Rayalaseema · Deccan Inland Plateau
Venkateswara addressed directly — praise, complaint, erotic longing and social observation, in a plain Telugu deliberately chosen over Sanskrit. Roughly 13,000 texts survive on copper plates; the melodies do not.
Sung at: Temple service and concert.
Four-line verses attacking ritualism, caste pretension and hypocrisy in the plainest possible speech, each closing with the same refrain. They function as proverbs rather than as songs.
Sung at: Recited, taught, quoted.
Episodes of the Ramayana and Mahabharata sung behind the screen, broken by the exchanges of two stock comic puppets who comment on the audience as much as the story.
Sung at: All-night puppet performances, dry season.
Rhythm songs whose metre is set by the stick strike rather than the other way round.
Sung at: Sankranti, jataras.
Sung divination performed by Yerukala women with a basket and a winnowing fan — a livelihood, an oral form and a genre of household news all at once.
Sung at: Door-to-door fortune-telling.
A decorated bull that nods to questions, led with a drum and a shehnai; and a mendicant singer who walks the streets at dawn with a brass pot on his head and must not speak, only sing.
Sung at: The month before Sankranti.
Handing over — sung by the women of the bride's household at the moment she leaves, and the one point in a Telugu wedding where grief is formally permitted.
Sung at: The bride's departure at a wedding.
Seasonal and marriage songs in an Indo-Aryan language spoken in hamlets across a Dravidian dryland.
Sung at: Teej, weddings, seasonal festivals.
The folk songs of Rayalaseema — what they are about, who sings them and when. (8)