Dhundhar & Shekhawati · Arid Northwest
Dance
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.
Performed by: Men, in large groups. Occasion: From Basant Panchami through to Holi
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.
Performed by: Men. Occasion: Holi
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.
Performed by: Women. Occasion: Gangaur, Teej, weddings
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.
Performed by: Men. Occasion: Wedding processions
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.
Performed by: Bhat puppeteer families. Occasion: Fairs and hired performance
Music
The school built on tatkar and layakari — footwork and rhythmic play — against Lucknow's emphasis on expression. Its lineage runs through Jai Lal, Sunder Prasad and Kundan Lal Gangani, and a trained eye can name the gharana in the first minute of a performance from the weight given to the feet.
Dhamal and chang songs sung by men's groups through the fortnight before Holi, in a call-and-response structure over frame drums, with the verses frequently improvised about the town's own affairs.
A large modern bhajan repertoire built around Khatushyamji and Salasar Balaji, carried by walking pilgrim groups from Delhi, Haryana and eastern Rajasthan. It is amplified, recorded and commercially enormous, and it is the most-heard music in the region by a wide margin.
Narrative songs about local outlaw figures and clan founders, sung to the Kachhi Ghodi dance and at village gatherings. They function as the region's non-official history and are frequently about disputes with the state.
Theatre
Open-air folk opera performed through the night on a raised platform, sung throughout, with a small instrumental group and a great deal of improvisation. Rajasthan's khyal traditions differ by tract, and the Shekhawati and Kuchamani forms are the northern pair.
Ramlila cycles in the basin towns before Dussehra, and Rasdhari troupes performing Krishna episodes on commission — a form that survived because merchant families paid for it as an act of merit.
Crafts
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.
Material: Quartz powder, powdered glass, fuller's earth and gum — no clay. Technique: The dough is pressed into plaster moulds because it will not stand on a wheel, dried, smoothed, painted with cobalt and copper oxide over a white slip, glazed and fired once at a low temperature. The whole body vitrifies, which is why a broken piece looks the same all the way through.
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.
Material: Cotton and silk, teak printing blocks, natural and chemical dyes. Technique: Carved wooden blocks printed in sequence — outline first, then fillers — each block registered against pinheads at the corners so the colours align. Fine work runs to five or more blocks per repeat.
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.
Material: Cotton, dabu clay resist, indigo, madder, harda, iron-jaggery syahi. Technique: Harda pre-treatment, then printing in dabu mud resist and dyeing, repeated for each colour, with washing and sun-drying between rounds. Every stage happens outdoors and the process runs on weather.
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.
Material: Gold, mineral enamel colours, foil, and cut stones. Technique: The metal is engraved into cells, enamel is packed into them and fired, colour by colour in descending order of firing temperature; red goes in last and is the hardest to hold. Kundan sets stones by pressing pure gold foil around them rather than by claws, so the setting is cold-worked.
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.
Material: Lac resin, mirror and glass inlay. Technique: Lac is warmed over a small flame until it can be rolled into a rod, joined into a ring, decorated with inlay, and then sized directly on the buyer's wrist while still soft.
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.
Material: Cotton rag and textile-mill waste. Technique: Rag is pulped, lifted from a vat on a mould, couched, pressed and sun-dried against a wall, then sized. No wood pulp is used, so the fibre length is long and the sheet takes ink and paint without feathering.
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.
Material: Lime plaster with marble dust; mineral pigments to about 1860, imported synthetics after. Technique: Ala gila — pigment laid into damp lime plaster and burnished with agate — for the best work, and dry tempera over set plaster for most of the later output. Guidelines were snapped onto the plaster with an ochre-dusted string.
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.
Material: Makrana and Rajsamand marble, local sandstone. Technique: Hand chiselling to iconographic proportion rules, then filing, sanding and wet polishing.
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.
Material: Coloured stones — emerald, garnet, ruby, and a great deal of treated material. Technique: Cutting and polishing on hand-fed laps, with the trade organised through Johari Bazaar's brokers.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Dhundhar & Shekhawati, from classical forms to village traditions. (20)