इस क्षेत्र का अनुवाद अभी इस भाषा में नहीं हुआ है, इसलिए यह अंग्रेज़ी में दिखाया जा रहा है।
Pandya Nadu · Eastern Coastal Plains
नृत्य
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.
कौन करता है: Professional troupes, hereditary and now mixed. मौका: Amman festivals and village fairs
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.
कौन करता है: Devotees fulfilling a vow. मौका: Thaipusam and Panguni Uthiram
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.
कौन करता है: Men, in a line. मौका: Village festivals
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.
कौन करता है: Village akhara lineages. मौका: Festivals, and as training
Peacock and dummy-horse dances performed in heavy costume frames, usually as part of a temple procession rather than as a stage item.
कौन करता है: Temple troupes. मौका: Murugan and Amman festivals
संगीत
A distinct concert style associated with singers who took the city's name — Madurai Mani Iyer, Madurai Somu, Madurai T. N. Seshagopalan — characterised by rhythmic drive, an unfussy delivery and an appetite for Tamil compositions at a time when the concert platform preferred Telugu and Sanskrit. M. S. Subbulakshmi was born in the city and learned in it.
The folk wind-and-drum ensemble of this belt — nadaswaram or pambai with thavil, urumi and cymbals — played for karagattam, processions and weddings, at a volume and tempo the temple periya melam does not attempt.
The urumi is a friction drum played with a curved stick drawn across the head to produce a growling, speech like sound, used at goddess festivals and in possession rituals. Pambai is its paired-drum companion.
Oduvars sing Thevaram at the Meenakshi temple as they do across Shaiva Tamil country, and Madurai was a centre of the twentieth-century Tamil Isai movement, which argued that Tamil compositions deserved the concert platform on their own terms.
रंगमंच
A commercial all-night stage form booked by villages for temple festivals, in which actors are hired individually rather than as a company and assemble on the night to perform a script they all already know. The Madurai region is its centre and the form has been studied in detail as an occupation as much as an art.
Open-air street theatre of the Mahabharata, performed overnight in costume and painted face at Draupadi Amman temples, with a narrator who steps in and out of the story.
Bow-song narration in which a large strung bow is beaten as percussion by the lead singer, with a chorus answering — used for temple legends, for saints' lives and, in the twentieth century, for public campaigns.
शिल्प
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.
सामग्री: Cotton, vegetable and azo-free chemical dyes. तकनीक: Cloth is knotted by hand thousands of times over, dipped in alkali, dyed, and untied. Each knot leaves a dot; the layout of the dots is the design. A traditional sari takes ten to fifteen days.
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.
सामग्री: Jasminum sambac. तकनीक: Buds are picked before dawn while still closed, graded, sold by weight at auction the same morning, and strung on banana fibre by hand. Opening in the buyer's hand rather than in the field is the whole product.
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.
सामग्री: Iron and brass. तकनीक: Hand-filed levers and hand-cut keys, each lock unique to its own key rather than to a manufactured series.
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.
सामग्री: Paper, chemicals, board. तकनीक: Hand-filled cases, hand-dipped match heads, and lithographic and offset printing at industrial scale.
Small, tight-cloved, pungent hill garlic with a high allicin content and a long shelf life. Registered in 2019-20.
सामग्री: Hill garlic. तकनीक: Grown on the plateau without irrigation and cured in the open.
Both registered in 2008-09. Low moisture, high aroma, and the specific reason Palani panchamirtham keeps without refrigeration.
सामग्री: Hill banana cultivars. तकनीक: Rain-fed cultivation on the Palani and Sirumalai slopes at 800 to 1,500 metres.
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.
सामग्री: Betel vine and table grape. तकनीक: Vine cultivation under shade in the Vaigai villages, and trellis cultivation in the Cumbum valley.
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.
सामग्री: Lime plaster, granite. तकनीक: Lime-and-shell stucco modelled over brick armatures for gopuram figures, repainted every twelve years at the kumbabishekam; granite piers carved as rearing yali and as composite colonnades.
Pandya Nadu के नृत्य, संगीत, रंगमंच और शिल्प — शास्त्रीय शैलियों से लेकर गाँव की परंपराओं तक। (20)