Arts and artisanal heritage

Danda NataRitual

Not a performance with a ritual attached but a penance with a performance inside it. A troupe takes a vow for the lunar month: one meal a day, no household bed, sleeping on sand at a village shrine, and moving from village to village every night. The penance escalates in three named stages — dhuli danda on the dust, pani danda in water, agni danda over fire — and between them the troupe performs comic and mythological interludes with fixed character pairs: Hadi and Hadiani the sweeper couple, Sabara and Sabaruni the hill hunter couple, Chadheya and Chadheyani the fowlers. The theology is Shaiva and the pairs are drawn from communities at the bottom of the village order, which is the point: for one month the penitents are outside the ordinary rules, and the drama says so out loud.

Performed by: Danduas — men who take a vow for the month, led by a Pata Bhakta. Occasion: The whole of Chaitra, ending at Meru or Vishuva Sankranti in mid-April

RanapaFolk

Stilt dancing — rana pa, literally "war leg" — performed on wooden stilts roughly a metre high to dhol and mahuri, with Krishna themes and acrobatic formations. It survives as a Ganjam speciality and as a school and mela item, and the skill is taught to children young enough to fall safely.

Performed by: Boys and young men of cowherd households. Occasion: Village festivals and Chaitra

Bagha NachaFolk

Tiger dance. Bodies are painted in yellow and black stripes, a tail is fixed on, and the dancer moves on all fours to a drum beaten in a stalking rhythm. It is a Berhampur town form and it belongs to the goddess's procession rather than to a stage.

Performed by: Young men of Berhampur's neighbourhoods. Occasion: Thakurani Jatra and Chaitra

GhumuraFolk

Danced with a pitcher-shaped drum slung at the neck and struck with both hands. Its heartland is Kalahandi in the uplands behind and above this region, not the Ganjam coast; it reaches this plain through the ghat passes, through migrant work and through the state's competitive folk circuit, and is best understood here as a borrowed form rather than a local one.

Performed by: Men, in a standing circle. Occasion: Nuakhai, Dussehra and competitive meets

Sakhi KandheiFolk

String puppetry with jointed wooden figures about a foot and a half high, worked from above to a sung narrative with mardala and harmonium. Ganjam is one of the two Odia string-puppet districts, and the number of working troupes is now very small.

Performed by: Hereditary puppeteer families. Occasion: Village fairs and weddings

Dasakathia

A two-man ballad form named for its instrument: a pair of wooden clappers, the kathi, struck against each other by the lead singer, the Gayaka, while the Palia answers, repeats and interrupts him. It is a Ganjam form specifically, sung standing, with the narrative broken by the Palia's questions so the audience gets the story explained inside the performance.

Mahuri and dhol ensemble

The double-reed mahuri with dhol, nisan and jhanj is the processional band of this coast — for Thakurani Jatra, for weddings and for Danda Nata. The mahuri's reed is cut locally and the instrument is loud enough to lead a street, which is its whole design brief.

Palla

Sung narrative in praise of Satyapir, performed either seated (baithaki) or standing (thia), with a lead singer, a mardala player and a chorus who supply rhyming challenges. The Satyapir cult it serves is explicitly Hindu-Muslim in composition, and the form travels along this coast in both directions.

Prahallada Nataka

Ganjam's own operatic theatre, performed on a raised rectangular platform with the actor playing Hiranyakashipu seated on a throne at one end and singing his lines in classical ragas to mardala accompaniment. It is attributed to the early nineteenth-century court of the Jalantara zamindari on this coast, runs all night, and is one of the few Indian folk theatres that uses a fully sung text rather than spoken dialogue with songs inserted.

Suanga and Ganjam jatra

Travelling all-night theatre with a mixed sung and spoken text, taken village to village in the dry months on a portable stage. It absorbed film music and amplification decades ago and still runs.

Berhampur silk weaving GI registered Ganjam

Registered as a geographical indication in 2010 as Berhampur Patta (Phoda Kumbha) Saree & Joda. The weaving quarters are inside the town, the yarn comes from outside the state, and the trade's most reliable customer is ritual rather than fashion.

Material: Mulberry silk, zari. Technique: Pit and frame loom, extra-weft border work with the phoda kumbha temple motif

Ganjam kewda distillation GI registered Ganjam

Both Ganjam Kewda Flower and Ganjam Kewda Rooh were registered as geographical indications in 2010. Thousands of hectares of coastal kewda thicket behind the dunes feed a distilling trade whose product leaves the region almost entirely — into attar houses in the north, into paan and gutkha, and into the sweet trade. The plant also holds the dunes together, so the crop and the coastal defence are the same bushes.

Material: Male flower spikes of Pandanus odorifer. Technique: Hydrodistillation in a copper deg with the vapour received through a bamboo pipe into a bhapka containing sandalwood oil or a light base, then aged. Only the male flower is used, and it is distilled within hours of cutting.

Cashew processing Ganjam

The laterite behind the beach ridge carries a large cashew belt, and the shelling yards employ mostly women on piece rates. The shell liquid blisters skin, which is why hand-shelling is done with oiled hands and why mechanisation has been pushed hard and adopted unevenly.

Material: Anacardium occidentale. Technique: Sun-drying in shell, roasting, hand-shelling, peeling and grading — still largely manual

Horn craft GI-worthy Gajapati (Paralakhemundi)

A small surviving craft on the hill road, working a material that is a slaughterhouse by-product and needs no felling. The workshops are few and the trade depends on emporium buying.

Material: Buffalo and cattle horn. Technique: Horn softened by heat, split, flattened, cut and polished into figures, combs and containers

Lanjia Saura idital wall painting GI registered Gajapati and the Rayagada hills beyond

Registered as a geographical indication in 2022 as Painting of Lanjia Saura (IDITAL), Odisha. It is a votive painting made to a diviner's instruction after a death or an illness, not a decoration; the densest concentration is around Puttasing on the Rayagada side of the same hills, just inland of this region's edge.

Material: Rice paste on a red earth ground. Technique: Painted directly onto the inner house wall with a bamboo splinter, working from the border inward, the composition read as a house with figures inside it rather than as a picture.

Palm-leaf and pattachitra work Ganjam

A thinner tradition than Raghurajpur's in the delta, kept up in a few households and by the Danda and jatra troupes who need painted properties.

Material: Palm leaf, cloth-and-tamarind-primed patti. Technique: Iron stylus etching filled with lampblack, or brush painting on primed cloth