mewati gharana and one of the most widely heard classical singers of his generation.
Sant Garib Das	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Sant poet	From Chhudani in Jhajjar. Composed a large body of devotional verse in the local speech and founded a sant tradition that still maintains dera establishments across the plain.
Khwaja Altaf Hussain Hali	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Urdu poet and critic	From Panipat. Wrote the Musaddas on the rise and decline of Islam in India, and produced the first serious Urdu literary criticism and biography — the plain's most consequential contribution to Urdu letters.
Master Chandgi Ram	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Wrestling	A Hind Kesari and Asian Games gold medallist who then opened an akhara on the Yamuna bank at Delhi and, from the 1990s, trained girls in it against considerable local opposition. Almost every account of women's wrestling in this region begins with his pit.
Sakshi Malik	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Wrestling	From Mokhra village in Rohtak. The first Indian woman to win an Olympic wrestling medal, taking bronze at Rio in 2016 — the result that changed which children villages sent to the akhara.
Yogeshwar Dutt	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Wrestling	From Bhainswal Kalan in Sonipat; Olympic bronze at London in 2012, and later the founder of an academy that turned the district into a formal training destination rather than an informal one.
Ravi Kumar Dahiya	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Wrestling	From Nahri in Sonipat, a village that has produced several international wrestlers. Olympic silver at Tokyo in 2021.
Bajrang Punia	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Wrestling	From Khudan in Jhajjar; Olympic bronze at Tokyo in 2021 and a long run of world championship medals.
Neeraj Chopra	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Athletics	From Khandra village near Panipat. Olympic gold in the javelin at Tokyo in 2021 and silver at Paris in 2024 — India's first individual Olympic gold in athletics.
Kalpana Chawla	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Aerospace engineering	Born in Karnal; the first woman of Indian origin in space, and lost with the Columbia crew on re-entry in 2003. The Karnal medical college and the town's planetarium carry her name.
Gafruddin Mewati Jogi	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Bhapang player and Mewati folk singer	A Jogi performer from the Alwar side of the Mewat tract who spent decades keeping the bhapang — a one-string plucked drum whose pitch is bent by hand as it is struck — in performance, and was awarded the Padma Shri.
Bhagyachandra (Ching-Thang Khomba)	Imphal Valley	King and patron	Under his court the Raas Leela was given the form it still has — the repertoire, the potloi costume and the temple context — and the Govindajee image at the centre of valley Vaishnavism is attributed to his reign. Almost every classical element in this file dates from or was reorganised in his time.
Hijam Anganghal	Imphal Valley	Poet	Composed the Khamba-Thoibi Sheireng, a verse recension of the Moirang epic running to tens of thousands of lines — the longest work in Meiteilon and the text through which most of the valley knows the story.
Guru Bipin Singh	Imphal Valley	Manipuri dance	Took Manipuri from temple and court context onto the proscenium stage without stripping its ritual grammar, systematised its training, and worked over decades with the Jhaveri sisters, who carried the form to audiences across India.
Maharaj Kumari Binodini Devi	Imphal Valley	Writer	Wrote the novel "Boro Saheb Ongbi Sanatombi", translated as "The Princess and the Political Agent", and the story for the film "Imagi Ningthem" — the writer who put the valley's nineteenth-century interior life into prose.
Aribam Syam Sharma	Imphal Valley	Filmmaker and composer	Made "Imagi Ningthem" and "Ishanou", the latter selected for Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 1990 — the films through which Meitei ritual and domestic life reached an international audience.
Ratan Thiyam	Imphal Valley	Theatre director	Founded the Chorus Repertory Theatre at Imphal in 1976 and built a body of work from Thang-Ta movement, pung drumming, local costume and Sanskrit and modern texts. One of the most widely programmed Indian theatre directors of his generation.
Heisnam Kanhailal and Sabitri Heisnam	Imphal Valley	Theatre	Director and actor who developed a theatre built on the body, on ritual practice and on Meiteilon rather than on written script, working through the Kalakshetra Manipur company they founded.
Rajkumar Singhajit Singh	Imphal Valley	Manipuri dance	Dancer, choreographer and teacher who trained several generations in the form and led its institutional presence outside the region.
Mary Kom	Imphal Valley	Boxing	From the Kom community, born at Kangathei near Moirang; multiple world amateur boxing champion and an Olympic medallist in 2012.
Saikhom Mirabai Chanu	Imphal Valley	Weightlifting	World champion in 2017 and an Olympic silver medallist in 2021, from Nongpok Kakching in the valley's eastern basin.
Khwairakpam Chaoba and Lamabam Kamal	Imphal Valley	Writers	With Hijam Anganghal, the writers credited with founding modern Meiteilon literature — a novel, a body of lyric poetry and a prose register that the language had not previously had.
Raja Ranjit Dev	Jammu Duggar	Ruler	Consolidated Jammu as the leading Dogra chieftaincy and made it a refuge for traders and craftsmen displaced by the raids on the Punjab plain in the mid-eighteenth century, which is the immediate reason the town acquired a court, a bazaar and a literary circle.
Kavi Dattu	Jammu Duggar	Poet	Court poet under Ranjit Dev and the writer who gave Dogri its Barah Massa — the twelve-month poem of separation that turned an oral seasonal song form into a literary one.
Nainsukh of Guler	Jammu Duggar	Painter	Worked for two decades at Jasrota in the Duggar hills for Balwant Singh, producing an unusually intimate, observational body of painting — a patron shaving, listening to music, looking out at snow. His sons and nephews later carried the family manner to Basohli, Chamba, Guler and Kangra, which is how one workshop seeded four schools.
Devidasa of Nurpur	Jammu Duggar	Painter	Signed and dated the 1694 Rasamanjari set that is the anchor point for the Basohli style — one of very few Pahari painters whose name and date are both recorded.
Maharaja Gulab Singh	Jammu Duggar	Ruler	The Jammu chief who founded the Dogra dynasty and under whom a hill chieftaincy became the seat of a very large Himalayan state, drawing Ladakh and Baltistan into Jammu's trading orbit.
General Zorawar Singh	Jammu Duggar	Commander	Led the Dogra campaigns across the Zanskar and Ladakh ranges in the 1830s and died at Toyo in western Tibet in 1841 — the reason a Jammu general's memorial stands on the Tibetan plateau and the reason the pashmina trade route ran through Jammu for a century afterwards.
Maharaja Ranbir Singh	Jammu Duggar	Ruler and patron	Standardised Dogra Akkhar as a script for printing and administration, established a translation department that rendered Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic works into Hindi and Dogri, and built the Raghunath temple library and the Ranbireshwar temple at Jammu.
Padma Sachdev	Jammu Duggar	Poet	The first major modern woman poet in Dogri, and the writer who made it possible to publish contemporary verse in the language. She received the Sahitya Akademi award in 1971 for Meri Kavita Mere Geet.
Pandit Shivkumar Sharma	Jammu Duggar	Music	Born in Jammu; took the santoor — a hundred-string struck zither used in Kashmiri Sufiana ensemble music — and rebuilt it, physically and technically, into a solo Hindustani classical instrument, which no one had previously attempted.
Ramnath Shastri	Jammu Duggar	Writer and organiser	A central figure in the Dogri Sanstha, the literary body founded in the 1940s whose sustained argument that Dogri was a language and not a dialect produced its Sahitya Akademi recognition in 1969.
Ved Rahi	Jammu Duggar	Writer and film-maker	Dogri novelist and short-story writer who also worked for decades as a Hindi film screenwriter and director — the clearest instance of the Dogri literary generation crossing into a national industry.
Baba Jitto	Jammu Duggar	Folk figure	The peasant of Dogra oral tradition who is said to have died rather than concede a share of his harvest, and whose daughter Bua Kouri died with him. His story is sung as Karak and the Jhiri fair is held for him — a devotional cult with an agrarian dispute at its centre.
Basavanna	Kalyana Karnataka	Poet, administrator, social reformer	Chief minister at the Kalachuri court at Kalyana and the central figure of the Sharana movement. Wrote vachanas in spoken Kannada signed Kudalasangamadeva, organised the Anubhava Mantapa as an open assembly, and argued that work itself was worship — kayaka. His samadhi is at Kudalasangama, where the Krishna meets the Malaprabha.
Akka Mahadevi	Kalyana Karnataka	Poet	Born at Udutadi in the Ghats to the south-west, she left marriage and household and came to Kalyana, where the assembly examined her before admitting her. Her vachanas, signed Chennamallikarjuna, are the most formally accomplished in the corpus and among the earliest sustained women's writing in an Indian vernacular. She is recorded as having left afterwards for Srisailam.
Allama Prabhu	Kalyana Karnataka	Poet, mystic	From Balligavi in the Ghats, and the presiding figure of the Anubhava Mantapa. His vachanas, signed Guheshwara, work by paradox and deliberate obscurity — the Shunya Sampadane, a later anthology, is built as a set of dialogues around him.
Channabasavanna	Kalyana Karnataka	Poet, organiser	Basavanna's nephew, who systematised the movement's doctrine and, after the violence at Kalyana in 1167, is credited in the tradition with carrying the vachana manuscripts away to safety — which is why any of the corpus survives at all.
Bijjala II	Kalyana Karnataka	Ruler	The Kalachuri king at Kalyana under whom the Sharana movement grew and in whose reign it collapsed in violence. The sequence of events in 1167 is reported very differently by different traditions and the contemporary record is thin.
Ahmad Shah I Wali Bahmani	Kalyana Karnataka	Sultan	Moved the Bahmani capital from Gulbarga to Bidar in 1425, rebuilt the fort there, and is buried at Ashtur in the tomb whose painted interior is the best-preserved Bahmani decoration surviving.
Mahmud Gawan	Kalyana Karnataka	Vizier, scholar, merchant	A Persian trader from Gilan who became the Bahmani prime minister, extended the sultanate to both coasts, reorganised its provinces and revenue, and built the madrasa at Bidar in 1472 and stocked its library. He was executed in 1481 on a charge later generally accepted to have rested on a forged letter.
Khwaja Bande Nawaz Gesu Daraz	Kalyana Karnataka	Sufi scholar	A Chishti teacher who left Delhi for the Deccan in old age and settled at Gulbarga. He wrote extensively, including in Dakhni, and his shrine became the largest pilgrimage centre in the region.
Krishnadevaraya	Kalyana Karnataka	Emperor, poet	The Vijayanagara ruler under whom Hampi reached its greatest extent, who took Raichur from Bijapur in 1520, built the Vitthala and Krishna temple complexes, and wrote the Telugu Amuktamalyada while patronising Kannada, Sanskrit and Tamil letters simultaneously.
Sharanabasaveshwara	Kalyana Karnataka	Religious figure	An eighteenth-century Lingayat figure at Kalaburagi in the Sharana tradition, around whose shrine the city's largest religious institution and its annual fair grew.
Bellary Raghava	Kalyana Karnataka	Actor, lawyer	A Ballari lawyer who became the leading stage actor of his generation in both Telugu and Kannada, professionalised amateur theatre in the Deccan, and is the reason Ballari has a theatre tradition disproportionate to its size.
Nainsukh of Guler	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Painter	Son of Pandit Seu and brother of Manaku, and the painter who moved Pahari work away from stylised convention towards close observation — portraits of his patron Balwant Singh shaving, listening to music, looking at a drawing. His family's workshop is where the mature Kangra manner begins.
Manaku of Guler	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Painter	Nainsukh's elder brother, whose Gita Govinda and Bhagavata Purana series set the narrative format the Kangra workshops used for the next three generations.
Sansar Chand Katoch	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Ruler and patron	Recovered Kangra Fort in 1786 and ran a court at Sujanpur Tira and Alampur that employed the painters whose output the valley's name is now attached to. His defeat by the Gurkhas in 1806 and the Sikh occupation from 1809 ended the patronage within a generation.
William Jameson	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Botany and colonial administration	As superintendent of the north-western botanical gardens he had tea planted in the Kangra valley from 1849, on the argument that the rainfall and the drainage matched Assam better than anywhere else in the western Himalaya. He was right, and Kangra tea took medals in Europe within four decades.
Norah Richards	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Theatre	An Irish theatre worker who helped establish Punjabi-language drama at Lahore, then settled at Andretta in the 1930s, built a mud-walled open-air theatre and taught there for three decades. She left her land to be used for the arts, which it still is.
Sobha Singh	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Painter	Settled at Andretta and painted the images of Guru Nanak and of Sohni-Mahiwal that became the most reproduced devotional and romantic pictures in Punjab. His house is now a gallery.
B. C. Sanyal	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Painter and teacher	A founding figure of modern art teaching in north India who worked at Andretta with Richards and Sobha Singh, linking a Kangra village to the Lahore and Delhi art worlds.
Mehr Chand Mahajan	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Law	Born in the Kangra hills; served as prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir at the moment of its accession in 1947 and later as Chief Justice of India.
The 14th Dalai Lama	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Religious leadership	Resident above Dharamshala since 1960. The presence of his office and of the Central Tibetan Administration rebuilt a Himalayan hill station as the political and monastic centre of a diaspora, and made Kangra a place people arrive at from outside India for reasons that have nothing to do with India.
Vikram Batra	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Military	From Palampur; awarded the Param Vir Chakra posthumously for the Kargil operations. Recruitment from these valleys into the army is high enough that almost every village has a memorial, and his is the name they are measured against.
Kalhana	Kashmir Valley	Historian and poet	Wrote the Rajatarangini around 1148–1150, a Sanskrit verse chronicle of the kings of Kashmir that works from inscriptions, coins and land grants. It is the earliest sustained attempt at a critical history in the subcontinent, and much of what is known about the valley before the fourteenth century comes through it.
Lal Ded (Lalleshwari)	Kashmir Valley	Poet and mystic	Composed the vaakhs that are the foundation of Kashmiri as a literary language and are still quoted in ordinary speech. She is claimed by both of the valley's religious traditions and belongs neatly to neither.
Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani (Nund Rishi)	Kashmir Valley	Saint and poet	Founded the Rishi order, a Kashmiri devotional movement built on vegetarian austerity, forest retreat and plain Kashmiri verse. His shruks are the other half of the language's founding canon, and his shrine at Charar-e-Sharief remains a centre of pilgrimage.
Zain-ul-Abidin (Budshah)	Kashmir Valley	Ruler	The reign every Kashmiri craft traces itself to. He is credited with bringing weavers, papermakers, bookbinders, painters and joiners from Central Asia and Persia and settling them in the valley, and with commissioning Persian translations of the Rajatarangini and the Mahabharata. The shawl, carpet, papier-mâché and khatamband trades all date their present form to that century.
Habba Khatoon	Kashmir Valley	Poet	The lol lyric's defining voice and, by tradition, a peasant woman who became queen to Yusuf Shah Chak. Her songs of separation are still sung, and a mountain above the Gurez approach carries her name.
Rasul Mir	Kashmir Valley	Poet	The romantic poet of Shahabad in southern Kashmir, whose ghazals in Kashmiri brought the Persian love idiom fully into the vernacular. Sung constantly, published late.
Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor	Kashmir Valley	Poet	Turned Kashmiri verse towards the land and its cultivators at a moment when the prestige literary language was Urdu, and is generally treated as the founder of modern Kashmiri poetry.
Zinda Kaul (Masterji)	Kashmir Valley	Poet	Wrote in Kashmiri, Persian, Urdu and Hindi, and received the first Sahitya Akademi award given in Kashmiri, for Sumaran, in 1956 — the moment the language entered the modern national literary apparatus.
Dina Nath Nadim	Kashmir Valley	Poet and playwright	Wrote Bombur ta Yamberzal, the first Kashmiri verse opera, and pushed the language into free verse and modern stage forms.
Akhtar Mohiuddin	Kashmir Valley	Novelist and short-story writer	Wrote the first Kashmiri novel and a body of short fiction that gave the language a modern prose register it had not previously had.
Rahman Rahi	Kashmir Valley	Poet and critic	The most decorated writer the language has produced — awarded the Jnanpith in 2004, the first for Kashmiri — and the critic who argued hardest that Kashmiri could carry a modern poetic idiom of its own.
Raj Begum	Kashmir Valley	Singer	The first woman to sing Kashmiri professionally on radio, at a time when it was socially costly to do so, and the voice through which much of the folk and lol repertoire reached a mass audience.
Bhajan Sopori	Kashmir Valley	Santoor	From the Sopori musical lineage of Sopore; played and taught the santoor in a manner deliberately tied to its Sufiana origins rather than to the Hindustani concert adaptation, and composed extensively in Kashmiri.
Agha Shahid Ali	Kashmir Valley	Poet	Wrote in English from a Srinagar childhood, and made the ghazal a working form in American poetry — including editing a landmark anthology of ghazals in English.
Bahinabai Chaudhari	Khandesh	Poet	A farming woman of Jalgaon district who was never taught to read or write and composed songs in Ahirani while working. Her son Sopandev Chaudhari transcribed what he had memorised and published the collection after her death; it entered the Marathi canon and school curriculum, and remains the only body of Ahirani verse with a national readership.
Bhaskara II (Bhaskaracharya)	Khandesh	Mathematician and astronomer	Author of the Siddhanta Shiromani, completed in 1150, whose Lilavati section became the standard Indian arithmetic text for centuries. An inscription attributed to his grandson Changadeva records the family lineage and places them at Patan, near Chalisgaon in this region, where a math was endowed to teach his work.
Muktabai	Khandesh	Poet-saint	The youngest of the four siblings of the Dnyaneshwar household and a composer of abhangas in her own right, including the exchange known as the Taatiche Abhang. Local tradition places her disappearance near Muktainagar, which is named for her.
Sane Guruji (Pandurang Sadashiv Sane)	Khandesh	Writer, teacher, activist	Born in the Konkan but formed by Khandesh — he taught at Amalner, organised there, and wrote Shyamchi Aai, one of the most widely read Marathi books ever published. In May 1947 he fasted for ten days at Pandharpur to press for the Vitthal temple's opening to all castes.
Bhalchandra Nemade	Khandesh	Novelist, critic	Born at Sangvi in Jalgaon district. Kosla (1963) changed the register of the Marathi novel by writing in unliterary speech, and his later work argues explicitly for regional rootedness — deshivad — against cosmopolitan literary models. Awarded the Jnanpith in 2014.
Bhavarlal Jain	Khandesh	Industrialist	Founded what became Jain Irrigation Systems at Jalgaon in 1963. Its micro-irrigation and tissue-culture banana programmes are the direct cause of the district's banana yields and of the shift from flood irrigation to drip across the valley; he also endowed Gandhi Teerth at Jalgaon.
Malik Raja and Nasir Khan Faruqi	Khandesh	Rulers	Founders of the Faruqi sultanate of Khandesh, which held the Tapi valley for over two centuries from Thalner and then Burhanpur, with Asirgarh as its stronghold. Their rule is the source of one reading of the region's name, from the Khan title they carried.
Sopandev Chaudhari	Khandesh	Poet and editor	Bahinabai's son, himself a poet, who wrote down his mother's songs from memory and brought them to publication with Acharya Atre's advocacy. Without him the language's best-known literature would not exist in written form.
Suresh Khanapurkar	Khandesh	Geologist	Developed the Shirpur pattern of groundwater recharge in Dhule district — widening and deepening stream beds and building check dams keyed to the basalt's water-bearing layers — which raised water tables across a cluster of chronically dry villages and has since been copied elsewhere in Maharashtra.
M. H. Hasham Premji	Khandesh	Industrialist	Founded Western India Vegetable Products at Amalner in 1945 to press groundnut and cottonseed oil — the region's two oilseeds. The company later diversified and became Wipro.
Bhil and Pawra badwas	Khandesh	Ritual specialists	The hereditary ritual practitioners of the Satpura communities, who conduct the Pithora wall painting rite, the healing and vow ceremonies, and the oral genealogies. They are the reason the slope's tradition survives without any written record.
U Tirot Sing Syiem	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Syiem of Hima Nongkhlaw	Granted the British permission to build a road from the Brahmaputra plain to Sylhet through his territory, withdrew it when the terms proved to be occupation rather than transit, and fought a four-year guerrilla campaign from 1829. Captured in 1833 and deported to Dhaka, where he died. He is the central figure of Khasi political memory.
U Kiang Nangbah	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Jaintia leader	Led the Jaintia rising of 1860–62 against taxation and interference with Pnar rite, was betrayed, tried and publicly hanged at Jowai on 30 December 1862. The date is observed annually in the Jaintia hills.
Ka Phan Nonglait	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Resistance figure	Remembered in Khasi oral tradition for her part in the resistance of the 1820s and 1830s alongside Tirot Sing. She is the woman most often named in Khasi historical memory, and a Shillong women's institution carries her name.
Thomas Jones	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Missionary and linguist	A Welsh Presbyterian who arrived at Sohra in 1841 and fixed the Khasi language to the Roman alphabet, using the Sohra dialect. The consequence is a hill society with high literacy in its own language and no Indic script — and a standard dialect chosen by a foreigner working with a few informants.
U Soso Tham	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Poet	The founding figure of written Khasi poetry, whose long work Ki Sngi Barim U Hynñiew Trep set the origin narrative of the seven clans into verse and demonstrated that the newly written language could carry a literature of its own rather than only translation.
Homiwell Lyngdoh	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Historian	Wrote in Khasi on the himas, the syiemships and Khasi religious practice at a point when the oral record was still intact, producing some of the earliest indigenous historical writing from the hills.
Lou Majaw	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Musician	Shillong's longest-running performer, who has staged a Bob Dylan birthday concert in the city every May since the early 1970s — the event around which the city's guitar culture organised itself.
Neil Nongkynrih	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Pianist and conductor	Trained in London, returned to Shillong and founded the Shillong Chamber Choir in the early 2000s, building it out of the region's existing four-part congregational singing rather than importing a technique.
Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Poet and novelist	Writes in both Khasi and English, and has done more than anyone to put Khasi oral material — phawar, clan narrative, the sacred grove — into English-language literature without flattening it into folklore.
Desmond L. Kharmawphlang	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Poet and folklorist	A folklorist at North-Eastern Hill University and a poet, whose fieldwork and teaching established the academic study of Khasi oral tradition inside the region rather than from outside it.
Patricia Mukhim	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Journalist	Editor of The Shillong Times and a long-standing commentator on the hills, awarded the Padma Shri in 2000.
Rinchen Zangpo	Kinnaur & Spiti	Translator and monastic founder	The great translator of the second diffusion of Buddhism in western Tibet, who is credited by tradition with founding a chain of monasteries across the western Himalaya, Tabo among them. The Tibetan canon in its western recension, and the Indo-Tibetan painting idiom that came with it, both travelled on his workshops.
Padmasambhava (Guru Rinpoche)	Kinnaur & Spiti	Tantric teacher, in tradition rather than record	Local tradition through the upper Sutlej and Spiti attaches meditation caves, rock imprints and consecration sites to him, and villages such as Nako maintain shrines on that basis. The historical record is thin and the attributions are devotional, but they matter here as evidence of how the valley understands the arrival of Buddhism — up the river, by teacher rather than by conquest.
Alexander Gerard	Kinnaur & Spiti	Surveyor	Surveyed the upper Sutlej and its passes in the 1810s and 1820s and wrote the first detailed outside account of Kinnaur, then called Koonawur. His measurements of village and pass altitudes are the earliest systematic record of the region's vertical geography.
Sándor Csoma de Kőrös	Kinnaur & Spiti	Philologist	A Hungarian scholar who spent years in the western Himalaya, including a long stay at the monastery of Kanam in upper Kinnaur around 1827–1830, working on the Tibetan language. His grammar and dictionary made Tibetan studies possible as a European discipline, and much of the work was done in a Kinnauri village.
Satyanand Stokes (Samuel Evans Stokes)	Kinnaur & Spiti	Horticulture and social reform	An American who settled at Kotgarh on the Sutlej below Kinnaur, introduced American apple varieties to the hills from 1916, and taught grafting and orcharding to local farmers. The Kinnauri apple economy that now dominates the region's cash income descends directly from that introduction; he later took Indian citizenship in effect, converted to Hinduism and was imprisoned during the freedom movement.
आदि शंकर	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	दर्शन	पेरियार तट पर कालडी में जन्म; अद्वैत वेदांत को व्यवस्थित रूप दिया और पूरे उपमहाद्वीप में मठ स्थापित किए।
श्री नारायण गुरु	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	समाज सुधार	ऐसे मंदिरों की प्रतिष्ठा की जो उन जातियों के लिए खुले थे जिन्हें मौजूदा मंदिरों में प्रवेश नहीं था, और सुधार आंदोलन को उसका सूत्र दिया — "मनुष्य के लिए एक जाति, एक धर्म, एक ईश्वर"। आधुनिक केरल के सामाजिक इतिहास की सबसे प्रभावशाली शख़्सियत।
राजा रवि वर्मा	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	चित्रकला	भारतीय देवताओं और महाकाव्य दृश्यों को यूरोपीय अकादमिक तैलचित्र शैली में चित्रित किया और फिर लिथोग्राफ़ से बड़े पैमाने पर छापा, जिससे यह तय हो गया कि आज भी भारत का बड़ा हिस्सा अपने देवताओं की कल्पना कैसे करता है।
कुमारन आशान	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	कविता	मलयालम कविता को दरबारी रूढ़ि से हटाकर रोमानी और सामाजिक विषयों की ओर मोड़ा; उनकी कविता सुधार के तर्क को साहित्य तक ले गई।
वैक्कम मुहम्मद बशीर	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	साहित्य	मलाबार के आम मुसलमानों की सीधी बोलचाल वाली मलयालम में लिखा, जो साहित्यिक भाषा-स्तर से एक सुविचारित विच्छेद था और जिसने उपन्यास की भाषा को स्थायी रूप से चौड़ा कर दिया।
ई. एम. एस. नंबूदिरीपाद	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	राजनीति	1957 में केरल की पहली निर्वाचित सरकार का नेतृत्व किया और भूमि-सुधार तथा शिक्षा संबंधी क़ानून आगे बढ़ाए, जिन्होंने राज्य के सामाजिक संकेतकों को आकार दिया।
के. आर. नारायणन	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	सार्वजनिक जीवन	राजनयिक और भारत के दसवें राष्ट्रपति, तथा यह पद सँभालने वाले पहले दलित।
वर्गीज़ कुरियन	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	दुग्ध सहकारिता	कोझिकोड में जन्म; ऑपरेशन फ़्लड के शिल्पकार, जिसने किसानों के स्वामित्व वाली सहकारी समितियों के ज़रिए भारत को दुनिया का सबसे बड़ा दूध उत्पादक बनाया।
एम. टी. वासुदेवन नायर	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	साहित्य और सिनेमा	उपन्यासकार और पटकथा लेखक, जिनके वडक्कन गाथाओं और महाभारत के पुनर्कथनों ने दोनों को आधुनिक पाठक के लिए नए सिरे से गढ़ा।
के. जे. येसुदास	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	संगीत	पार्श्वगायक और शास्त्रीय गायक, जिनकी रिकॉर्डिंग छह दशकों में अनेक भारतीय भाषाओं में फैली है।
कमला दास (माधवीकुट्टी)	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	साहित्य	अंग्रेज़ी और मलयालम दोनों में इच्छा और आत्म के बारे में उस समय खुलकर लिखा जब दोनों में से किसी साहित्य में इसकी जगह नहीं थी।
पी. टी. उषा	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	एथलेटिक्स	लॉस एंजिल्स 1984 में 400 मी बाधा दौड़ का ओलंपिक पदक सौवें सेकंड से चूक गईं, और भारतीय ट्रैक एथलेटिक्स की कसौटी बन गईं।
G. D. Naidu	Kongu Nadu	Inventor and industrialist	Left school early, ran a motor transport business, then built Coimbatore's first electric motors and a long list of prototypes — a razor, a radio, a petrol engine, a distance-adjustable camera. He is the reason the city's engineering trade thinks of itself as inventive rather than merely industrial, and the museum he left holds the workshop pieces.
