Hadoti · Arid Northwest
Dance
A spinning dance in wide gathered skirts, performed to dholak and manjira, in which the dancer turns continuously for long stretches while the skirt holds a full circle. It is specific to the Hadoti districts and is the region's best-known folk form.
Performed by: Women of the Kanjar community of the Kota and Baran districts. Occasion: Weddings and fairs
A men's circle dance struck out with short sticks, recorded in the folk-dance surveys of Rajasthan as a Sahariya form of the Baran forest tracts. It is danced by the same households that come to Sitabari.
Performed by: Sahariya men of Baran. Occasion: Seasonal and fair gatherings
The circling women's dance common to all Rajasthan, danced here at the same festivals as elsewhere; the Hadoti version is danced in printed cotton rather than in bandhani.
Performed by: Women. Occasion: Teej, Gangaur and weddings
The groom is taken through the village on horseback over several nights with dancing at each halt — a procession form rather than a performance, and still the commonest reason to hear a dhol in a Hadoti village.
Performed by: The bridegroom's party. Occasion: The nights before a wedding
Music
The Rajasthani semi-classical form, sung across the state and taught in the Hadoti towns alongside khayal. It is not local to Hadoti, but it is the register in which the region's court repertoire was sung.
All-night bhajan sessions at the river fairs — Chandrabhaga at Jhalarapatan, Kapil Dhara at Baran — sung by village groups with dholak, manjira and harmonium, and the main live musical practice of the region.
Wedding songs praising the bridegroom and the bride, sung antiphonally by the two households, in Harauti rather than in standard Hindi.
Song attached to the forest year in Baran — mahua flowering, tendu collection and the Sitabari gathering. Very little of it has been recorded, which is the main thing to say about it.
Theatre
A competitive sung folk theatre of the south-eastern Rajasthan and Malwa plateau, in which two troupes — one taking the Turra, the Shaiva side, the other the Kalangi, the Shakta side — improvise verse against each other through the night before a village audience. It is a contest form, and the argument is the entertainment.
Staged in the plateau towns through Ashvin, and in Kota folded into the Dussehra mela that has run on the same ground for well over a century.
Crafts
Around Kaithun, weaving is still largely a household activity done by women on looms sunk into the floor of the house. Sari counts are named by the number of khats across the width — 300, 350 and 400 — and the higher the count, the finer and slower the work.
Material: Fine combed cotton of 80s–120s count and degummed mulberry silk. Technique: Woven on pit looms in a plain weave whose repeating unit, the khat, is fourteen threads — eight cotton and six silk — in both warp and weft. The yarn is sized with onion juice and rice starch before weaving, which stiffens a very fine cotton enough to survive the loom and then washes out, leaving the transparency.
The Bundi school is identifiable by its blue-green palette and its treatment of vegetation and rain, and by a run of continuity unusual among Rajput schools: it worked from the seventeenth century into the nineteenth.
Material: Stone pigment, gold, squirrel-hair brush on wasli paper. Technique: Opaque watercolour built in thin layers over a burnished ground, with a strongly worked landscape — dense foliage, water and night skies — behind the figures.
Kota separated from Bundi as a state in 1631 and its painters separated too, specialising in the shikar — the ruler on an elephant in a black tangle of forest, with the tiger mid-spring. It is the most convincing depiction of animal movement in Rajput painting.
Material: Stone pigment and gold on wasli. Technique: The same materials as Bundi, worked with a faster, more gestural line and a much deeper picture space.
The Chitrashala in Bundi's Garh Palace carries the largest surviving programme — Krishna cycles, court processions and hunts, worked over a blue-green ground — and the idiom continued into merchant havelis in the town below.
Material: Lime plaster and mineral pigment. Technique: Pigment worked into a lime ground on interior walls and ceilings, in the same idiom as the miniatures.
A quarrying belt rather than a craft cluster, but the dressing and edge-finishing is hand work, and the stone floors and paves an enormous share of Indian institutional buildings.
Material: Kota limestone — a fine-grained, greenish-blue to brown calcareous stone. Technique: Split along natural bedding planes, then hand-dressed, chiselled or machine-polished.
Household production tied to the forest year rather than to a market, and the material base of the only Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group recognised in Rajasthan.
Material: Bamboo, grass, gum, mahua and tendu leaf. Technique: Basketry, rope and broom making alongside seasonal collection of forest produce.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Hadoti, from classical forms to village traditions. (16)