Kumaon · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya
Dance
A sword-and-shield dance performed in front of the groom's party by men in white and red costume, moving in paired combat sequences to dhol, damau, turi and ransingha. It is a stylised armed escort — the wedding party is being protected, historically from actual raiding — and it is strongest in Champawat, Pithoragarh and Almora.
Performed by: Hereditary performers, at the head of a wedding procession. Occasion: Weddings, and now fairs and state functions
A linked-arm circle dance that grows as people join it, moving in a slow anticlockwise shuffle to a sung call-and-response. There is no audience and no performer — the dance is the crowd, and a large jhora at a fair can run to hundreds.
Performed by: Men and women together, in an open circle. Occasion: Fairs, festivals, weddings
A slower and older circle form associated with the Danpur country behind Bageshwar, sung in a characteristic long-breathed line with the hurka keeping time.
Performed by: Men and women of the Danpur valley. Occasion: Village festivals
A courtship duet danced with a mirror and a handkerchief, quick-footed and flirtatious, sung to hurka and manjira. It is the one Kumaoni form built around a couple rather than a circle.
Performed by: A man and a woman, as a pair. Occasion: Fairs and celebrations
Night-long invocation in which the jagariya sings the deity's story to hurka and thali until the deity arrives in a human vehicle, who then dances, is questioned and answers. Golu, Bholanath, Kalbisht, Airy, Haru and Saim are among the deities called. It functions as therapy, arbitration and court of appeal, and it is entirely current.
Performed by: A jagariya singer and the person the deity possesses. Occasion: Whenever a household or village needs the deity present
A ritualised work performance in which the hurkiya stands in the flooded field singing a heroic ballad while the transplanting crew works to his rhythm and answers his lines. The song sets the pace of the labour, and the drummer is paid out of the crop.
Performed by: A hurkiya drummer-singer and the field crew. Occasion: Paddy transplanting
A masked agricultural pageant of ploughmen, oxen and the fearsome Lakhiya Bhoot, which came into Pithoragarh from the Sorar country across the Kali and is performed on both sides of that river to this day.
Performed by: Village troupes in the Soar and Kumaur country of Pithoragarh. Occasion: Late monsoon, after transplanting
Music
The Kumaoni epic — the ballad of Malushahi, a Katyuri prince, and Rajula, the daughter of a Shauka trader of the Bhot valleys, sung over nights by hurkiya bards. Its plot is the trans-Himalayan trade route itself, from the Katyuri capital up through the Johar valley to the Tibetan marts, which makes it the most geographically literal love story in the Himalaya.
A solo song of longing named after a hill bird, sung in a high, open, unaccompanied voice with long held lines. Traditionally sung alone while grazing or cutting grass, and its texts are almost always about distance.
Sung repartee performed at fairs — two singers alternate improvised verses in a fixed metre, each answering and attempting to outdo the last, with the audience keeping score. It is a competitive form and the reputations are real.
The hurka — a small hourglass drum squeezed under the arm to bend the pitch — is the Kumaoni instrument, carried by the jagariya and the hurkiya. Dhol and damau serve processions, the ransingha and turi announce them, and the masakbeen, a bagpipe adopted from military bands, has become standard at weddings within living memory.
A courtship song from the Almora country, arranged and popularised by Mohan Upreti and his colleagues in the 1950s, which became the effective anthem of the region. Its opening image is agricultural — the wild fig ripens all twelve months and nobody wants it, while the kafal ripens in Chaitra alone — and everyone in Uttarakhand can finish the line.
Theatre
The Almora and Nainital Ram Lila are sung throughout in classical raga rather than spoken, a nineteenth-century local development in which the entire cycle is performed as music theatre. It is distinct enough from plains Ram Lila that it is studied separately.
The masked agricultural pageant of the Pithoragarh valleys, brought from the far-western Nepali hills, enacting the plough, the pair of oxen and the buffalo-demon in a village courtyard after transplanting.
The mid-twentieth-century institution through which Kumaoni folk material was arranged for the stage — Mohan Upreti and Brijendra Lal Sah's work made ballads like Rajula Malushahi performable as productions, and put the region's music on national platforms.
Crafts
Practised by women, taught mother to daughter, and still drawn on doorsteps at every festival across the middle hills. Its geometry — dots joined into grids, lotus registers, and the specific chauki designs — is shared with Mithila and Rajasthani floor arts in principle and with nothing in detail.
Material: Geru (red ochre wash) and biswar (soaked ground rice paste). Technique: The surface is washed with red ochre and the design drawn freehand in white rice paste with the last three fingers — no brush and no stencil. Each pattern belongs to a specific occasion and place — the threshold, the household shrine, the seat under a bridegroom, the vessel for a namkaran — and drawing the wrong one is a category error rather than a matter of taste.
The Tamta artisan community of Almora has made the gagar water pot, the cooking vessel, the temple bell and the ritual lamp for generations, supplying Garhwal as well as Kumaon. Aluminium and steel destroyed the cooking-vessel market; ritual and decorative work is what remains.
Material: Sheet copper and bell metal. Technique: Sheet raised and beaten over a form with a graded set of hammers, joined, annealed, and tinned inside for cooking. Vessels are finished by hand-scraping rather than polishing, which leaves the facet pattern visible.
The carved doorway is the display surface of a Kumaoni house, and Almora's old bazaar lanes still show hundreds of them at first-floor height. As with Garhwali tibari carving, dismantled panels now move into the antiques trade faster than new ones are cut.
Material: Deodar, tun and local cedar. Technique: Deep relief carving on door frames, jambs, lintels and window screens — dense registers of lotus, creeper, deity figures and geometric bands, cut with chisels and finished without varnish.
Working equipment rather than decoration — the doko is still how a load moves where no vehicle goes. The craft is held by specific artisan communities and is under pressure from plastic on one side and from restrictions on ringaal cutting on the other.
Material: Ringaal, the dwarf hill bamboo of the 1,000–2,500 m belt. Technique: Culms split into strips by hand and plaited or coiled into carrying baskets, grain bins, winnowing trays, mats and lidded boxes, without nails or adhesive.
A craft that lost half its raw material and all of its market in the early 1960s and rebuilt as a cooperative economy, most visibly at Munsiyari. What is sold as Bhotiya wool now is often mill yarn worked by hand, and the difference is worth asking about.
Material: Sheep and goat wool, formerly with Tibetan raw wool and pashmina. Technique: Hand-spun on a drop spindle and woven on backstrap and pit looms in narrow widths, then stitched into blankets, wraps and rugs. Geometric registers are counted rather than drawn.
A tradition of building many small temples in a cluster rather than one large one — Jageshwar alone has well over a hundred — which produced a distinctively Kumaoni skyline and a distinctively Kumaoni idea of what a temple site is. The masons' lineages are gone; the buildings are protected.
Material: Local grey stone. Technique: Small nagara-form shrines with a curved shikhara and a crowning amalaka, assembled dry from dressed blocks, with sculpted door jambs and river-goddess figures at the base.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Kumaon, from classical forms to village traditions. (21)