Uttarandhra · Eastern Coastal Plains
Dance
A circle dance in which the line links arms at the waist and moves sideways in a slow, insistent step to the mori and tudumu drums, with the tempo raised over several hours rather than within a piece. The same dance is danced across the plateau into Koraput; the state line runs through the middle of the form and does nothing to it.
Performed by: Bagata, Valmiki, Khond, Kotia and Gadaba communities. Occasion: Chaitra, weddings and village festivals
A drum dance specific to this coast: a heavy tappeta drum is slung at the waist, beaten with both hands and with sticks, and the dancers move in a crouch with the drum swinging, working up to acrobatic leaps. It is performed to invoke rain and to propitiate Gangamma, which is a fairly direct statement about a region that irrigates from tanks rather than canals.
Performed by: Men, chiefly shepherd and cultivator communities. Occasion: Rain invocation and village festivals
Stick dancing in concentric circles, with the pattern of strikes rather than the footwork carrying the complexity. Common across the Telugu country and taught here as a schools item.
Performed by: Mixed groups, village and school troupes. Occasion: Sankranti and temple festivals
Not a dance but a ritual spectacle organised like one. A long, slender tree trunk is mounted on a cart with a priest bound to its far end, high above the crowd, and the whole assembly is drawn three times past the fort. The tree is selected by dream instruction, felled and used once.
Performed by: The Pydithalli Ammavaru temple's designated bearer. Occasion: Sirimanotsavam at Vizianagaram, the Tuesday after Vijayadashami
Music
A saraswati veena in which the resonator, neck and head are cut from a single block of jackwood rather than assembled — an ekanda instrument. The single block is the acoustic argument: no glued joint to damp the resonance, at the cost of an enormous amount of wood and labour. It carries a geographical indication and is made by a small number of families around Bobbili.
Sung and spoken narrative religious performance, a solo art with the narrator standing, wearing ankle bells, singing in Carnatic ragas and dropping into prose and topical comment. Its modern Telugu form was created by Adibhatla Narayana Das at Vizianagaram at the end of the nineteenth century, which makes it one of the few Indian performance genres with a known author and a known address.
The Maharajah's college of music at Vizianagaram, opened in 1919, was one of the earliest institutions to teach Carnatic music on a formal syllabus, and the violinist Dwaram Venkataswamy Naidu taught and directed there. The result is that a small estate town, not a metropolis, holds a documented teaching lineage.
A Srikakulam ballad form sung to the jamuku, a small clay pot-drum with a gut string pulled through the head, which produces a low growl rather than a beat. Sung by a lead with two responders, all night, on heroic and caste-history subjects.
Theatre
The ballad-drama of the 1757 storming of Bobbili fort and the reprisal that followed — a real event between the Vizianagaram estate, the Bobbili estate and a French force under Bussy, which became the most-performed historical narrative in Telugu and a fixture of burrakatha, stage drama and later film.
Street theatre played on an open patch with a curtain held by two men, mythological in subject, all night in duration, and progressively displaced by amplification and cinema. It survives around temple festivals rather than as a touring trade.
Crafts
Registered as a geographical indication in 2014. The wood is a soft, close-grained white timber that takes a lathe cleanly, and the dyes are made from seeds, roots, bark and leaves — which is why the toys survived the shift to non-toxic-toy regulation better than painted competitors did.
Material: Ankudu wood (Wrightia tinctoria), lac, seed, bark and root dyes. Technique: The piece is turned on a lathe, and while it is still spinning a stick of lac coloured with vegetable dye is pressed against it. Friction melts the lac onto the surface and the same friction polishes it, so colouring and finishing are one operation and no brush or varnish is involved.
Registered as a geographical indication in 2010. Made by a handful of families whose trade is hereditary, and now also produced in miniature as a souvenir, which is what actually pays for the workshop.
Material: Jackwood, in a single block. Technique: The resonator is hollowed from the same block that becomes the neck and the head, worked with chisels and gouges over weeks, then fretted with wax and brass.
Registered as a geographical indication in 2007. A beaten-sheet tradition rather than a casting one, which is unusual in India and gives the vessels their thin walls and their weight.
Material: Brass and bell metal sheet. Technique: Sheet metal is beaten over stakes into vessel forms and joined, then scraped and polished on a lathe to a mirror finish rather than cast in a mould.
Registered as a geographical indication in 2023, and organised through a khadi workers' society rather than through master weavers. The count achieved by hand here is the whole product.
Material: Short-staple local cotton. Technique: Cotton cleaned and aligned with a fish jawbone, spun on a charkha by women working at home, and woven on pit looms in the village.
One of the largest cashew-processing clusters in India, drawing raw nut from the local laterite belt, from Odisha and from West Africa. The workforce is largely women on piece rates, and the shell liquid is caustic enough that hand-shelling remains skilled work.
Material: Anacardium occidentale. Technique: Sun-drying in shell, steaming or roasting, hand-shelling, peeling, grading
Household production for household use, sold at the weekly shandy. It is the craft economy of the ghats and it has almost no retail presence outside them.
Material: Bamboo, cane, siali leaf, gourd. Technique: Split-bamboo weaving, coiled cane, and stitched leaf plates
The dance, music, theatre and crafts of Uttarandhra, from classical forms to village traditions. (16)