Old Mysore · Deccan Inland Plateau
Dance
A distinct school kept alive by palace patronage, with a wider use of the stage, softer arm lines and a repertoire including Kannada devaranama and compositions written for the Wadiyar court. Its transmission ran through Jatti Tayamma, who taught at the palace into the twentieth century.
Performed by: The palace lineage and its successors. Occasion: Court, temple and concert
Performers sing the Mahadeshwara epic while striking a pair of heavy brass discs — one held, one struck — and dance in a widening circle. The instrument keeps time for a narrative that can run all night, and the singers are initiates rather than professionals.
Performed by: Male devotees of Male Mahadeshwara, largely from the southern forest edge. Occasion: Jaatre, night-long epic recitation
A vigorous sword dance in Veerabhadra costume with a large forehead plate, performed to the beat of the sambal drum. It leads the Dasara procession and is the loudest thing in it after the elephants.
Performed by: Lingayat Veerabhadra devotees. Occasion: Dasara, Shravana, temple processions
Masked dance in which the performer wears a huge painted wooden mask, sometimes over a metre tall, representing the village guardian. The mask belongs to the temple and is repainted rather than replaced.
Performed by: Village guardian-deity households of the southern districts. Occasion: Village jaatre
Large barrel drums slung at the waist and played while moving in formation, with a leader controlling the tempo by cymbal. The drums are heavy enough that the dance is as much load-bearing as choreography.
Performed by: Kuruba men. Occasion: Festivals, processions
Music
A distinct instrumental school built on court patronage, in which the veena is played with a particular right-hand plucking style and a preference for slow gamaka-heavy exposition. Veena Sheshanna and Veena Subbanna were palace musicians, and the instrument itself was made in workshops attached to the court.
A solo narrative form in which a reciter sings verses from Kumaravyasa's Kannada Mahabharata and a second performer, the vyakhyanakara, stops him to explain each one in prose. It is closer to public reading than to concert music, and it is how the epic reached people who could not read it.
The palace maintained a standing establishment of musicians, and the Dasara season was their annual showcase. The public concerts held through the ten days are the direct descendant of that arrangement.
Kannada devotional compositions of the Haridasa tradition, sung as the closing items of a Carnatic concert here far more often than they are further south, where the same slot goes to Tamil or Telugu texts.
Theatre
The touring professional Kannada theatre of the early twentieth century — a permanent company with its own tent, painted drop-curtains, live orchestra and singing actors, playing mythological and historical plays for weeks in one town before moving on. Gubbi Veeranna's company was the largest and trained a generation of film actors.
Leather shadow puppetry performed by Killekyatha families, with translucent goat-hide figures up to a metre high, coloured with vegetable dye and manipulated against a backlit cotton screen. The comic characters speak in a dialect of their own and comment on the epic being performed.
Open-air village theatre performed on a bare threshing floor with no set, running from night until dawn — the older layer under the Company theatre, still staged at jaatres in the dry districts.
Crafts
A registered geographical indication, and a school with a documented institutional home — the Jaganmohan Palace collection at Mysuru holds the reference works, and the court kept painters on establishment into the twentieth century.
Material: Paper laid on wood, natural pigment, gesso, gold foil. Technique: The figure is drawn, then selected areas — jewellery, crowns, pillars, thrones — are built up in gesso applied in very low relief with a fine brush and left to dry, and thin gold foil is burnished over it. The relief is deliberately shallow, so the gold catches light as a glow rather than as an object. The Thanjavur tradition on the other side of the plateau uses a much thicker gesso and sets glass and semi-precious stones into it, which is why one painting reads as a surface and the other as a relief.
A registered geographical indication. The local account traces the craft to artisans invited from Persia under Tipu Sultan, and the town has been a single-industry town ever since.
Material: Hale mara (ivory-wood), rubber wood, lac, vegetable dye. Technique: Wood is turned on a lathe and lac sticks of coloured resin are pressed against the spinning piece, so the friction melts the colour onto the surface; a screwpine leaf is then held against it to burnish. There is no paint and no varnish, which is why the toys are safe for children to put in their mouths.
A registered geographical indication, and the craft behind the panelled doors and screens of the palace interiors. The workshops cluster around the Mysuru palace and sell mostly through the state emporia.
Material: Rosewood, ivory-substitute plastics, sandalwood, coloured woods. Technique: Shapes are cut from contrasting woods and let into a routed recess in a rosewood ground, then sanded flush and polished, so the picture is level with the surface rather than applied to it. Since the 1972 ivory ban the white elements have been synthetic.
Constrained by the raw material rather than the market. The tree has been state property regardless of whose land it stands on since the eighteenth century, a rule relaxed only in the early 2000s, so the carvers work on rationed stock at controlled prices.
Material: Santalum album heartwood. Technique: Deep undercut relief and pierced work in a wood dense enough to hold a hair-fine line, worked green because seasoned sandal splits.
Registered as a geographical indication, and the most improbable industrial product in India — it exists because the First World War closed the export market and left the state sitting on unsold sandalwood in 1916.
Material: Sandalwood oil, vegetable oils. Technique: Steam distillation of chipped heartwood to an oil that fixes other fragrances, then cold-milled into a soap cast in an oval and wrapped in a printed paper carton that has barely changed in a century.
A registered geographical indication. The region is the centre of the Indian incense trade, and the industry's two halves — village rolling and urban perfumery — have never been in the same building.
Material: Bamboo splints, charcoal and jigat binder, perfume oils. Technique: A paste is rolled by hand onto a bamboo splint, dried, and then dipped in perfume — the rolling is piece-rate home work, overwhelmingly by women, and the perfuming is done at the factory.
A registered geographical indication and a near-dead craft, kept going by a handful of painters and by collectors rather than by anyone who plays the game.
Material: Handmade card, cloth-and-lacquer board, natural pigment. Technique: Circular playing cards painted by hand in suits drawn from the Dashavatara, finished with lac so they survive shuffling.
A village of hereditary shilpi families supplying stone deities to temples across the south, working to commission and to canon.
Material: Krishnashila (black granite), soapstone. Technique: Temple images carved to the proportions set out in the Shilpa Shastra, checked with a measuring cord rather than by eye.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Old Mysore, from classical forms to village traditions. (20)