South Konkan · Western Coastal Strip
Dance
An evening form that opens with a naman, an invocation to Ganapati and the village deity, and moves into khele — comic and satirical sketches with cross-dressed roles, danced to the dholki with the balya dance between items. It is looser and funnier than Dashavatar and is performed by the village itself rather than by a paid company.
Performed by: Village troupes across Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg. Occasion: Shimga (Holi), and village vows
A fast circling dance to dholki and tal, performed between the sketches of a Naman-Khele night, with the pace increasing until the drummer stops it.
Performed by: Young men of the village. Occasion: Shimga and Naman evenings
The village deity is carried house to house in a palanquin over several days, with drums, and the romat processions of Sindhudurg escort it with dance, colour and considerable noise. The palkhi's route is the village's actual social map, and the order of houses matters.
Performed by: The whole village, by household. Occasion: Holi, over several days
A drum-driven men's dance performed around the drummers in a tightening ring, brought down the ghat with the transhumant flocks.
Performed by: Dhangar pastoralist communities on the ghat slope. Occasion: Deity festivals
Music
The Shimga-season repertoire of Naman and Khele, sung over the dholki barrel drum with tal and a one-string drone, with lyrics that are as often about a local dispute as about a deity.
Village devotional singing groups with pakhawaj, taal and harmonium, which double as the region's music school — most Dashavatar and Naman singers learn timing and raga here first.
The sung half of the picture-storytelling tradition, performed to the ektari drone and the huduk hourglass drum, in which the narrator sings the episode while a second person turns the painted sheets.
Work and festival songs of the Malvan, Vengurla and Devgad fishing communities, in Malvani, with the pulling rhythm of a hauled net under them.
Theatre
Overnight folk theatre performed in the open forecourt of a village temple, from around Diwali to the start of the rains, by professional all-male companies who tour a fixed circuit of villages. A performance begins near midnight with a fixed purvarang — Ganapati, then Riddhi and Siddhi, then the demon Sankasur, then Brahmadev and the Sutradhar — and only then opens the aakhyan, the main Puranic episode, which runs until dawn. There is no written script; the sequence and the verses are held by the company, the harmonium and paddle drum cue the actors, and the audience corrects them. The tradition in Sindhudurg traces itself to a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century troupe leader at Adivare in Rajapur who is said to have learned the form from a Karnataka company, which is why its structure resembles Yakshagana more than it resembles anything else in Maharashtra.
The commercial Marathi stage in Malvani. From the 1980s, plays written in the dialect and performed in it filled auditoria in Mumbai and Pune — audiences of migrants from these districts, watching their own speech treated as a stage language rather than as a joke. Gangaram Gavankar's Vastraharan, in Machhindra Kambli's production, is the play that did it and ran for thousands of performances.
String puppetry kept by the same Thakar families at Pinguli who keep Chitrakathi, along with leather shadow puppets — three narrative forms held by one small community in one village.
Crafts
Fruit, vegetables, boxes and toys turned and lacquered by families working around the Sawantwadi palace, where the former ruling family maintains a workshop in the Durbar Hall. Reports of a geographical indication for the craft have circulated; treat the registration as unverified here until it is checked against the register.
Material: Pangara and other soft local woods, lac, natural and tempera colour. Technique: The turned piece is held against a spinning lathe while a stick of lac is pressed to it; friction melts the lac onto the surface and the colour is burnished in as it turns. Layers of different colours are cut back to make the pattern.
A Persian-derived court game that survived in India mainly as a painted craft. Sawantwadi is one of very few places still making the cards, and the painters are the same families who do the lacquerware.
Material: Hand-cut card, natural pigment and lacquer. Technique: Round cards painted by hand, each suit in a different ground colour, the Dashavatar pack running to ten suits of twelve cards for the ten incarnations of Vishnu.
Held by Thakar families at Pinguli near Kudal, among the last practitioners of picture-storytelling in India, with only a handful of complete old pothis surviving. The Gangavane family, who keep a museum and teaching space in the village, have been nationally honoured for sustaining it.
Material: Handmade paper, natural pigment, and the ektari and huduk for the telling. Technique: Episodes are painted on loose sheets bound into a pothi of thirty to fifty leaves in narrative order. The narrator sings the episode and turns the sheets to the audience one at a time — the pictures are cues for a performance, not illustrations of a book.
Coastal temple decoration running from the Konkan through Goa into coastal Karnataka. Much of it has been lost to repainting and cement renovation, which destroys the layer the technique depends on.
Material: Laterite-derived red oxide, lime plaster. Technique: A wall is plastered with lime over a red laterite ground, then the white surface is scraped away where the design falls, so the figure appears in red at a depth of a millimetre. It is sgraffito worked in materials that the region has underfoot.
Registered as a geographical indication in 2018 for the Konkan coastal districts, after decades in which fruit from anywhere was sold under the name. Devgad and Ratnagiri growers additionally market under their own collective marks, because the GI covers a larger area than either wants to share a price with.
Material: Grafted Mangifera indica on local rootstock. Technique: Grafted, never grown from seed, so every Alphonso tree is a clone; harvested at three-quarter maturity with a bamboo zela and ripened in hay-lined crates rather than on the tree.
Registered as a geographical indication as Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri kokum. The tree needs no irrigation or chemical input and fruits on ground too poor for anything else, so it is a genuine smallholder crop and the processing is done at household and co-operative scale.
Material: Garcinia indica fruit. Technique: Rind salted and sun-dried into sol over several days; the drained liquor kept as agal; the pulp made into syrup and butter.
The Vengurla series of cashew varieties was bred at the research station there and planted across the Konkan and beyond. A geographical indication for Vengurla cashew has been reported; it is treated as unverified here.
Material: Anacardium occidentale. Technique: Nuts steam- or drum-roasted to break down the caustic shell liquid, then cracked and peeled by hand, almost entirely by women working on piece rates.
The region's building material is the plateau itself. It is soft enough to saw when freshly quarried and hardens on exposure, which is why every old wall, temple plinth and fort here is the same red-brown.
Material: Jambha — laterite. Technique: Cut wet from the plateau in rectangular blocks with a hand chisel, then stacked to harden in air before use.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of South Konkan, from classical forms to village traditions. (19)