Robert Stanes	Kongu Nadu	Planter and industrialist	Set up the first cotton spinning mill in Coimbatore in the 1880s, along with coffee and tea interests on the slope above it and the schools that carry his name. The mill economy the region is now defined by starts with that plant.
T. S. Avinashilingam	Kongu Nadu	Educationist	Founded an institution at Coimbatore for the education of rural women and pushed basic education across the Kongu districts. The university that grew out of it carries his name.
P. Sabapathy	Kongu Nadu	Engineer	Designed the tilting granite wet grinder at Coimbatore in 1955 — an object now in most South Indian kitchens and still overwhelmingly manufactured within a few kilometres of where it was devised.
T. R. Sundaram	Kongu Nadu	Film producer	Built Modern Theatres at Salem into a full studio with its own laboratories and processing, and produced the first Tamil feature made in full colour in 1956. Running a major studio from a mill town rather than from Madras was the point.
G. K. Devarajulu	Kongu Nadu	Industrialist	Founded Lakshmi Machine Works at Coimbatore in 1962 to build textile spinning machinery, which moved the region from spinning cotton to making the machines that spin it.
R. Shanmugasundaram	Kongu Nadu	Novelist	Wrote Kongu agrarian life from inside it, most durably in Nagammal, using the region's own register at a time when Tamil prose fiction was largely written in the language of the coast.
Nallathambi Sarkarai Manradiar	Kongu Nadu	Cattle breeder and landholder	The Pattagar of Palayakottai, credited in the livestock literature with consolidating and improving the Kangayam breed and with defending the korangadu grazing system that supports it.
Kongu Velir	Kongu Nadu	Poet	Author of the Perunkathai, the Tamil retelling of the Brihatkatha, and known only by a name that places him in this country. The attribution is traditional rather than documented, and it is the region's oldest claim on a literary text.
Laxman Naik	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Freedom movement	A Bhumia leader from Tentuliguma in the Koraput hills who organised the region's Adivasi villages during the 1942 movement and was tried and hanged at Berhampur in 1943. He remains the highland's own historical figure rather than a borrowed one, and every district town here has his statue.
Bhima Bhoi	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Poet and religious teacher	A blind poet of Kondh origin, the principal voice of the Mahima Dharma movement, whose Odia verse — Stuti Chintamani above all — reached villages that had no access to Sanskrit learning. His seat at Khaliapali lies just beyond the Bolangir lowland, and the movement's reach through this belt is his.
Mangei Gomango	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Script	Devised Sorang Sompeng, a script created specifically for the Sora language rather than adapted from Odia or Devanagari — one of very few Indian languages of its size with a purpose-made writing system.
Verrier Elwin	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Anthropology	Lived and worked among the Bonda and the Sora and wrote Bondo Highlander and The Religion of an Indian Tribe. His books remain the fullest published record of Sora funerary ritual and Bonda social organisation, and they are the reason much of that material is documented at all.
M. S. Swaminathan	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Agricultural science	His foundation's centre at Jeypore worked with cultivator families on the plateau's rice landraces and a community seed bank, and that documentation underpinned the recognition of Koraput's traditional agriculture by the Food and Agriculture Organization in 2012.
Gobardhan Panika	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Weaving	A Kotpad weaver who kept the full aal-root dye process working when synthetic dye was cheaper and faster in every respect, and was awarded the Padma Shri in 2018. The craft's survival is a small number of such households, not an industry.
Nannaya Bhattaraka	Kosta Andhra	Poet	Began the Telugu rendering of the Mahabharata at the Eastern Chalukya court at Rajahmundry, and is called Adi Kavi — the first poet — because the surviving Telugu literary tradition starts with him. The work was completed by two later poets across two centuries.
Siddhendra Yogi	Kosta Andhra	Dance-drama	The figure to whom the Kuchipudi tradition attributes its founding text, Bhamakalapam, and the vow that bound the village's brahmin households to perform it. His dates are not securely established and the tradition is older than any single account of it.
Sir Arthur Cotton	Kosta Andhra	Engineer	Built the Godavari anicut at Dowleswaram, completed in 1852, and the Krishna anicut at Vijayawada, converting two famine-prone deltas into canal-irrigated double-crop country. He had earlier worked on restoring the Grand Anicut on the Cauvery, and the delta still carries his name on a barrage, a museum and a large number of garlanded statues.
Kandukuri Veeresalingam	Kosta Andhra	Reformer and writer	Working from Rajahmundry, he organised the first widow remarriages in the Telugu country from 1881, campaigned against dowry and against corruption in the schools, ran a reformist press, and wrote Rajasekhara Charitramu, generally treated as the first Telugu novel.
Raghupathi Venkaiah Naidu	Kosta Andhra	Cinema	From Machilipatnam. Brought exhibition and then production to the Telugu country, built the first permanent cinemas in the region and financed early film-making — the reason Telugu cinema's lifetime achievement award carries his name.
Durgabai Deshmukh	Kosta Andhra	Public life and social work	Born at Rajahmundry. Joined the non-cooperation movement as a schoolgirl, qualified as a lawyer, sat in the Constituent Assembly, and founded the Andhra Mahila Sabha — an education and welfare institution for women that is still running.
Devulapalli Krishnasastri	Kosta Andhra	Poet	From Pithapuram in the Godavari country, and the central figure of bhava kavitvam — a romantic, interior lyric mode that broke with the classical conventions and shaped Telugu song writing for decades after.
Ghantasala Venkateswara Rao	Kosta Andhra	Singer and composer	Born in Krishna district. The defining playback voice of Telugu cinema for a generation, with a classical training he used to carry padyam recitation into film.
Vempati Chinna Satyam	Kosta Andhra	Kuchipudi	Born in Kuchipudi village. Reorganised the form for the proscenium stage, choreographed full-length dance dramas, opened a Chennai academy and trained the generation through whom Kuchipudi became a nationally taught classical dance — including, for the first time at scale, women.
Potti Sriramulu	Kosta Andhra	Activist	Died in December 1952 after a fast demanding a separate province for Telugu speakers then administered from Madras. Andhra State was constituted in 1953, and the linguistic reorganisation of Indian states followed from that precedent three years later.
Ajbar Sen	Kullu & Mandi	Ruler	Founded Mandi town on the left bank of the Beas in 1526 and moved the seat of the Suket-derived line there. The Bhutnath temple belongs to the same moment, which is why the town's oldest stonework and its street plan are the same project.
Suraj Sen	Kullu & Mandi	Ruler	Installed Madho Rai as the presiding deity of Mandi and, by tradition, made the state over to the deity and ruled as its regent. It is the clearest statement anywhere in the region of the arrangement that governs it — the deity holds the sovereignty, the human holds the office.
Jagat Singh	Kullu & Mandi	Ruler	Brought the Raghunath image to Kullu from Ayodhya and installed it as the ruling deity of the valley in expiation for a wrong, taking the position of its servant. Kullu Dussehra, in which every village devta attends on Raghunath, is a direct consequence of that act.
Sidh Singh	Kullu & Mandi	Ruler and builder	Credited with building Naggar Castle, the largest surviving kath-kuni structure in the region and the Kullu seat for roughly two centuries.
Nicholas Roerich	Kullu & Mandi	Painter and writer	Settled at Naggar in the Kullu valley in the late 1920s after his Central Asian expeditions and painted the Himalaya from there until his death. His house and gallery remain, and the estate is a working cultural centre.
Svetoslav Roerich	Kullu & Mandi	Painter	Nicholas Roerich's son, who continued the family's Indian work and whose association kept the Naggar estate in use as an art institution rather than letting it become a memorial.
Lal Chand Prarthi	Kullu & Mandi	Poet and public life	Wrote in Kullvi and Hindi and worked, from within Himachal's public life, to give Kullu Dussehra and the region's folk forms a standing beyond the valley.
Padmasambhava	Kullu & Mandi	Buddhist tradition	Tibetan Buddhist tradition holds that he departed for Tibet from Rewalsar, which is why a Mandi lake carries the name Tso Pema and draws pilgrims from across the Tibetan Buddhist world to a Himachali hill town.
Nain Singh Rawat	Kumaon	Explorer and surveyor	From Milam in the Johar valley. Trained by the Survey of India to survey clandestinely in Tibet, he walked routes in the disguise of a trader, counting a fixed pace on a rosary of one hundred beads and hiding notes in a prayer wheel, and fixed the position of Lhasa and the course of the Tsangpo. He was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's gold medal in 1877. His cousin Kishen Singh worked the same way over even longer routes.
Badri Datt Pandey	Kumaon	Journalist and political leader	Led the campaign against coolie-begar, the forced portering demanded of hill villagers, which culminated at the Bageshwar Uttarayani fair in January 1921. He also wrote Kumaun ka Itihas, still the standard local history, and was known as Kumaon Kesari.
Govind Ballabh Pant	Kumaon	Politics	From an Almora district family. Premier and then Chief Minister of the United Provinces and Uttar Pradesh and later Union Home Minister, he was among the principal advocates of state reorganisation on linguistic lines. Awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1957.
Sumitranandan Pant	Kumaon	Poet	Born at Kausani. A central figure of the Chhayavaad movement in Hindi poetry, whose landscape imagery is drawn directly from this ridge. Received the Jnanpith Award in 1968.
Jim Corbett	Kumaon	Hunter, naturalist and writer	Born in Nainital and raised at Kaladhungi in the bhabar. He shot a series of man-eating tigers and leopards across Kumaon and Garhwal, then argued for protection and photography instead, and India's first national park was later named after him. His books are also an unusually close record of hill village life.
Uday Shankar	Kumaon	Dance	Established his India Culture Centre at Almora between 1938 and 1942, bringing classical, folk and modern teachers together on one campus. Zohra Sehgal, Guru Dutt and Shanti Bardhan were among those who passed through it, and its influence on Indian stage dance far outlasted its four years.
Mohan Upreti	Kumaon	Composer and theatre director	Arranged Kumaoni folk material for the stage and, with Brijendra Lal Sah, built the Parvatiya Kala Kendra. His setting of Bedu Pako Baro Masa turned a courtship song into the region's anthem, and his production of Rajula Malushahi put the Kumaoni epic in front of national audiences.
Girish Tiwari 'Girda'	Kumaon	Poet, singer and activist	The voice of the Uttarakhand statehood movement and of every forest, dam and liquor agitation before it. He wrote in Kumaoni and Hindi, sang his poems rather than reciting them, and functioned as the movement's public conscience for four decades.
Shekhar Pathak	Kumaon	Historian	Historian of Uttarakhand and of the Chipko movement, founder of the journal and collective PAHAR, and initiator of the Askot–Arakot Abhiyan, a long transect walk across the hills repeated at ten-year intervals since 1974 to record what has changed.
Shivani (Gaura Pant)	Kumaon	Novelist	Wrote a large body of Hindi fiction rooted in Kumaoni domestic life, with women's interior lives and hill households at its centre. Her work carried Kumaoni idiom into mainstream Hindi readership.
Mahadevi Verma	Kumaon	Poet and essayist	Not from the region, but she built a house at Ramgarh in the Kumaon hills and wrote there for decades. Her essays on hill women and village life are among the sharper outside accounts of the society she settled in.
The Johar valley's expedition porters and guides	Kumaon	Mountaineering	The Johar and Darma valleys supplied the load-carriers, guides and high-altitude workers for a century of Himalayan expeditions, from the early Nanda Devi attempts onward. Individual names appear in expedition accounts more often than on title pages, which is itself part of the record.
Ram Singh Malam	Kutch	Craftsman and architect	A Kutchi sailor shipwrecked on a voyage, who spent years in Holland learning glassmaking, tilework, clockmaking and enamelling, returned, and was set to work by Maharao Lakhpatji. The Aina Mahal at Bhuj is his, and it is a rare instance of European technique arriving in India inside an Indian craftsman rather than alongside a European one.
Maharao Lakhpatji	Kutch	Ruler and patron	Patron of the Aina Mahal and of the workshops around it, and the ruler under whom Bhuj's craft establishment was assembled. The port of Lakhpat carries his name.
Maharao Pragmalji II	Kutch	Ruler	Built the Prag Mahal, the Italianate palace and clock tower that stands damaged beside the Aina Mahal.
Maharao Khengarji III	Kutch	Ruler	Ruled for over sixty years and oversaw the railway, the water works and the schools of the Kutch state, as well as the building of the Vijay Vilas Palace at Mandvi in 1929.
Shyamji Krishna Varma	Kutch	Nationalist and scholar	Born at Mandvi; a Sanskritist who took a lectureship at Oxford, founded the Indian Home Rule Society and India House in London in 1905, and published The Indian Sociologist. He died in Geneva; his ashes were brought to India in 2003 and are held at Kranti Teerth in Mandvi, in a building modelled on India House.
Mekan Dada	Kutch	Saint	A Kutchi ascetic remembered for going out into the Rann with a dog and a donkey carrying water and food to find travellers lost on the salt. His shrine at Dhrang holds an annual fair and a working langar, and the practice he is remembered for is the practice the shrine still performs.
Jesal and Toral	Kutch	Legend and devotional tradition	A Jadeja bandit and the woman who is said to have turned him to religious life. They are traditional rather than documented figures, but their joint samadhis at Anjar are a functioning shrine, several standard Gujarati bhajans are attributed to Toral, and the story has been staged and filmed repeatedly for a century.
Chandaben Shroff	Kutch	Craft development	Founded Shrujan in 1969 during a drought, on the principle that Kutchi women already possessed a skill worth paying for and needed a market rather than relief work. It became the model for the craft organisations that followed here, and she was awarded the Padma Shri.
Judy Frater	Kutch	Craft development and design education	Founded Kala Raksha at Sumrasar Sheikh in 1993 and, in 2005, a design school that teaches artisans to design for themselves rather than executing designs sent from cities. It reversed the usual relationship between designer and maker in Indian craft development.
Abdul Gafur Khatri	Kutch	Rogan painting	The best-known practitioner of Rogan painting at Nirona, from the family that kept the craft alive when it was reduced to almost nothing, and awarded the Padma Shri. He also began training women from other communities in it, which is why the craft now has more practitioners than the family that saved it.
Ismail Mohmed Khatri	Kutch	Ajrakh block printing	Ajrakh printer of Dhamadka and then Ajrakhpur, awarded an honorary doctorate by De Montfort University for his work on natural dyes. He led the move to Ajrakhpur after the 2001 earthquake, when the old village's water would no longer produce the colours.
Rinchen Zangpo	Ladakh & Zanskar	Translator and temple founder	The great translator of the second diffusion of Buddhism in the western Himalaya. He studied in Kashmir, brought Kashmiri artists and craftsmen back over the passes, and is traditionally credited with founding a large number of temples across Ladakh, Zanskar, Spiti and the wider region. The Kashmiri-style painting at Alchi and its sister temples belongs to the world he opened.
Sengge Namgyal	Ladakh & Zanskar	King	The builder king of the Namgyal dynasty — the nine-storey Leh Palace, the expansion of Hemis, and much of the monastic and civil fabric the region still uses. His reign is the one Ladakhi material culture is most visibly dated to.
Alexander Csoma de Kőrös	Ladakh & Zanskar	Philologist	A Hungarian who reached Zanskar in search of the origins of his own people, spent years at Zangla and Phuktal working with a Ladakhi lama, and produced the first Tibetan grammar and dictionary in English, published in 1834. Tibetan studies as a discipline begins in an unheated room in Zanskar.
Ghulam Rasool Galwan	Ladakh & Zanskar	Caravan guide and author	A Leh man who began as a pony boy on Central Asian expeditions and rose to be a caravan headman, and who wrote Servant of Sahibs in his own idiosyncratic English — published in 1923, and one of very few accounts of the Central Asian trade written by a Ladakhi rather than about one.
Abdul Wahid Radhu	Ladakh & Zanskar	Trader and memoirist	From a Leh Muslim family that ran the caravan trade between Ladakh, Kashmir and Lhasa; he travelled the route himself and wrote a memoir of a commerce and a world that ended in his lifetime. It is a rare first-hand record of Ladakh's Muslim mercantile society.
Kushok Bakula Rinpoche	Ladakh & Zanskar	Monk and public figure	The nineteenth Bakula Rinpoche, head of Ladakh's Gelug establishment, later India's ambassador to Mongolia, and the figure most associated with the twentieth-century reorganisation of Ladakhi monastic education. Leh's airport carries his name.
Morup Namgyal	Ladakh & Zanskar	Singer and folklorist	Sang and recorded a very large part of the Ladakhi folk repertoire through radio in Leh, and in doing so fixed in recorded form a body of song that had been transmitted only by memory.
Sonam Wangchuk	Ladakh & Zanskar	Engineer and education reformer	Founded an alternative school and campus that teaches through Ladakhi conditions and materials, and developed the ice stupa — a conical tower of stream water frozen through winter and left to melt in spring, which addresses the region's real agricultural constraint, which is not annual water but water in April.
Nawang Tsering Shakspo	Ladakh & Zanskar	Historian and folklorist	Collected and published Ladakhi folk song, oral history and cultural history in English and Ladakhi at a point when almost none of it had been written down, and helped establish the study of Ladakhi culture from inside the region.
Sheikh Ubaidullah	Lakshadweep	Religion, by tradition	The preacher to whom island tradition attributes the conversion of Lakshadweep to Islam, and whose tomb is at the Juma mosque on Andrott. The account is legend rather than documented history — the date given, the shipwreck and the dream all belong to hagiography — but the tradition itself is a real and central part of how the islands narrate themselves.
Ali Manikfan	Lakshadweep	Marine research, boatbuilding, languages	A Minicoy islander with no formal higher education who worked as a field researcher for the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, and after whom the damselfish Abudefduf manikfani is named. He rebuilt the ninth-century Arab sailing ship Sohar for Tim Severin's 1980–81 voyage to China, working from historical descriptions and sewn-plank technique, and received the Padma Shri in 2021.
P. M. Sayeed	Lakshadweep	Politics	Represented Lakshadweep in the Lok Sabha for around three decades from 1967 and served as Union Minister of Power. For a generation he was the territory's single channel to Delhi, which is what a one-seat union territory's politics tends to produce.
Hamdulla Sayeed	Lakshadweep	Politics	P. M. Sayeed's son, elected to the Lok Sabha from Lakshadweep in 2009 as one of the youngest members of that House, and again subsequently.
Mohammed Faizal P. P.	Lakshadweep	Politics	Lok Sabha member for Lakshadweep for the Nationalist Congress Party, and a central figure in the public argument over the administration's 2021 draft regulations on land use, food and local self-government.
Ashoka	Magadh	Emperor	Ruled the Mauryan empire from Pataliputra, issued the rock and pillar edicts that are the earliest deciphered Indian writing, dedicated the Barabar caves to a rival sect, and sent the mission that carried Buddhism out of India.
Chanakya (Kautilya)	Magadh	Political theorist	Associated with the founding of the Mauryan state and with the Arthashastra, a manual of statecraft, revenue and espionage of a bluntness that still surprises readers.
Aryabhata	Magadh	Mathematician and astronomer	Worked at Kusumapura, near Pataliputra. Gave a value of pi accurate to four decimal places, stated that the earth rotates on its axis, and set out a trigonometric and algebraic apparatus in verse.
Mahavira	Magadh	Tirthankara	The twenty-fourth Jain tirthankara, who taught across Magadh and died at Pawapuri; the Jain canon was transmitted in Ardhamagadhi, the region's Prakrit.
The Buddha	Magadh	Teacher	Attained enlightenment at Bodh Gaya, taught at Rajgir under the patronage of Bimbisara, and left an order whose first council met in a cave in the hills above the old capital.
Makhdum Sharfuddin Yahya Maneri	Magadh	Sufi	The Firdausi shaikh of Bihar Sharif, whose Maktubat — letters of spiritual instruction — are among the most widely read Sufi texts written in India.
Guru Gobind Singh	Magadh	Guru	The tenth Sikh guru, born at Patna, where he spent his early childhood; the takht that marks the site is one of Sikhism's five seats of authority.
Hiuen Tsang's hosts at Nalanda	Magadh	Scholars	Silabhadra and the Nalanda faculty, who taught the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang for several years — his account is the principal source for how the mahavihara actually worked.
Anugrah Narayan Sinha	Magadh	Politics	From Aurangabad; a leader of the Champaran satyagraha's follow-up work and Bihar's first deputy chief minister and finance minister, and a founder of its university and irrigation institutions.
Jagjivan Ram	Magadh	Politics	From the Shahabad country on this region's western edge; a cabinet minister across four decades and the most consequential Dalit political leader of his generation in north India.
Ram Sharan Sharma	Magadh	Historian	Wrote the standard economic and social histories of early India and taught at Patna, arguing for a materialist account of exactly the period this region is famous for.
Bindeshwar Pathak	Magadh	Social reform	Founded Sulabh International in 1970 at Patna, whose twin-pit toilet design was aimed explicitly at ending manual scavenging, and which built sanitation across thousands of Indian towns.
Rani Durgavati	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Ruler	A Chandel princess of Mahoba who married Dalpat Shah of Garha-Katanga and, after his death, governed the Gond kingdom as regent for her son. She was killed in June 1564 fighting a Mughal force under Asaf Khan near Jabalpur. The Jabalpur museum, the university and the local June observance all carry her name.
Bakht Buland Shah	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Ruler	The Gond raja of Deogarh who shifted his seat down to the plains and is credited with the founding of Nagpur. A city now read as entirely Marathi began as the administrative move of a Gond king.
Jangarh Singh Shyam	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Painter	A Pardhan Gond from Patangarh, found by a Bharat Bhavan survey team in 1981 painting on village walls and brought to Bhopal. Within a decade he had converted a bardic visual vocabulary into a studio practice on paper and canvas, trained the next generation and named it by his own hand. He died in Japan in 2001. The style is called Jangarh Kalam after him — the rare case of an Indian folk school named for a single living founder.
J. Swaminathan	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Painter and curator	Founding director of the Roopankar museum at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal, from 1982. He sent survey teams into the districts rather than waiting for artists to arrive, hung Adivasi painting on the same walls as urban modernism, and refused the folk-versus-fine distinction that would have kept Jangarh in a craft emporium.
Bhajju Shyam	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Painter	Jangarh's nephew and student; his London Jungle Book (2004) redrew a European city in the Pardhan Gond idiom, using its animal vocabulary as a way of describing an unfamiliar place. Awarded the Padma Shri in 2018.
Durgabai Vyam	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Painter and illustrator	Working with Subhash Vyam, she illustrated Bhimayana (2011), a graphic biography, entirely in the Pardhan Gond visual language — proving the style could carry sequential narrative and not only single images.
Venkat Raman Singh Shyam	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Painter	Another of the Patangarh line; his illustrated memoir Finding My Way sets out how a Pardhan bardic household became a studio, in the words of someone who made the transition.
Verrier Elwin	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Anthropologist	Settled in the Mandla district in the 1930s and wrote The Baiga (1939) and The Agaria (1942), still the fullest descriptions of bewar cultivation and of central Indian iron smelting. Much of what is knowable about the region's practice in that period exists because he wrote it down.
Kanaka Raju	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Dancer	The best-known exponent and teacher of the Gussadi dance of the Adilabad Raj Gonds, who trained successive village troupes and kept the Dandari cycle in performance. Awarded the Padma Shri in 2021.
Bhavani Prasad Mishra	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Poet	Born in the Narmadapuram district; his Satpura ke Ghane Jangal is the poem through which most Hindi readers first picture this landscape, and it is about the forest's silence rather than its scenery.
Harishankar Parsai	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Writer	Born near Hoshangabad and resident in Jabalpur for most of his life; the writer who made satire a serious prose form in Hindi and did it entirely from a small city in this region.
Subhadra Kumari Chauhan	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Poet	Settled in Jabalpur, where she wrote and where she died. Her ballad on the Rani of Jhansi is among the most widely memorised poems in Hindi.
Zainuddin Makhdum II	Malabar	Scholarship and history	Taught at Ponnani and wrote Tuhfat al-Mujahidin, an Arabic account of this coast and of the Portuguese on it — one of the earliest histories of a part of India written by someone living in it.
Kunhali Marakkar IV	Malabar	Naval command	The last of the Marakkar admirals who commanded the Zamorin's fleet against the Portuguese for most of the sixteenth century, using small fast craft against larger ships. Executed in 1600 after the alliance with the Zamorin broke down.
Qazi Muhammad of Kozhikode	Malabar	Poetry and religious scholarship	Composed the Muhyiddin Mala in 1607 — the earliest surviving work in Arabi-Malayalam, and the beginning of a written literature in a script that gave Malayalam a second readership.
Hermann Gundert	Malabar	Lexicography and printing	A Basel Mission scholar at Illikkunnu near Thalassery who published the first Malayalam newspaper, Rajyasamacharam, in 1847, wrote an early Malayalam grammar, and compiled the Malayalam–English dictionary published in 1872 that later Malayalam lexicography is built on.
Keeleri Kunhikannan	Malabar	Circus	A kalari teacher at Thalassery who opened the country's first circus training school in 1901, taking the body conditioning of kalaripayattu and applying it to acrobatics. Most of the Indian circus trade traced its performers back to this coast for the following century.
O. Chandu Menon	Malabar	Literature	A magistrate in Malabar who wrote Indulekha in 1889 — the first substantial Malayalam novel, set in a matrilineal household and arguing about it from inside.
Moyinkutty Vaidyar	Malabar	Poetry	The major poet of Mappila pattu, from Kondotty; his Badarul Munir–Husnul Jamal of 1872 is the form's best-known romance, and he is the reason Mappila verse is treated as literature rather than as folklore.
K. Kelappan	Malabar	Public life	Born near Koyilandy; led the Guruvayur satyagraha for temple entry in 1931–32 and was a central figure in Kerala's temple-entry and social reform campaigns.
A. K. Gopalan	Malabar	Politics	From Kannur; a teacher who became the first Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, and the name attached to the earliest constitutional case on preventive detention in independent India.
S. K. Pottekkatt	Malabar	Literature	Novelist and travel writer of Kozhikode, awarded the Jnanpith in 1980 for Oru Desathinte Katha, a novel that is essentially a biography of one street in his own city. His statue stands on that street.
Punathil Kunjabdulla	Malabar	Literature	A doctor from Vadakara whose Smarakasilakal brought the interior life of a Mappila household into mainstream Malayalam fiction.
M. Mukundan	Malabar	Literature	Born in Mahe; wrote the enclave into Malayalam literature in Mayyazhippuzhayude Theerangalil, a novel of a French town inside Malabar and of what happened to it in 1954.
P. T. Usha	Malabar	Athletics	From Payyoli in Kozhikode district; ran the 400 m hurdles final at the 1984 Olympics and finished fourth by one-hundredth of a second, and then built a training school on this coast that has produced a line of international athletes.
Kuvempu (K. V. Puttappa)	Malnad	Poet, novelist	Born at Kuppalli in Thirthahalli, he wrote Sri Ramayana Darshanam and the Malnad novels Kanooru Heggadithi and Malegalalli Madumagalu, and received the first Jnanpith awarded to a Kannada writer, in 1967. His formulation of the vishwa manava — the universal person a child is born as and is then narrowed into — remains widely quoted in Karnataka.
U. R. Ananthamurthy	Malnad	Novelist, critic	Born at Melige in the same taluk as Kuvempu. His novel Samskara, written in 1965, examines a Brahmin agrahara's response to a death it does not want to handle, and became the defining work of the Kannada navya movement. He received the Jnanpith in 1994.
Poornachandra Tejaswi	Malnad	Writer, naturalist, photographer	Kuvempu's son, who moved to a farm near Mudigere and wrote about the Malnad he actually lived in — its fishermen, mechanics, birds and dogs — in a plain style that broke deliberately with his father's. Karvalo and Chidambara Rahasya changed what Kannada prose could be about.
K. V. Subbanna	Malnad	Cultural organiser, publisher	Built Ninasam at Heggodu from a village drama troupe into a theatre institute, repertory, film society and publishing house, on the argument that serious culture belongs in a village rather than being carried to it. He received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1991.
