Khandesh · Deccan Inland Plateau
Dance
Circling lines of dancers to large drums and flute, moving from village to village through the Holi week and converging on fairs where marriages are negotiated. It is the year's principal social event on the slope, and it runs across the Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat lines as one calendar.
Performed by: Bhil, Pawra and Barela men and women of the Satpura slope. Occasion: Holi, over several days
Masked night performances in which performers take on deities and figures from local myth, with drums, an open ground and no stage. Documented across Khandesh and the Satpura foothills, and increasingly rare.
Performed by: Village troupes, Bhil and valley communities. Occasion: Post-harvest, and at village deity festivals
A metal or paper mask of the goddess Kanbai is installed on a decorated pole in the house, offered rot — a thick unleavened wheat bread that must be eaten entirely within the household and not carried outside — and then taken in procession to water for immersion. The festival is specific to Khandesh and is not kept in the same form anywhere else in Maharashtra.
Performed by: Households and neighbourhood groups. Occasion: Shravan, after Nag Panchami
The Marathi travelling form circulates through Khandesh's fairs as it does through the plateau, and Khandeshi audiences and some troupes are part of its circuit; the songs, however, are in Marathi rather than Ahirani.
Performed by: Travelling phad troupes. Occasion: Jatra and fair season
Commissioned overnight invocations to Renuka, Bhavani and Khandoba, performed in the house or courtyard of the family that vowed them.
Performed by: Gondhali performers. Occasion: Weddings and vows
Music
Khandeshi folk song — work songs, grinding songs, wedding songs and seasonal songs — in Ahirani rather than Marathi, and the largest surviving body of material in the language. Its transmission is domestic and almost entirely oral, and it is the main reason Ahirani retains a distinct literary register at all.
Bahinabai, a farming woman of Jalgaon district who could neither read nor write, composed songs in Ahirani at work through her life. Her son Sopandev Chaudhari wrote them down and published them after her death; the collection is now standard Marathi school reading, and it is the one case in which the language reached a national readership.
Drum-and-flute repertoire of the Satpura slope, tied to Holi, to marriage negotiation at the fairs and to ancestor rites, sung in Pawri and Bhili rather than in Ahirani.
Theatre
A village form in which masked performers enact deity narratives through the night on open ground, with the audience seated on all sides. Its masks are made locally and repainted each year.
Varkari kirtan performed in Khandeshi towns by returning dindis, in Marathi, and an important channel by which standard Marathi devotional culture entered an Ahirani-speaking countryside.
Crafts
Registered as a geographical indication in 2016–17. Jalgaon district is among India's largest banana-producing districts, and the crop reorganised the valley's water, credit and rail freight around itself.
Material: Banana, mainly Grand Naine and other Cavendish types. Technique: Tissue-cultured planting material under drip irrigation and fertigation, with bunches bagged on the plant and cut for rail dispatch. The switch from sucker planting to tissue culture and from flood to drip is what raised the district's yields to their present level.
Registered as a geographical indication in 2016–17 — a GI granted to a vegetable defined by the dish it is cooked into rather than by a market grade.
Material: Brinjal — the thorny bharit vange landrace. Technique: Grown specifically to be fire-roasted, with a thin skin, few seeds and flesh that separates cleanly from the char. Harvested large.
The region's main household manufacture, run largely by women's self-help groups, and the industry that absorbs the pre-monsoon weeks when there is no field work.
Material: Wheat starch, urad and moong flour. Technique: Wheat is soaked, ground and its starch separated by repeated washing, then extruded through a press into spirals and dried in the pre-monsoon sun on cloth. It cannot be done in the monsoon.
A Bhil, Pawra and Rathwa tradition continuous across the Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat hill country; the Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh versions are better documented than the Maharashtra ones.
Material: Earth pigment and lime on a mud wall. Technique: Horses and figures painted on an interior wall by a badwa or ritual specialist as part of fulfilling a vow, with the painting itself constituting the rite rather than decorating the house.
A market disproportionate to the town's size, built on the cash flow of banana and cotton, and drawing buyers from across northern Maharashtra and the neighbouring Madhya Pradesh districts.
Material: Gold. Technique: Hand-finished ornament and retail, concentrated in a few lanes.
Working craft rather than a market craft — grain bins, cots, baskets and roofing from forest produce, made by Bhil and Pawra households and by valley carpenters.
Material: Teak, bamboo. Technique: Hand-cut joinery and split-bamboo basketry for domestic use.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Khandesh, from classical forms to village traditions. (16)