Arts and artisanal heritage

OdissiClassical

The classical form of this coast, and one whose modern history should be stated plainly: what is danced today was assembled in the 1950s. A group of teachers and scholars — Kelucharan Mohapatra, Pankaj Charan Das, Deba Prasad Das, Mayadhar Raut and others, with the writer and critic circle around them — worked from three surviving sources: the repertoire of the maharis, the temple dancers whose practice was by then almost gone; the gotipua akhadas, boys trained as dancers in the villages around Puri; and the sculpture and the Abhinaya Chandrika text. The tribhanga stance and the chauka square are drawn from the temple images. It was recognised nationally as a classical form in the late 1950s. Calling it ancient without saying that is a misdescription; the reconstruction was real scholarship and does not need the exaggeration.

Performed by: Trained dancers of both sexes, on stage. Occasion: Concert performance, and increasingly at temple festivals

GotipuaFolk

Trained in akhadas from around the age of six, gotipuas dance in pairs with an acrobatic vocabulary — bandha nrutya — that folds the body into shapes taken directly from temple sculpture. A boy's career ends with puberty. Raghurajpur maintains akhadas and is where most visitors see it.

Performed by: Pre-adolescent boys dressed and made up as girls. Occasion: Village akhada performance, festivals, and now the stage

MahariRitual

The temple dancers, whose service included dancing the Gita Govinda before the deity at the night ritual. The institution declined through the twentieth century and effectively ended within living memory — the last surviving mahari of the temple died in 2015. Much of Odissi's abhinaya derives from what could be recorded of their practice.

Performed by: Women dedicated to the Jagannath temple. Occasion: The temple's daily and nightly ritual sequence

Chaiti GhodaFolk

A dancer carries a cloth-and-bamboo horse frame at the waist and moves to dhol and mahuri while a pair sing and speak the accompanying story of Basuli, the community's deity. Performed house to house through the fishing villages of the Puri and Kendrapara coast.

Performed by: Kaibarta fishing communities of the coast. Occasion: Chaitra, from Chaitra Purnima

Sankha and Dhuduki processional danceFolk

The processional forms that accompany a deity through streets — conch, cymbal, drum and a loose dancing crowd. Structurally simple, and the commonest live performance anyone in the region actually sees.

Performed by: Village troupes. Occasion: Jatras and temple processions

Odissi music

A distinct classical system with its own raga and tala names, its own notation tradition and a repertoire built on Odia chhanda and champu alongside the Gita Govinda. Its identity as a separate system, rather than a regional Hindustani or Carnatic dialect, has been argued for decades and rests on the surviving palm-leaf music manuscripts.

Gita Govinda in the temple

Jayadeva's twelfth-century Sanskrit poem is not merely revered here — it is sung as part of the temple's nightly ritual before the deity retires. A poem of erotic devotion holding a fixed slot in an institutional liturgy is the region's most characteristic arrangement.

Mardala

The barrel drum of Odissi music and dance, played with the palms, tuned with a paste applied to the head, and distinct in construction and stroke vocabulary from the pakhawaj and the mridangam it is often mistaken for.

Pala

A sung and spoken narrative performance — a lead singer with a chamar whisk, a drummer and a chorus, moving between Sanskrit quotation, Odia verse, explanation and joking argument with the audience. Daskathia is its leaner cousin, performed with a pair of wooden clappers.

Jatra

Odia touring theatre, mounted by companies that travel the delta and the coast in the dry months with a portable stage, a generator, a live orchestra and a night-long programme. It is a working commercial industry with its own stars, based around Cuttack and the delta towns.

Ravana Chhaya

Shadow puppetry from Odagaon, using flat deerskin puppets with no moving joints, so all expression is carried by the puppet's angle and by the narration. One of the most austere shadow traditions in India, and down to very few practitioners.

Sahi Jata

Puri's neighbourhood processions in Chaitra, in which each sahi mounts its own tableaux, costumed characters and akhada displays and takes them through the streets — the town's own festival as against the temple's.

Pattachitra GI registered Puri (Raghurajpur and Danda Sahi)

The temple's own painting tradition — the anasara patti that stands in for the deities during their fortnight out of sight is a pattachitra, which is the reason the craft was never merely decorative.

Material: Cotton cloth, tamarind-seed paste, chalk, mineral and vegetable pigment. Technique: Two layers of cloth are glued with tamarind-seed paste, coated with chalk and gum, dried and burnished with stone until the surface is closer to a board than a fabric. Painting is in hingula red, haritala yellow, conch white and lamp black, with the outline drawn last, and the finished patta is lacquered over a fire.

Palm-leaf etching GI-worthy Puri (Raghurajpur) and the Prachi valley

The same technique that produced Odisha's manuscript literature, including its music and dance treatises, turned to picture-making. The roundness of the Odia script comes from this material.

Material: Cured palm leaf, iron stylus, lamp black. Technique: Lines are incised with a stylus and lamp black is rubbed in and wiped off, so the image appears as blackened grooves. Leaves are stitched into folding panels or bound as pothi manuscripts.

Konark stone carving GI registered Puri (Konark) and Puri town

A living craft, not a heritage one — the carvers who restore temples and make new images are from the same families and the same villages, and the Sun Temple is their reference text.

Material: Khondalite, chlorite and laterite. Technique: Carving in the Kalinga temple idiom with hand chisels, working from a block to a finished figure without mechanised cutting in the traditional workshops.

Pipili appliqué GI registered Puri (Pipili)

The town exists because the temple needs canopies, umbrellas and chariot coverings every year on a schedule. The work is done by named households with hereditary temple service rights alongside the shop trade on the Bhubaneswar–Puri road.

Material: Cotton cloth in flat colours, mirror, cord. Technique: Cut shapes laid and stitched onto a ground cloth, edged and reinforced by hand.

Cuttack silver filigree GI-worthy Cuttack

Tarakasi, worked in workshops around Cuttack's old lanes. Its most conspicuous annual output is not jewellery but the silver and gold filigree backdrops built for the city's Durga Puja pandals, which are dismantled and re-made year on year.

Material: Fine drawn silver wire, usually of high purity. Technique: Silver is drawn into hair-fine wire, flattened, twisted and soldered into an open frame with no backing sheet, so the object is entirely line and void.

Sola pith work Puri

Supplies the deity's floral ornament and the dancer's tahia. The material weighs almost nothing and lasts almost no time, which suits an object meant for a single occasion.

Material: Sola, the pith of the shola plant. Technique: Sliced, carved and assembled into flowers, crowns and ornament with no armature.

Ganjapa cards GI-worthy Puri (Raghurajpur)

Hand-painted circular playing cards for a game of ten suits, made by pattachitra families. The game has all but disappeared and the cards are now made for collectors, which has begun to change what is painted on them.

Material: Cloth-and-tamarind-paste board, painted. Technique: Round cards prepared like a pattachitra surface and painted with suit figures by hand.

Brass and bell metal Khordha (Balakati) and the delta towns

Utensil and lamp making for domestic and temple use, sustained by ritual demand that steel has not replaced.

Material: Brass, bell metal. Technique: Casting and hand-beating of vessels, lamps and temple ware.