Rani Chennamma of Keladi	Malnad	Ruler	Ruled the Keladi Nayaka state from Bidanur and is recorded as having sheltered the Maratha prince Rajaram in 1690 and refused to surrender him under Mughal pressure. She is a different person from the Kittur Chennamma of the plain to the north, and the two are frequently confused.
Shivappa Nayaka	Malnad	Ruler, administrator	The Keladi ruler whose land revenue settlement — the shistu — assessed holdings by soil and crop rather than by a flat rate, and is still cited locally as the standard against which later systems were judged.
Akka Mahadevi	Malnad	Poet	Born at Udutadi in the Shivamogga hills. She left marriage and household and walked east to the assembly at Kalyana, where she was examined before being admitted; her vachanas, signed Chennamallikarjuna, are among the earliest sustained bodies of women's writing in any Indian language.
Allama Prabhu	Malnad	Poet, mystic	From Balligavi in the same district, and the presiding figure of the Anubhava Mantapa at Kalyana. Two of the movement's three central figures came out of these hills and made their reputations on the dry plateau three hundred kilometres east.
Vishnuvardhana	Malnad	Ruler	The Hoysala king under whom Belur and Halebidu were begun, and under whom the dynasty moved from a hill chieftaincy on this ghat edge to control of most of southern Karnataka.
Shantala Devi	Malnad	Queen, dancer	Vishnuvardhana's queen, a trained dancer and a Jain in a Vaishnava court, and a patron of temple building in her own right. The bracket figures at Belur are popularly associated with her, which is a tradition rather than a documented fact.
Baba Budan	Malnad	Sufi figure	Traditionally credited with carrying seven coffee seeds out of Yemen and planting them on the hills near Chikkamagaluru that now bear his name. The account is traditional rather than documented, but the hills, the shrine and the first Indian coffee are all in the same place.
Vidyaranya	Malnad	Scholar, jagadguru	A Sringeri pontiff, traditionally credited in the accounts with encouraging the founding of the Vijayanagara state on the Tungabhadra. The tradition links this math to the empire that later ruled the dry plateau downstream of its own river.
Field Marshal K. M. Cariappa	Malnad	Soldier	Born at Shanivarsanthe in Kodagu, and the first Indian Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, taking charge in January 1949. He was made Field Marshal in 1986.
General K. S. Thimayya	Malnad	Soldier	Born at Madikeri, Army Chief from 1957 to 1961, and earlier chairman of the neutral repatriation commission in Korea. Kodagu, a district of a few lakh people, produced both him and Cariappa within seven years of each other.
Kalidasa	Malwa Plateau	Poet and dramatist	Associated with Ujjain throughout his work — the Meghaduta routes its cloud messenger deliberately over the city and lingers there. Ujjain has run an annual Kalidasa Samaroh of Sanskrit drama and scholarship since 1958 on the strength of the association.
Raja Bhoja	Malwa Plateau	Paramara king and author	Ruled Malwa from Dhar and is credited with Sanskrit works on poetics, architecture and astronomy, including the Samarangana Sutradhara. The plateau's memory of him is as a scholar first and a king second, which is unusual.
Hoshang Shah	Malwa Plateau	Sultan of Malwa	Moved the Malwa capital to Mandu and built the city that survives there. His marble tomb is the first of its kind in India and is the acknowledged ancestor of a much more famous one.
Baz Bahadur and Rani Roopmati	Malwa Plateau	Ruler and singer	The last independent sultan of Malwa and the singer associated with him. Their story survives as a body of Malvi and Hindi verse and as two buildings on the Mandu escarpment; Malwa fell to Akbar's forces in 1561.
Malhar Rao Holkar	Malwa Plateau	Maratha commander	Established Holkar authority over Malwa in the 1730s and made Indore, then a customs post on a crossing, into an administrative centre — the beginning of the plateau's Maratha century.
Ahilyabai Holkar	Malwa Plateau	Ruler	Governed the Holkar state for nearly thirty years from Maheshwar, funding temple, ghat and rest-house construction from Somnath to Kashi, and established the weaving that became the Maheshwari sari. She belongs to Nimar geographically and to both regions politically.
Kumar Gandharva	Malwa Plateau	Hindustani vocalist	Settled at Dewas, lost the use of one lung to tuberculosis, and rebuilt his singing around the Malwa folk melody he had spent years listening to. His nirguni Kabir remains the most widely heard version of a repertoire that is otherwise entirely oral.
Prahlad Singh Tipanya	Malwa Plateau	Folk singer	A schoolteacher from Luniyakhedi in Ujjain district who took the Malwa Kabir singing tradition from village satsangs to national and international stages, singing in Malvi with tambura and khartal. Padma Shri, 2011.
Lata Mangeshkar	Malwa Plateau	Playback singer	Born in Indore, where her father's theatre company was performing. The city keeps the claim visibly, and it is a fair one — the Holkar capital was on the Marathi theatre circuit precisely because of its Deccan ties.
Rahat Indori	Malwa Plateau	Urdu poet	An Indore poet and teacher who took the mushaira from a literary form to a mass one, and whose couplets circulate far outside the Urdu-reading public.
Johnny Walker	Malwa Plateau	Actor	Born Badruddin Jamaluddin Kazi at Indore; became Hindi cinema's defining comic actor of the 1950s and 1960s.
Ustad Amir Khan	Malwa Plateau	Hindustani vocalist	Born at Indore, and the founder of the Indore gharana of khayal — an unusually slow vilambit, a merukhand approach to phrase-building, and an influence on nearly every subsequent generation of singers.
Mukundraj	Marathwada	Poet	Credited by tradition with the Viveksindhu at Ambajogai and named as the first poet to compose in Marathi. The attribution and the dating are both contested; the claim itself is part of the region's self-description.
Sant Namdev	Marathwada	Poet-saint	A tailor by caste whose abhangs are central to the Varkari canon, and who travelled north into Punjab. Sixty-one of his compositions are included in the Guru Granth Sahib, which makes him the region's longest-running export. Tradition places his birth at Narsi in Hingoli.
Sant Janabai	Marathwada	Poet-saint	A domestic servant in Namdev's household, from Gangakhed on the Godavari, whose abhangs describe grinding, dung cakes and sweeping as the setting for the divine. Among the earliest women's voices in Marathi and the plainest.
Goroba Kaka	Marathwada	Poet-saint	The potter of Ter, whose test of other saints by tapping their heads with his clay-beater is the Varkari tradition's most repeated anecdote about spiritual maturity.
Sant Eknath	Marathwada	Poet, editor, dramatist	Produced a corrected recension of the Dnyaneshwari, wrote the Eknathi Bhagavat and the Bhavarth Ramayan, and invented the bharud — devotional argument written in the voice of society's least respectable characters. He worked entirely at Paithan.
Dasopant	Marathwada	Poet	Of Ambajogai; author of an enormous devotional corpus and of the Pasodi, a painted and written cloth scroll running to tens of thousands of verses, kept and displayed at Ambajogai.
Malik Ambar	Marathwada	Regent and administrator	Born in Ethiopia and sold into slavery, he rose to be the effective ruler of the Nizam Shahi state, founded Khadki in 1610 on the site that became Aurangabad, built its Nahr-e-Ambari water channels, and reorganised its revenue system. He also held the Mughals off with cavalry raiding rather than pitched battle for two decades.
Guru Gobind Singh	Marathwada	Guru	The tenth Sikh Guru died at Nanded in 1708, having ended the line of living Gurus by conferring authority on the Guru Granth Sahib. The takht at Nanded exists because of that event and has sustained a Punjabi community on the Godavari ever since.
Swami Ramanand Tirth	Marathwada	Public life	Led the Hyderabad State Congress through the 1938–48 period and was the principal organiser of the movement in the Marathi-speaking districts. Nanded's university carries his name.
Govindbhai Shroff	Marathwada	Public life and education	An organiser of the same movement who then spent five decades building colleges and institutions in a region that had almost none, on the argument that the schooling deficit left by 1948 was the thing that would last.
Narhar Kurundkar	Marathwada	Critic and essayist	From Nanded; the most rigorous Marathi critic of his generation, whose essays on history, caste and literature are still argued with rather than cited.
N. D. Mahanor	Marathwada	Poet	From Palaskhed under the Ajanta range; wrote the landscape and labour of dryland Marathwada into Marathi poetry and into film lyric, and farmed the same land he wrote about.
Shankarrao Chavan	Marathwada	Public administration	From Nanded; associated with the Godavari irrigation schemes, including the Jayakwadi and Vishnupuri projects that supply the region's water.
Velu Nachiyar	Marava & Ramnad	Ruler	Born a princess of Ramanathapuram and married into Sivaganga; after her husband was killed by Company troops at Kalaiyar Kovil in 1772 she took refuge at Virupachi near Dindigul under Hyder Ali, spent eight years assembling an alliance, and retook Sivaganga in 1780 — the first Indian queen to make war on the East India Company and win her state back. Her commander Kuyili is remembered in the region's oral accounts as having destroyed the enemy's armoury at the cost of her own life; the episode is community memory rather than documented record.
Periya Marudhu and Chinna Marudhu	Marava & Ramnad	Commanders and administrators	Velu Nachiyar's commanders and, after her, the effective rulers of Sivaganga. They organised the southern resistance of 1801, sheltered fighters from across the region, and were hanged together at the fort of Tiruppathur on 24 October 1801.
Muthuramalinga Sethupati	Marava & Ramnad	Ruler and builder	Completed the third corridor of the Ramanathaswamy temple, the longest temple corridor in India, on an island with no stone of its own.
Bhaskara Sethupathi	Marava & Ramnad	Ruler and patron	The Raja of Ramnad who funded Swami Vivekananda's journey to the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago, met him on his return at Rameswaram, and raised the memorial column there.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam	Marava & Ramnad	Aerospace engineer and President of India	Born at Rameswaram to a family that ferried pilgrims across the strait; led India's satellite launch vehicle and missile programmes and served as President from 2002 to 2007. He is buried at Peikarumbu, near the island.
Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar	Marava & Ramnad	Singer	From Ariyakudi in this region; fixed the modern Carnatic concert format — the running order and proportions of a kutcheri — which every vocalist has followed since.
Dakshinamurthy Pillai	Marava & Ramnad	Percussionist	The central figure of the Pudukkottai school; raised the kanjira from an accompaniment to a solo instrument and trained the generation that defined twentieth-century Carnatic percussion.
Palani Subramania Pillai	Marava & Ramnad	Percussionist	Of the same Pudukkottai lineage; a mridangam and kanjira player whose approach to accompaniment — supporting the singer rather than competing — is still taught as a principle.
Ramnad Krishnan	Marava & Ramnad	Singer	From Ramanathapuram; a Carnatic vocalist of unusual purity of intonation who taught at Wesleyan University in the United States and made some of the recordings by which the tradition was first heard abroad.
Alagappa Chettiar	Marava & Ramnad	Industrialist and educational founder	Founded the cluster of colleges at Karaikudi that became Alagappa University, along with technical and research institutions — the clearest instance of Nagarathar overseas profits being converted into local education.
Annamalai Chettiar	Marava & Ramnad	Banker and educational founder	A Nagarathar banker with houses across Burma and Malaya who founded Annamalai University in 1929 and endowed the first university department of Tamil music.
Prithviraj Chauhan	Marwar & the Thar	Ruler	The last Chauhan king of Ajmer and Delhi, whose defeat at the second battle of Tarain in 1192 opened north India to the Delhi Sultanate. His court poet Chand Bardai's Prithviraj Raso made him a legend.
Rana Kumbha	Marwar & the Thar	Ruler and builder	Ruler of Mewar credited with a very large building programme, including Kumbhalgarh and the Vijay Stambh at Chittorgarh, and a scholar of music who wrote on the subject.
Meera Bai	Marwar & the Thar	Poetry and devotion	A Rathore princess who refused the role marriage assigned her and composed bhajans to Krishna in Braj and Rajasthani that are still sung across north India.
Maharana Pratap	Marwar & the Thar	Ruler	Held out against Akbar's expansion from the Aravalli hills after the battle of Haldighati in 1576, becoming the region's enduring symbol of resistance.
Panna Dhai	Marwar & the Thar	History	The nurse who, by the Mewar chronicles, substituted her own son to save the infant heir Udai Singh II — the founding story of Udaipur's dynasty.
Amrita Devi Bishnoi	Marwar & the Thar	Conservation	Led villagers at Khejarli who clasped khejri trees to stop them being felled for a royal palace; 363 are recorded as having been killed. The event is the ancestor of the Chipko movement.
Sawai Jai Singh II	Marwar & the Thar	Ruler, astronomer, planner	Founded Jaipur in 1727 on a planned grid derived from the shilpa shastra, and built five masonry observatories across north India.
Jamnalal Bajaj	Marwar & the Thar	Business and freedom movement	Industrialist from the Sikar region, treasurer of the Congress and a close associate of Gandhi, who funded and organised much of the movement's infrastructure.
Vijaydan Detha	Marwar & the Thar	Literature	Collected and rewrote Rajasthani oral tales into literature over decades; his stories became the films Duvidha, Paheli and the play Charandas Chor.
Komal Kothari	Marwar & the Thar	Folklore	Ethnomusicologist who documented and then created a livelihood for the Langa and Manganiyar musicians internationally, effectively saving both traditions.
Allah Jilai Bai	Marwar & the Thar	Music	Maand singer of Bikaner whose recording of "Kesariya Balam" became the definitive version.
Irrfan Khan	Marwar & the Thar	Cinema	Born in Jaipur; an actor who moved between Hindi and international cinema without adjusting his register for either.
Rana Kumbha	Mewar	Ruler, builder and musicologist	Built or rebuilt a large part of Mewar's fort architecture, including Kumbhalgarh and the Vijay Stambh at Chittorgarh, and wrote on music — a commentary on the Gita Govinda and treatises on performance are credited to him. He was killed by his own son.
Rana Sanga	Mewar	Ruler	Assembled the largest Rajput confederacy of its period and lost it to Babur at Khanwa in 1527, a defeat that settled the Mughal position in north India more decisively than Panipat had.
Meera Bai	Mewar	Poetry and devotion	Born in Merta on the Marwar side and married into the Mewar ruling house at Chittor, she refused the household role that came with it and composed padas to Krishna that are still sung across north India and Gujarat. Her temple stands inside Chittorgarh fort; the tradition places her death at Dwarka.
Maharana Pratap	Mewar	Ruler	Refused the marriage alliance with the Mughal court that Amber and most of the other Rajput houses accepted, fought Man Singh I at Haldighati in 1576, and spent his remaining years operating from the hills, ruling from Chavand rather than from any of the lost forts.
Rana Punja	Mewar	Bhil chieftain	Led the Bhil contingent with Pratap in the Aravalli campaigns. The Mewar emblem carries a Bhil beside a Rajput for this reason, and the accession rite of the Maharanas involved a Bhil applying the tilak.
Bhamashah	Mewar	Minister and financier	Mewar's chief minister, who by the chronicles handed over his accumulated wealth to fund the resumption of Pratap's campaign when the state's revenues had gone. His name is still used in Rajasthan as shorthand for private money put to public use.
Maharana Raj Singh I	Mewar	Ruler	Built the Rajsamand dam as famine relief and had the Raj Prashasti cut into it, and received the Shrinathji image into Mewar in 1672 — the decision that created Nathdwara and, with it, the region's largest continuing economy of painting, dairy and pilgrimage.
Sahibdin	Mewar	Painting	The Mewar court's leading painter in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, who produced a Ragamala in 1628 and the illustrated Ramayana made for Jagat Singh I between 1649 and 1653. He signed his work, which is why the Mewar school can be dated with unusual precision.
Maharana Fateh Singh	Mewar	Ruler	Travelled to Delhi for the Durbar of 1911 and did not attend the ceremony, a decision Rajasthani tradition attributes to the poet Kesari Singh Barhath's verses urging him to stay away.
Kesari Singh Barhath	Mewar	Poetry and revolutionary politics	Wrote "Chetavani ra Chungatya", the verses addressed to Fateh Singh about the Durbar, and was imprisoned for his part in armed anti-colonial activity. His son and brother both died in custody or in the same movement.
Vijay Singh Pathik	Mewar	Peasant organising	Led the Bijolia agitation against levies on Mewar's tenants from 1916, turning a local grievance into the first sustained peasant movement in a princely state.
Manikya Lal Verma	Mewar	Politics	Founded the Mewar Praja Mandal, worked on the Bhil tracts and on bonded labour, and later became the first Chief Minister of the united Rajasthan formed in 1948.
Mohanlal Sukhadia	Mewar	Politics	Chief Minister of Rajasthan for seventeen years from 1954, through the period in which the princely states' administrations were dismantled and replaced. Udaipur's university carries his name.
Devilal Samar	Mewar	Folk arts	Founded the Bhartiya Lok Kala Mandal at Udaipur in 1952 and used it to document, train and tour Rajasthani puppetry and folk performance at a point when both were losing their patrons.
Vidyapati	Mithilanchal	Poet	Wrote in Maithili when the learned wrote in Sanskrit, and produced a body of song still performed from memory across the region. His padas influenced Bengali and Assamese Vaishnav poetry directly, and he is claimed by three literatures.
Gangesha Upadhyaya	Mithilanchal	Philosopher	Wrote the Tattvachintamani and founded Navya-Nyaya, the new logic — a rigorous analytical system that became the working method of Sanskrit scholarship across India for the next five centuries.
Mandan Mishra	Mithilanchal	Philosopher	The Mimamsa scholar of Mahishi whose debate with Shankaracharya, judged by his wife Bharati, is one of the foundational stories of Indian intellectual history.
Vachaspati Mishra	Mithilanchal	Philosopher	Wrote authoritative commentaries on all six schools of Indian philosophy, and named his best-known work Bhamati after his wife.
Jyotirishwar Thakur	Mithilanchal	Writer	Wrote the Varna Ratnakara, the earliest surviving prose work in Maithili and among the earliest in any modern Indian language — a catalogue of the world as a fourteenth-century Maithil saw it.
Jagdamba Devi	Mithilanchal	Painter	Of Jitwarpur; the first Mithila painter to receive the Padma Shri, in 1975, and one of the women whose work moved the tradition from wall to paper.
Sita Devi and Ganga Devi	Mithilanchal	Painters	Two of the founding figures of Mithila painting as a public art. Ganga Devi's late cycles, including her paintings made during cancer treatment, turned the idiom towards autobiography.
Baua Devi	Mithilanchal	Painter	Among the first generation to paint on paper in 1966–67, and still working; her naga paintings are the tradition's best-known single motif.
Baba Nagarjun (Vaidyanath Mishra)	Mithilanchal	Poet	Wrote in Maithili as 'Yatri' and in Hindi as Nagarjun; a political poet who spent his life travelling on foot and writing about famine, flood and the state.
Karpoori Thakur	Mithilanchal	Politics	From Pitaunjhia in Samastipur; twice Chief Minister of Bihar, architect of the state's reservation policy, and remembered for having died with no property to his name. Awarded the Bharat Ratna in 2024.
Maharaja Kameshwar Singh	Mithilanchal	Zamindar and patron	The last Maharaja of Darbhanga, who endowed universities, temples and hospitals across Bihar and whose estate's dissolution after 1950 reshaped the region's land economy.
Lalit Narayan Mishra	Mithilanchal	Politics	Union railway minister from Darbhanga, associated with the region's rail expansion, and assassinated at Samastipur in 1975.
James Herbert Lorrain	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Missionary and lexicographer	With F. W. Savidge, reduced Mizo to a Roman alphabet in 1894, published the first primer in 1896, and compiled the Dictionary of the Lushai Language — the reference work still consulted for older vocabulary.
Frederick William Savidge	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Missionary and linguist	Lorrain's partner in the 1894 orthography and in the grammar and dictionary work that followed. The choice of a short phonetic alphabet, rather than an Indic script, is the reason Mizo literacy spread as fast as it did.
David Evan Jones	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Welsh Presbyterian missionary	Known in Mizo as Zosaphluia; began work in the Lushai Hills in 1897 and built the school and church network through which the new alphabet reached villages. The Welsh connection is why hymn-singing, rather than any instrumental tradition, became the region's dominant musical practice.
Liangkhaia	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Historian and clergyman	Wrote Mizo Chanchin, the first substantial history of the Mizo written by a Mizo, gathering clan genealogies and migration accounts that would otherwise have stayed oral.
Hmuaki	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Composer, in oral tradition	Remembered as an early woman composer of Mizo song, and the subject of a well-known folk narrative about a singer silenced by her own community. The narrative is folklore rather than record, but it is the story the tradition tells about itself and its songmakers.
Jeremy Lalrinnunga	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Weightlifting	From Aizawl; won gold at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games and at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in the 67 kg class.
Lalremsiami	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Hockey	From Kolasib; forward for the India women's team and named FIH Rising Star of the Year in 2019, one of the clearest markers of how far the region's sporting network reaches beyond it.
Jeje Lalpekhlua	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Football	Striker for the India national team and among the most-capped players Mizoram has produced. Football is the region's mass sport, and Aizawl FC's national league title in 2017 was won by a club from a city of under three lakh people.
Rochunga Pudaite	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Translation and publishing	A Hmar from the Manipur hills who translated the New Testament into Hmar and spent his life in scripture distribution. His career is the regional pattern in one life — the people who mattered most to written culture here were translators and compilers, which is why a Kuki-Chin language with a few thousand speakers still has an orthography, a hymnal and a press.
Merak Lama Lodre Gyatso	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Monastic founder	Founded Tawang Monastery in 1680–81 at the behest of the fifth Dalai Lama, establishing the Gelugpa institution around which the belt's religious, educational and, historically, administrative life was organised.
Tsangyang Gyatso	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Sixth Dalai Lama, poet	Born at Urgelling near Tawang. His short love poems entered oral circulation across the Tibetan-speaking world and are still sung; they are the most widely known body of writing associated with anywhere in this belt.
Thangtong Gyalpo	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Bridge-builder, engineer, teacher	The Tibetan iron-chain bridge builder to whom the Chakzam near Tawang is traditionally attributed. The documentary basis for the attribution is thin, but the story is part of how the belt accounts for its own crossings.
The twelfth Tsona Gontse Rinpoche	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Monastic founder	Established Gontse Gaden Rabgyel Ling at Bomdila in 1965, giving the middle valleys a major Gelugpa monastery of their own rather than a dependency of Tawang.
Yeshe Dorjee Thongchi	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Writer	Born at Jigaon in West Kameng, of the Sherdukpen community, and writing in Assamese. Won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2005 for the novel Mauna Onth Mukhar Hriday and was awarded the Padma Shri in 2020 — the writer through whom this belt's material entered Assamese literature.
Sange Dorjee Thongdok	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Filmmaker	Directed Crossing Bridges in 2013, shot in West Kameng and made in Sherdukpen — the first feature film in the language. It won the National Film Award in the Sherdukpen category.
Temsula Ao	Naga Hills	Poet, short-story writer and ethnographer	Wrote the region's oral tradition into English prose and verse, including "These Hills Called Home", and published an ethnographic study of Ao oral literature. Received the Padma Shri in 2007 and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2013.
Easterine Kire	Naga Hills	Novelist and poet	Published the first Naga novel in English, "A Naga Village Remembered", built on the history of Khonoma, and won the Hindu Prize in 2015 for "When the River Sleeps". Her work is the principal literary route into Angami village society.
Talimeren Ao	Naga Hills	Footballer and physician	Captained India at the 1948 London Olympic Games and practised medicine in Assam and Nagaland afterwards. The stadium at Kohima and a generation of local sport are named for him.
Machihan Sasa	Naga Hills	Potter	Tangkhul master of Longpi pottery from the Nungbi villages of Ukhrul, who kept the wheel-less serpentinite-and-clay technique working and trained a generation in it. Awarded the Padma Shri in 2024.
Moa Subong	Naga Hills	Musician and instrument maker	Ao musician who devised the bamhum, a bamboo wind instrument played by humming into it — a rare instance of a new instrument entering the region's family rather than leaving it.
The Tetseo Sisters	Naga Hills	Musicians	Chakhesang siblings from Phek who perform Li, the Chokri folk-song repertoire, with the tati fiddle, and who took the form onto recordings and national stages without translating it out of its language.
Chekrovolü Swüro	Naga Hills	Archer	Chakhesang archer who competed for India at the 2012 Olympic Games — the region's traditional bow culture converted into a modern competitive discipline.
Edwin W. Clark	Naga Hills	Missionary and linguist	American Baptist who settled in the Ao hills in the 1870s and produced the first printed material in Ao, including a dictionary. The choice of the Chungli variety for the press is the reason it became the Ao literary standard.
J. H. Hutton and J. P. Mills	Naga Hills	Administrator-ethnographers	Wrote the monograph series — "The Angami Nagas", "The Sema Nagas", "The Lhota Nagas", "The Ao Nagas", "The Rengma Nagas" — that remains the densest single record of the pre-Christian village order. They are colonial documents and are read as such, but nothing since has matched their detail.
Ayya Vaikundar	Nanjil Nadu	Religious founder	Born at Swamithope, he founded what became Ayyavazhi, teaching against caste distinction and the ritual order that enforced it, and gathering a following across south Travancore. The movement produced its own scripture, the Akilathirattu Ammanai, its own worship centres and its own practice, and it remains concentrated in this district.
Marshal A. Nesamony	Nanjil Nadu	Politician	Led the campaign of the Tamil-speaking taluks of south Travancore to be transferred to Madras State, and is generally regarded as the reason Kanyakumari district exists in its present form from 1 November 1956. He was later a member of the Lok Sabha from the district he had helped create.
William Tobias Ringeltaube	Nanjil Nadu	Missionary	Established the London Missionary Society at Mylaudy from 1806, beginning the mission school and dispensary network that shaped the district's unusually high literacy and its large Protestant population, and whose successors were central to the upper-cloth agitations.
Theodore Howard Somervell	Nanjil Nadu	Surgeon and mountaineer	A member of the 1922 and 1924 Everest expeditions who then spent most of his working life as a surgeon at the mission hospital at Neyyoor, developing it into one of the largest hospitals in south India at the time. The Everest career is the footnote here; the operating theatre is not.
Sundara Ramaswamy	Nanjil Nadu	Writer	A central figure of Tamil literary modernism, who lived and wrote at Nagercoil and set his work in this landscape. He also translated Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai's Chemmeen into Tamil — a writer of this region carrying the neighbouring region's novel across the language line in person.
Nanjil Nadan	Nanjil Nadu	Writer	A Tamil novelist and short-story writer who took the region's own name as his pen name and wrote its speech, caste texture and food into Tamil fiction. Awarded the Sahitya Akademi prize for Tamil in 2010.
Jeyamohan	Nanjil Nadu	Writer	A prolific Tamil novelist and essayist from this district who also writes and is read in Malayalam, and whose fiction repeatedly takes the bilingual condition of this stretch of coast as its subject rather than its background.
Swami Vivekananda	Nanjil Nadu	Monk	Not of this region, but the reason a large part of it is on the map. His stay on the offshore rock in 1892, at the end of a walk down the length of the country and before he left for Chicago, is the event the memorial and much of modern Kanyakumari were built around.
John Richardson	Nicobar Islands	Bishop and parliamentarian	A Nicobarese from Car Nicobar who became an Anglican bishop, translated the Bible into Nicobarese — published in 1970 — and was nominated to the first Lok Sabha in 1952 to represent the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. He was imprisoned and tortured under the Japanese occupation and lost two sons in it. Padma Shri in 1965, Padma Bhushan in 1975. No single person has shaped the modern Nicobarese record more.
The Nicobarese Tribal Councils	Nicobar Islands	Community governance	The village and island councils through which customary land is held and represented, and the bodies that have publicly contested the Great Nicobar development project and the land consents attached to it. Listed collectively because that is how they act and how the record names them.
The Chowra potters	Nicobar Islands	Craft	Named collectively because the record names them collectively. Chowra's monopoly on pot-making, and the standing it gave a small island inside the group's exchange system, is one of the most-cited features of Nicobarese social organisation in the anthropological literature.
