Mewar · Arid Northwest
Dance
The circular veil dance, danced with the odhni drawn and the ghagra swinging on the turn. Its origins are Bhil and it was taken up at the Rajput courts, which is the direction of travel worth noting — the court borrowed from the hill, not the other way round.
Performed by: Women. Occasion: Gangaur, Teej, weddings
A large circle dance struck out with sticks in a cross-rhythm against dhol and thali, with dancers moving inwards and outwards from a centre. Mewar's Holi Gair is danced through several days rather than one.
Performed by: Men, and mixed groups at Holi. Occasion: Holi and the days after it
Not a dance so much as a season. A village takes on Gavri once every few years and, having done so, its troupe performs ten to fifteen hours a day for forty consecutive days, travelling to the villages its married daughters have gone to. Participants go barefoot for the whole period, sleep on the ground, eat no meat, drink no liquor and abstain from sex. Women do not perform; men play the female roles.
Performed by: Bhil men only. Occasion: Forty days from the day after Raksha Bandhan
Thirteen small cymbals tied to ankles, wrists, elbows and waist and struck in sequence by a seated dancer. Common across the region's fairs and performed at Mewar's Ramdev shrines.
Performed by: Women of the Kamad community. Occasion: Devotional gatherings for Baba Ramdev
Music
The Pushtimarg temple music of Nathdwara — dhrupad-derived kirtan sung to pakhawaj inside the haveli, with a fixed repertoire assigned to particular darshans, seasons and festivals. Ragas are not chosen by the singer; the calendar chooses them, and the same eight compositions come round at the same hour every year.
Meera's padas, sung in a Mewari-inflected Braj across north India and in Gujarati bhajan mandalis on the other side of the Aravallis. Every one closes with the signature line naming Giridhar as her lord, which is how the tradition marks a pada as hers.
The Devnarayan epic, performed against a painted cloth scroll by a Bhopa and Bhopi through a whole night. Devnarayan's shrine tract centres on Asind in Bhilwara, and the epic is Gurjar in ownership — the Mewar counterpart to the Pabuji phad of the desert districts, and a longer text.
Madal and dhol, the thali struck as a gong, and the bansuri. Gavri's music is percussion-led and cyclical because it has to hold an audience for ten hours without a written script.
Theatre
A sung debate form centred on Nimbahera and Chittorgarh, in which two rival troupes — Turra, taking the side of Shiva, and Kalangi, taking the side of Shakti — improvise verse arguments against each other through the night. It travels east into Malwa and is the region's most distinctive folk theatre after Gavri.
A hinged wooden box shrine is opened panel by panel by a travelling kaavadiya bhat, who narrates episodes and the patron family's own genealogy as each door swings back and the innermost image is finally revealed. The box is a temple that has been made portable, and the sequence of opening is the sequence of the story.
String puppetry, performed by Bhat puppeteers whose community base is in the Nagaur country to the north, but institutionally sustained from Udaipur since the Bhartiya Lok Kala Mandal was founded there in 1952 to collect, train and stage it.
Crafts
A workshop tradition of hereditary painter families settled at Nathdwara from the late seventeenth century to supply the temple's seasonal cloth. It received a Geographical Indication as Nathdwara Pichhwai in 2023. The commercial market for decorative pichwai now far exceeds the temple's own requirement.
Material: Cotton cloth sized with starch, mineral and stone pigments, gold and silver leaf. Technique: The ground is burnished smooth, the drawing laid in with charcoal and a fine brush, then flat mineral colour built up in layers with the figures outlined last. Fixed proportions and a fixed iconography — Shrinathji frontal, arm raised holding Govardhan, cows and gopis ranged around him — because the object has a job to do behind the image rather than a composition to invent.
Made by Kumhar families in one village near Nathdwara and bought by Bhil, Garasia and Gameti pilgrims from across southern Rajasthan and eastern Gujarat, who carry the plaque home and install it as the village shrine. The maker almost never sees where the god ends up.
Material: Local pond clay mixed with donkey dung and sand. Technique: Clay is rolled into a flat sheet and figures are built onto it in relief from separately rolled coils and pellets, leaving the back open and hollow so the plaque fires without cracking. It is a relief tradition, not a modelled one — everything is added to the surface.
Made by a handful of Suthar carpenter families at Bassi and commissioned by kaavadiya bhats, who carry it from patron village to patron village. The genealogy of the patron family is painted into the object, which makes each one a commission rather than a stock item.
Material: Wood, joined with wooden pins and hinged with leather or metal. Technique: A box is built with multiple hinged doors that open outward in sequence, each face painted over a red ground with narrative registers, so that opening it walks the viewer inward through the layers of a temple to the innermost image.
An unusually well documented school, because Mewar's painters signed and dated. Nasiruddin's Ragamala was painted at Chavand in 1605; Sahibdin's Ramayana series for Jagat Singh I was made between 1649 and 1653 and the bulk of it is now in the British Library. Devgarh, a Mewar thikana, ran a distinct sub-school under Bagta and Chokha.
Material: Handmade paper, mineral and shell pigments, gold. Technique: Flat unmodelled colour on strong red and yellow grounds, figures in profile with a heavy outline, and narrative registers stacked rather than receding. Later Udaipur work moves to very large sheets showing the whole court in a single topographic view of the palace and lakes.
Armour and weapon decoration that outlived the armoury, now applied to plates, boxes and knives. Registered as Udaipur Koftgari Metal Craft in 2023.
Material: Steel, gold and silver wire. Technique: The steel surface is cross-hatched with a fine chisel, gold or silver wire is hammered into the roughened ground, and the whole is burnished and heated so the inlay locks in without solder.
Held within one Soni family lineage at Pratapgarh for over two centuries, with the working details treated as family property rather than a trade skill.
Material: Sheet gold and coloured glass. Technique: A gold sheet is pierced and chased into an openwork scene, then fused onto coloured glass with heat so the colour shows through the openings.
Rajsamand sits on one of India's largest working marble belts, and the temple-image workshops around Rajnagar supply installations far outside the region. The carving lineage is old; the quarrying scale is not.
Material: Local white and green marble. Technique: Hand chiselling and drilling of images, screens and architectural members before machine finishing.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Mewar, from classical forms to village traditions. (18)