कला और शिल्प परंपरा

Panthiअनुष्ठान

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.

कौन करता है: The Satnami community. मौका: Guru Ghasidas Jayanti in December, and Magh Purnima

Raut Nachaलोक

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.

कौन करता है: Yadav and Raut cattle-herders. मौका: Dev Uthni Ekadashi, in Kartik

Suwaलोक

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.

कौन करता है: Women. मौका: Diwali to Dev Uthni Ekadashi

Karmaअनुष्ठान

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.

कौन करता है: Gond, Oraon and cultivator households of the northern fringe. मौका: Bhadrapada Ekadashi

Saila and Danda Nachaलोक

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.

कौन करता है: Young men of the Sarguja fringe. मौका: After harvest, Dashera to Magh

Gaura-Gauraअनुष्ठान

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.

कौन करता है: Village households, with a baiga officiating. मौका: Diwali night

Pandwani

Solo narration of the Mahabharata in Chhattisgarhi, told from the Pandavas' side and drawing on Sabal Singh Chauhan's Hindi retelling rather than the Sanskrit text. Two schools: Vedamati, seated and sober, and Kapalik, standing and acted out. In the Kapalik style the singer's tambura becomes every prop in the story in turn — Bhima's mace, a chariot, a bow, a river — so a single instrument does the work of an entire stage. Teejan Bai is its best-known exponent.

Bharthari gayan

The epic of King Bharthari, who leaves his throne to become a jogi, sung through the night to the sarangi by singers of the Nath and jogi communities. It is a renunciation story performed by renouncers, which is why it is sung at wakes as readily as at fairs.

Chandaini

The Lorik and Chanda epic, sung over many nights in the villages. Ram Chandra Deshmukh's Chandaini Gonda in 1971 took it onto a proscenium stage with a company of village performers and changed how the region's own folk forms were staged thereafter.

Dadaria

The two-line improvised couplet thrown back and forth between men and women at work, at a fair or on a walk. It is the shortest and most common form in the region, and almost none of it is written down.

Jas geet

Devi songs sung all night through Navratri to manjira and dhol, in a call-and-response that lets a whole village take turns leading.

Nacha

Night-long open-air folk theatre with the audience on all four sides and a single lamp in the middle. A company of men plays every role, including the female ones, and the plot is interrupted by gammat — comic skits that are the real reason people stay. There is no stage, no wings and no fourth wall, because a four-sided audience does not permit one.

Naya Theatre and the Nacha actors

Habib Tanvir built his company around Nacha performers, kept them acting in Chhattisgarhi, and let their timing rather than a script shape the production. Charandas Chor in 1975 was the result, and it is the point at which this region's village theatre entered the modern Indian repertoire without being translated first.

Champa kosa silk जीआई पंजीकृत Janjgir-Champa

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.

सामग्री: Tussar cocoons of Antheraea mylitta. तकनीक: Cocoons reared outdoors on forest trees, boiled or degummed, reeled by hand — often after the moth has emerged, which breaks the filament and gives the yarn its slub — and woven on pit and frame looms.

Bell metal and dhokra at Ektaal जीआई योग्य 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.

सामग्री: Brass and bell metal over a clay core. तकनीक: Lost-wax casting — a clay core wound with wax threads, invested in clay, the wax melted out and metal poured in. Every piece destroys its own mould, so no two are identical.

Village ironwork 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.

सामग्री: Wrought iron. तकनीक: Forged at the anvil from bar stock or, on the Maikal fringe, from locally smelted bloom.

Godna work 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.

सामग्री: Ink on skin; now also pigment on paper and cloth. तकनीक: Fine dotted and linear patterns pricked into the skin, and the same pattern vocabulary transferred to paper as line drawing.

Bamboo and sabai grass work 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.

सामग्री: Bamboo and sabai grass. तकनीक: Split and coiled baskets, mats, fans and rope.

Votive terracotta 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.

सामग्री: River clay, open-pit fired. तकनीक: Coil-built horses, elephants and riders, unglazed.