कला और शिल्प परंपरा

Koli nrityaलोक

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.

कौन करता है: Koli fishing communities. मौका: Narali Purnima, weddings, Holi

Tarpa nachजनजातीय

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.

कौन करता है: Warli, Malhar Koli and Kokna communities of the Palghar uplands. मौका: Harvest, weddings and Diwali

Bohadaअनुष्ठान

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.

कौन करता है: Warli, Kokna and Thakur communities of Thane and Palghar. मौका: Village deity festival, mainly in the dry months

Lezim and dhol-tashaलोक

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.

कौन करता है: Neighbourhood mandals. मौका: Ganesh processions, Gudi Padwa

Koli geet

Working songs of the fishing villages, in a distinctive Koli Marathi, built on call and response with the rhythm of rowing under them. From the 1950s the Marathi record and film industry took them up, and a handful of these songs are now more familiar to the region than any classical repertoire.

Shakti-Tura

A competitive all-night song contest between two rival panels — the Shakti side and the Tura side — arguing theology, cosmology and village grievance in verse before an audience that keeps score. Held at village fairs across Thane, Palghar and Raigad, and shrinking fast.

Ovi at the quern

Women's couplets sung to the rhythm of the hand grindstone, composed and passed on entirely by women and dealing with parents, brothers, marriage and work. The grindstone is gone from most kitchens and the form went with it.

Qawwali at the coastal dargahs

The Mahim and Haji Ali shrines sustain a working qawwali circuit, and the Mahim urs in particular draws singers for ten nights.

The playback industry

The single largest musical fact about this region is not a folk form — it is that the Hindi film song industry has been based here since the 1930s, and has absorbed and re-exported the folk material of every other region in this atlas.

The Marathi commercial stage

Mumbai, not Pune, is where Marathi theatre became an industry — a network of auditoria in Dadar, Vile Parle and Thane running weekend matinees, supported by touring and by a subscription audience, and the reason a Malvani or Vidarbha play can find a paying house at all.

Bohada masked drama

The narrative half of the Bohada procession, in which masked figures act out short deity episodes between drum sequences.

Visiting Dashavatar troupes

South Konkan Dashavatar companies play the Mumbai and Thane suburbs through the season, staged by migrant associations for audiences from the same villages. The form belongs to Sindhudurg; the paying audience is here.

Warli painting जीआई पंजीकृत Palghar — Dahanu, Talasari, Jawhar, Mokhada

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.

सामग्री: Rice-paste white on a cow-dung and mud ground. तकनीक: Bamboo twig chewed to a brush; figures reduced to two triangles joined at the point, with a circle for the head. The ritual form is the chauk, a square enclosing the mother goddess Palaghata, painted by married women for a wedding, and it was not meant to be seen by outsiders.

Pen Ganesh idol making जीआई योग्य 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.

सामग्री: Shadu clay, and plaster of Paris for the export trade. तकनीक: Moulded in reusable negatives, dried slowly, then painted by hand in workshops that run all year for one week of demand.

Salt-making 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.

सामग्री: Seawater. तकनीक: Series-pan solar evaporation on tidal flats, harvested March to May.

Karvi and bamboo wattle 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.

सामग्री: Karvi stems (Strobilanthes), bamboo, cow dung and mud. तकनीक: Stems set vertically between frames and plastered — the wall that Warli painting is painted onto.

Wooden fishing-boat building 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.

सामग्री: Teak and marine ply. तकनीक: Plank-on-frame construction laid out without drawings, by eye and by template.

Zaveri Bazaar goldsmithing 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.

सामग्री: Gold and silver. तकनीक: Hand chain-making, setting and the traditional wax and die work of the Bhuleshwar lanes.