Danish and Austrian expedition surgeons and naturalists	Nicobar Islands	Early documentation	The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European attempts to settle the Nancowry harbour failed, mostly to malaria, but produced the first written vocabularies, sketches and descriptions of Nicobarese life. They are the earliest external record there is, and they were made by people whose settlements the islands outlasted.
Ahilyabai Holkar	Nimar	Ruler	Ruled the Holkar state from Maheshwar for nearly three decades, funding temple, ghat, well and rest-house construction from Somnath to Kashi out of her own privy purse, and settling weavers at Maheshwar to produce the cloth that became the Maheshwari sari. The most consequential single figure in the valley's history.
Sant Singaji	Nimar	Saint and poet	A cowherd of the Nimar country who composed devotional verse in Nimadi rather than in a literary language. His padas are still sung nightly by bhajan mandalis across the valley, and his samadhi draws the region's largest annual fair.
Tantya Bhil	Nimar	Rebel	A Bhil of the Khandwa country who fought a long guerrilla campaign against colonial revenue and forest authority in the Nimar and Satpura hills, and was hanged in 1889. Remembered locally as Tantya Mama, and now officially commemorated by the state.
Bhima Nayak	Nimar	Bhil leader	Led Bhil forces in the Nimar and Satpura country during and after the 1857 uprising; captured and deported to the Andamans. The valley's Adivasi political memory is organised around him and Tantya Bhil, not around the dynasties.
Adi Shankara	Nimar	Philosopher	Tradition places his meeting with his teacher Govindapada in a cave at Omkareshwar, and the site is treated as the beginning of his career. The claim is devotional rather than documented, and the valley makes it plainly.
Kishore Kumar	Nimar	Singer and actor	Born at Khandwa and never quiet about it — the line about eating milk and jalebi and living in Khandwa is quoted in the town as its own. His ashes were brought back here, and the anniversary is observed at his memorial.
Ramnarayan Upadhyay	Nimar	Writer	An essayist from Khandwa who wrote in Hindi while working consistently from Nimadi material — one of the few figures through whom the region's oral culture reached a reading public.
Mahadeo Prasad Chaturvedi	Nimar	Poet and translator	Rendered the Bhagavad Gita into Nimadi as Ammar Bol, regarded as the first extended literary work in the language.
Dadaji Dhuniwale	Nimar	Ascetic	Kept a perpetual fire at Khandwa; the shrine that grew around it is the largest devotional site in eastern Nimar and the fire is still tended.
Nasir Khan Faruqi	Nimar	Sultan of Khandesh	Founded Burhanpur — conventionally dated to 1388 — and made it the Faruqi capital, naming it for a Sufi of Daulatabad. The decision that put a court, a textile industry and eventually a Mughal army headquarters into the Tapti side of this region.
Richard and Sally Holkar	Nimar	Craft revival	Founded the Rehwa Society at Maheshwar in 1979 to restart the town's weaving, and later the WomenWeave handloom school. Between them they are the reason the Maheshwari sari exists as a living trade rather than a museum entry.
Medha Patkar	Nimar	Social movement	Led the Narmada Bachao Andolan from the mid-1980s, organising displaced households across the valley's submergence zone. Whatever one concludes about the dams, the movement is the single largest political fact of Nimar's last forty years.
Kanhoji Angre	North Konkan	Admiral	Commanded the Maratha navy from Kolaba and Khanderi and levied passes on European shipping along this coast for nearly three decades, defeating or evading English, Portuguese and Dutch attempts to remove him. He died undefeated at sea, and his samadhi is at Alibag.
Chimaji Appa	North Konkan	Military commander	Brother of the Peshwa Bajirao I; took Vasai from the Portuguese in 1739 after a long and costly siege, ending two centuries of Portuguese rule over the northern coast and leaving the fort as the ruin it is now.
Anandibai Joshi	North Konkan	Medicine	Born at Kalyan and married at nine, she qualified as a doctor of medicine in the United States in 1886 — the first Indian woman to do so — and died of tuberculosis the following year, aged twenty-two.
Narayan Meghaji Lokhande	North Konkan	Labour organisation	Organised Bombay's mill workers into the first Indian labour association, edited the paper Dinbandhu, and campaigned for the weekly holiday and shorter hours that the mills conceded in 1890. The industrial city's labour politics starts with him.
Jivya Soma Mashe	North Konkan	Warli painting	Took Warli painting off the wedding wall and onto paper as an everyday practice, which was a break with the ritual rule that only married women painted, and only for a wedding. His work made the form internationally legible and created the market that now sustains it.
Nissim Ezekiel	North Konkan	Poetry	Bene Israel poet and critic who made Bombay itself the subject of English-language Indian poetry, and whose ear for the city's spoken English is still the standard reference for it.
Narayan Surve	North Konkan	Poetry	Abandoned as an infant and raised by a mill worker in Girangaon; wrote the poetry of the chawl and the mill gate in Marathi, and is the reason that world has a literature written from inside it rather than about it.
Vinoba Bhave	North Konkan	Social reform	Born at Gagode in the Raigad creek country; walked some tens of thousands of kilometres across India asking landowners to donate land for redistribution in the Bhoodan movement.
Homi J. Bhabha	North Konkan	Physics and institution-building	Bombay-born Parsi physicist who founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Indian atomic energy programme, and who used the city's Parsi industrial money to build scientific institutions with it.
Datta Samant	North Konkan	Trade unionism	Led the Bombay textile strike that began in January 1982 and involved around a quarter of a million workers. The strike was not won, the mills did not reopen, and the land under them became the city's property boom — the single largest economic rupture in the region's modern history.
Kempe Gowda I	Old Mysore	Chieftain and town founder	Laid out the fortified market town of Bengaluru in 1537 as a grid of trade streets under the Vijayanagara order, and built the tanks that watered it. The four towers he is said to have set at the town's intended limits are still standing, several kilometres inside the modern city.
Hyder Ali	Old Mysore	Ruler and soldier	Rose through the Mysore army to run the state in fact if not in name, rebuilt it around a professional infantry and artillery, and began the garden at Lalbagh. His administration is the hinge between the older Wadiyar kingdom and the eighteenth-century power that fought four wars with the Company.
Tipu Sultan	Old Mysore	Ruler	Ruled from Srirangapatna until he was killed defending it in 1799. Sent an embassy to Bengal in 1785 to bring back sericulture, which is the origin of the silk economy the region still runs on, and pushed iron-cased rockets far enough that captured examples were studied in England.
Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV	Old Mysore	Maharaja	Presided over the most deliberately developmental princely state in India — hydro-electricity, the Krishnaraja Sagara, a university, a sandalwood oil factory and soap works, a sericulture department and a legislative assembly that predated most in British India. He also kept the palace painting workshop and the veena establishment on the payroll.
M. Visvesvaraya	Old Mysore	Engineer and administrator	Born at Muddenahalli on the plateau; invented the automatic gated weir before he came home, served as Dewan of Mysore from 1912 to 1918, and built the Krishnaraja Sagara. His birthday is observed as Engineers' Day in India.
Mirza Ismail	Old Mysore	Administrator	Dewan from 1926 to 1941, and the man who gave Bengaluru and Mysuru their planned avenues, park frontages and public buildings. He treated town planning as a state function at a time when almost nobody in India did.
Veena Sheshanna	Old Mysore	Musician	Palace vainika whose playing defined the Mysore school of the instrument, and a composer who wrote in both Carnatic and Hindustani idioms for a court that listened to both.
Mysore Vasudevacharya	Old Mysore	Composer	A student of the Tyagaraja lineage who spent his life in Mysuru and left several hundred compositions in Sanskrit and Telugu that remain standard concert repertoire.
K. Venkatappa	Old Mysore	Painter	Trained in the Bengal School under Abanindranath Tagore and returned to work under palace patronage, producing the Ooty and Kodaikanal landscape watercolours that hang in the gallery named for him in Bengaluru. He refused commissions he thought beneath the work, and died without selling most of it.
R. K. Narayan	Old Mysore	Novelist	Wrote fourteen novels set in the invented small town of Malgudi, assembled largely out of Mysuru, where he lived for most of his life. The books are the closest thing the region has to a continuous social record of its twentieth century.
Masti Venkatesha Iyengar	Old Mysore	Writer	Called the father of the Kannada short story, and a civil servant in the Mysore administration while he wrote. Awarded the Jnanpith in 1983.
Gubbi Veeranna	Old Mysore	Theatre	Ran the largest of the Kannada touring theatre companies out of Gubbi in Tumakuru, with elephants, hydraulic stage effects and a payroll of hundreds. Most of the first generation of Kannada film actors came through it.
Rajkumar	Old Mysore	Actor and singer	Born at Gajanur on the southern forest edge and trained in company theatre; carried the Kannada film industry for four decades and sang his own playback, which almost no leading actor of his era did.
Andal	Pandya Nadu	Poet and saint	The only woman among the twelve Alvars, from Srivilliputhur; composed the Thiruppavai and the Nachiyar Thirumozhi. The Thiruppavai is recited every morning of Margazhi across the Tamil and Telugu Vaishnava world, which makes her the most widely performed poet this region produced.
Nakkeerar	Pandya Nadu	Poet	Associated in tradition with the Madurai academy and with the argument that a poet may contradict a god on a point of grammar. Author of the Thirumurugatruppadai, the guide-poem to Murugan's six shrines.
Thirumalai Nayak	Pandya Nadu	Ruler and builder	Rebuilt much of the Meenakshi temple complex, built his own palace and the Vandiyur tank, and is credited with merging the city's Shaiva and Vaishnava festivals into the single Chithirai cycle. Most of what a visitor sees in Madurai is his.
M. S. Subbulakshmi	Pandya Nadu	Singer	Born in Madurai to a family of hereditary musicians and trained in the city; became the defining Carnatic voice of the twentieth century, sang at the United Nations in 1966, and gave away the proceeds of most of her concerts.
Madurai Mani Iyer	Pandya Nadu	Singer	Built a concert style around rhythmic drive and clean, unornamented lines, and put Tamil compositions on platforms that had preferred Telugu and Sanskrit. The style is still identifiable by name.
Ilaiyaraaja	Pandya Nadu	Composer	From Pannaipuram in the Theni hills; scored well over a thousand films and put the region's folk metres, urumi and naiyandi patterns into mainstream Indian film music, with Western counterpoint sitting on top of them.
A. Vaidyanatha Iyer	Pandya Nadu	Social reformer	Led the Meenakshi temple entry of 8 July 1939, walking into the temple with Dalit companions and forcing the question of temple access into the open in this city before it was settled anywhere in the south.
K. Kamaraj	Pandya Nadu	Administrator	Born in Virudhunagar; as chief minister expanded rural schooling on a very large scale and introduced the school midday meal that later became a national programme. He had four years of formal education himself.
Annamalai Reddiar	Pandya Nadu	Poet	Gave the kavadi chindu its literary form — verses in a swinging metre matched to a pilgrim's step, still sung on the road to Palani.
Madurai Somu	Pandya Nadu	Singer	A concert singer who kept one foot in Tamil devotional and folk repertoire and drew audiences that the strict kutcheri circuit did not.
Vere Henry Levinge	Pandya Nadu	Engineer and administrator	Retired collector who dammed a stream on the Palani plateau in 1863 to make the Kodaikanal lake, and stocked it with fish. The town's entire tourist geography is arranged around a body of water he built.
Ki. Rajanarayanan	Pandya Nadu	Writer	The founder figure of karisal ilakkiyam, the black-soil fiction of the southern dryland, who wrote in the spoken dialect of his own villages and compiled a dictionary of it.
Banwang Losu	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Teacher and script inventor	A schoolteacher from Longding district who devised an alphabet for Wancho between 2001 and 2012, working from the sounds of his own village's speech rather than from an existing script. It was accepted into Unicode in version 12.0 in March 2019, which makes Wancho one of a very small number of languages worldwide to receive a purpose-built script and international encoding within a single lifetime. Whether the script displaces Roman in everyday Wancho use is still an open question.
Lakhum Mossang	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Script inventor	Devised a script for Tangsa, a language cluster with some thirty varieties and no writing system of its own, addressing the problem of a single orthography for varieties that are not always mutually intelligible. The Tangsa script was encoded in Unicode version 14.0 in 2021.
Bisa Gam	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Singpho chief	The Singpho chief who in 1823 supplied the trader Robert Bruce with specimens of the tea the community had long been growing and curing. Bruce died the following year and his brother Charles Alexander Bruce carried the work forward; the Assam tea industry, and eventually the Indian one, descends from that transaction. The community that gave the plant away received almost nothing from what followed.
James Lowangcha Wanglat	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Politics	From Tirap; founded the People's Party of Arunachal Pradesh in 1977, the state's first regional political party, was detained under emergency-era preventive detention in 1974, and later served as a state minister. His career is the clearest instance of the frontier districts organising their own political representation rather than receiving it.
Stephen Morey	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Linguistics	The linguist whose long-term fieldwork with Tangsa, Singpho and Tai communities produced the fullest record that exists of Tangsa varieties and of the Wihu song tradition, much of it in collaboration with community members and returned to the communities as usable recordings and text.
Guru Nanak	Punjab Doabs	Founder of the Sikh tradition, poet	Born at Talwandi in the Bari Doab, worked at Sultanpur Lodhi, travelled widely and settled at Kartarpur on the Ravi, where he established a working community around collective labour, shared eating and remembrance. His compositions are in Punjabi and are the first layer of the Guru Granth Sahib.
Baba Farid (Fariduddin Ganjshakar)	Punjab Doabs	Sufi and poet	A Chishti Sufi whose Punjabi verse is among the earliest surviving in the language and is included in the Guru Granth Sahib. His shrine is at Pakpattan in Pakistan; the Indian town of Faridkot carries his name.
Guru Arjan	Punjab Doabs	Fifth Guru, compiler and builder	Compiled the Adi Granth and installed it at Amritsar in 1604, arranging its contents by musical raag and including compositions by Hindu and Muslim devotional poets alongside those of the Gurus. He founded towns, including Kartarpur in the Doaba, and was executed at Lahore.
Guru Gobind Singh	Punjab Doabs	Tenth Guru	Inaugurated the Khalsa at Anandpur Sahib on Vaisakhi 1699, gave the community its form and its articles of faith, instituted Hola Mohalla and the dhadi ballad's martial repertoire, and vested authority after him in the scripture rather than in a person.
Waris Shah	Punjab Doabs	Poet	Composed the Heer in 1766, the definitive version of Punjab's central verse romance and the work by which the language's literary register is measured. Its lines function as everyday proverbs on both sides of the border.
Bulleh Shah	Punjab Doabs	Sufi poet	Wrote kafis in plain Punjabi that attack orthodoxy, caste and self-importance in language a farmer could follow. Sung continuously since, from shrine courtyards to film soundtracks.
Maharaja Ranjit Singh	Punjab Doabs	Ruler	Unified the Sikh misls into a single state from 1801 and ruled a Punjab that ran from the Sutlej to the Khyber for four decades, with a court and army that recruited across religions. The gilding of the Harmandir Sahib and much of the region's surviving nineteenth-century building belongs to his period.
Bhai Vir Singh	Punjab Doabs	Poet and scholar	From Amritsar; wrote the first modern Punjabi novels, revived Gurmukhi publishing and effectively created a modern literary prose for the language.
Nanak Singh	Punjab Doabs	Novelist	Survived Jallianwala Bagh and later wrote a long poem about it, alongside dozens of Punjabi novels that established social realism in the language.
Amrita Pritam	Punjab Doabs	Poet and novelist	Born at Gujranwala; wrote "Ajj aakhaan Waris Shah nu", the poem addressed to the eighteenth-century poet asking him to speak for a Punjab being torn apart in 1947, which remains the text people on both sides of the border reach for. Her novel Pinjar is set in the same rupture. Awarded the Jnanpith in 1981.
Shiv Kumar Batalvi	Punjab Doabs	Poet	From Batala in Majha; wrote a lyric Punjabi of extraordinary density and a verse play, Loona, which inverted a traditional story to argue from the woman's side. He died at thirty-six and is sung more than he is read.
Gurdial Singh	Punjab Doabs	Novelist	Wrote from and about the landless and marginal rural Malwa that Punjabi literature had largely ignored. His novel Marhi Da Deeva is a landmark, and he was awarded the Jnanpith in 1999.
Surinder Kaur	Punjab Doabs	Singer	Born in Lahore; recorded Punjabi folk song — suhag, ghorian, mahiya, boliyan — for radio and disc from the 1940s, and did more than anyone else to fix the domestic women's repertoire in recorded form.
Lal Chand Yamla Jatt	Punjab Doabs	Singer	Made the one-stringed tumbi a solo instrument and a Punjabi emblem, and carried village song into the recording industry with almost none of its production.
Sobha Singh	Punjab Doabs	Painter	Born at Sri Hargobindpur in Gurdaspur and later based in the Kangra hills; painted the portraits of the Gurus and of Sohni and Heer that became the standard images reproduced in millions of Punjabi households.
Gursharan Singh	Punjab Doabs	Theatre	Took Punjabi theatre out of city halls and into village courtyards for four decades, performing without sets or ticketing, and trained a generation of rural theatre groups.
Milkha Singh	Punjab Doabs	Athlete	Orphaned and displaced by the violence of 1947, he became India's foremost sprinter of the 1950s and early 1960s and narrowly missed an Olympic medal in the 400 metres at Rome in 1960.
Jayadeva	Rarh	Sanskrit poet	Author of the Gita Govinda, the lyric cycle on Radha and Krishna that shaped devotional song and dance across India. Kenduli on the Ajay is claimed as his birthplace in Bengali tradition; a village of similar name in Odisha makes the same claim, and the question is unresolved.
Chandidas	Rarh	Vaishnava poet	The padavali poet associated with Nanoor in Birbhum, whose Bengali lyrics on Radha's love are among the oldest surviving in the language. Scholars generally hold that more than one poet wrote under the name.
Bir Hambir	Rarh	Malla king	The Bishnupur ruler who took Vaishnava initiation and began the temple-building programme that produced the town's terracotta architecture. The court patronage that founded the Bishnupur gharana of music dates from the same period.
Ramakrishna Paramahansa	Rarh	Religious teacher	Born at Kamarpukur on the Rarh's eastern edge. His teaching, recorded verbatim by a disciple in the Kathamrita, became the foundation of the Ramakrishna Mission and of a great deal of modern Hindu thought.
Bamakhepa	Rarh	Tantric ascetic	The cremation-ground ascetic of Tarapith, around whom that shrine's practice and its enormous pilgrim traffic are organised.
Rabindranath Tagore	Rarh	Poet, educationist	Founded the school at Santiniketan in 1901, expanded it into Visva-Bharati in 1921 and added the rural reconstruction institute at Sriniketan in 1922 — an attempt to build an education that started from a landscape rather than from a syllabus. The campus is now a World Heritage site.
Nandalal Bose	Rarh	Painter	Principal of Kala Bhavana and the central figure in the school of Indian modernism that grew there. He supervised the illustration of the manuscript copy of the Constitution of India.
Ramkinkar Baij	Rarh	Sculptor	Born in Bankura to a family of modest means, trained and then taught at Kala Bhavana. His Santhal Family of 1938, built in the open in cement and laterite chips, is generally counted as the first modern public sculpture in India, and he made it about the people who lived in the villages around him.
Benode Behari Mukherjee	Rarh	Painter and muralist	Made the Hindi Bhavana mural cycle on the medieval saints at Santiniketan while severely visually impaired, and continued working after going completely blind. Satyajit Ray, who had been his student, filmed him in The Inner Eye.
Kazi Nazrul Islam	Rarh	Poet and composer	Born at Churulia near Asansol. Wrote in Bengali across devotional, revolutionary and romantic registers, composed several thousand songs, and is the national poet of Bangladesh — a Rarh village poet claimed by two countries.
Nabani Das Khyapa Baul	Rarh	Baul singer	The Birbhum Baul who taught in Tagore's circle at Santiniketan and through whom the Baul repertoire entered the modern Bengali cultural mainstream.
Purna Das Baul	Rarh	Baul singer	Nabani Das's son, and the performer who took Baul singing onto international stages from the 1960s onward. He appears on the cover of Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding, which is how a Birbhum singing tradition ended up in the visual record of American rock music.
Gambhir Singh Mura	Rarh	Chhau dancer	The Purulia Chhau performer whose work brought the form to national and international audiences from the 1970s. He was awarded the Padma Shri.
Amartya Sen	Rarh	Economics	Born on the Santiniketan campus and schooled there. His work on famine, entitlement and social choice frequently returns to Bengal's 1943 famine, which fell hardest on precisely this kind of rural district.
Tallapaka Annamacharya	Rayalaseema	Poet-composer	From Tallapaka in the Kadapa country. Composed devotional songs on Venkateswara in Telugu rather than Sanskrit, over a working life at Tirumala, and is generally treated as the founder of the Telugu sankeertana tradition. Around 13,000 of his texts survive engraved on copper plates recovered from the temple; the melodies do not.
Atukuri Molla	Rayalaseema	Poet	A potter's daughter from Gopavaram in the Kadapa country who wrote a Telugu Ramayana in deliberately plain language, stating in her own preface that poetry loaded with Sanskrit compounds serves the poet and not the listener.
Sri Krishnadevaraya	Rayalaseema	Vijayanagara ruler and poet	Wrote the Telugu poem Amuktamalyada, endowed temples across this region and made repeated recorded visits to Tirumala, where his portrait sculptures stand. The empire he ruled from Hampi retreated into this country after 1565 and governed from Penukonda.
Vemana	Rayalaseema	Poet	Wrote several thousand four-line verses in the plainest spoken Telugu, attacking ritual, caste pretension and greed, each closing with the same refrain. His samadhi is at Katarupalli in the Kadapa country. He is quoted daily by people who have never read a book of poetry.
Tarigonda Vengamamba	Rayalaseema	Poet and devotee	A widowed woman of Tarigonda who wrote Telugu devotional verse and prose and secured a permanent ritual role at Tirumala against considerable opposition; the muthyala harathi performed at the close of the day's service is attributed to her.
Uyyalawada Narasimha Reddy	Rayalaseema	Chieftain	A Kurnool-country poligar who led an armed revolt against Company revenue collection in 1846–47 and was tried and executed at Koilkuntla. The rising is one of the earliest documented armed challenges to Company revenue administration in south India.
Charles Philip Brown	Rayalaseema	Scholar and administrator	A Company official posted at Kadapa who spent his own money employing scribes to collect, copy and edit Telugu manuscripts, produced a Telugu–English dictionary and a grammar, and recovered and published Vemana's verses. A substantial part of the pre-modern Telugu corpus survives because he had it copied.
Rallapalli Anantakrishna Sarma	Rayalaseema	Musicologist and scholar	From the Anantapur country; worked on the Annamacharya copper plates at Tirupati and set a large number of the recovered texts to music, which is why they can be performed at all.
Chittoor V. Nagaiah	Rayalaseema	Actor, singer and composer	Acted, sang, scored and produced in early Telugu and Tamil cinema, most durably in Thyagayya. He financed his own films, lost everything doing it, and spent his last years in small parts.
Vidwan Viswam	Rayalaseema	Poet and journalist	Wrote Pennetigatha, a long poem taking the Penna river and the drought around it as its subject — one of the few substantial Telugu literary works about the region's actual hydrology.
Sathya Sai Baba	Rayalaseema	Religious figure	Born at Puttaparthi. The institutions built around him — a university, a specialty hospital and a large drinking-water scheme for the surrounding dryland districts — reshaped a village in one of the driest parts of India into an international destination.
Neelam Sanjiva Reddy	Rayalaseema	Public office	From the Anantapur country; served as President of India from 1977 to 1982, and earlier as Speaker of the Lok Sabha.
Ahmed Raza Khan (Ala Hazrat)	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Islamic scholar	Wrote and taught at Bareilly, and gave his name to the Barelvi school — the strand of South Asian Sunni Islam centred on devotion to the Prophet and on the shrines, and today the majority tradition in much of the subcontinent.
Hafiz Rahmat Khan	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Ruler	Regent of the Rohilla state and its principal builder, killed at the battle of Miranpur Katra in 1774, which ended Rohilkhand's independence and led to the founding of Rampur as its remnant.
Ustad Wazir Khan	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Musician	Court musician at Rampur and holder of the Senia instrumental tradition; his teaching of Allauddin Khan is the link through which that lineage reached Maihar, and from there Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar.
Ustad Inayat Hussain Khan	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Musician	Founded the Rampur-Sahaswan gharana of khayal singing at the Rampur court, a school defined by full-voiced delivery and elaborate taan work.
Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Musician	Of the Rampur-Sahaswan line, born at Badaun; a teacher whose students included several generations of Hindi film and classical singers.
Ustad Rashid Khan	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Musician	Born at Sahaswan in Badaun; the most widely heard khayal singer of his generation, and the reason the gharana's name is familiar far outside classical audiences.
Jigar Moradabadi	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Poet	Among the most popular Urdu ghazal poets of the twentieth century, and a mushaira performer whose recitation style shaped how the ghazal is heard.
Shakeel Badayuni	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Poet and lyricist	From Badaun; wrote Urdu ghazal and, with the composer Naushad, some of the most durable Hindi film songs of the 1950s and 1960s.
Kamal Amrohi	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Filmmaker	From Amroha; wrote and directed Mahal and Pakeezah, and brought the qasbah Urdu idiom of this region into Hindi cinema.
Jaun Elia	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Poet	Born at Amroha and later in Karachi; a poet whose reputation has grown steadily since his death and whose Amrohvi family produced three generations of Urdu writers.
Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqulla Khan	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Revolutionaries	Both from Shahjahanpur, both hanged in December 1927 for the Kakori train action — and remembered together, as a Hindu and a Muslim from the same town in the same conspiracy.
Begum Hazrat Mahal's Rohilla allies and the 1857 leadership	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Rebellion	Khan Bahadur Khan, grandson of Hafiz Rahmat Khan, led the 1857 government at Bareilly for nearly a year — the longest-held rebel administration in the region.
Narsinh Mehta	Saurashtra	Poet	A Nagar Brahmin of Junagadh usually treated as the first poet of Gujarati. His padas are still sung in bhajan gatherings, and "Vaishnav jan to tene kahiye" — a definition of a good person written entirely as a list of behaviours — became the best-known Gujarati poem in the world.
Zaverchand Meghani	Saurashtra	Folklorist, poet and journalist	Born at Chotila; walked the peninsula collecting oral literature from Charan and village singers and published it as Saurashtra ni Rasdhar, Radhiyali Raat and Sorathi Baharvatiya. Almost everything now known as Saurashtra folk literature reaches us through his transcriptions, which makes his editorial hand part of the record.
Bhagvatsinhji of Gondal	Saurashtra	Ruler and lexicographer	Commissioned and drove the Bhagvadgomandal, a nine-volume Gujarati encyclopaedic dictionary covering some two and a half lakh words, compiled over decades and published from 1944. He also trained in medicine and wrote on Ayurveda.
Dayanand Saraswati	Saurashtra	Religious reformer	Born at Tankara in Morbi; founded the Arya Samaj in 1875 on a programme of Vedic authority, rejection of image worship and the reform of caste and gender practice.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi	Saurashtra	Lawyer and public figure	Born at Porbandar and schooled at Rajkot and Bhavnagar. His vegetarianism, his fasting practice and much of his moral vocabulary come out of a Kathiawadi Vaishnav household in close contact with Jain teaching, which is a regional inheritance before it is anything else.
Surasinhji Gohil "Kalapi"	Saurashtra	Poet	Ruler of the small state of Lathi and a Gujarati romantic poet who died at twenty-six. Kalapi no Kekarav remains in print and his lines are quoted in ordinary speech.
Ranjitsinhji	Saurashtra	Cricketer and ruler	From Sarodar near Jamnagar; played for Sussex and England and is credited with the leg glance, a stroke that redirected pace rather than opposing it. He later ruled Nawanagar and rebuilt Jamnagar, and the Ranji Trophy carries his name.
