Malnad · Deccan Inland Plateau
Dance
A circling dance in full ceremonial saree and head scarf, the dancers striking small brass cymbals in their own hands and singing as they turn. The tempo builds across the song and the circle tightens.
Performed by: Kodava women. Occasion: Cauvery Sankramana, weddings, Puttari
Stick dances in kupya and chele — Kolat with short sticks struck in pairs, Bolakat with longer staves and a more combative step, both danced in a ring to the dudi drum.
Performed by: Kodava men. Occasion: Puttari and village gatherings
A peacock-feather dance, performed with plumes held or fixed at the waist, in a fast circling formation.
Performed by: Kodava men. Occasion: Festival nights
A sword-and-plaque dance with recited narration of Virabhadra's story, performed at jatras through the Shivamogga and Chikkamagaluru country and out onto the maidan beyond.
Performed by: Performers attached to Veerashaiva mathas. Occasion: Shivaratri and temple processions
Line and circle dances to hand drums, performed within the community rather than for audiences, and documented far less than the settled communities' forms around them.
Performed by: Yerava and Jenu Kuruba communities of the Kodagu and Nagarhole forests. Occasion: Community festivals
Music
Kodava narrative song performed to the dudi, a small hourglass drum held in one hand and struck with the fingers, by elders who carry the clan and territory histories. It is the primary vehicle of Kodava oral history — genealogies, land boundaries and origin accounts are sung, not written.
Kodava wedding songs sung by the assembled company rather than by professionals, marking each stage of a ceremony that has no priest — a Kodava wedding is conducted by the elders of the two clans.
The sung narration and the upright stick drum that drive an all-night Yakshagana. The bhagavata sings the fixed verse and controls tempo and entries from one spot; the chende battery announces the troupe long before it arrives. The ghat taluks lie inside the northern Badagutittu range, where the chende leads.
Village bhajan groups that meet through the monsoon nights in areca villages, working through Dasa and Shaiva repertoire with cymbals, harmonium and a tabla. The most widely practised music in the region and the least performed for outsiders.
Theatre
All-night dance-drama on epic and puranic prasangas, performed on an open field with no set. The costume is the form's signature — a towering gilt and mirror headgear, wooden shoulder ornaments, wide pleated skirts padded at the hip, painted faces, and an entrance made from behind a hand-held curtain. The bhagavata sings the fixed verse; the dialogue between verses is improvised on the night, which is why the same prasanga is never twice the same play. The Badagutittu school of the north and the Tenkutittu of the south divide at roughly the Sitanadi and differ in headgear, drumming and the balance of dance to speech; the ghat taluks here are Badagutittu country.
Yakshagana with the costume, the dance and the stage removed. The performers sit in a row and argue the story out in speech, with only the bhagavata and the drums. In the areca villages it is a monsoon form — when field work stops and outdoor performance is impossible, the argument is what remains, and audiences judge it on rhetoric alone.
A theatre institute, repertory company, film society and publishing house in the village of Heggodu near Sagara, built up from a village drama troupe founded in 1949. Its repertory tours Kannada productions of Brecht, Sophocles, Shakespeare and new Kannada writing to small towns, and its annual culture course brings several hundred people to a village of a few thousand for a week each October.
Crafts
Coorg Arabica, Chikmagalur Arabica and Bababudangiris Arabica were among five Indian coffees granted geographical indications in 2019. The shade system is why these estates hold bird and mammal populations that a monoculture plantation would not, and why the pepper crop and the coffee crop are the same enterprise.
Material: Arabica and robusta, grown under native shade. Technique: Multi-storey shade cultivation under retained forest canopy, with pepper vines trained up the shade trees; arabica washed and dried to parchment, robusta more often sun-dried whole as cherry.
Registered as a geographical indication. The colour is the grading criterion, and slow drying at controlled heat is what preserves it.
Material: Cardamom capsules. Technique: Grown under shade at 900–1,200 m, picked selectively over several rounds and dried slowly to retain green colour.
A loose-skinned mandarin with a distinct sharpness, registered as a geographical indication. Production has fallen heavily since its peak because of disease and because coffee pays better on the same land.
Material: A mandarin grown in the estate shade. Technique: Grown interplanted among coffee rather than in dedicated orchards.
Appemidi holds a geographical indication as a Karnataka appellation. The trees are individually known, named and valued — a good one is a household asset — and the fruit is picked from riverbank groves rather than orchards.
Material: Wild and semi-wild tender mango. Technique: Tender fruit is picked with the stalk intact so the cut does not weep, wiped rather than washed, and packed whole into salt brine in glazed jars for a year or more.
The Gudigar carvers worked sandalwood and ivory for courts and temples, and the sandalwood trade's restrictions and the 1972 ivory ban between them forced the craft onto cheaper timbers. The carving vocabulary survived the material change.
Material: Sandalwood, and now other timbers. Technique: Deep undercut relief carving in successive planes, worked with chisels of many profiles.
A small modern industry built entirely on a by-product that used to be burnt. It is one of the very few new manufactures the areca economy has produced in a century.
Material: The fallen leaf sheath of the areca palm. Technique: The sheath is softened, heat-pressed in a die and trimmed into plates and bowls.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Malnad, from classical forms to village traditions. (18)