Dress and textiles

KapdagandaDongria Kondh women and men

A coarse off-white cotton shawl embroidered in green, red and yellow thread with dense geometric lines and triangles, worked freehand without a drawn design. Unmarried girls embroider them and give them to brothers and to suitors, so the piece functions as a statement about a relationship as much as a garment. Older pieces used cloth woven by Dom weavers in exchange for hill produce.

Worn for: Everyday and courtship

RingaBonda women

A narrow handwoven waistcloth, roughly a foot deep, wrapped and tucked. It is woven at home on a simple loin loom, historically from fibre stripped and processed from local plants and now often from bought cotton yarn.

Worn for: Everyday

Kerang clothGadaba women

A stiff, coarse striped cloth traditionally woven from processed plant fibre rather than cotton, giving a textile closer to matting than to a sari. Mill cotton has replaced it in daily use and the technique now survives with only a few weavers.

Worn for: Everyday, now largely ceremonial

Dhoti and gamucha with tangiKondh and Paraja men

A short dhoti, a cotton towel over the shoulder, and — in the Niyamgiri villages — a small axe carried on the shoulder as a matter of routine rather than of display, along with hairpins worn in a bunch at the knot of the hair.

Worn for: Everyday

Sambalpuri-style cotton sariWomen of the lowland

Below the ghat, in Balangir, Titlagarh and the Kalahandi plains, the dress is the tie-dyed bandha cotton of the Kosli belt, worn with the pallu over the left shoulder.

Worn for: Everyday and festival

Kotpad handloomGI tagKoraput (Kotpad)

Cotton dyed with the root bark of aal (Morinda) by Mirgan weavers, giving a maroon-to-deep-brown range and, with an iron modifier, black. The yarn is pre-treated for weeks in castor oil, ash and cow dung before it will take the dye at all, and the colour deepens rather than fades with washing. No synthetic dye is used. Motifs are small and drawn from the surrounding villages — fish, crab, temple, axe, conch. Registered as a geographical indication.

HabaspuriGI tagKalahandi (Chicheguda)

A cotton sari woven in the Kalahandi lowland with Kondh-derived motifs — temple spire, fish, flower — set in a narrow contrasting border. Nearly extinct in the mid-twentieth century and revived from a handful of surviving weavers. Registered as a geographical indication.

Kapdaganda embroideryRayagada and Kalahandi (Niyamgiri)

Not a woven textile but a surface one — hand embroidery on plain cloth, counted by eye. Its motifs are read locally as hills, streams, paths and fields, though the reading is a description of the country rather than a fixed code.