Dula Bhaya Kag	Saurashtra	Charan poet and singer	A Charan of Majadar in Bhavnagar whose Kag Vani brought the duha and bhajan repertoire into print and onto record while keeping its oral metre intact.
Hemu Gadhavi	Saurashtra	Folk singer and broadcaster	A Charan singer who worked at All India Radio in Rajkot and used it to put dayro, duha and loksahitya on air, which is how the repertoire reached listeners outside the fair circuit. He died at thirty-six.
Ai Shri Sonal Ma	Saurashtra	Charan saint and reformer	Of Madhada in the Gir country; venerated across Charan households and remembered chiefly for pushing the caste away from traga, dowry and infant marriage from inside its own religious authority.
Diwaliben Bhil	Saurashtra	Folk singer	From the Junagadh country; sang Gujarati folk and garba repertoire on record and on radio, and received the Padma Shri. She came to singing from domestic work and never trained formally.
Manishankar Bhatt "Kant"	Saurashtra	Poet	Born at Chavand in Amreli; brought the khandkavya, a compact narrative lyric, into Gujarati and is read as one of the language's most technically exact poets.
Mamang Dai	Siang & Adi Belt	Poet and novelist	From Pasighat, and the writer through whom Adi material — origin narrative, river, the moral weight of landscape — entered Indian English literature. The Legends of Pensam (2006) and The Black Hill (2014), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2017; Padma Shri in 2011; also the author of a working account of the state's food.
Talom Rukbo	Siang & Adi Belt	Religious reformer	An Adi who set out to give Donyi-Polo a congregational form it had not previously had — a first dedicated worship space in 1968, the Donyi-Polo Yelam Kebang as a central body in 1986, standardised images in place of bamboo altars, and written prayer. The result is argued over: supporters see consolidation, critics see a shift towards Hindu organisational form.
Daying Ering	Siang & Adi Belt	Public life	An Adi leader from the Siang who represented the frontier in Parliament in the decades after independence, at a time when almost no institutional channel existed between these villages and Delhi. The wildlife sanctuary on the braided Siang below Pasighat carries his name.
Lummer Dai	Siang & Adi Belt	Novelist	One of the first novelists from Arunachal Pradesh, who wrote in Assamese rather than in Adi because that was the literary language available to him — a fact that says most of what needs saying about the hill-and-valley relationship in the mid-twentieth century.
Verrier Elwin	Siang & Adi Belt	Anthropology and administration	Adviser for tribal affairs on the North-East Frontier and the person most responsible for the policy that kept outside settlement and missionary activity out of these valleys in the 1950s. His collections of Adi and neighbouring myth remain the largest published body of the material, and his approach has been criticised since as protective to the point of paternalism.
Moji Riba	Siang & Adi Belt	Documentation and film	A Galo film-maker and researcher who founded a centre for cultural documentation in Arunachal and won a Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2008 for recording the state's oral traditions and ritual calendars while the last full practitioners were alive.
Tenzing Norgay	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Mountaineering	Reached the summit of Everest with Edmund Hillary in 1953 and then spent the rest of his working life in Darjeeling as the first director of field training at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, which turned a single ascent into an institution and a profession for a generation of hill climbers.
Thutob Namgyal	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Ruler and chronicler	The ninth Chogyal, who with Maharani Yeshay Dolma compiled the History of Sikkim in 1908 — the first sustained written account of the kingdom's own past, assembled from monastic records and oral genealogy.
Te-ongsi Sirijunga Xin Thebe	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Scholar and language reviver	Revived the Limbu script, taught it with the Mundhum across Limbuwan and west Sikkim, and was killed in west Sikkim in the 1740s. The script now carries his name, and its twentieth-century revival began from the manuscripts he left.
Sarat Chandra Das	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Tibetology	Travelled into Tibet in 1879 and 1881 and compiled a Tibetan–English dictionary that remained standard for a century, working from Darjeeling — which is how this ridge, rather than any metropolitan university, became the first centre of Tibetan studies in India.
Gergan Dorje Tharchin	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Publishing	Printed the Tibet Mirror at Kalimpong from 1925 to 1963 — the first sustained Tibetan-language newspaper, set and printed on a hand press in a hill town, and for decades the main source of outside news reaching Lhasa.
Agam Singh Giri	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Poetry	The Darjeeling poet who put the condition of the Indian Nepali — labour, belonging and the sense of being read as foreign at home — at the centre of modern Nepali verse in India.
Indra Bahadur Rai	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Fiction and criticism	Novelist, short-story writer and critic from Darjeeling, awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for Nepali, and the driving figure behind Leela Lekhan, the region's own literary-theoretical movement.
Parijat	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Fiction and poetry	Born in Darjeeling and later based in Kathmandu; her novel Shirishko Phool changed the register of Nepali fiction and made the interior life of a woman its subject.
Lain Singh Bangdel	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Painting and art history	Born in the Darjeeling hills; introduced modernist painting to Nepali art and then documented the theft of Himalayan stone sculpture in a series of books that made the trade internationally visible.
Danny Denzongpa	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Film	From Sikkim; a four-decade career in Hindi cinema and the first performer from the eastern Himalaya to be a household name across India, who also recorded Nepali songs at the height of his film work.
Bhaichung Bhutia	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Football	From Tinkitam in south Sikkim; captained India, played professionally in England, and made football the sport through which the eastern Himalaya is visible in Indian public life.
Prajwal Parajuly	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Fiction	From Gangtok; writes in English about Nepali-speaking lives across Sikkim, Darjeeling, Nepal and the diaspora, a subject Indian English fiction had largely left alone.
Narmadashankar Dave "Narmad"	South Gujarat Littoral	Poet and lexicographer	From Surat; wrote the first Gujarati dictionary, the Narmakosh, argued in prose for social reform, and composed "Jai Jai Garvi Gujarat", which functions as the language's anthem. He is usually treated as the point at which Gujarati prose becomes modern.
Nandshankar Mehta	South Gujarat Littoral	Novelist and educationist	A Surat schoolmaster who wrote Karan Ghelo in 1866, generally counted as the first novel in Gujarati, and wrote it while running a school rather than as a literary professional.
Dadabhai Naoroji	South Gujarat Littoral	Economist and public figure	Born at Navsari; developed the drain-of-wealth argument in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, using trade and revenue figures to make an economic case that had until then been made only morally. He was also the first Indian elected to the British House of Commons.
Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata	South Gujarat Littoral	Industrialist	Born at Navsari into a priestly family; built the textile mills, the hotel and the plans for the steel works and the research institute that his successors completed. His ancestral house in Navsari is still standing.
Meherji Rana	South Gujarat Littoral	Zoroastrian priest	High priest of Navsari, summoned to Akbar's court in 1578 to explain Zoroastrian practice during the emperor's religious discussions. The Navsari library that carries his name, founded in 1872, holds one of the great collections of Zoroastrian manuscripts.
Bahman Kaikobad Sanjana	South Gujarat Littoral	Priest and chronicler	Wrote the Qissa-i-Sanjan at Navsari in 1599, the verse account of the community's flight from Iran and landing at Sanjan. It is the only narrative source for the migration and was composed centuries after it, which is the central problem in Parsi historiography.
Morarji Desai	South Gujarat Littoral	Administrator and statesman	Born at Bhadeli in Valsad district; a career that ran from the provincial civil service to the office of prime minister, and a lifelong public advocate of naturopathy and prohibition.
Sam Manekshaw	South Gujarat Littoral	Soldier	Field Marshal, and one of only two Indian officers to hold that rank. He was born in Amritsar, but his family were Parsis of Valsad who had moved north — the coast's diaspora working in the ordinary direction.
Jivya Soma Mashe	South Gujarat Littoral	Warli painter	Worked at Ganjad, on the Konkan side of the Warli country whose Gujarat half lies in the Dangs and Valsad. He was the first to paint Warli on paper and canvas for a market rather than on walls for a rite, which is why the tradition has a public name at all — and also why its ritual and commercial forms have since diverged.
Zinabhai Ratanji Desai "Snehrashmi"	South Gujarat Littoral	Poet	From Chikhli in Navsari district; brought the haiku into Gujarati and wrote several hundred of them, along with short stories and an autobiography.
Bhulabhai Desai	South Gujarat Littoral	Lawyer	Born at Valsad; one of the leading advocates of his generation at the Bombay bar, best remembered for the defence he led in the Red Fort trials of 1945.
Vallabhbhai Patel	South Gujarat Littoral	Lawyer and administrator	Born in Central Gujarat rather than here, but he acquired the title Sardar at Bardoli in 1928 while leading the campaign against a revenue increase — which is why a taluka town on this estuary carries a national reputation.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak	South Konkan	Politics and journalism	Born at Chikhali in Ratnagiri district and schooled partly in Ratnagiri town, where his birthplace is kept as a memorial. He turned the Ganesh festival from a household observance into a public, organised one — the single decision that most shaped how this region's biggest festival now looks.
Dhondo Keshav Karve	South Konkan	Education and social reform	From Murud in Dapoli taluka; married a widow in 1893 when doing so cost a man his social standing, founded a home and then a school for widows, and in 1916 established India's first university for women. Awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1958, in his hundredth year.
Keshavsut	South Konkan	Poetry	Krishnaji Keshav Damle, born at Malgund near Ganpatipule, is treated as the founder of modern Marathi poetry — the point at which the language's verse stopped being devotional or courtly and became personal and secular. His house at Malgund is a memorial.
Sane Guruji	South Konkan	Writing and social reform	Pandurang Sadashiv Sane, born at Palgad in Dapoli taluka; wrote Shyamchi Aai, among the most widely read Marathi books ever published, and fasted in 1947 to force the opening of the Pandharpur temple to all castes.
Mangesh Padgaonkar	South Konkan	Poetry	Born at Vengurla; one of the three poets whose recital-and-song performances in the 1960s and 1970s took Marathi poetry to a mass audience outside the literary establishment.
Machhindra Kambli	South Konkan	Theatre	Actor and producer whose staging of Gangaram Gavankar's Vastraharan ran for thousands of performances and made Malvani a language of the commercial Marathi stage rather than a comic accent within it.
Gangaram Gavankar	South Konkan	Playwriting	Wrote Vastraharan, a play about a village troupe trying to stage a mythological, entirely in Malvani. It is the reason a generation of Malvani speakers stopped apologising for their speech.
Parshuram Gangavane	South Konkan	Chitrakathi and puppetry	Kept the Thakar Chitrakathi and puppetry traditions of Pinguli alive through decades when there was no audience for them, trained his family in the forms, and built a museum and performance space in the village around the surviving pothis. Nationally honoured for the work.
Madhu Dandavate	South Konkan	Politics	Represented Rajapur in Ratnagiri district in Parliament for five terms; as railway minister he pushed the sanction of the Konkan Railway, the single decision that changed this region's relationship to the rest of the country, and introduced the cushioned second-class sleeper berth that every Indian traveller has since slept on.
B. R. Ambedkar	South Konkan	Social reform, law and the Constitution	Born at Mhow into a Mahar family whose village was Ambadawe in Mandangad taluka on this coast, in the military service tradition that offered one of the few routes out of the Konkan's caste order. The village keeps a memorial, and the region's rigid land tenure and its army recruitment are both part of the background to his politics.
Upendra Bhanja	South Odisha & Ganjam	Poet	Born at Kulagarh near present-day Bhanjanagar into the Ghumsur branch of the Bhanja family, and the central figure of Odia riti poetry. He wrote under formal constraints of extraordinary severity — Baidehisha Bilasa has every line beginning with the same syllable — and compiled Geetabhidhana, an early Odia lexicon. His texts are still the core repertoire of Odissi music, which means a Ganjam poet supplies the words for a coastal Odisha classical tradition.
Dhananjaya Bhanja	South Odisha & Ganjam	Poet and ruler	Upendra's grandfather and a Ghumsur ruler who wrote in the same ornate register. The Ghumsur court is the rare case of a small hill-edge estate producing two generations of a language's canonical poets.
Krushna Chandra Gajapati Narayan Deo	South Odisha & Ganjam	Ruler and public figure	The Paralakhemundi ruler who organised and financed the case for a separate Odia-speaking province, argued it before the Simon Commission and the Round Table Conferences, and saw it created in 1936. The campaign was run from the hill edge of this region rather than from the Odia heartland, because it was this region that stood to be divided.
Madhusudan Das	South Odisha & Ganjam	Lawyer and organiser	Founder of the Utkal Sammilani in 1903, the body that made the case for uniting Odia-speaking tracts then split between three administrations. His work is the reason the Ganjam question was a question at all.
The Sora shamans documented at Puttasing and the Gajapati hills	South Odisha & Ganjam	Oral tradition	Not one person but a lineage of practitioners whose funerary dialogues — in which the shaman speaks in the voice of a named dead person and is argued with by the family — were recorded and published in detail by anthropologists from the 1970s onwards, giving this region one of the most closely documented oral traditions in South Asia.
Bhanja-era mural painters of Buguda	South Odisha & Ganjam	Painting	Anonymous, and known only through the work: the Ramayana cycle painted on the wooden ceiling and walls of the Biranchi Narayan temple, which is the largest surviving Odia wall-painting programme outside manuscript illumination.
Bonbibi	Sundarbans	Forest deity	Not a historical person but the region's central cultural institution. She is petitioned by Hindus and Muslims in the same words at the same shrines, is depicted in Muslim dress and worshipped with Hindu ritual, and her story ends in a division of the forest with the tiger-lord rather than in his defeat — a settlement, not a conquest, which is precisely how the people who go into the forest describe their own position.
Dakshin Rai	Sundarbans	Tiger-spirit and forest lord	The Brahmin lord of the southern forest who takes the form of a tiger. He is not eliminated from the cult after losing to Bonbibi; he is worshipped alongside her, because the forest is understood to be his and the human claim on it to be conditional.
Munshi Mohammad Khater	Sundarbans	Poet	Author of the version of the Bonbibi Johuranama most widely printed and recited. Composed in Bengali dwipadi payar with Perso-Arabic vocabulary, it turned an oral forest cult into a fixed text that a village performer could buy for a few rupees at a market stall.
Sir Daniel Mackinnon Hamilton	Sundarbans	Estate builder and cooperative organiser	Bought and leased islands around Gosaba from 1903 and cleared, embanked and settled them on cooperative principles, running schools, a cooperative bank and dispensaries, and issuing his own estate currency notes for use within it. The settlement pattern of a large part of the polder belt is his.
Tushar Kanjilal	Sundarbans	Teacher and rural development organiser	Headmaster at Rangabelia on Gosaba, and with the Tagore Society for Rural Development built one of the earliest large women's cooperative and health networks in the islands, working on drinking water, embankments and handicraft income rather than on relief.
Amitav Ghosh	Sundarbans	Novelist	His novel The Hungry Tide (2004) put the Bonbibi cult, the tide country and the settlement history in front of a large readership, and did so accurately enough that it is now routinely cited as an entry point to the region by people who work there.
Annu Jalais	Sundarbans	Anthropologist	Her fieldwork on the Sundarbans, published as Forest of Tigers, is the standard ethnographic account of how islanders understand the relationship between people and tigers, and of the Bonbibi cult as a working framework rather than a folkloric survival.
The village bauley	Sundarbans	Ritual office	The gunin or bauley who leads a forest party, recites the Bonbibi formulae and draws the line the party may not cross is a recognised office rather than an individual reputation. Named practitioners are known island by island, and the role is transmitted by apprenticeship.
Ganapati Deva	Telangana	Kakatiya ruler	Presided over the largest phase of tank construction on the plateau and over the Motupalli port charter that guaranteed foreign traders' goods against seizure — an unusually explicit medieval commercial guarantee.
Rudrama Devi	Telangana	Kakatiya ruler	Succeeded her father and ruled in her own right, issuing inscriptions under the male regnal name Rudradeva Maharaja. Marco Polo's account of the kingdom, written of the period just after her reign, describes a realm governed by a widowed queen.
Jayapa Senani	Telangana	General and dance theorist	Ganapati Deva's elephant-corps commander and the author of the Nrittaratnavali, a Sanskrit treatise that documents regional and folk dance alongside the classical repertoire. It is the textual source used to reconstruct Perini.
Palkuriki Somanatha	Telangana	Poet	Wrote the Basava Purana and Panditaradhya Charitra in Telugu dwipada — a deliberately plain two-line metre chosen so that Veerashaiva material could be recited by people who were not court audiences.
Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah	Telangana	Ruler and poet	Founded Hyderabad in 1591 and built the Charminar. He is generally credited with the first compiled divan of Urdu (Deccani) poetry, and his subject matter — the city, its monsoon, its festivals, its women — was concrete and local at a time when Persian convention was neither.
Mah Laqa Bai Chanda	Telangana	Poet and courtesan	The first woman to have a full divan of Urdu poetry compiled, the Gulzar-e-Mahlaqa. She was also a landholder, a patron of scholarship and a mounted attendant at court, and endowed the library and complex around her tomb at Moula Ali.
Bhadrachala Ramadasu (Kancherla Gopanna)	Telangana	Poet-composer	Built the Bhadrachalam temple and wrote Telugu keertanas in a direct, complaining, first-person voice that entered the Carnatic repertoire and never left it.
Sarojini Naidu	Telangana	Poet and public figure	Born and raised in Hyderabad; published English verse from the 1890s and became the first Indian woman to preside over the Indian National Congress and later a state governor.
Suravaram Pratapa Reddy	Telangana	Writer, editor and historian	Edited the Golconda Patrika and compiled Golkonda Kavula Sanchika in 1934 — an anthology of some 350 poets from these districts, assembled specifically to refute the assertion that the region produced no Telugu literature. His Andhrula Sanghika Charitra remains a standard social history.
Makhdoom Mohiuddin	Telangana	Urdu poet	A central figure of the progressive Urdu movement in Hyderabad; his ghazals and nazms were widely set to music and are still sung.
Kaloji Narayana Rao	Telangana	Poet	Wrote in the spoken Telangana idiom rather than the literary standard, at a time when doing so was treated as a solecism. His birthday, 9 September, is observed as Telangana Language Day, and he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1992.
P. V. Narasimha Rao	Telangana	Scholar, translator and administrator	A polyglot from Karimnagar who translated Vishwanatha Satyanarayana's Veyipadagalu into Hindi and Marathi fiction into Telugu, and later served as Prime Minister of India from 1991 to 1996.
Dasarathi Krishnamacharya	Telangana	Poet and lyricist	Brought the vocabulary and cadence of plateau Telugu into Telugu film lyric, and translated the Persian quatrains of the Deccan into Telugu verse.
C. Narayana Reddy	Telangana	Poet	Awarded the Jnanpith in 1988 for Viswambhara. He worked simultaneously as an academic poet and as a prolific film lyricist, which is why his lines are quoted by people who have never read the book.
P. V. Sindhu	Telangana	Badminton	From Hyderabad; Olympic silver in 2016 and bronze in 2020, and world champion in 2019 — the most visible product of the Gopichand academy, which made the city the centre of Indian badminton training.
Mahendravarman I	Tondaimandalam	Pallava king, poet and patron	Began the practice of cutting temples directly into living rock in this country, with pillared cave mandapas at Mandagapattu and elsewhere — an inscription of his boasts of building without brick, timber, metal or mortar. He also wrote the surviving Sanskrit farce Mattavilasa Prahasana, which mocks the religious establishments of his own capital.
Narasimhavarman I (Mamalla)	Tondaimandalam	Pallava king	The reign the shore town is named for, in which whole temples were carved downward out of standing boulders as monoliths — the rathas — an intermediate step between excavation and construction that exists almost nowhere else.
Rajasimha (Narasimhavarman II)	Tondaimandalam	Pallava king	Built in cut and stacked stone — the Shore Temple and the Kailasanathar at Kanchipuram — completing the move from carving to construction and fixing the plan and elevation that later southern temple architecture worked from.
Ramanuja	Tondaimandalam	Philosopher	Born at Sriperumbudur on this plain; systematised Vishishtadvaita, reorganised temple administration at Srirangam and further west, and pushed for wider access to temple worship. The Vaishnava institutional order across the south still runs on arrangements attributed to him.
Sekkizhar	Tondaimandalam	Poet and minister	From Kunrathur near Chennai; wrote the Periya Puranam, the lives of the sixty-three Shaiva saints, which became the twelfth book of the Tamil Shaiva canon and the source of the Mylapore procession.
Ananda Ranga Pillai	Tondaimandalam	Merchant and chief dubash	Chief interpreter and commercial agent to the French governor Dupleix, and the author of a diary kept for decades that is one of the most detailed accounts of eighteenth-century south Indian commercial and political life written by an Indian participant.
Veena Dhanammal	Tondaimandalam	Musician	A Madras veena player and singer whose slow, ornamented, deliberately unshowy style became a reference point for twentieth-century Carnatic music through the students and descendants who carried it.
Subramania Bharati	Tondaimandalam	Poet	Spent a decade in exile in the French enclave from 1908, writing much of his major work there beyond the reach of British sedition law. He rebuilt Tamil poetry in plain contemporary language, and the house he lived in is preserved.
Sri Aurobindo	Tondaimandalam	Philosopher	Arrived in the French enclave in 1910 and remained for forty years, writing The Life Divine and Savitri; the community that formed around him became the ashram that still shapes a large part of the town.
Mirra Alfassa (the Mother)	Tondaimandalam	Organiser and teacher	Ran the Sri Aurobindo Ashram from the 1920s, built its school and its workshops, and founded Auroville in 1968 as a planned international township north of the town.
Rukmini Devi Arundale	Tondaimandalam	Dancer and institution builder	Founded Kalakshetra in Madras in 1936, which took the sadir repertoire of the temple dancer lineages onto the concert stage and into a formal curriculum. The reform is celebrated and contested in roughly equal measure and both positions are worth hearing.
M. S. Subbulakshmi	Tondaimandalam	Singer	Born in the Vaigai country and resident in Madras for most of her life; her recordings of the Venkatesa Suprabhatam and the Bhaja Govindam are played daily in millions of households, which is a distribution no other Carnatic musician has had.
S. Muthiah	Tondaimandalam	Historian and columnist	Wrote the modern history of Madras in weekly instalments for decades, and is the reason a great deal of the city's nineteenth- and twentieth-century record was collected before the buildings that held it came down.
Marthanda Varma	Travancore & Kuttanad	Ruler	Consolidated the small Venad principalities into Travancore, defeated a Dutch East India Company force at Colachel in 1741, and in 1750 performed the Thrippadidanam, making the kingdom over to Sree Padmanabha and reconstituting his own dynasty as the deity's servants. Every later Travancore institution is built on that legal fiction.
Eustachius De Lannoy	Travancore & Kuttanad	Soldier	The Dutch commander captured at Colachel who then spent three decades rebuilding the Travancore army on European lines with drilled infantry and artillery, and who is buried at Udayagiri fort. The state that later resisted Mysore was largely his construction.
Velu Thampi Dalawa	Travancore & Kuttanad	Administrator and rebel	Travancore's dalawa, who reformed revenue collection and then turned on the British subsidiary alliance with the Kundara Proclamation of 1809, calling on the country to rise. He died by his own hand rather than be taken.
Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma	Travancore & Kuttanad	Ruler and composer	Reigned from 1829 and left several hundred Carnatic and Hindustani compositions, drew Vadivelu of the Thanjavur quartet to his court, and presided over the codification of the Mohiniyattam repertoire. A ruling monarch with a standing place in the concert repertoire is close to unique.
Ayyankali	Travancore & Kuttanad	Social reformer	Born at Venganoor into the Pulaya community, he broke the ban on lower-caste use of public roads by driving a bullock cart down one in 1893, founded the Sadhu Jana Paripalana Sangham, forced open school admission through an agricultural labourers' strike, and sat in the Travancore legislature.
Sree Narayana Guru	Travancore & Kuttanad	Philosopher and reformer	Born at Chempazhanthy, he consecrated a Siva image at Aruvippuram in 1888 in defiance of the rule that only Brahmins could do so, and left a body of writing arguing one caste, one religion, one god for humankind. His mutt at Sivagiri remains the centre of the movement he began.
Mannathu Padmanabhan	Travancore & Kuttanad	Social organiser	Founded the Nair Service Society at Changanassery in 1914 and built it into an institutional network of schools and colleges. He also joined the Vaikom Satyagraha of 1924–25 over temple-road access, which is the point at which Travancore's caste question became a national one.
Accamma Cherian	Travancore & Kuttanad	Independence activist	Led a mass march to the Travancore ruler's palace in 1938 demanding the lifting of the ban on the State Congress, and offered herself to be shot first when troops were ordered to fire. She later headed the State Congress herself.
Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai	Travancore & Kuttanad	Novelist	Wrote from his own village in Kuttanad and made its labour, land and water the subject of Malayalam fiction — Randidangazhi on the tenant farmers, Chemmeen on the coastal fishery, and Kayar on the century-long history of land in the region. Awarded the Jnanpith in 1984.
Kunchan Nambiar	Travancore & Kuttanad	Poet and performer	Invented Ottamthullal while attached to the Ambalappuzha temple, writing in a Malayalam plain enough that no Sanskrit was needed to follow the satire, and aiming it squarely at the landlords and officials in the audience.
O. N. V. Kurup	Travancore & Kuttanad	Poet and lyricist	Born at Chavara in Kollam, he wrote several hundred film lyrics alongside a body of poetry marked by an early Marxist commitment and a later ecological one, and received the Jnanpith in 2007.
Dhanya Manikya	Tripura Hills & Plains	Ruler and builder	Built the Tripura Sundari temple at Udaipur in 1501 and put the region's Shakta pilgrimage geography on a permanent footing. The dynastic chronicle, the Rajmala, took its lasting form in Bengali verse under his reign.
Bir Chandra Manikya	Tripura Hills & Plains	Ruler, photographer and patron	Patron of Rabindranath Tagore from the poet's early career, and an accomplished photographer at a time when the practice was barely two decades old anywhere in India. His patronage is why a Bengali literary relationship with this court exists at all.
Radha Kishore Manikya	Tripura Hills & Plains	Ruler and builder	Built Ujjayanta Palace between 1899 and 1901 and continued his father's patronage of Tagore, who named the building.
Bir Bikram Kishore Manikya	Tripura Hills & Plains	Ruler and planner	Built Neermahal in Rudrasagar lake, laid out the modern plan of Agartala and established its airfield. The region's airport carries his name.
Rabindranath Tagore	Tripura Hills & Plains	Poet	Visited this court repeatedly across five decades, named Ujjayanta Palace, and set the novel Rajarshi and the play Visarjan in the region's own dynastic history — which is how a hill kingdom entered the Bengali literary canon as a subject rather than as a footnote.
Radhamohan Thakur	Tripura Hills & Plains	Grammarian	Wrote Kokborokma, the first grammar of Kokborok, published in 1900, and the foundation of every subsequent attempt to teach and standardise the language.
Sachin Dev Burman	Tripura Hills & Plains	Composer	Born into this region's ruling family and trained in the folk music of the plain, he carried bhatiali and Bengali folk melody into Hindi film composition across four decades — the region's most widely heard export by an enormous margin.
Thanga Darlong	Tripura Hills & Plains	Musician	The last accomplished player of the rosem, the Darlong bamboo wind instrument, awarded the Padma Shri in 2019 at the age of ninety-eight. He lived and played in a village in the northern hills for his entire life.
Satyaram Reang	Tripura Hills & Plains	Folk dance	Spent his life teaching and staging the Hojagiri dance of the Reang community, and was awarded the Padma Shri in 2021 — the recognition that moved the form from a village observance to a nationally known one.
Madhvacharya	Tulu Nadu	Philosophy	Born at Pajaka near Udupi; founded the Dvaita school against Advaita, and established the eight mathas whose rotation still governs worship at Udupi. The region's single largest export before the restaurants.
Abbakka Chowta	Tulu Nadu	Rule and warfare	Queen of Ullal, of a matrilineal Jain house, who refused tribute and held off repeated Portuguese attacks on her port over decades. Commemorated locally as the coast's first serious resistance to European sea power.
