Mahakoshal & Gondwana · Central Highlands & Forest Belt
Dance
A branch of the karma tree is cut, planted in the courtyard and danced around all night in a shoulder-linked line that gathers and releases to the mandar drum. The dance ends at dawn with the branch taken to water. It is the region's central monsoon rite and it runs east into Chhattisgarh and Chota Nagpur with different theology attached at each stop.
Performed by: Gond, Baiga and Oraon households. Occasion: Karma Ekadashi in Bhadon, and through the monsoon
Rela is the men's line dance to dhol and timki, taken at a running tempo; Rina is the women's counterpart, slower, sung in call and response. Both are named after their song form rather than their steps.
Performed by: Gond men and women. Occasion: Weddings and village fairs
A stick dance in which each dancer strikes his neighbour's stick on a fixed beat while the circle rotates, so a mistake is audible instantly. Shared with the Chhattisgarh plains and the Sarguja fringe.
Performed by: Young men. Occasion: After the harvest, Dashera to Magh
A troupe travels from village to village for several days performing narrative sequences, led by Gussadi dancers in peacock-feather crowns and body ash who are treated as embodying the deity rather than representing him. Strongest in the Adilabad uplands.
Performed by: Raj Gonds of the southern uplands. Occasion: Diwali
Danced in two facing lines with a dipping, wave-like step, to a drum and a bamboo flute. The Baiga repertoire is separate from the Gond one despite the villages often being a kilometre apart.
Performed by: Baiga men and women. Occasion: Dashera and the winter fairs
Music
A three-stringed spike fiddle with a carved horse-head or peacock finial, played by the Pardhan bards attached to Gond patron clans. The clan deity is understood to reside in the instrument, so the Pardhan is not an accompanist but part of the ritual apparatus — a clan cannot properly worship its Persa Pen without its bard, and the bard is paid in grain by the households whose history he keeps.
The Gond origin epic, sung over several nights: Pahandi Pari Kupar Lingo brings the gods out of the cave and founds the clan order that still governs who may marry whom. It is the charter document of Gond society and it exists only as sung performance.
Short cyclical songs built for hours of repetition, led by one voice and answered by the line, with the mandar, timki and tudbudi carrying an accelerating pulse.
The Bundeli and Bagheli repertoire reaches into the Narmada belt at Holi and through the monsoon, and the Jabalpur countryside sings both without treating them as foreign.
Theatre
The Gussadi troupes perform episodes of Gond myth in the round with masks and mime over several nights of Diwali, moving between villages rather than drawing an audience to one place.
The Chhattisgarhi night theatre with its gammat comic interludes crosses the Maikal into Balaghat and Dindori, played in the open with the audience on all four sides and a single lamp in the middle.
Crafts
A forty-year-old school of contemporary painting descended directly from a bardic caste. It has a founder, a named style, three generations of practitioners and an international market, and no geographical indication.
Material: Poster and acrylic colour on paper and canvas. Technique: A flat outlined form filled edge to edge with one repeated mark — dot, dash, comma, fish-scale, seed. Each artist owns a signature fill, and other painters do not use it, which functions as a signature more reliably than the name in the corner.
The wall and floor painting done by Gond and Baiga women. Every visual habit of the studio painting that made the region famous — the outline, the repeated fill, the flattened animal — is here first, on a surface designed to be washed off.
Material: White clay, geru, cow dung and rice paste on mud wall and floor. Technique: Painted freehand with fingers and a rag at festivals and before weddings, and renewed each year because the surface it is painted on is renewed each year.
A body-marking system with its own named patterns, now rapidly declining, and increasingly reproduced as a drawing idiom on paper and cloth rather than on people.
Material: Soot and pigment under the skin. Technique: Applied by itinerant Badni tattooists with a needle bundle, in a fixed sequence keyed to age — forehead in girlhood, then chest, arms, legs, and the great back pattern after marriage.
The smelting tradition of the Agaria, documented by Verrier Elwin in 1942 and now surviving mainly as blacksmithing rather than smelting. The famous central Indian wrought-iron craft with a geographical indication is Bastar's, over the watershed, and is a different tradition.
Material: Local iron ore and charcoal. Technique: Small clay furnaces worked with hand or foot bellows, producing a bloom that is then forged into tools and ritual objects at the anvil.
Grain bins, winnowing fans, fish traps and the flat tokni. The region grows more bamboo than almost anywhere in India and consumes most of it as containers rather than as construction.
Material: Bamboo from the region's own forests. Technique: Split, shaved and coiled or twilled by Basod and Burud households.
A craft that exists because the raw material is lying at the foot of the cliff. Worked at the stalls above the Dhuandhar fall and almost nowhere else.
Material: Dolomitic limestone from the gorge, sold locally as marble. Technique: Hand-cut and filed figures, bowls and lamps, then polished with abrasive stone.
Made to be left at a clan shrine and then left to weather. The figures are not sold as art in the village and are not repaired; the shrine accumulates decades of them.
Material: River clay, fired in an open pit. Technique: Coil-built horses, elephants and riders, unglazed and unpainted.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Mahakoshal & Gondwana, from classical forms to village traditions. (18)