कला और शिल्प परंपरा

Pandav Lilaअनुष्ठान

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.

कौन करता है: Whole villages, with hereditary drummers and designated dancers. मौका: Winter, usually between the harvest and the spring sowing

Langvir nrityaलोक

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.

कौन करता है: Men, individually. मौका: Fairs

Chaunphula and Jhumeilaलोक

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.

कौन करता है: Young men and women together, or women alone. मौका: Spring, Basant and marriage seasons

Thadyaलोक

A standing dance — thad means standing — performed in the courtyard, more restrained than Chaunphula and often sung by an older woman leading a line.

कौन करता है: Women. मौका: Spring

Barada Natiलोक

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.

कौन करता है: Jaunsari communities. मौका: Village festivals in Jaunsar-Bawar

Jagarअनुष्ठान

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.

कौन करता है: A jagariya singer and a pashwa medium. मौका: Whenever a household or a village needs the deity present

Dhol Sagar

The oral corpus of drum knowledge held by the Auji or Das drummer community — framed as a dialogue between Shiva and Parvati and learned entirely by ear. Particular rhythms belong to particular deities, moments and processions, and playing the wrong one at a jagar is not a musical mistake but a ritual one. Very few full carriers of it remain.

Dhol–damau and bhankora

The standing ensemble of Garhwal — a two-headed dhol, the small kettle-drum damau, and the bhankora, a long straight copper trumpet blown at temple processions and found essentially nowhere else. The curved ransingha and the reed turi join for larger occasions.

Mangal geet

Auspicious songs sung by women at every stage of a wedding, from the grinding of turmeric to the departure of the bride, each with its own text and its own moment. Learned by hearing, and the main reason a Garhwali wedding runs to several days.

The Garhwali recording tradition

From the cassette boom of the 1980s onwards, Garhwali song moved from courtyard to tape and then to video, with Narendra Singh Negi as its central figure — a body of work that includes love songs, migration songs and open political satire, and that is now the main channel through which younger, city-raised Garhwalis hear the language.

Ramman

The masked ritual theatre of Saloor-Dungra in the Painkhanda valley of Chamoli, held annually in the courtyard of the Bhumiyal Devta temple and inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. It combines a Rama cycle, masked appearances and household ritual; specific families hold specific roles and masks, and the Bhumiyal Devta stays for the year in a household chosen by an established rule rather than by choice.

Pandav Lila as theatre

Where the possession element is lighter, the same Mahabharata cycle is staged as narrative theatre with dialogue, costume and comic interludes — the two modes exist in neighbouring valleys and the villagers are quite clear about which is which.

Chaitra and Ram Lila troupes

Travelling companies that work the spring fair circuit through the middle hills, performing in Garhwali with plains-Hindi songs mixed in. Their repertoire is where new material enters the village calendar.

Garhwali woodcarving and the tibari जीआई योग्य 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.

सामग्री: Deodar and local cedar. तकनीक: Relief and pierced carving on the three-arched wooden facade of the upper storey of a hill house, on door frames, brackets and temple lintels. The arches are structural as well as decorative — the carved beam carries the balcony load.

Ringaal basketry जीआई योग्य 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.

सामग्री: Ringaal, the dwarf hill bamboo of the 1,000–2,500 m belt. तकनीक: Culms split by hand into strips, soaked, and coiled or plaited into the doko carrying basket, grain bins, winnowing trays, mats and lidded containers. No nails, no glue and no machinery.

Garhwal Qalam painting 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.

सामग्री: Handmade paper, mineral and vegetable pigment. तकनीक: Miniature painting in a Mughal-derived line, adapted to a hill palette — deep greens, cloud and water, and figures set in recognisably Himalayan landscape rather than in a court garden.

Stone and slate craft 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.

सामग्री: Local slate and schist. तकनीक: Slabs split along the cleavage plane and laid dry as roofing, paving and terrace revetment, and dressed stone laid in courses with wooden lacing.

Koti Banal timber-and-stone building जीआई योग्य 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.

सामग्री: Deodar beams and undressed stone. तकनीक: Multi-storey towers built of stone laid between horizontal timber frames, without mortar, so the wall can absorb ground movement instead of resisting it. Floors are cantilevered on projecting beams.

Copper and bell metal work जीआई योग्य 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.

सामग्री: Copper and bronze. तकनीक: Sheet beaten over a form and joined, then tinned for cooking use.