Telangana · Deccan Inland Plateau
Dance
A vigorous solo male form reconstructed in the twentieth century from sculpture on the Ramappa and Thousand Pillar temples and from the Nrittaratnavali of Jayapa Senani, the Kakatiya general who wrote a dance treatise. It is fair to call it a reconstruction rather than an unbroken lineage, and the sculpture is the primary source.
Performed by: Male dancers, reconstructed repertoire. Occasion: Concert; formerly temple and pre-battle
Not a choreographed dance so much as a sustained clapping circle around the flower stacks, moving anticlockwise, with a call-and-response song line and a rhythm that accelerates through the evening.
Performed by: Women. Occasion: Nine nights of Bathukamma
Women carry the offering pot on the head to the goddess's temple while a bare-chested male figure, the Pothuraju, dances ahead of the procession with a whip and turmeric. The pot must not be set down.
Performed by: Women carrying bonam pots; Pothuraju before them. Occasion: Ashadam Bonalu
Frame-drum ensembles that lead every village procession on the plateau. The dappu is a shallow single-headed drum of hide over a wooden ring, played with two sticks of different weight so one hand keeps time and the other cuts across it.
Performed by: Oggu and Madiga drummer communities. Occasion: Jataras, processions, funerals
Dancers in peacock-feather headdresses, deer horn and cowries move through a village-to-village circuit over several days during the Dandari festival. The costume is assembled once and kept for a lifetime.
Performed by: Raj Gond men, Adilabad. Occasion: Dandari, at Diwali
A circle dance in full mirror-worked skirts, with a stooping and rising step that makes the coin and cowrie work sound in time. The songs are in Gor Boli, not Telugu.
Performed by: Banjara women. Occasion: Teej, Holi, weddings
Stick dance in concentric rings, the outer ring moving against the inner so that each striker meets a different partner every beat. Common across Telugu country and danced here to Bathukamma and jatara songs.
Performed by: Mixed groups. Occasion: Festivals
Music
Women's songs sung in call and response around the flower stacks, most carrying the refrain uyyalo. The texts are domestic and often sharp — a married daughter's account of her in-laws' house, a complaint about work, a Gauri story — and they are sung by the whole circle, not by a trained singer.
Night-long sung narratives of Mallanna, Beerappa and Yellamma performed by the Oggu community of the shepherd castes, with the oggu drum, cymbals and a lead narrator who alternates sung verse with spoken commentary. The performers are also the priests of the deities they narrate.
Cattle-keeping Yadava lineages recite the Katamaraju epic of a cattle chief's war over grazing rights — a pastoral epic rather than a royal one, and one of the few long Telugu narratives about land use.
Hyderabad has held a continuous Urdu poetic gathering culture since the Qutb Shahi court. The Deccani register — with its Telugu and Marathi loanwords and its own idiom — was a written literature two centuries before Delhi's Urdu was.
A loud drum-and-shawm wedding ensemble played by the Chaush community of Hyderabad, descended from Hadrami Arab soldiers recruited to the Nizam's irregular forces. It is the sound of an old-city procession and has no equivalent elsewhere in the Deccan.
Sung at the dargahs of the old city and in the ashurkhanas through Muharram. Hyderabad's ashurkhanas are Qutb Shahi foundations and hold metal alams rather than paper taziyas.
Theatre
Night-long enacted narrative, chiefly the Jambapurana, performed by the Chindu Madiga community for the castes that patronise them — a hereditary bardic relationship in which the performers are the historians of a specific community.
A three-person form: a lead narrator with a tambura, two side-men with clay drums who ask questions and interject comedy. Its structure — one voice narrating, two interrupting — is what let it carry long historical material to audiences with no text.
Street theatre in verse, performed on a raised earth platform through the night, with the harmonium and the mridangam on stage and no set beyond a curtain.
Crafts
Made by the Nakashi families of Cheriyal as the visual aid for itinerant caste-narrator communities, each of whom commissioned the episodes of their own patron deity's story. Registered as a geographical indication in 2010–11. A handful of families still paint, and the market has shifted from storytellers to collectors.
Material: Khadi cloth primed with tamarind-seed paste, chalk and gum; natural pigments. Technique: A long vertical scroll is painted in horizontal panels, read from the bottom upward as the storyteller unrolls it. Figures are in profile against a flat red ground, with no perspective and no landscape.
A sheet-metal tradition that began as temple and chariot fittings under Kakatiya patronage and survived by moving to decorative panels and lamps. Registered as a geographical indication in 2010–11.
Material: Sheet brass, sometimes silver. Technique: Repoussé and chasing — the design raised from the reverse with punches, then finished from the front.
Three separate geographical indications were registered in 2008–09 — Nirmal toys and craft, Nirmal paintings and Nirmal furniture. The wood is the constraint: poniki grows locally, is soft enough to carve wet and hard enough to hold an edge when dry.
Material: Poniki (Wrightia tinctoria) softwood; herbal and mineral pigment. Technique: Figures are carved from a light, close-grained softwood, coated with a paste, painted, and finished with a lacquer that gives a gold tone without gold. The paintings use the same finish on wooden panels, in a Kakatiya and Mughal-derived idiom.
Cast by the Ojha (Wojari) community of the northern forest belt, in a technique shared with Bastar and Chhota Nagpur. Registered as a geographical indication in 2017–18.
Material: Brass and bell metal, beeswax, clay. Technique: Lost-wax casting — a clay core is wrapped in wax threads, cased in clay, fired so the wax runs out, and the cavity filled with molten brass. Each casting destroys its own mould, so no two pieces are identical.
Filigree of a fineness that requires the wire to be drawn on site. Registered as a geographical indication in 2007–08. It shares a technique with Cuttack's tarakasi and with Portuguese and Persian filigree, and the route by which it arrived is not settled.
Material: Fine silver wire. Technique: Silver drawn to hair thickness, twisted, and soldered into an openwork lattice with no backing sheet.
The bangle lane running west from the Charminar has been selling to Hyderabadi brides for generations. The craft is not GI-protected and the material is now largely bought-in rather than locally made.
Material: Lac, glass, coloured stones, metal foil. Technique: Lac is warmed over a small flame, worked around a form into a ring, and set with stones and mirror while still plastic. The whole process happens at the shopfront in front of the buyer.
Some thousands of looms across a cluster of villages, working a design vocabulary that expanded enormously in the twentieth century. Double ikat is done in very few places on earth, and Puttapaka is one of them.
Material: Cotton and mulberry silk. Technique: Yarn is wound on a frame, tied off in the pattern with rubber or plastic strip, dyed, untied and re-tied for each successive colour, then loaded on the loom so the design appears as weaving proceeds. In double ikat both warp and weft are resisted and must register against each other on the loom.
Registered in 2017–18. The trade sustained itself on institutional orders long after households stopped buying.
Material: Cotton, later wool. Technique: Interlocked and dovetailed weft on a horizontal pit loom, giving a reversible flat-weave with no pile.
Included here only to correct a common misattribution. Bidri is named for Bidar and is made there, not in Hyderabad; Hyderabad was its principal market and remains the place most visitors buy it. The Bidar GI belongs to that region, not this one.
Material: Zinc-copper alloy inlaid with silver. Technique: Silver inlaid into a cast alloy body, then blackened with a soil paste from the Bidar fort.
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Telangana, from classical forms to village traditions. (25)