Kanakadasa	Tulu Nadu	Devotional poetry	A Haridasa poet of the Kannada country, born far inland, whose association with Udupi is the reason the Krishna Matha's deity is viewed through a window in the wall rather than through the door.
Ammembal Subba Rao Pai	Tulu Nadu	Banking and law	A Mangaluru lawyer who founded Canara Bank in 1906 explicitly as an instrument for a community without access to credit. The template — a local bank raised by subscription for a trade — was copied four more times on this coast within thirty years.
Kudmul Ranga Rao	Tulu Nadu	Social reform	Opened hostels and schools for children of communities barred from existing ones, in Mangaluru, from the 1890s, and campaigned against untouchability decades before it was a national argument.
Manjeshwar Govinda Pai	Tulu Nadu	Poetry and scholarship	The first poet honoured as Rashtrakavi in Kannada, born and resident at Manjeshwar, and a scholar of the coast's chronology. His life is the standing argument that the 1956 border cut through a literature.
T. M. A. Pai	Tulu Nadu	Education, banking and medicine	Co-founded Syndicate Bank at Udupi in 1925, deliberately built to collect tiny daily deposits from beedi rollers and weavers, and used the capital it accumulated to build Manipal — a university town raised on a laterite hill that had nothing on it.
Kota Shivarama Karanth	Tulu Nadu	Literature, theatre and environment	Novelist and Jnanpith laureate of 1977, born in Udupi district, who documented Yakshagana exhaustively and then reworked the Badagutittu style into a compressed three-hour form for a modern stage — and was attacked by purists for it for the rest of his life.
Kayyara Kinhanna Rai	Tulu Nadu	Poetry and public life	A Kannada poet and teacher of Kasaragod who spent decades on the question of what happens to a language community left on the wrong side of a state boundary, and lived long enough to see none of it settled.
B. V. Karanth	Tulu Nadu	Theatre and music	Born in Bantwal taluk; brought Yakshagana's rhythmic and vocal grammar into modern Indian theatre and into film scoring, and trained a generation of directors through the national drama school.
Jayadeva	Utkal	Poet	Wrote the Gita Govinda in Sanskrit, traditionally at Kenduli Sasan in the Prachi valley. It became liturgy at Puri, repertoire for the maharis, woven text on Khandua silk and, later, the core of Odissi's abhinaya — one poem operating simultaneously as scripture, textile and dance.
Sarala Das	Utkal	Poet	Composed the Odia Mahabharata — not a translation but a retelling, in Odia, by a man who described himself as unlettered. It is the founding work of Odia literature and the point at which the vernacular took over from Sanskrit here.
Jagannatha Das	Utkal	Poet	One of the Panchasakha; his Odia Bhagabata became the book kept in the village bhagabata tungi and read aloud in the evening, which made it the most widely heard text in the region for four centuries.
Madhusudan Das	Utkal	Law, public life and crafts	Cuttack lawyer who set up the Utkal Tannery and worked to put Odisha's filigree and leather crafts on a commercial footing, and who argued the case for the Odia-speaking tracts being administered together.
Fakir Mohan Senapati	Utkal	Literature	Founded modern Odia prose. His novel Chha Mana Atha Guntha, on the taking of a widow's land, is among the earliest Indian novels to make land and rent its actual subject rather than its background.
Gopabandhu Das	Utkal	Education and public life	Established the open-air school at Satyabadi near Sakhigopal, where teaching was done under mango trees on a curriculum of Odia, Sanskrit and manual work — an institution that produced a generation of the region's writers and public figures.
Subhas Chandra Bose	Utkal	Politics	Born and schooled at Cuttack, where the family house on Oriya Bazar is now a museum.
Pankaj Charan Das	Utkal	Odissi	Came from a mahari family and carried the temple dancers' repertoire directly into the reconstructed form, which is why his line of Odissi is the one closest to the ritual practice.
Kelucharan Mohapatra	Utkal	Odissi	Born at Raghurajpur; a pattachitra painter and mardala player before he was a dancer, and the choreographer who did most to give the reconstructed form its stage grammar.
Sanjukta Panigrahi	Utkal	Odissi	The first dancer to perform Odissi internationally at scale and the performer through whom the form was accepted as classical outside the region.
Raghunath Mohapatra	Utkal	Stone sculpture	Worked in the Konark carving tradition on temple restoration and new commissions, and was awarded the Padma Vibhushan — the clearest demonstration that the craft at Konark is a continuing practice.
Sashimani Devi	Utkal	Mahari	The last surviving mahari of the Jagannath temple. Her death closed the institution from which a substantial part of Odissi's expressive vocabulary was recovered.
Gurajada Apparao	Uttarandhra	Playwright and poet	Wrote Kanyasulkam in 1892 in ordinary spoken Telugu and set it in Vizianagaram, at a time when serious Telugu literature was expected to be written in a classical register. It is still performed, and his poem beginning "a country is not its soil" is the most quoted modern Telugu line.
Gidugu Venkata Ramamurthy	Uttarandhra	Linguist and reformer	Born in Srikakulam district and long a teacher at Paralakhemundi on the Odia side of the hills, he led the campaign for vyavaharika bhasha — Telugu written as it is spoken — and at the same time produced the first serious grammar and vocabulary of Savara, a Munda language of those hills. Telugu Language Day is observed on his birthday.
Adibhatla Narayana Das	Uttarandhra	Musician and narrator	Created the modern Telugu Harikatha at Vizianagaram, performing narrative in Carnatic ragas with spoken commentary, and headed the Maharajah's music college there. Very few performance genres have a documented author; this one does.
Dwaram Venkataswamy Naidu	Uttarandhra	Violinist	Taught and directed at the Vizianagaram music college and made the Carnatic violin a solo concert instrument rather than only an accompanying one.
Alluri Sitarama Raju	Uttarandhra	Rebel leader	Led the Rampa rebellion of 1922–24 in the agency tracts against forest laws and the muttadari system, raiding police stations for arms with a small hill force. He was captured and shot in 1924; the district covering that country now carries his name.
Srirangam Srinivasa Rao (Sri Sri)	Uttarandhra	Poet	Born at Visakhapatnam. Mahaprasthanam, published in 1950, broke Telugu poetry out of its metrical conventions and gave the language its modern political voice.
Rachakonda Viswanatha Sastry	Uttarandhra	Writer and lawyer	Practised law at Visakhapatnam and wrote fiction in the region's own spoken register, taking his material from the courts he worked in. His prose is the standing counterexample to the idea that the northern dialect is only good for comedy.
The Sarwasiddhi veena-making families	Uttarandhra	Instrument making	Hereditary makers around Bobbili who hollow a saraswati veena from a single block of jackwood. The craft's geographical indication rests on their method, and the number of families still doing it is very small.
Harishena	Vidarbha	Ruler	The Vakataka king of the Vatsagulma branch, ruling from what is now Washim, under whose court the second and greatest phase of excavation at the Ajanta caves was carried out. The dynasty was based in Vidarbha; the caves it paid for are in Marathwada.
Raghuji Bhonsle I	Vidarbha	Ruler	Built the Nagpur Bhonsle state into the dominant power of the eastern Deccan, extending its raiding and revenue reach as far as Bengal and Odisha. Nagpur as a capital city dates from his line.
Sant Gadge Baba	Vidarbha	Reformer and kirtankar	Born at Shengaon in Amravati district. Travelled village to village with a broom and a broken pot, cleaning the village before performing kirtan in it, and using the kirtan to argue against caste practice, animal sacrifice and drink. He built dharamshalas and schools and kept nothing.
Rashtrasant Tukdoji Maharaj	Vidarbha	Poet and reformer	From Yavali in Amravati district; wrote the Gramgeeta, a long verse programme for village self-reliance, and used bhajan as an organising method. Nagpur's university carries his name.
Mahatma Gandhi	Vidarbha	Politics	Moved his base to Sevagram near Wardha in 1936 and ran the last decade of the national movement from a mud hut in a Vidarbha village, deliberately choosing a place with no railway station of its own.
Jamnalal Bajaj	Vidarbha	Industry and public life	The Wardha merchant and industrialist who financed and hosted Gandhi's move, and who founded the village industry institutions that still operate at Wardha. He opened his family's Laxminarayan temple to Dalits in 1928, well before any law required it.
Vinoba Bhave	Vidarbha	Social movement	Settled at Paunar near Wardha, from where he walked across India from 1951 asking landholders to donate land for redistribution — the Bhoodan movement, which collected several million acres by voluntary transfer.
B. R. Ambedkar	Vidarbha	Law, politics and religion	Chose Nagpur for the mass conversion of 14 October 1956, at which he and several lakh followers took the Buddhist refuges and precepts along with twenty-two additional vows he composed. He explained the choice of Nagpur by reference to the Nagas of the region. He died on 6 December of the same year.
Suresh Bhat	Vidarbha	Poet	From Amravati; established the ghazal as a Marathi form rather than an imported one, working out how a metre built for Urdu could be made to sit on Marathi stress. His verse is sung as widely as it is read.
Vasantrao Deshpande	Vidarbha	Hindustani vocalist and actor	Born at Murtizapur in Akola district; combined several gharana trainings into a voice of his own and made Katyar Kaljat Ghusali the defining Marathi musical drama of the twentieth century.
Wamandada Kardak	Vidarbha	Shahir	The shahir most closely identified with Bhim Geet, who wrote and performed several thousand songs on Ambedkar, the conversion and the lives of the communities that made it, and left the copyright question entirely alone.
Dadaji Ramaji Khobragade	Vidarbha	Farmer and plant breeder	A smallholder in Nagbhid taluka, Chandrapur district, who noticed an unusual plant in his paddy field in the 1980s and selected from it over several seasons to fix the HMT rice variety, which then spread across central India. He never held rights over it and died poor, which is the part of the story that gets told.
Rani Hirai	Vidarbha	Ruler	The Gond queen of Chandrapur credited with completing the city's fortification wall after her husband's death. The Gond dynasty of Chandrapur is the region's longest-ruling and least documented.

दुकानें और बाज़ार 563

नाम	क्षेत्र	प्रकार	टिप्पणी
Sagarika Government Emporium	Andaman Islands	Port Blair	Padauk wood craft, shell and coconut-shell items, island produce
Aberdeen Bazaar	Andaman Islands	Port Blair	The islands' main market — fish, produce, cloth, everyday goods
Junglighat fish landing jetty	Andaman Islands	Port Blair	The morning fish landing
Cottage industries and rural craft outlets	Andaman Islands	Port Blair, Rangat and Mayabunder	Cane, bamboo and coir products from the settlement villages
The Bhagalpur silk lofts of Nathnagar and Champanagar	Anga & Seemanchal	Bhagalpur	Tussar, ghicha and matka silk by the metre
Manjusha artists of Bhagalpur	Anga & Seemanchal	Bhagalpur	Painted panels and boxes in the three-colour Manjusha idiom
Zardalu mango orchards	Anga & Seemanchal	Bhagalpur	The Zardalu mango, in season from late May
Katarni chura mills	Anga & Seemanchal	Banka and Bhagalpur	Aromatic flattened rice
The makhana mandis of Purnia and Katihar	Anga & Seemanchal	Purnia	Raw and popped makhana by grade
Kishanganj tea factories	Anga & Seemanchal	Kishanganj	CTC tea from smallholder leaf
Thaggu ke Laddu	Antarved Doab	Kanpur	Laddu and 'badnaam kulfi'
Netram Moolchand and Hari ki Kachori	Antarved Doab	Prayagraj (Loknath gali)	Kachori, dahi-bada and tamatar chaat
Bushy's and the old Civil Lines bakeries	Antarved Doab	Prayagraj	Allahabadi cake, patties and rusk
Ram Chandra and the Meerut gajak shops	Antarved Doab	Meerut	Gajak, rewri and sesame brittle
The Kannauj attar houses	Antarved Doab	Kannauj	Mitti attar, shamama, ruh gulab and khus
Aligarh lock workshops	Antarved Doab	Aligarh	Padlocks, lever locks and brass hardware
The Firozabad bangle market	Antarved Doab	Firozabad	Glass bangles by the box
Tunday Kababi	Awadh	Lucknow (Chowk and Aminabad)	Galouti kebab
Idrees Biryani	Awadh	Lucknow (Chowk)	Mutton biryani cooked in a single enormous sealed degh
Raheem's	Awadh	Lucknow (Akbari Gate)	Nihari and kulcha at dawn
Ram Asrey	Awadh	Lucknow (Chowk)	Malai gilori, makkhan malai and khurchan
Prakash ki Kulfi	Awadh	Lucknow (Aminabad)	Kulfi with falooda
The Chowk attar houses	Awadh	Lucknow (Chowk)	Mitti attar, shamama and khus
SEWA Lucknow and the chikan cooperatives	Awadh	Lucknow	Chikankari bought directly from the women who embroider it
Sundarja mango orchards, Govindgarh	Bagelkhand	Govindgarh, Rewa	The GI-registered Sundarja mango
Maihar temple bazaar	Bagelkhand	Maihar	Prasad, devotional recordings, brass and steel puja ware
Mrignayanee — Madhya Pradesh State Emporium	Bagelkhand	Rewa and other MP cities	State-certified handicrafts, including bamboo, terracotta and tribal metalwork
Forest produce cooperatives and van dhan kendras	Bagelkhand	Shahdol, Umaria, Sidhi	Mahua, chironji, tendu, honey and sal-leaf products
Weekly haats of the Son valley	Bagelkhand	Sidhi, Shahdol, Singrauli	Bamboo baskets, grain bins, forest produce, live poultry, iron tools
Fatak Bazar	Barak Valley	Silchar	The valley's central market — fish, shutki, satkora, gur and everything the household kitchen needs
New Market	Barak Valley	Silchar	Cloth, ready-made garments, sari and household goods
Manipuri handloom cooperatives of the Cachar plain	Barak Valley	Silchar and Lakhipur	Phanek, innaphi, stoles and shawls woven in the settlement villages
The estate factory outlets of the Barak tea belt	Barak Valley	Cachar and Hailakandi	Loose leaf sold from the gardens that grew it
The winter gur markets	Barak Valley	Across the valley, Agrahayan to Poush	Date-palm and cane gur, sold by the pot in the weeks after the harvest
Shabari Emporium	Bastar	Jagdalpur and Raipur	Dhokra, wrought iron, wood carving and Kosa silk, sold at fixed price
Kondagaon craft village and Shilpgram	Bastar	Kondagaon	Dhokra casting and wrought iron, bought from the workshop
Bhanpuri iron cluster	Bastar	Bhanpuri, near Jagdalpur	Wrought-iron lamps, figures and panels
Nagarnar potters' yards	Bastar	Nagarnar	Votive terracotta horses, elephants and shrine figures
Tokapal, Darbha, Bakawand and Chhindgarh haats	Bastar	Villages around Jagdalpur	Salfi, landa, chapda, bamboo shoot, forest produce, iron tools and cloth
Sanjay Market	Bastar	Jagdalpur	The daily produce and provisions market, and the town end of the forest-produce trade
Thakur Pedha	Bayaluseeme	Dharwad (Line Bazar)	Dharwad pedha, made by the family that brought it here
Mishra Pedha	Bayaluseeme	Dharwad	Dharwad pedha
The Ilkal weavers' societies	Bayaluseeme	Ilkal, Bagalkot	Handloom Ilkal sarees bought at the loom
The Guledgudda khana looms	Bayaluseeme	Guledgudda, Bagalkot	Blouse-piece cloth sold as a khana
The karadantu shops of Amingad and Gokak	Bayaluseeme	Amingad and Gokak	Gum-and-jaggery karadantu, sold in cut slabs
The girmit and bajji carts	Bayaluseeme	Hubballi and Dharwad	Girmit with a stuffed green chilli bajji, from about five in the evening
Bhim Chandra Nag	Bengal Delta	Kolkata (Bowbazar)	Sandesh, and the Ledikeni — a fried chhena sweet the shop associates with Lady Canning.
Nalin Chandra Das & Sons	Bengal Delta	Kolkata (Shyambazar)	Sandesh in a large range of moulds, and nolen gur work through the winter.
Girish Chandra Dey & Nakur Chandra Nandy	Bengal Delta	Kolkata (Hatibagan)	Naram pak sandesh, and a jolbhora with a liquid gur centre that has to be eaten whole.
Putiram	Bengal Delta	Kolkata (College Street)	Radhaballabhi, kochuri and chholar dal, sold to the university crowd since before the university had one.
K. C. Das	Bengal Delta	Kolkata (Esplanade and branches)	Rosogolla, and the tinned rosogolla that made the sweet portable.
Balaram Mullick & Radharaman Mullick	Bengal Delta	Kolkata (Bhowanipore)	Sandesh and mishti doi, and a large modern range built on the same chhena technique.
Chittaranjan Mistanna Bhandar	Bengal Delta	Kolkata (Shyambazar)	Mishti doi set in earthen pots, and kalakand.
Tantuja and the Santipur–Fulia weavers' societies	Bengal Delta	Santipur and Fulia, Nadia	Santipur and Fulia cotton saris direct from the cooperative and from individual weaver households.
Khagra bell-metal market	Bengal Delta	Berhampore, Murshidabad	Kansa and brass plates, water vessels and the thala-bati sets used at weddings.
Ghurni workshops	Bengal Delta	Krishnanagar, Nadia	Fired and painted clay figures, sold from the modelling sheds themselves.
Kumartuli workshops	Bengal Delta	Kolkata	Idols, from small household Saraswatis to the twenty-foot Durga frames, and the sholapith dressing.
Chandernagore lighting workshops	Bengal Delta	Chandernagore, Hooghly	Sequenced electric-light tableaux built on bamboo frames, hired out to festivals nationwide.
The Banarasi silk weavers of Madanpura and Mubarakpur	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Varanasi, Azamgarh	Hand-woven kadhua brocade
Ram Bhandar and the Kachori Gali counters	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Varanasi	Kachori-sabzi, jalebi and launglata
Blue Lassi and the Thatheri Bazaar lassi shops	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Varanasi	Thick lassi in clay cups
The malaiyo sellers	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Varanasi	Winter milk foam sold from head-carried trays
Keshav Tambul Bhandar and the old paan shops	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Varanasi	Banarasi paan, cured and folded to order
The Bhadohi carpet lofts	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Bhadohi	Hand-knotted wool and silk carpets
Nizamabad black pottery workshops	Bhojpur & Purvanchal	Nizamabad, Azamgarh	Black clay ware inlaid with silvery patterns
Sualkuchi weaving households	Brahmaputra Valley	Sualkuchi, Kamrup	Buying muga, pat and eri mekhela chadors from the looms themselves — the only reliable way to know that muga is muga and not a viscose imitation.
Sarthebari bell-metal workshops	Brahmaputra Valley	Sarthebari, Bajali	Xorai, bati and ban-bati beaten by hand in a craft village where the trade is still organised by household.
Fancy Bazar	Brahmaputra Valley	Guwahati	The city's main market — silk, gamosas, dry fish, brassware and everything else, over several noisy blocks.
Guwahati Tea Auction Centre	Brahmaputra Valley	Guwahati	One of the largest CTC tea auction centres in the world; the price of a great deal of India's everyday chai is set here.
Pragjyotika, Assam Government Emporium	Brahmaputra Valley	Guwahati	Fixed-price handloom and handicraft with provenance — useful precisely because muga is so widely faked.
Artfed and Assam Apex Weavers showrooms	Brahmaputra Valley	Guwahati and district towns	Cooperative-run outlets selling directly on behalf of weavers, including Bodo dokhona and aronai.
Jonbeel Mela barter ground	Brahmaputra Valley	Morigaon	Not a shop at all — a fair, once a year, where hill and plains communities exchange goods without money, as they have for centuries.
Maniram Dewan Trade Centre	Brahmaputra Valley	Betkuchi, Guwahati	The state's trade fair and handicraft venue, named for the tea planter and rebel executed by the British in 1858.
