Arts and artisanal heritage

BharatanatyamClassical

The solo dance of the Tamil country, reconstituted in Madras in the 1930s from the sadir repertoire of the temple dancer lineages and moved onto the proscenium stage and into an institution. The transmission is contested and the shift is not a neutral one — the repertoire survived, the community that held it largely did not, and the argument about that is live and worth knowing before watching a performance.

Performed by: Trained soloists, historically the devadasi lineages. Occasion: Temple, court and concert

TherukoothuRitual

Street theatre in the round, performed all night in heavy costume and towering headgear, working through the Mahabharata episode by episode across successive nights and culminating in a fire-walk. It is liturgy rather than entertainment; the performance is an obligation the village owes the goddess.

Performed by: Hereditary troupes of the northern Tamil villages. Occasion: The Draupadi Amman festival, over up to eighteen nights

Poikkal kudiraiFolk

Dummy-horse dance — the performer wears a light cane and cloth horse at the waist and dances the animal, often on stilts inside the legs.

Performed by: Troupes at temple festivals. Occasion: Processions

Karagattam and kavadi attamFolk

A balanced pot and a carried arch, both danced. The kavadi is a vow being discharged in public; the karagam began as a water offering and now runs largely as a booked performance.

Performed by: Professional troupes and vow-keepers. Occasion: Goddess and Murugan festivals

SilambamMartial

A staff-fighting form, performed at festivals in circular patterns at speed.

Performed by: Men, trained in village gymnasiums. Occasion: Temple festivals and demonstrations

Carnatic music and the sabha kutcheri

The concert format itself is this region's invention — a two-and-a-half-hour solo recital with a fixed internal architecture of varnam, kritis, a main raga with alapana and improvisation, a tani avartanam for the percussion and a set of lighter closing pieces. It was standardised in Madras in the early twentieth century and is now how Carnatic music is performed everywhere.

The Veena Dhanammal lineage

A family school of veena and vocal music in Madras whose austere, slow, ornament-heavy style shaped much of twentieth-century Carnatic practice through its students and descendants.

Nagaswaram and thavil at the temple

The outdoor double-reed and barrel drum pair, played for processions and weddings at length and at volume, with a repertoire and a set of ragas partly its own. The Mylapore and Kanchipuram temple establishments are among the last to keep full-time players.

Gaana

The street song of north Chennai — sung originally at funerals and wakes to a hand-beaten rhythm, with improvised topical verses about poverty, drink, loss and the neighbourhood. It moved into film music without losing its street practice, which is unusual for an Indian folk form.

Sabha natakam

Tamil drawing-room drama — comedies of the middle-class household, staged by amateur and semi-professional companies in the same halls that host the concerts, and concentrated in the same December weeks.

Therukoothu

The all-night Mahabharata cycle of the northern villages, with painted faces, wooden ornaments and a chorus, performed on open ground with the audience on all sides and no set at all.

The Madras studio era

From the 1930s the Kodambakkam studios made this city the production centre for Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam cinema simultaneously — four industries in one suburb, sharing crews, sound stages and laboratories for four decades.

Kanchipuram silk weaving GI registered Kancheepuram

Registered as a geographical indication in 2005–06. The trade runs on several thousand households, a cooperative and private buyer system, and a constant argument about power-loom copies sold under the name.

Material: Mulberry silk, silver-gilt zari. Technique: Three shuttles and two warps. The body is woven on one warp and the borders on another of a different colour, and the two are interlocked weft by weft on the loom in the join called korvai — which is why the border cannot be pulled off and why, if the saree tears, it tears in the body and not at the join. The pallu is attached to the body by a second join, the petni, in which the two warps are knotted together thread by thread and woven on. A korvai saree needs two or three weavers working in step, which is most of what makes it expensive.

Mamallapuram stone carving GI-worthy Chengalpattu

A working sculpture town rather than a heritage display, supplying temple images, garden pieces and commissions across India and abroad. The workshops line the road and are audible before they are visible.

Material: Local granite and charnockite. Technique: Carving with hand chisels and points on a stone hard enough to blunt tools quickly, working from the outside inward — the same method as the seventh-century monuments, in an unbroken local practice supported since the 1950s by a government college of architecture and sculpture in the town.

Ayyanar terracotta horses GI-worthy Across the tank villages of the plain

One of the largest unfired-to-fired terracotta traditions anywhere, made by hereditary potter families and renewed rather than restored — old horses are left to weather and new ones added beside them.

Material: Coiled and fired local clay. Technique: Built in sections by coiling rather than thrown or moulded, sometimes to over four metres, then fired in a pit kiln beside the shrine and painted. The horses are commissioned as vows and installed at the village boundary shrine of the guardian deity.

Real Madras Handkerchief weaving GI-worthy Chennai and the Palar towns

A four-century export trade that is invisible in India because almost none of the cloth is sold here.

Material: Cotton, vegetable and reactive dyes. Technique: Plain-weave checks in yarn-dyed cotton, historically with dyes chosen to bleed on washing — a defect everywhere else and a specification here, because the West African market wanted it.

Palar valley tanning and leather goods Vellore, Ranipet, Ambur

One of India's two largest leather clusters, built on a sand-bed river and the groundwater under it, supplying European footwear brands and employing on a scale that dominates the district's economy.

Material: Hides, vegetable and chrome tanning agents. Technique: Pit and drum tanning, finishing and cutting for footwear and leather goods manufacture.

Puducherry handmade paper and craft workshops Puducherry

A twentieth-century craft economy rather than an inherited one, and now a substantial part of what the enclave sells to visitors.

Material: Cotton rag, natural dye, terracotta, textiles. Technique: Sheet-formed rag paper, hand block printing and studio pottery, developed through the ashram and Auroville workshops from the mid-twentieth century.