Arts and artisanal heritage

HojagiriFolk

Four to six dancers balance standing on an earthen pitcher, with a bottle and a lit lamp on the head and further lamps held in the hands. Only the lower body moves — hips, waist and knees carry the whole dance while the head and shoulders stay absolutely still, because they have to. A full performance runs about half an hour and mimes the agricultural year. It is the single most technically demanding folk dance in the region and the one that travels furthest outside it.

Performed by: Women and girls of the Reang (Bru) community. Occasion: The Hojagiri festival, at the full moon after Durga puja, for the goddess Mailuma

Garia danceRitual

Danced around the Garia — a bamboo pole dressed as the deity — through the seven days and nights of the festival, as the pole is carried between households. The dance is the worship rather than an accompaniment to it, and the deity is asked for a good jhum year rather than for anything abstract.

Performed by: Tripuri, Jamatia and other Kokborok-speaking communities. Occasion: Garia puja, in the first month of the year, mid-April

Lebang BoomaniFolk

Men beat bamboo clappers in rhythm to drive the brightly coloured lebang insects out of the newly sown plot; women dance in pursuit of them. It is a pest-control operation that became choreography — one of very few dances anywhere whose original purpose was to make a specific noise at a specific insect.

Performed by: Tripuri men and women. Occasion: After sowing the jhum plot

MamitaFolk

A thanksgiving dance performed when the new rice is in, with the whole village taking part rather than a trained troupe. It closes the agricultural cycle that Garia opens in April.

Performed by: Tripuri communities. Occasion: The harvest, in autumn

Hai-HakFolk

A post-harvest dance of the Halam, who are Kuki-Chin speakers within this region — which is why the movement vocabulary reads closer to the hill dances to the east than to the Kokborok dances beside it.

Performed by: Halam community. Occasion: After the harvest, for the goddess Laxmi

Bizu danceFolk

Danced across the three days of the Chakma new year, alongside the making of pachon. The Chakma are Buddhist and speak an Indo-Aryan language written in its own script, so their calendar and their dance sit inside this region without belonging to either of its two main systems.

Performed by: Chakma community. Occasion: Bizu, at the turn of the year in mid-April

Sangrai and the Owa bamboo danceFolk

A water festival with dance, and a bamboo dance in which performers step between clapped poles — the same structural idea as Cheraw in the hills to the east, arrived here by way of an Arakanese rather than a Kuki-Chin route.

Performed by: Mog (Marma) community. Occasion: Sangrai, the Buddhist new year in mid-April

Cheraw on the Jampui ridgeFolk

The bamboo dance of the Mizo hills, performed at the northern end of this region by the ridge villages — the clearest single marker that the Jampui crest belongs culturally to the hills east of it.

Performed by: Mizo-speaking villages of the Jampui hills. Occasion: Community festivals and the November orange festival

DhamailFolk

A circle of women singing and clapping in step, common to the Bengali households of this plain and to Sylhet on the other side of the ranges. It is sung rather than drummed, and the same songs are current on both sides.

Performed by: Bengali women of the plains. Occasion: Weddings

Rosem

A bamboo wind instrument of the Darlong community, played with a gourd or water-pot resonator and limited to a narrow range. It was on the edge of disappearing when its last accomplished player, Thanga Darlong, was awarded a Padma Shri in 2019 at the age of ninety-eight.

Kham and sumui

The drum and the bamboo flute that carry the Kokborok dance repertoire, played by men while women dance — a division that holds across Hojagiri, Garia and Lebang Boomani alike.

Kokborok folk song

Work songs, courtship songs and jhum songs sung in Kokborok, largely without instruments in their older forms and now increasingly recorded and broadcast. The language has been official in the state since 1979 and is written in both Bengali and Roman script.

Bengali folk and kirtan of the plain

Baul, kirtan and the boat songs of the Meghna floodplain, current in the western plains households and indistinguishable in repertoire from what is sung across the ranges.

Jatra

The travelling Bengali popular theatre of the plain, staged on open ground with amplified declamation and a night-long running time. It arrives with the winter mela season.

Kokborok theatre and cinema

A small but continuous body of stage and screen work in Kokborok, of which the feature film Yarwng (2008) is the best known outside the region. It matters disproportionately, because it is one of the few places the language is heard by people who do not speak it.

Bamboo and cane craft GI-worthy Agartala, Bishalgarh and the western plain

The region's largest craft economy by employment. Bamboo is Tripura's leading forest crop, and the state is a substantial supplier of the plain round sticks that the Indian incense industry runs on — an unglamorous, high-volume trade sitting underneath the decorative work that gets photographed.

Material: Muli and other bamboo species, cane. Technique: Splitting, sizing and close-plaiting of bamboo slivers into screens, mats, panels, trays, lamps and furniture; cane binding for frames.

Rignai Pachra and Risa weaving GI registered Statewide, concentrated in the hill areas

Both Rignai Pachra and the Tripura Risa Textile were registered as geographical indications in 2024. The craft is domestic and female, and in most hill households the loom is set up in the veranda rather than a workshop.

Material: Cotton and acrylic yarn. Technique: Loin-loom weaving of narrow panels with banded, named patterns, joined into a single cloth.

Matabari Pera Prasad GI registered Gomati (Udaipur)

Registered as a geographical indication in 2024. Unusually, the registration attaches to a temple's prasad rather than to a town's confectionery — the product is defined by where it is offered.

Material: Milk and sugar. Technique: Milk reduced and worked with sugar into a dense soft pera, made in the lane beside the temple.

Tripura Queen pineapple GI registered Statewide, with the best fruit from the hill slopes

Registered as a geographical indication in March 2015. Small, deep golden and intensely aromatic compared with the Kew variety grown for canning, and now the region's main horticultural export.

Material: Pineapple, Queen variety. Technique: Slope cultivation on well-drained laterite soil, largely without chemical inputs.

Jampui mandarin orange growing GI-worthy North Tripura (Jampui hills)

A crop that works only on this one ridge, because it needs the winter cold the rest of the region does not get. The November orange festival at Vanghmun is built around the harvest.

Material: Khasi mandarin. Technique: Terrace orchards on the ridge, harvested November to December.

Rock carving at Unakoti and Chabimura Unakoti and Gomati

Two bodies of monumental relief sculpture cut into hillsides — Unakoti from around the eighth to ninth centuries and Chabimura from the fifteenth to sixteenth. Both are carved where they stand, which is why neither could be moved to a museum and why both survive largely unlooted.

Material: Living rock. Technique: Relief carving directly into cliff faces, worked in situ rather than assembled.

Terracotta and pottery Western plain

A plains craft shared with the delta, supplying the earthen pitchers that the Hojagiri dancers stand on among everything else.

Material: Alluvial clay. Technique: Wheel-thrown domestic ware and moulded ritual figures.