Brijwasi Mithai Wala	Braj	Mathura	Mathura peda, khurchan and barfi
Shankar Mithaiwala	Braj	Vrindavan	Peda and rabri
The Loi Bazaar poshak workshops	Braj	Vrindavan	Deity clothing, ornaments and shringar
Mathura khoya mandi	Braj	Mathura	Wholesale khoya
Sanjhi artists of Vrindavan	Braj	Vrindavan	Hand-cut paper stencils and water-sanjhi
Government Diamond Office, Panna	Bundelkhand	Panna	Registering, valuing and auctioning diamonds found in the shallow pits
Bell-metal foundries of Tikamgarh and Datia	Bundelkhand	Tikamgarh and Datia	Cast bell-metal lamps, bells, vessels and measures under the joint GI
Mrignayanee — Madhya Pradesh State Emporium	Bundelkhand	Khajuraho, and other MP cities	State-certified handicrafts including bell metal, stone carving and tribal work
Mahoba paan barejas	Bundelkhand	Mahoba	Desawari betel leaf
Kalpi handmade paper units	Bundelkhand	Kalpi, Jalaun	Rag-pulp handmade paper and paper products under the 2023 GI
Khajuraho stone-carving workshops	Bundelkhand	Khajuraho	Sandstone carving in the Chandela figural vocabulary
Totgars' Cooperative Sale Society	Canara Coast	Sirsi	Graded areca, pepper, cardamom and the Sirsi Supari appellation
Kadamba Marketing Souharda Sahakari	Canara Coast	Sirsi	Appemidi pickle, forest honey, kokum, pepper, jaggery and areca-based products
Shetty Lunch Home	Canara Coast	Karwar	Karwari fish thali, rava-fried mackerel and prawn preparations
The Kumta, Tadadi and Honnavar fish landings	Canara Coast	Kumta and Honnavar	Mackerel, seer, prawn, squid and the drying yards behind the jetties
Sirsi's pickle and spice houses	Canara Coast	Sirsi	Appemidi in brine, tender-mango tokku, kokum and dried uppage
The Yakshagana costume workshops	Canara Coast	Uttara Kannada and adjoining Udupi	Headgear, shoulder ornaments, mirror and gilt work for the troupes
The Doeguling settlement market	Canara Coast	Mundgod	Tibetan food, monastic supplies, carpets and thangka work
The Chamba Rumal revival workshops	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Chamba	Hand-embroidered do-rukha rumals
The chappal makers around the Dogra Bazaar	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Chamba	Chamba chappal
Himachal handicrafts and handloom emporium	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Chamba and Dalhousie	Pattu, gudma, Chamba chappal, chukh
Chamba chukh self-help group outlets	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Chamba	Red and green chukh
Bhaderwah rajmash growers' outlets	Chenab Valley & Chamba	Bhaderwah	Bhaderwah Rajmash
Shabari Emporium	Chhattisgarh Plains	Raipur	Kosa silk, bell metal, godna-derived work, bamboo and terracotta
Sanjeevani outlets	Chhattisgarh Plains	Raipur, Bilaspur and district towns	Mahua, chironji, tikhur, forest honey and herbal preparations
The weaver cooperative showrooms at Champa	Chhattisgarh Plains	Champa, Janjgir-Champa	Kosa silk bought where it is reeled and woven
The Ektaal bell-metal workshops	Chhattisgarh Plains	Ektaal, Raigarh district	Lost-wax cast figures, lamps and measures
Tribes India (TRIFED)	Chhattisgarh Plains	Raipur	Kosa, bell metal, bamboo and forest produce from artisan groups
The sweet shops of Gol Bazar	Chhattisgarh Plains	Raipur	Dehrori, khurmi, thethri and papchi
Sri Mangalambika Vilas	Chola Nadu	Kumbakonam	Degree coffee and the tiffin that goes with it
The Swamimalai bronze foundries	Chola Nadu	Swamimalai	Lost-wax panchaloha icons made to Shilpa Shastra proportion
Poompuhar emporium, Thanjavur	Chola Nadu	Thanjavur	Thanjavur paintings, art plates, dolls and bronzes under one roof
The Thanjavur veena workshops	Chola Nadu	Thanjavur	Ekanda and sada Saraswathi veenas
Narasingapettai nagaswaram makers	Chola Nadu	Narasingapettai, near Kumbakonam	Concert-grade nagaswarams in aacha wood
Nachiarkoil lamp foundries	Chola Nadu	Nachiarkoil	Brass and bell-metal kuthuvilakku
The Kumbakonam betel and flower market	Chola Nadu	Kumbakonam	Betel leaf, flowers and temple supplies at dawn
Jharcraft emporium	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Ranchi	Tasar silk, lac work, bamboo, Sohrai painting on paper and cloth
Sanskriti Museum and Art Gallery	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Hazaribagh	Sohrai and Khovar painting, and the documentation behind it
Seraikela mask workshops	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Seraikela	Chhau masks, made by hereditary Sutradhar households
Amadubi Paitkar village	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Amadubi, East Singhbhum	Painted scrolls, sold by the painters
Tribal Research Institute Museum	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Morabadi, Ranchi	Standing collections of Munda, Santal, Ho and Oraon material culture
Kuchai tasar cluster	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Kuchai, Seraikela-Kharsawan	Reeled tasar yarn and undyed woven cloth
Deoghar temple lanes	Chota Nagpur Plateau	Deoghar	Peda, and the pilgrimage supply trade
Chitale Bandhu Mithaiwale	Desh	Pune	Bakarwadi, amba barfi and mithai
Kayani Bakery	Desh	Pune (East Street)	Shrewsbury biscuits
Sujata Mastani	Desh	Pune (Sadashiv Peth)	Mastani
Bedekar Misal	Desh	Pune (Narayan Peth)	Puneri misal
Khasbag Misal	Desh	Kolhapur	Kolhapuri misal with unlimited kat
Padma Guest House	Desh	Kolhapur	Tambda and pandhra rassa with mutton thali
Mahadwar Road chappal market	Desh	Kolhapur	Kolhapuri chappal bought from the makers
Sangli market yard	Desh	Sangli	Turmeric, and the underground curing pits behind it
Gujari bazaar	Desh	Kolhapur	Kolhapuri Saaj and silver ornament work
The Sitarmaker workshops	Desh	Miraj, Sangli district	Tanpuras and sitars, made to order
Satara kandi pedha shops	Desh	Satara	Kandi pedha, a dense scorched-milk sweet
Maniharon ka Rasta	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Jaipur	Lac bangles, made and sized to the wrist over a flame while you wait
Khajane Walon ka Rasta	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Jaipur	Marble and sandstone image carving
Kripal Kumbh	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Jaipur (Bani Park)	Blue pottery from the workshop of the man who revived it
Rawat Mishthan Bhandar	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Jaipur (Station Road)	Pyaaz kachori and mawa kachori
Lakshmi Mishthan Bhandar	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Jaipur (Johari Bazaar)	Ghewar, paneer ghewar and a pure-vegetarian Rajasthani thali
Lassiwala	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Jaipur (MI Road)	Thick lassi served in unglazed clay kulhads, sold until it runs out
The Kagzi paper units, Sanganer	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Sanganer, Jaipur	Handmade cotton-rag paper, sized, dyed and embedded with fibre
The Chhipa quarter, Bagru	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Bagru, Jaipur district	Dabu mud-resist block print bought at the printing yard
Anokhi Museum of Hand Printing	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Amber, Jaipur	A restored haveli explaining block printing, with printers and block carvers working on site
Dr Ramnath A Podar Haveli Museum	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Nawalgarh	A merchant haveli of the early twentieth century, restored and opened as a museum
Nadine Le Prince Haveli	Dhundhar & Shekhawati	Fatehpur	A large haveli bought and conserved from 1998, run as a cultural centre
The Dooars weekly haats	Dooars & Terai	Malbazar, Chalsa, Nagrakata, Birpara, Madarihat and Jaigaon	Sidol, shutki, gundruk, bamboo shoot, cane fish traps and Bhutanese oranges in winter
Siliguri Tea Auction Centre	Dooars & Terai	Siliguri	The auction through which most Dooars and Terai tea is sold
Bidhan Market	Dooars & Terai	Siliguri	Loose tea, spices, hill vegetables and fish
Hong Kong Market	Dooars & Terai	Siliguri	Imported goods, electronics and cross-border trade stock
Din Bazar	Dooars & Terai	Jalpaiguri	Rajbanshi cane and bamboo work, sitalpati mats, brass and everyday hardware
Jaigaon bazaar	Dooars & Terai	Jaigaon	Bhutanese cheese, dried chilli, incense, textiles and oranges
Tea estate factory outlets	Dooars & Terai	Across the Dooars and Terai gardens	CTC tea sold at the factory gate by grade
Chotiwala	Garhwal	Rishikesh (Swarg Ashram)	Thali meals beside the Ganga, and a costumed doorman with a painted face and a topknot
Prakash Stores	Garhwal	Landour, Mussoorie	Home-made jams, marmalade, peanut butter and cheese
Cambridge Book Depot	Garhwal	Mussoorie (Mall Road)	Books, and Ruskin Bond, who has signed them here on Saturday afternoons for decades
Ellora's Bakery	Garhwal	Dehradun	Bakery, confectionery and cakes in the old Doon manner
Mana village wool and herb sellers	Garhwal	Mana, Chamoli	Hand-spun wool, thulma and pankhi blankets, and high-altitude herbs
Ringaal basket sellers at Gopeshwar and Chamoli	Garhwal	Gopeshwar	Doko carrying baskets, grain bins, mats and lidded containers in dwarf hill bamboo
Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam counters	Garhwal	Rishikesh, Dehradun, Joshimath, Uttarkashi	Pilgrim registration, rest houses and route information for the Char Dham
Tura Bazar	Garo Hills	Tura	Nakham (smoke-dried fish), jhum chilli and ginger, bamboo shoot, cane baskets, dakmanda cloth
Meghalaya handloom and handicrafts outlet, Tura	Garo Hills	Tura	Dakmanda and daksari cloth, cane and bamboo work
Williamnagar and Baghmara markets	Garo Hills	Williamnagar and Baghmara	Simsang fish, dried fish, foothill produce and forest greens
Daribokgre community homestays	Garo Hills	Daribokgre, near Nokrek	Garo home cooking — do'o kappa, nakham bitchi, minil — and access to the biosphere reserve
Wangala ground food stalls, Asanang	Garo Hills	Asanang	Bamboo-tube pork, chu, and rice plates during the festival
Confeitaria 31 de Janeiro	Goa & Gomantak	Panaji (Fontainhas)	Bebinca, dodol, doce and the Goan Christmas sweet range
Cafe Tato	Goa & Gomantak	Panaji	Vegetarian Goan and Saraswat food — mushroom xacuti in season, bhaji-pao, thalis
Ritz Classic	Goa & Gomantak	Panaji	The fish thali — rice, kodi, fried fish, sol kadhi and a dry vegetable
Vinayak Family Restaurant	Goa & Gomantak	Assagao, Bardez	Rava-fried fish, prawn curry and crab xec xec
Martin's Corner	Goa & Gomantak	Betalbatim, Salcete	Sorpotel, vindalho, chouriço pulao and Goan pork cooking
Mum's Kitchen	Goa & Gomantak	Panaji (Miramar)	Recipes collected from Goan households, both Hindu and Catholic, cooked from those originals
The village taverna	Goa & Gomantak	Across the New Conquest taluks	Feni and urrack sold by the glass
Velha Goa Galeria	Goa & Gomantak	Panaji	Hand-painted azulejo tiles, house nameplates and panels
Cazulo Premium Feni	Goa & Gomantak	South Goa	Small-batch cashew and coconut feni, and distillery visits during the season
Kota Doria Development Hadauti Foundation	Hadoti	Kaithun, Kota	Kota Doria saris certified under the geographical indication
The Kaithun weaver households	Hadoti	Kaithun, Kota	Kota Doria woven on pit looms in the house
Rajasthali	Hadoti	Kota and Jaipur	State handicraft emporium — Kota Doria, blue pottery, stone and brass
The kachori stalls of Rampura and Gumanpura	Hadoti	Kota	Kota kachori with tamarind and green chutney
Ramganjmandi krishi upaj mandi	Hadoti	Ramganjmandi, Kota	Whole coriander seed, sold by the sack
The Kota stone yards at Ramganjmandi and Suket	Hadoti	Ramganjmandi, Kota	Cut and hand-dressed Kota limestone
The painters below Bundi's Garh	Hadoti	Bundi	Miniature painting in the Bundi manner on paper and on old ledger sheets
Amrik Sukhdev	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Murthal, Sonipat	Aloo paratha with a slab of white butter, and thick sweet lassi
The Murthal dhaba strip	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Murthal, Sonipat	Parathas, dal makhani, kadhi and lassi, served all night
Panipat home-textile market	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Panipat	Durries, bedcovers, blankets and furnishing fabric
Baba Thakur Das & Sons	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Alwar	Alwar milk cake
The Jhajjar potters' lane	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Jhajjar	Surahis, kulhads and unglazed terracotta water vessels
Kurukshetra's Brahma Sarovar bazaar	Haryana Bangar & Bagar	Kurukshetra	Gita editions, ritual brass and the pilgrimage supply trade
Ima Keithel (Khwairamband Bazar)	Imphal Valley	Imphal	Ngari, fresh fish, yongchak, chak-hao, phanek, innaphi and household goods
Paona Bazar and Thangal Bazar	Imphal Valley	Imphal	The commercial streets around Ima Keithel — cloth, hardware, books and stationery
Manipur Handloom and Handicrafts emporium	Imphal Valley	Imphal	Moirang Phee, Wangkhei Phee, Shaphee Lanphee, kauna mats and Longpi ware
Andro pottery workshops	Imphal Valley	Andro, Imphal East	Hand-built, wheel-less cooking and ritual pots
Kauna craft cooperatives	Imphal Valley	Bishnupur and Thanga, around Loktak	Reed mats, cushions and baskets cut from the lake
Longpi ware outlets	Imphal Valley	Imphal, sourced from Nungbi in Ukhrul	Black serpentinite-and-clay cookware and serving pieces
The kalari carts of Raghunath Bazaar	Jammu Duggar	Jammu	Kalari kulcha
The Kud roadside sweet stalls	Jammu Duggar	Kud, on the Jammu–Srinagar road	Patisa and kalakand
J&K Handicrafts and Handloom Corporation emporium	Jammu Duggar	Jammu	Basohli pashmina, loi and pattu, Basohli-style painting
The anardana and dry-fruit shops of Raghunath Bazaar	Jammu Duggar	Jammu	Anardana, dried gucchi morels, rajma from the Chenab valley
Basohli weaving self-help groups	Jammu Duggar	Basohli, Kathua	Hand-spun and hand-woven pashmina
The Bidar bidri workshops	Kalyana Karnataka	Bidar (the lanes around the Chaubara and the old town)	Silver-inlaid blackened bidriware — hookah bases, boxes, plates, jewellery
Sandur Kushala Kala Kendra	Kalyana Karnataka	Sandur, Ballari	Lambani embroidery on bags, jackets and yardage, bought from the women who stitch it
The roti angadis of Kalaburagi	Kalyana Karnataka	Kalaburagi	Khaddi jolada rotti and sajje rotti sold by weight, and chutney pudi by the tin
Kinnal artisans' workshops	Kalyana Karnataka	Kinnal village, Koppal	Gessoed and painted wooden figures, cradles and toys
Cauvery Karnataka State Emporium	Kalyana Karnataka	Bidar, Kalaburagi and other district towns	Bidriware, Kinnal work and Lambani embroidery at fixed prices
Palampur Cooperative Tea Factory	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Palampur	Orthodox Kangra black and green tea, processed from smallholder leaf
Wah Tea Estate	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Palampur	Estate-grown orthodox Kangra tea and garden visits
Norbulingka Institute craft workshops	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Sidhpur, near Dharamshala	Thangka painting, silk appliqué, wood carving and copper statues
Andretta Pottery and Craft Society	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Andretta	Wheel-thrown functional stoneware and residential pottery courses
Tibetan handicraft cooperatives, McLeodganj	Kangra & Dhauladhar	McLeodganj	Hand-knotted carpets, woollens and thangka mounts
Himachal Emporium outlets	Kangra & Dhauladhar	Dharamshala and Palampur	Pattu, shawls, woollens and Kangra tea at fixed state-corporation prices
Ahdoos	Kashmir Valley	Srinagar (Residency Road)	Wazwan served as a restaurant meal
Mughal Darbar	Kashmir Valley	Srinagar (Residency Road)	Rista, gushtaba and tabak maaz
Krishna Dhaba	Kashmir Valley	Srinagar (Durganag)	Vegetarian Kashmiri food — dum aloo, haakh, nadru, rajma
The harissa houses of downtown	Kashmir Valley	Srinagar (Aali Kadal, Fateh Kadal, Nowhatta)	Harissa at dawn, October to March
The kandur wan	Kashmir Valley	Every neighbourhood	Girda and tsochvor at dawn, lavasa in the evening, bakerkhani for guests
Kashmir Government Arts Emporium	Kashmir Valley	Srinagar (Residency Road)	Shawls, carpets, papier-mâché and walnut wood at fixed, labelled prices
The Pampore saffron growers and the Dussu spice park	Kashmir Valley	Pampore	Kashmir saffron under the GI grading and packing regime
Rajmal Lakhichand Jewellers	Khandesh	Jalgaon	Gold ornament
The Jalgaon gold lanes	Khandesh	Jalgaon	Gold retail, drawing buyers from across northern Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh
Savda and Raver banana markets	Khandesh	Savda and Raver, Jalgaon district	Banana, sold by the bunch and loaded for rail
Gandhi Teerth	Khandesh	Jalgaon	A research museum and archive on Gandhi, with a working library
Kurdai and papad self-help groups	Khandesh	Jalgaon and Dhule districts	Wheat-starch kurdai and lentil papad, made in the pre-monsoon months
Sarangkheda horse market	Khandesh	Sarangkheda, Nandurbar district	Marwari and Kathiawari horses, in December
The Ajanta approach at Fardapur	Khandesh	Fardapur, on the Jalgaon–Aurangabad road	The shuttle point and the craft and stone-carving stalls at the T-junction
Trattoria	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Shillong (Police Bazar)	Jadoh, dohneiiong, tungrymbai and doh khlieh
The Ïewduh jadoh stalls	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Shillong (Bara Bazar)	Jadoh and ja stem plates
Ïewduh market	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Shillong	Betel and areca, dried fish, sohphlang, cane baskets, local greens and eri cloth
Dylan's Café	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Shillong (Laitumkhrah)	Coffee, and the city's Bob Dylan habit
Meghalaya Handloom and Handicrafts emporium	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Shillong	Eri and cotton handloom, cane and bamboo, Larnai pottery
Muezart	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Shillong and Umden–Diwon	Eri silk yarn and Ryndia cloth bought from the Umden weavers
The Sohra weekly market	Khasi & Jaintia Hills	Sohra (Cherrapunji)	Sohra honey, cinnamon and bay, oranges and pineapple from the War slope
Himachal Pradesh state handloom and handicraft emporia	Kinnaur & Spiti	Reckong Peo, Shimla and Delhi	Kinnauri shawls, caps and pattu bought at fixed price against the state's own grading
HPMC collection and processing centres	Kinnaur & Spiti	Reckong Peo, Jangi and along the Sutlej road	Apple grading, cold storage and processing for the state horticulture corporation
Kaza bazaar	Kinnaur & Spiti	Kaza	Sea-buckthorn juice, dried apricot, churpi, woollens and every supply the valley cannot make
Village weavers and small workshops in Sangla and Kalpa	Kinnaur & Spiti	Sangla and Kalpa	Shawls, mufflers and caps sold by the household that wove them
पैरागॉन रेस्तराँ	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	कोझिकोड	मलाबार बिरयानी, मछली करी और मटन, जिसे एक ही परिवार चार पीढ़ियों से चला रहा है।
मिठाई तेरुवु (Sweetmeat Street), एस.एम. स्ट्रीट	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	कोझिकोड	हलवे की दुकानों की एक पूरी सड़क, जहाँ गेहूँ, नारियल, केले और करुत्त हलवा हर रंग की चट्टानों जैसी ढेरियों में बिकता है।
इंडियन कॉफ़ी हाउस, तिरुवनंतपुरम	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	तिरुवनंतपुरम	लॉरी बेकर द्वारा डिज़ाइन किए लाल ईंटों के सर्पिल मीनार में फ़िल्टर कॉफ़ी और कटलेट, जहाँ एक ही अटूट ढलान मेज़ों के पास से घूमती हुई ऊपर जाती है।
आरन्मुल धातु-दर्पण कार्यशालाएँ	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	आरन्मुल	एकमात्र जगह जहाँ आरन्मुल कण्णाडि बनती है, गिने-चुने परिवारों द्वारा जो हर दर्पण को हफ़्तों तक हाथ से ढालते, घिसते और चमकाते हैं।
कुतम्पुल्ली बुनकर गाँव	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	त्रिशूर ज़िला	उन्हीं पिट करघों से सीधे कसवु ख़रीदना जिन पर वह बुना गया, शोरूम की क़ीमत के एक अंश में।
चालै बाज़ार	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	तिरुवनंतपुरम	पुराना थोक बाज़ार — मसाले, गुड़, पीतल के बर्तन, दर्जनों किस्म के केले, और सद्या के लिए ज़रूरी हर चीज़।
कैराली / सुरभि, केरल राज्य हस्तशिल्प एम्पोरियम	कोच्चि और मध्य केरल	कई शहर	तय क़ीमत पर कांसा, कॉयर, केवड़े की चटाइयाँ और प्रामाणिकता की गारंटी वाले आरन्मुल दर्पण, जो ख़ासकर दर्पण के मामले में मायने रखती है।
Annapoorna	Kongu Nadu	Coimbatore	Idli, ven pongal, filter coffee and the fixed tiffin sequence
Sri Krishna Sweets	Kongu Nadu	Coimbatore	Mysurpa — a soft, ghee-loose version of Mysore pak
The Erode turmeric market complex	Kongu Nadu	Erode	Turmeric traded by lot, on fixed days, by open auction
Bhavani jamakkalam weavers' outlets	Kongu Nadu	Bhavani, Erode district	Pit-loom cotton carpets and blankets
SAGOSERVE, Salem	Kongu Nadu	Salem	The regulated sago and starch market
Tiruppur's knitwear streets	Kongu Nadu	Tiruppur	Cotton knitwear, sold from factory seconds outlets by the kilo as often as by the piece
Ankadeli haat	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Onukudelli, Malkangiri district	The weekly market below the Bonda hills
Chatikona haat	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Chatikona, Rayagada district	The Dongria Kondh market at the foot of Niyamgiri
Kunduli haat	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Kunduli, Koraput district	The plateau's largest weekly market
Kotpad weavers' cluster	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Kotpad, Koraput district	Aal-dyed cotton saris, stoles and yardage
Boyanika	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Bhubaneswar, Jeypore and district towns	Odisha handloom, including Kotpad and Habaspuri
Utkalika	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Bhubaneswar and district centres	Odisha handicrafts, including dokra, terracotta and tribal jewellery
Tribes India outlet, Koraput	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Koraput	Millet, forest produce, dokra and craft bought through tribal cooperatives
Millet Shakti outlets	Koraput–Kalahandi Uplands	Koraput, Bhawanipatna and other district towns	Ragi and little millet cooked as tiffin — mandia jau, millet idli, millet pitha
The Pedana kalamkari units	Kosta Andhra	Pedana, Krishna	Block-printed, mordant-dyed kalamkari yardage and sarees
Uppada weavers and the handloom cooperatives	Kosta Andhra	Uppada, Kakinada	Jamdani sarees woven two-to-a-loom
The Mangalagiri handloom cluster	Kosta Andhra	Mangalagiri, Guntur	Dense plain cotton with zari borders
The Atreyapuram pootharekulu households	Kosta Andhra	Atreyapuram, Konaseema	Rice-starch sheet sweets, sugar and jaggery versions
The Machilipatnam laddu shops	Kosta Andhra	Machilipatnam	Bandar laddu
Tapeswaram and Kakinada kaja makers	Kosta Andhra	Tapeswaram and Kakinada	Madatha kaja and the soft Kakinada kaja
Kondapalli toy workshops	Kosta Andhra	Kondapalli, NTR district	Carved and painted poniki-wood figures and sets
Narsapur lace units	Kosta Andhra	Narsapur, West Godavari	Hand-crocheted cotton lace and table linen
Guntur Mirchi Yard	Kosta Andhra	Guntur	Guntur Sannam chilli, traded and graded in bulk
Lepakshi and APCO emporia	Kosta Andhra	Vijayawada, Rajahmundry, Kakinada	State handicrafts and handloom outlets
Bhutti Weavers Cooperative Society (Bhuttico)	Kullu & Mandi	Kullu	Kullu shawls, stoles and caps woven by member households
The Kullu weavers' cooperative societies	Kullu & Mandi	Kullu valley	GI-marked Kullu shawls sold direct from producing societies
Himachal Emporium outlets	Kullu & Mandi	Kullu, Manali and Mandi	Shawls, caps, pattu and woollens at fixed state-corporation prices
HPMC processing and sales units	Kullu & Mandi	Across the Beas valley	Apple juice, cider vinegar and fruit products from the valley's own crop
The government trout farm at Patlikuhl	Kullu & Mandi	Patlikuhl, near Naggar	Trout raised on Beas water, and the hatchery that stocks the rivers
Khim Singh Mohan Singh Rautela	Kumaon	Almora (Lala Bazar)	Bal mithai and singori
Joga Lal Shah	Kumaon	Almora (Lala Bazar)	Bal mithai, singori and chocolate
Panchachuli Women Weavers	Kumaon	Munsiyari	Hand-spun and hand-woven wool — shawls, blankets and rugs from high-valley flocks
The Tamta copper workshops	Kumaon	Almora	Beaten copper gagar water pots, cooking vessels, lamps and temple bells
Sakley's	Kumaon	Nainital (Mall Road)	Old-fashioned bakery, pastry and confectionery
Bageshwar Uttarayani fair stalls	Kumaon	Bageshwar	Copper, ringaal, wool, iron tools and hill produce, once a year in January
Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam counters	Kumaon	Nainital, Almora, Munsiyari, Pithoragarh	Rest houses, permits and route information for the inner valleys
Shrujan and the Living and Learning Design Centre	Kutch	Bhujodi, near Bhuj	Community embroidery, sold with the style and the maker's community identified
Khamir	Kutch	Kukma, near Bhuj	Weaving, ajrakh, bell making, lacquer, Kharad and Kala cotton textiles
Kala Raksha	Kutch	Sumrasar Sheikh	Embroidery from member artisans, and a collection of old pieces held for reference
Qasab — Kutch Craftswomen's Producer Company	Kutch	Bhuj	Embroidery and craft produced by member women across the district
The ajrakh workshops at Ajrakhpur	Kutch	Ajrakhpur	Natural-dye ajrakh printed on both faces
Nirona's craft houses	Kutch	Nirona	Rogan painting, copper-coated bells and lacquer turning
The Bhujodi weavers	Kutch	Bhujodi	Woollen shawls, dhablas and stoles woven on pit looms
The Khavda potters	Kutch	Khavda	Iron-red and white painted earthenware
The original dabeli shop, Mandvi	Kutch	Mandvi	The dabeli, where it was invented
Leh Main Bazaar and the women's vegetable line	Ladakh & Zanskar	Leh	Garden produce sold directly by the women who grew it
Women's Alliance of Ladakh	Ladakh & Zanskar	Leh	Local produce, and a long-running argument for eating what Ladakh grows
LEDeG Ecology Centre shop	Ladakh & Zanskar	Leh	Local wool, apricot products, books on Ladakh
LAMO, Leh old town	Ladakh & Zanskar	Leh	Exhibitions, archives and two restored old-town houses
Chiling metalworkers	Ladakh & Zanskar	Chiling, on the road to Zanskar	Copper and silver teapots, churns, ladles and ritual vessels
The Nubra apricot roadsides	Ladakh & Zanskar	Diskit, Hunder, Turtuk, Sumur	Fresh apricots in July, dried apricots and kernels the rest of the year
Lakshadweep Development Corporation outlets	Lakshadweep	Kavaratti and Kochi	Coir products, coconut oil, tuna products and lacquered woodwork
SPORTS (Society for Promotion of Nature Tourism and Sports)	Lakshadweep	Kavaratti, with a booking office in Kochi	The official tourism packages, ship berths and island huts
The island coir factories	Lakshadweep	Kadmat, Kalpeni, Kavaratti, Amini and Androth	Coir yarn, matting and rope
Masmin from the fishermen's societies	Lakshadweep	Agatti, Minicoy, Kavaratti	Smoked and dried tuna, sold by weight
The Silao khaja bazaar	Magadh	Silao, Nalanda	Layered khaja by weight
The tilkut lanes of Ramna and Tekari Road	Magadh	Gaya	Tilkut, khoya tilkut and til-gur
Maner laddu shops	Magadh	Maner, Patna district	Coarse-grain gram-flour laddu
The bhunja shops	Magadh	Across Magadh	Grain roasted in sand to order, and sattu ground fresh
Magahi paan growers of Nawada and Nalanda	Magadh	Nawada	Magahi betel leaf
Bodh Gaya monastery bookshops and craft stalls	Magadh	Bodh Gaya	Stone and metal images, Tibetan thangkas, Pali and Tibetan texts
Mrignayanee	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Jabalpur	Gond painting, bamboo, bell metal and MP handloom under one roof
Vindhya Valley outlets	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Jabalpur and Narmadapuram	Mahua products, forest honey, chironji, amla and tikhur
Tribes India (TRIFED)	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Jabalpur and Bhopal	Pardhan Gond painting, Baiga godna-derived work, bamboo and metal
The marble-carving stalls above Dhuandhar	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Bhedaghat, Jabalpur	Carved dolomitic limestone figures, bowls and lamps
The khoya jalebi shops around Fuhara Chowk	Mahakoshal & Gondwana	Jabalpur	Khoya jalebi, sold warm by weight
Paragon Restaurant	Malabar	Kozhikode	Malabar biryani, fish curry and mutton, in the same family for four generations
Zain's Hotel	Malabar	Kozhikode (Kuttichira)	Mappila home cooking — pathiri, chatti pathiri, mutta mala, unnakkaya
Mithai Theruvu	Malabar	Kozhikode	Kozhikode halwa, sold by weight from stacked slabs in every colour
Mambally's Royal Biscuit Factory	Malabar	Thalassery	Biscuits, plum cake and a family claim to the first cake baked in Kerala
Kanhirode Weavers' Co-operative Society	Malabar	Kannur district	Handloom furnishing cloth and mundu bought from the society that wove it
Beypore uru yards	Malabar	Beypore, Kozhikode	Watching a wooden ocean-going ship being built by hand
Payyannur pavithra ring workshops	Malabar	Payyannur, Kannur district	The knotted gold ring, made to order
Uravu, Thrikkaipetta	Malabar	Wayanad	Bamboo craft and products made by a village enterprise on the plateau
Ninasam and Akshara Prakashana	Malnad	Heggodu, Shivamogga	Theatre, a repertory season, a film society and a publishing house in one village
The areca and pepper growers' co-operatives	Malnad	Shivamogga, Sagara and Thirthahalli	Graded areca, black pepper and cardamom bought at the auction floor
The coffee curing works and estate stores	Malnad	Chikkamagaluru, Kushalnagar and Madikeri	Estate arabica and robusta, sold as parchment, cherry or roasted
The kachampuli and spice stalls of Madikeri market	Malnad	Madikeri	Kachampuli, wild honey, pepper, cardamom and Coorg orange squash
The Gudigar workshops	Malnad	Sagara and Sorab, Shivamogga	Deep-relief carving, now mostly in timbers other than sandalwood
Sarafa Bazaar	Malwa Plateau	Indore	A jewellers' market that becomes a food street at night
Chhappan Dukan	Malwa Plateau	Indore	Fifty-six food shops in a single planned row
Joshi Dahi Bada House	Malwa Plateau	Indore (Sarafa)	Dahi bada thrown and caught at the counter
Johny Hot Dog	Malwa Plateau	Indore (Chhappan Dukan)	The fried-bun "hot dog" and the egg benjo
Vijay Chaat House	Malwa Plateau	Indore (Sarafa)	Garadu in winter and khopra patties
Prakash Namkeen and the Indore namkeen houses	Malwa Plateau	Indore	Barik sev, laung sev, ratlami sev and mixture by the kilo
The sev shops of Ratlam	Malwa Plateau	Ratlam	Ratlami sev, made with clove and black pepper
Bherugarh batik workshops	Malwa Plateau	Ujjain	Wax-resist printed saris, dupattas and yardage
The Mahakal Lok market	Malwa Plateau	Ujjain	Rudraksha, bhasma, temple images and papier-mâché work
Tara Paan Centre	Marathwada	Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar	An elaborately built paan that has become a reason people stop in the city
The naan-qalia counters of the old city	Marathwada	Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (City Chowk, Shahganj, Aurangpura)	Mutton qalia with tandoor naan, from evening until late
The Paithani weaving centres at Paithan	Marathwada	Paithan	Handloom Paithani bought at the loom
The Himroo workshops of the old city	Marathwada	Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar	Himroo shawls and stoles on pit looms
Langar at Takht Sachkhand Sri Hazur Sahib	Marathwada	Nanded	A free kitchen running continuously, open to anyone
The Kesar mango markets	Marathwada	Jalna and Beed	Marathwada Kesar mango, in season
The masala chakkis	Marathwada	Latur, Beed, Parbhani	Grinding a household's year of kala masala
The Bangala	Marava & Ramnad	Karaikudi	Chettinad meals served in sequence in a restored family bungalow
Athangudi tile workshops	Marava & Ramnad	Athangudi	Handmade cement tiles cast face-down on glass
Muneeswaran Koil Street antiques market	Marava & Ramnad	Karaikudi	Architectural salvage — teak columns, doors, brass, Belgian mirror glass
Kandangi weaving cluster	Marava & Ramnad	Karaikudi and Kandanur	Heavy cotton Kandangi sarees on pit looms
Manamadurai potters' street	Marava & Ramnad	Manamadurai	Water pots, curd pots and cooking pots in unglazed red clay
Ramanathapuram chilli market	Marava & Ramnad	Ramanathapuram, with Mudukulathur and Kamuthi	Sun-dried Ramnad Mundu chilli
Rameswaram fish landing	Marava & Ramnad	Rameswaram	Reef and bay fish, crab and squid straight off the boats
Lakshmi Mishthan Bhandar (LMB)	Marwar & the Thar	Jaipur	Ghevar, paneer ghewar and a pure-vegetarian Rajasthani thali, on Johari Bazaar in the old city.
Rawat Mishthan Bhandar	Marwar & the Thar	Jaipur	The pyaaz kachori that most people in Jaipur will name first, and mawa kachori.
Shri Mishrilal Hotel	Marwar & the Thar	Jodhpur	Makhaniya lassi at the Sardar Market clock tower — saffron, cardamom, a slab of cream, served all day until it runs out.
Mohanlal Verhomal (MV) Spices	Marwar & the Thar	Jodhpur	Hand-blended spice mixes at Sardar Market, run by the family's daughters, with several imitators trading on the name nearby.
Maniharon ka Rasta	Marwar & the Thar	Jaipur	A lane off Tripolia Bazaar where lac bangles are made and sized to the wrist while you wait, over a small flame.
Anokhi	Marwar & the Thar	Jaipur	Hand block print revived commercially — and a museum of hand printing in a restored haveli at Amber that explains the craft properly.
The Gem Palace	Marwar & the Thar	Jaipur	Kundan and meenakari jewellery from a family that supplied the courts, on Mirza Ismail Road.
Bapu Bazaar and Johari Bazaar	Marwar & the Thar	Jaipur	Mojri and jutti footwear, bandhani and leheriya, quilts and precious stones — Johari for jewellery, Bapu for everything else.
