Arts and artisanal heritage

Bhuta KolaRitual

A night-long invocation in which a named spirit — Panjurli the boar, Guliga, Jumadi, the deified twins Koti and Chennaya, Kalkuda and Kallurti — is called into the body of a performer. The performer is costumed, painted, handed a mirror to see the deity in his own face, and then dances until possession shows as a tremor. From that point he is addressed as the daiva, not as himself: he hears complaints, settles land and family disputes, and gives a binding utterance that the village treats as judgement. Landholding households commission the Kola; the performers who become the gods for the night come from communities those same households rank below them, and both facts are held together without contradiction.

Performed by: Hereditary performers of the Nalike, Pambada, Parava and Ajalaya communities. Occasion: December to May, at a daivasthana, on a date fixed by the household or village that owns the shrine

NagamandalaRitual

An all-night serpent ritual danced around an enormous coloured floor drawing of an entwined naga made in dry pigments, with two performers — one who sings and one who is possessed — circling until the drawing is erased by their feet. Expensive enough that a family may hold one only once in decades.

Performed by: Vaidya and Nagapatri specialists. Occasion: Once in a generation at a serpent grove, on a vow

Aati KalenjaFolk

A single costumed figure who walks house to house through the wettest, hungriest month with an umbrella of palm leaf, dancing to a drum to drive out sickness and receiving rice. The visit is the point: it is the one figure that appears when nothing else in the ritual calendar can be held.

Performed by: Men of the Nalike community. Occasion: Aati, the monsoon lean month

Siri JatreRitual

Women assemble at a Siri shrine and enter possession together as figures from the Siri epic, speaking as those women and being answered by a male elder who takes the role of the ancestor. It is the region's one mass ritual in which the possessed are almost entirely women, and it has been studied as a channel for grievances that ordinary household authority does not admit.

Performed by: Women, in large numbers. Occasion: Full-moon nights at the end of the dry season

Karadi VeshaFolk

Men painted head to foot as bears, dancing to a fast tase drum in the street processions. A twentieth-century urban form with no ritual claim at all, and the most popular thing on the street when it appears.

Performed by: Neighbourhood troupes, Mangaluru. Occasion: Dasara and Ganesh Chaturthi processions

Paddana

Sung oral epic in Tulu, narrating a daiva's life, death and elevation — the Koti-Chennaya cycle and the Siri cycle run to thousands of lines. Paddanas are sung by the performers at a Kola, and separately by women transplanting paddy, in a different tune and often a different version. The field version is where most of the surviving text was recorded.

Yakshagana bhagavathike

The bhagavata sings the whole story and controls the performance with a bell-metal jagate and the tala; the actors improvise dialogue against what he sings. He is the only person on the ground who knows what happens next.

Voviyo

Konkani Catholic wedding songs sung by women at the roce ceremony the night before a wedding, in verse patterns that predate the community's arrival on this coast.

Beary wedding song and Kolkali

Beary weddings carry a stick-clapping circle dance and a body of wedding song that is recognisably the same tradition as the Mappila Kolkali of the coast to the south, in a language that is neither Tulu nor Malayalam but sits between them.

Yakshagana Tenkutittu

The southern style, performed from Dakshina Kannada down through the Kasaragod belt: chende-led, faster, with high leaps, spinning entries and demon roles played at full volume. North of Udupi the Badagutittu style takes over — maddale-led, weighted towards dialogue and character — and it continues up the coast into Uttara Kannada. A performance runs from about ten at night to dawn, in the open, on a raised patch of earth with an oil lamp for a proscenium; most are commissioned by a household discharging a vow rather than programmed by a producer.

Talamaddale

Yakshagana with the costume, dance and stage removed. The same singer, drummers and actors sit in a row and perform the argument alone, which turns the form into competitive extempore debate in verse and prose. It travels well, needs no ground, and is where the reputation of an actor's speech is actually made.

Mangalore tiles GI-worthy Dakshina Kannada

The Basel Mission's Georg Plebst opened the first factory at Mangaluru in 1865. Within decades the tile was the standard roof of coastal and southern India and was being shipped to Sri Lanka, Burma, East Africa and Australia. A house is still described locally by whether it has a tiled roof.

Material: Alluvial clay from the Netravati and Gurupura banks. Technique: Wire-cut and pressed clay tiles fired in long kilns, with an interlocking flange

Udupi saree weaving GI registered Udupi

A geographical indication registered in 2015–16, covering a cluster that had almost stopped weaving before a deliberate revival put looms back into working households.

Material: Handspun and mill cotton. Technique: Pit-loom and frame-loom weaving of fine checks with a contrast border

Kasaragod saree weaving GI registered Kasaragod

A geographical indication registered in 2010–11, held by weaver cooperatives in the border belt.

Material: Cotton. Technique: Handloom checks and stripes with a high-twist finish that gives the cloth its lustre

Yakshagana kirita and vesha making GI-worthy Udupi and Dakshina Kannada

A handful of workshops supply the melas. A full crown is built to a named character rather than a size, and a mela's inventory is the most valuable thing it owns.

Material: Light wood, mirror, gilt foil, cloth and cane. Technique: Carved and built-up crowns and shoulder pieces, faced with mirror glass and gilt

Bhuta bronzes and ritual masks Dakshina Kannada and Udupi

Standing bronze figures of daivas — boar-headed Panjurli among them — were cast for shrines from at least the sixteenth century and are among the most distinctive metal sculpture in South India. Enough have left the region through the antiquities trade that shrines now commission replacements.

Material: Bronze, brass and wood. Technique: Lost-wax casting of standing spirit figures; carved and painted wooden masks and headpieces