Kaithun weaving village	Marwar & the Thar	Kota district	Buying Kota Doria at the pit looms it is woven on, where the fineness can actually be checked.
The Nathdwara bazaar sweet shops	Mewar	Nathdwara	Peda, thor, rabri and the seasonal temple sweets
The Nathdwara painters' lanes	Mewar	Nathdwara	Pichwai, both temple-scale cloth and small paper work
Molela potters' village	Mewar	Molela, Rajsamand	Hollow terracotta relief plaques of local deities
Bassi kaavad workshops	Mewar	Bassi, Chittorgarh	Hinged wooden portable shrines, and painted Gangaur and Isar heads
Akola dabu printers	Mewar	Akola, Chittorgarh	Mud-resist indigo block print
Sadhna	Mewar	Udaipur	Tanka and appliqué hand stitching, sold by the enterprise that employs the women who make it
Jodhpur Misthan Bhandar	Mewar	Udaipur (Bapu Bazaar)	Pyaaz kachori, dahi vada and mithai
Natraj Dining Hall	Mewar	Udaipur	An unlimited Rajasthani thali served in sequence rather than all at once
The Rajsamand marble workshops	Mewar	Rajnagar and Kelwa, Rajsamand	Carved marble images, screens and architectural members
The makhana mandis of Darbhanga and Purnia	Mithilanchal	Darbhanga	Raw and popped makhana by grade
Artist households at Jitwarpur and Ranti	Mithilanchal	Madhubani	Mithila painting on paper and cloth
Sikki cooperatives of Madhubani and Sitamarhi	Mithilanchal	Madhubani	Mauni baskets, boxes and figures
Sujini collectives at Bhusra	Mithilanchal	Muzaffarpur	Narrative quilted panels and stoles
The Darbhanga sweet shops	Mithilanchal	Darbhanga	Makhana kheer, anarsa, khaja and balushahi
Bara Bazar	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Aizawl	Smoked pork and beef by weight, fermented bamboo shoot, sa-um, wild greens and Mizo chilli
Zoram Handloom and Handicrafts Development Corporation emporium	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Aizawl	Puanchei, pawndum, ngotekherh and tawlhlohpuan at fixed prices
Thenzawl handloom workshops	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Thenzawl	Puans woven to order on fly-shuttle looms
Hnahlan vineyards and the Zawlaidi label	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Hnahlan, Champhai district	Grape wine made from vines on the eastern slopes
Mizoram Food and Allied Industries Corporation outlets	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Aizawl	Processed pork products, packaged smoked meat and local fruit preserves
Champhai market	Mizo–Kuki–Chin Hills	Champhai	Rice from the valley, Chin Hills goods and Mizo chilli in bulk
The Mon Shugu handmade paper unit	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Tawang	Monpa handmade paper made from shugu sheng bark
Government craft centres at Tawang and Bomdila	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Tawang and Bomdila	Hand-knotted carpets, thangka, wooden masks and bowls, woollen weaving
Tawang market	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Tawang	Churpi by the string, dried chilli, buckwheat flour, butter and local cheese
Dirang market	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Dirang	Apples, kiwi, walnuts, local cheese and woollen goods
The monastery shop at Tawang	Monpa & Tawang Belt	Tawang	Ritual items, printed texts, incense and thangka reproductions
Mao Market	Naga Hills	Kohima	Axone, anishi, smoked pork and beef, wild greens, bamboo shoot, king chilli
Hong Kong Market and Naga Bazaar	Naga Hills	Dimapur	Hill produce brought down to the plains edge, plus imported goods from the eastern trade
Nagaland Handloom and Handicrafts emporium	Naga Hills	Kohima	Loin-loom shawls, bamboo and cane work, wood carving
Diezephe craft village	Naga Hills	Chumoukedima, near Dimapur	Weaving and wood carving bought from the workshops themselves
Khonoma village homestays	Naga Hills	Khonoma	Village-run accommodation, terrace walks and local food
Mokokchung town market	Naga Hills	Mokokchung	Anishi, Ao ferments, seasonal insects and river fish
Thovalai flower market	Nanjil Nadu	Thovalai	Jasmine, chrysanthemum and garland flowers, sold wholesale before dawn
The Nagercoil temple-jewellery workshops	Nanjil Nadu	Nagercoil	Stone-set temple jewellery for dancers and for deities
Chinnamuttom and Colachel fish landings	Nanjil Nadu	Kanyakumari and Colachel	Seer, tuna, sardine and estuary crab straight off the boat
The Marthandam rubber and honey market	Nanjil Nadu	Marthandam	Smallholder rubber sheet, and honey from the Ghats slope
The spice traders of Kuzhithurai	Nanjil Nadu	Kuzhithurai	Clove, nutmeg, mace and pepper from the slope gardens
Vivekananda Kendra, Kanyakumari	Nanjil Nadu	Kanyakumari	Books and publications on the memorial and its background
None on the islands	Nicobar Islands	Nicobar district	Nothing, and that is the accurate entry
Sagarika Government Emporium	Nicobar Islands	Port Blair	Nicobari mats, hodi models and island craft, sold on the Andaman side
Village and island co-operative societies	Nicobar Islands	Car Nicobar and the Nancowry group	Copra and coconut oil marketing
Rehwa Society	Nimar	Maheshwar	Handwoven Maheshwari saris, stoles and yardage, sold from inside the fort
WomenWeave and the Handloom School	Nimar	Maheshwar	Training and production in handloom weaving, with an emphasis on women weavers
The weaving sheds inside Maheshwar fort	Nimar	Maheshwar	Watching the reversible border being set up on the loom
Omkareshwar ghat stalls	Nimar	Omkareshwar	Banalinga stones, rudraksha, and the puja goods of the island circuit
Burhanpur cloth market	Nimar	Burhanpur	Powerloom cotton, saris and zari-bordered cloth
Forest produce collection centres of the Satpura slope	Nimar	Khargone, Barwani, Khandwa districts	Mahua, chironji, honey, tendu and amla
Kyani & Co.	North Konkan	Mumbai (Dhobi Talao)	Irani chai, bun maska, mawa cake
B. Merwan & Co.	North Konkan	Mumbai (Grant Road)	Mawa cakes, sold until they run out
Britannia & Co.	North Konkan	Mumbai (Ballard Estate)	Berry pulao, sali boti, caramel custard
Yazdani Bakery	North Konkan	Mumbai (Fort)	Brun pav baked in a wood-fired oven, apple pie, ginger biscuits
Mahesh Lunch Home	North Konkan	Mumbai (Fort)	Coastal seafood — crab, surmai, bombil, sol kadhi
Ashok Vada Pav	North Konkan	Mumbai (Dadar, near the station)	Vada pav
Sassoon Dock morning auction	North Konkan	Mumbai (Colaba)	The day's landing, sold by the crate before six in the morning
Zaveri Bazaar	North Konkan	Mumbai (Bhuleshwar)	Gold and silver, and the workshops behind the shopfronts
Guru Sweet Mart	Old Mysore	Mysuru (Sayyaji Rao Road)	Mysore pak
Mavalli Tiffin Rooms (MTR)	Old Mysore	Bengaluru (Lalbagh Road)	Rava idli, masala dosa, the fixed-price meal
Vidyarthi Bhavan	Old Mysore	Bengaluru (Gandhi Bazaar, Basavanagudi)	Masala dosa
Central Tiffin Room (Shri Sagar)	Old Mysore	Bengaluru (Malleshwaram)	Benne masala dosa
Brahmin's Coffee Bar	Old Mysore	Bengaluru (Shankarapuram)	Idli, vada and a chutney it will not describe
Devaraja Market	Old Mysore	Mysuru	Flowers, bananas, spices, sandalwood oil and rasabale in season
KSIC Silk Factory showroom	Old Mysore	Mysuru	Mysore silk sarees direct from the mill
Cauvery Handicrafts Emporium	Old Mysore	Bengaluru and Mysuru	Rosewood inlay, sandalwood carving, Channapatna toys, Ganjifa
Konar Mess	Pandya Nadu	Madurai	Kari dosai
Famous Jigarthanda	Pandya Nadu	Madurai (near Simmakkal)	Jigarthanda
Murugan Idli Shop	Pandya Nadu	Madurai	Idli, podi and a very large number of chutneys
Amma Mess	Pandya Nadu	Madurai	Mutton chukka, kola urundai and paya
Mattuthavani flower market	Pandya Nadu	Madurai	Jasmine sold by weight at auction before dawn
Puthu Mandapam tailors	Pandya Nadu	Madurai	Same-day shirts, blouses and alterations under a Nayak colonnade
The Srivilliputhur palkova street	Pandya Nadu	Srivilliputhur	Palkova, sold by weight from open pans
Dindigul lock workshops	Pandya Nadu	Dindigul	Hand-filed iron and brass locks, including very large ones
Khonsa market	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Khonsa	Nocte weaving, cane and bamboo work, smoked pork, bamboo shoot and king chilli
Longding market and the Wancho carving workshops	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Longding	Wancho wood carving, bead work, woven bags and belts
Choephelling handicraft centre, Miao	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Miao	Hand-knotted woollen carpets, Tibetan handicraft
Miao market	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Miao	Provisioning for Namdapha, local produce, Tibetan and Lisu goods
Singpho households around Bordumsa and Innao	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Bordumsa, Changlang	Phalap — bamboo-cured smoked tea, sold by the households that make it
Nampong and the Pangsau festival stalls	Patkai & Tirap Belt	Nampong	Tangsa, Tutsa, Lisu and Singpho craft and food; cross-border goods when trade is permitted
Kesar Da Dhaba	Punjab Doabs	Amritsar	Dal, lachha paratha with ghee, and phirni in an earthen bowl
Bharawan Da Dhaba	Punjab Doabs	Amritsar	Vegetarian Punjabi thali, paneer and dal
The Amritsar fish shops	Punjab Doabs	Amritsar	Ajwain-heavy batter-fried river fish, sold by weight in winter
Malerkotla jutti bazaar	Punjab Doabs	Malerkotla	Hand-stitched and tilla-embroidered juttis, sold from the workshops that make them
Katra Jaimal Singh and the Amritsar cloth katras	Punjab Doabs	Amritsar	Phulkari, dupattas, suit lengths and woollens, organised by commodity lane
Verka and the Milkfed outlets	Punjab Doabs	Across Punjab	Milk, ghee, paneer, lassi and kheer from the state dairy cooperative federation
The Shaktigarh langcha strip	Rarh	Shaktigarh, Purba Bardhaman	Langcha, sold hot from dozens of adjacent shops
The Bardhaman sweet shops on BC Road	Rarh	Bardhaman	Sitabhog and mihidana
Amar Kutir	Rarh	Ballavpurdanga, near Bolpur	Santiniketan leather, kantha, batik and dokra
Sonajhuri Khoai Haat	Rarh	Santiniketan	Craft, textiles, Baul performance and tribal jewellery
Charida mask workshops	Rarh	Baghmundi, Purulia	Chhau masks, both performance-weight and decorative
Panchmura potters' village	Rarh	Taldangra, Bankura	Bankura horses, elephants and terracotta plaques
The Bishnupur weavers' clusters	Rarh	Bishnupur	Baluchari and Swarnachari sarees, Bishnupuri silk
TTD laddu counters, Tirumala	Rayalaseema	Tirumala	The GI-registered Tirupati laddu, issued as prasadam
Srikalahasti kalamkari workshops	Rayalaseema	Sri Kalahasti	Hand-drawn kalamkari panels, hangings and yardage
Dharmavaram silk weavers' cooperative societies	Rayalaseema	Dharmavaram	Heavy mulberry-silk sarees with broad zari borders
Nimmalakunta puppet artisans	Rayalaseema	Nimmalakunta, near Dharmavaram	Tholu Bommalata leather puppets, lampshades and painted hide panels
Allagadda sculptors' workshops	Rayalaseema	Allagadda	Stone temple images carved to Agama proportion
Kadapa kaja stalls	Rayalaseema	Kadapa and the Rajampet road	Madatha kaja
Lepakshi Handicrafts Emporium	Rayalaseema	Tirupati, Kurnool and other town branches	Kalamkari, leather puppetry, stone and wood craft at fixed prices
Nandyal and Banaganapalle mango markets	Rayalaseema	Nandyal, Banaganapalle	Banaganapalle mangoes in season
Yemmiganur handloom societies	Rayalaseema	Yemmiganur	Cotton durries and coarse handloom cloth
Ghani oil mills, Anantapur and Kurnool	Rayalaseema	Across the groundnut belt	Cold-pressed groundnut oil
The Moradabad brass workshops	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Moradabad	Engraved and cast brassware, by weight
The Pilibhit flute makers	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Pilibhit	Bamboo bansuri, tuned individually
Rampur's wedding kitchens	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Rampur	Taar korma, shab deg and adrak ka halwa
The Amroha dholak mohallas	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Amroha	Dholak, naal and tabla shells
Moradabadi dal carts	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Moradabad	Thin moong dal with raw onion and masala
The Sambhal horn workshops	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Sambhal	Horn and bone combs, handles and tableware
Bareilly's zari workshops and jhumka shops	Rohilkhand & Katehar	Bareilly	Zardozi embroidery, and the earrings the city is known for
Talala Gir Market Yard	Saurashtra	Talala, Gir Somnath	The Gir Kesar mango auction
Chandi Bazaar, Jamnagar	Saurashtra	Jamnagar	Silver, and bandhani sold from the workshops that tie it
Jetpur dyeing and printing cluster	Saurashtra	Jetpur, Rajkot district	Screen-printed and dyed cotton saree cloth
Sihor brass bazaar	Saurashtra	Sihor, Bhavnagar district	Brass and copper vessels, and hand-tinning
Tangaliya weavers' association, Surendranagar	Saurashtra	Surendranagar	Tangaliya shawls and stoles woven with the dana technique
Garvi Gurjari emporia	Saurashtra	Rajkot and other Gujarat cities	State-run retail for Gujarat's handloom and handicraft clusters
The Bhavnagar gathiya shops	Saurashtra	Bhavnagar	Soft gathiya with papaya sambharo and fried chillies
Pasighat main market	Siang & Adi Belt	Pasighat	Fermented and dried bamboo shoot, king chilli, hearth-smoked pork and fish, local ginger, foraged greens and seasonal river fish
Aalo bazaar	Siang & Adi Belt	Aalo (Along)	Galo weaving, cane and bamboo baskets, apong ingredients and starter cakes
Daporijo market	Siang & Adi Belt	Daporijo	Tagin and Galo produce, millet, cane work and the supplies for the upper Subansiri villages
Ziro weaving and craft groups	Siang & Adi Belt	Ziro / Hapoli	Apatani loin-loom textiles bought from the weavers' own collectives
Arunachal Pradesh state handicrafts emporia	Siang & Adi Belt	Itanagar and Naharlagun	Cane and bamboo work, textiles and dao from across the state
Basar Confluence craft stalls	Siang & Adi Belt	Basar	Galo textiles, cane work and food, sold directly by the households that make them
Nathmull's Tea	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Darjeeling	Single-estate Darjeeling by flush and garden
Glenary's	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Darjeeling	Bakery, breakfast and a nineteenth-century dining room on Nehru Road
Kunga	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Darjeeling (Gandhi Road)	Thukpa, thenthuk and momo
Lark's Provisions	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Kalimpong	Kalimpong cheese and Kalimpong lollipops
Gompu's	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Kalimpong	Outsized pork momos
Sikkim Government Institute of Cottage Industries	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Gangtok	Hand-knotted carpets, thangka, choktse tables and handmade paper
Temi Tea Estate	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Temi, south Sikkim	Sikkim's only tea garden, planted in 1969
The Lal Bazar and MG Marg cardamom sellers	Sikkim & Darjeeling Hills	Gangtok	Bhatti-cured large cardamom, dalle achar, churpi and gundruk
Dotivala Bakery	South Gujarat Littoral	Surat	Surti batasa, nankhatai and khari
The locho stalls of Chowk Bazaar and Gopipura	South Gujarat Littoral	Surat	Locho, sev khamani and khaman, from early morning
The ghari makers of Surat	South Gujarat Littoral	Surat	Ghari, in the week before Chandani Padvo
The Parsi eating houses of Udvada	South Gujarat Littoral	Udvada, Valsad district	Set Parsi meals — dhansak, patra ni machhi, sali boti
Sosyo	South Gujarat Littoral	Surat	A locally made fruit-and-spice soft drink
The zari workshops of the old city	South Gujarat Littoral	Surat	Drawn and flattened metal thread, badla, kasab and salma-sitara
The weekly haats at Ahwa and Waghai	South Gujarat Littoral	Ahwa and Waghai, Dang district	Nagli, forest produce, bamboo work and mahua
The Sawantwadi palace lacquerware workshop	South Konkan	Sawantwadi	Lacquer-turned fruit, boxes, toys and hand-painted ganjifa packs
Thakar Adivasi Kala Angan, Pinguli	South Konkan	Pinguli, near Kudal	Chitrakathi pothi paintings, string and shadow puppets, and performances on request
Devgad taluka mango growers' co-operative	South Konkan	Devgad	Alphonso sold under the growers' own collective mark, direct from the orchard
The Harnai beach auction	South Konkan	Harnai, Dapoli taluka	The day's catch sold on the sand as the boats land
Malvan's family khanavals	South Konkan	Malvan and Tarkarli	A fixed-price thali of fish curry, sukka, vade, rice and sol kadhi
The kokum co-operatives of Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri	South Konkan	Kudal, Sawantwadi and Ratnagiri	Sol, agal, kokum syrup and kokum butter
Vengurla cashew processors	South Konkan	Vengurla	Raw and roasted cashew from the Vengurla-series varieties
Boyanika	South Odisha & Ganjam	Berhampur and Bhubaneswar	Berhampur patta sarees and joda at fixed prices
Utkalika	South Odisha & Ganjam	Berhampur and Bhubaneswar	State handicrafts emporium — horn work, palm leaf, applique, textiles
The Berhampur silk weaving lanes	South Odisha & Ganjam	Brahmapur (Berhampur)	Patta sarees and joda bought from the loom
The chhena and sweet shops of the Aska road	South Odisha & Ganjam	Berhampur, Hinjilicut and Aska	Chhena poda, chhena kheeri and fresh chhena sold by weight
The kewda distilleries around Chhatrapur and Rangeilunda	South Odisha & Ganjam	Ganjam district	Kewda rooh and kewda water
Gopalpur fish landing	South Odisha & Ganjam	Gopalpur-on-Sea	Morning sea catch and sun-dried sukhua
The cashew yards	South Odisha & Ganjam	Berhampur and Chhatrapur	Graded cashew kernels sold by the kilo
Horn-craft workshops, Paralakhemundi	South Odisha & Ganjam	Paralakhemundi	Combs, figures and containers worked from buffalo horn
Forest department honey counters	Sundarbans	Sajnekhali, Canning and Kolkata	Wild Sundarbans honey collected under licence and sold under the West Bengal Forest Development Corporation's Bonphool label, alongside beeswax.
Joynagar moa shops	Sundarbans	Joynagar–Majilpur, South 24 Parganas	Kanakchur puffed rice bound with nolen gur, made only from about December to February.
Rangabelia cooperative handicrafts	Sundarbans	Rangabelia, Gosaba	Kantha stitch, tailoring and household craft produced through the village women's cooperatives.
Gosaba and Pakhiralay market	Sundarbans	Gosaba, South 24 Parganas	Dried fish, crab, honey, gur in season, and the boat and net supplies the islands actually run on.
Canning fish and crab market	Sundarbans	Canning, South 24 Parganas	Mud crab, prawn and estuarine fish going up to Kolkata, at first light.
Boat yards at Canning and Namkhana	Sundarbans	Canning and Namkhana	Wooden bhutbhuti hulls and their pump engines, built and repaired to order.
Shadab	Telangana	Hyderabad (Ghansi Bazaar)	Mutton biryani and old-city breakfasts
Shah Ghouse Cafe	Telangana	Hyderabad (Shah Ali Banda and Tolichowki)	Haleem in Ramzan, biryani year-round
Pista House	Telangana	Hyderabad	Haleem
Nimrah Cafe and Bakery	Telangana	Hyderabad (Charminar)	Irani chai and Osmania biscuits
Subhan Bakery	Telangana	Hyderabad (Nampally)	Osmania biscuits and fruit biscuits
Karachi Bakery	Telangana	Hyderabad (Moazzam Jahi Market)	Fruit biscuits and dilkush
Hameedi Confectioners	Telangana	Hyderabad (Purani Haveli)	Badam ki jali and Hyderabadi dry sweets
Laad Bazaar bangle shops	Telangana	Hyderabad (west of the Charminar)	Lac bangles set with stones and mirror
Pochampally weavers' cooperative societies	Telangana	Bhoodan Pochampally and Puttapaka	Ikat sarees, yardage and dupattas bought from the loom
Golconda Handicrafts and the state emporia	Telangana	Hyderabad	Nirmal toys and paintings, Pembarthi brass, Cheriyal panels, Adilabad dokra
Higginbothams	Tondaimandalam	Chennai (Mount Road)	Books
Nalli Silks	Tondaimandalam	Chennai (T. Nagar)	Kanchipuram silk sarees
Ratna Cafe	Tondaimandalam	Chennai (Triplicane)	Idli flooded with sambar
Rayar's Mess	Tondaimandalam	Chennai (Mylapore)	Idli, pongal, kara bath and coffee, in a room the size of a corridor
Karpagambal Mess	Tondaimandalam	Chennai (Mylapore)	Filter coffee and a fixed South Indian tiffin list
The Kanchipuram weavers' cooperative societies	Tondaimandalam	Kancheepuram	Korvai silk sarees bought closer to the loom
Burma Bazaar's atho stalls	Tondaimandalam	Chennai (George Town)	Atho and other Burmese street dishes
The Puducherry bakeries	Tondaimandalam	Puducherry	Baguette-style bread, croissants and macaroons
SMSM Institute	Travancore & Kuttanad	Thiruvananthapuram	Kerala handicrafts, including Aranmula mirrors, coconut-shell inlay and screw-pine mats
The Aranmula mirror workshops	Travancore & Kuttanad	Aranmula	Cast metal mirrors made to order
Indian Coffee House, Thampanoor	Travancore & Kuttanad	Thiruvananthapuram	Coffee, masala dosa and mutton cutlet in a spiral building
Kerala State Coir Corporation showroom	Travancore & Kuttanad	Alappuzha	Coir matting, rugs and rope sold at the source
Ambalappuzha Sree Krishna Temple palpayasam counter	Travancore & Kuttanad	Ambalappuzha	Palpayasam
The Sabarimala aravana counters	Travancore & Kuttanad	Sannidhanam, Pathanamthitta	Aravana payasam and appam prasadam in sealed tins
The Kuttanad toddy shops	Travancore & Kuttanad	Alappuzha and Kottayam districts	Duck roast, karimeen, kappa and fresh toddy
The Kollam cashew factories	Travancore & Kuttanad	Kollam	Cashew, roasted, salted and graded
Purbasha	Tripura Hills & Plains	Agartala	Rignai, risa, rikutu, cane furniture and bamboo craft at government rates
Bamboo and Cane Development Institute	Tripura Hills & Plains	Agartala	Bamboo product design, training and a display of what the material is capable of
Battala Bazar	Tripura Hills & Plains	Agartala	Berma, bamboo shoot, fresh chillies, seasonal greens and fish
Maharajganj Bazar	Tripura Hills & Plains	Agartala	Everyday provisions, dried fish and household goods
The pera lane at Matabari	Tripura Hills & Plains	Udaipur	Matabari pera prasad
Jampui orange growers	Tripura Hills & Plains	Vanghmun and the Jampui ridge villages	Mandarin oranges, sold by the grower through November and December
Ideal Ice Cream	Tulu Nadu	Mangaluru	Gadbad, and the layered ice-cream glasses that followed it
Mitra Samaj	Tulu Nadu	Udupi (Car Street)	Goli baje, biscuit roti and gulla-based dishes, steps from the Krishna Matha
New Taj Mahal Cafe	Tulu Nadu	Mangaluru (Hampankatta)	Goli baje and filter coffee
Shetty Lunch Home	Tulu Nadu	Kundapura	Koli ghee roast
Giri Manja's	Tulu Nadu	Mangaluru	Kane fry, anjal and the coast's fish in the plain Mangalorean idiom
Kadike Trust weavers, Brahmavar	Tulu Nadu	Udupi district	Udupi sarees bought directly from the looms that wove them
Mangaluru Central Market	Tulu Nadu	Mangaluru	Byadagi chilli, dried mackerel and anchovy, kanile, jackfruit in season and the coast's pantry
Ananda Bazar	Utkal	Puri, inside the Jagannath temple enclosure	Mahaprasad sold in earthen pots and on leaf plates
The Pahala rasagola stalls	Utkal	Pahala, on the Bhubaneswar–Cuttack road	Rasagola sold by the kilo, hot, from rows of roadside shops
The Cuttack filigree workshops	Utkal	Cuttack, around Nayasadak and the old lanes	Silver tarakasi — jhumka, brooches, boxes and full ornament sets
Raghurajpur artists' verandahs	Utkal	Raghurajpur, Puri district	Pattachitra, palm-leaf etching, ganjapa cards and masks
Pipili's appliqué shopfronts	Utkal	Pipili, on the Bhubaneswar–Puri road	Chandua canopies, umbrellas, wall hangings and lampshades
Boyanika	Utkal	Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and district towns	Odisha handloom — Khandua, Bomkai, Sambalpuri bandha, Habaspuri
Utkalika	Utkal	Bhubaneswar	Odisha handicrafts, including filigree, pattachitra, sola and horn work
Ekamra Haat	Utkal	Bhubaneswar	A permanent open-air crafts market with rotating artisan stalls
The Cuttack dahibara carts	Utkal	Cuttack, Chandni Chowk and Buxi Bazar	Dahi bara aloo dum, eaten standing
Andhra Fine Khadi Karmika Abhivrudhi Sangham	Uttarandhra	Ponduru, Srikakulam	Hand-spun Ponduru khadi dhotis, sarees and shirting
Girijan Cooperative Corporation outlets	Uttarandhra	Visakhapatnam, Araku, Paderu	Araku coffee, forest honey, tamarind, millets and gum
The Etikoppaka toy workshops	Uttarandhra	Etikoppaka, Anakapalli	Lathe-turned lacquered toys in vegetable dye
Bobbili veena workshops	Uttarandhra	Bobbili and Gollapalli, Vizianagaram	Full-size ekanda veenas and miniature souvenir instruments
Budithi brass workshops	Uttarandhra	Budithi, Srikakulam	Beaten brass and bell-metal vessels
Anakapalli jaggery market yard	Uttarandhra	Anakapalli	Cane jaggery in blocks and pots, sold at auction
Palasa and Kasibugga cashew traders	Uttarandhra	Palasa, Srikakulam	Graded cashew kernels
Lepakshi and APCO	Uttarandhra	Visakhapatnam and Vizianagaram	State handicrafts and handloom emporia
Visakhapatnam fishing harbour	Uttarandhra	Visakhapatnam	Morning sea catch, sold at auction
The savji khanavalis	Vidarbha	Nagpur (Itwari, Mahal, Gandhibagh)	Saoji mutton and chicken rassa, at a fixed lunch hour
The tarri poha counters	Vidarbha	Nagpur (Sitabuldi, Mahal, Dharampeth)	Poha flooded with tarri, from about seven in the morning
Haldiram's	Vidarbha	Nagpur	Santra barfi and Nagpur's sweet and namkeen trade
The orange markets	Vidarbha	Warud, Morshi, Katol, and Kalamna in Nagpur	Nagpur mandarin, by the crate
The Karvath Kathi looms	Vidarbha	Umred and Pauni	Handloom cotton saris with an interlocked saw-tooth border
Bhandara's brass market	Vidarbha	Bhandara	Brass and bell-metal cooking and storage vessels
Magan Sangrahalaya	Vidarbha	Wardha	Khadi, village-industry products and the tools that make them