The Making of Regional Cultures

This is Chapter 7 of Our Pasts – II. Chapter 6 (gess106) followed devotional movements across regions; this chapter asks how regional cultures — languages, religious traditions, heroic ideals, dance, painting, buildings and food — took shape. NCERT’s opening point: we tend to identify people by language and to link each region with distinctive food, clothes, poetry, dance, music and painting, assuming these identities are timeless; in fact the frontiers between regions have changed over time (and still change), and regional cultures are often the product of intermixing local traditions with ideas from other parts of the subcontinent. Some traditions are specific to a region, some are similar across regions, and some come from older practices in one area but take new forms elsewhere. The chapter takes examples: Kerala (language), Orissa (the Jagannatha cult), Rajasthan (heroic traditions), Kathak (a dance that crossed regions), miniature painting, and a closer look at Bengal. It has twelve pages of reading, so eight concept sections. Regions are described historically; nothing here ranks one region, language or community above another. The next chapter, gess108, turns to the eighteenth-century states that patronised many of these arts.

• Links in this book: gess102 (the Rajput clans and Prithviraj; temples as statements of power — NCERT’s ‘Chapter 2’); gess103 (the Bengal Sultans’ independence from Delhi); gess104 (Akbar, the subas, Mughal court culture); gess106 (Chaitanyadeva, the Nathpanthis, the bhakti movement that shaped Kathak and Kangra painting); gess108 (the regional states to which painters moved).
• Deeper pages: kefa106 (temple architecture, including the Jagannatha temple and Vishnupur’s terracotta temples); kefa105 (later mural traditions, including Kerala); kefa108 (Indo-Islamic buildings); lehs202 (the integration of local cults such as Jagannatha); iest203 (regional cultures within 1000–1700 CE); hess207 (sati and its abolition in the colonial period). This page links them and does not re-teach them.
• UPSC: Prelims ‘Art and Culture’ asks about classical dances and their states (1983), schools of miniature painting and Mughal influence (1995), and much more beyond this chapter (dancers, the ‘Bani Thani’ painting). GS1 asked how medieval temple sculptures represent social life (2022) — Bengal’s terracotta plaques of fish and markets are ready evidence.

• Regions are made, not given: language, food, dress and arts are linked to regions, but frontiers changed and regional cultures mixed local traditions with ideas from elsewhere.
• Kerala: Chera kingdom of Mahodayapuram (9th c.); Malayalam language and script in inscriptions; temple theatre from Sanskrit epics; Manipravalam (‘diamonds and corals’) — the Lilatilakam (14th c.).
• Orissa: Jagannatha (‘lord of the world’) at Puri — image made by local tribal people; Ganga ruler Anantavarman (12th c.); Anangabhima III the god’s ‘deputy’ (1230); Mughals, Marathas, East India Company seek control.
• Rajputs: ‘Rajputana’ (British, 19th c.); Rajput rule from about the 8th c.; heroic ideal — death rather than defeat; minstrels; women in stories, including sati. Kathak: katha, temple story-tellers, rasa lila, Mughal court, Jaipur and Lucknow gharanas, Wajid Ali Shah; classical after independence.
• Miniatures: palm leaf and Jaina texts → Mughal court (Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan) → Deccan and Rajput courts (Mewar, Jodhpur, Bundi, Kota, Kishangarh) → hills: Basohli (late 17th c., Rasamanjari), Kangra (after 1739; soft blues and greens).
• Bengal: language via Magadha, Guptas, Xuan Zang, Palas, Sultans, Mughal suba; literature — Mangalakavyas vs Nath songs and Dharma Thakur; pirs on the eastern frontier; dochala/chauchala temples, Vishnupur terracotta; fish — the Brihaddharma Purana.

NCERT begins with the link between language and region. The Chera kingdom of Mahodayapuram was established in the ninth century in the south-western part of the peninsula, part of present-day Kerala. Malayalam was probably spoken there, and the rulers introduced the Malayalam language and script in their inscriptions — one of the earliest examples of a regional language in official records in the subcontinent. At the same time the Cheras drew on Sanskritic traditions: the temple theatre of Kerala, traced to this period, borrowed stories from the Sanskrit epics; the first literary works in Malayalam, dated to about the twelfth century, are directly indebted to Sanskrit; and a fourteenth-century text, the Lilatilakam, dealing with grammar and poetics, was composed in Manipravalam — literally ‘diamonds and corals’, the two languages, Sanskrit and the regional language.

In other regions, regional cultures grew around religious traditions. NCERT’s best example is the cult of Jagannatha (literally ‘lord of the world’, a name for Vishnu) at Puri, Orissa. To this day the local tribal people make the wooden image of the deity, which suggests the deity was originally a local god, later identified with Vishnu. In the twelfth century, Anantavarman, one of the most important rulers of the Ganga dynasty, decided to build a temple for Purushottama Jagannatha at Puri. In 1230, king Anangabhima III dedicated his kingdom to the deity and proclaimed himself the god’s ‘deputy’. As the temple grew as a pilgrimage centre, its authority in social and political matters also grew. All who conquered Orissa — the Mughals, the Marathas and the English East India Company — tried to gain control over the temple, feeling this would make their rule acceptable to the local people.

In the nineteenth century the British called the region that is most of present-day Rajasthan Rajputana. This may suggest it was inhabited only or mainly by Rajputs, but NCERT says that is only partly true: several groups identify themselves as Rajputs in many areas of northern and central India, and many peoples other than Rajputs live in Rajasthan. Still, the Rajputs are often recognised as contributing to Rajasthan’s distinctive culture. These traditions were closely linked with the ideals and aspirations of rulers. From about the eighth century, most of present-day Rajasthan was ruled by various Rajput families — Prithviraj (gess102) was one such ruler. They cherished the ideal of the hero who fought valiantly, often choosing death on the battlefield rather than face defeat. Stories of Rajput heroes were recorded in poems and songs, recited by specially trained minstrels; these preserved the memories of heroes and were meant to inspire others. Ordinary people too were drawn to the stories, with their dramatic situations and strong emotions — loyalty, friendship, love, valour, anger. Did women find a place? Sometimes women are shown following their heroic husbands in life and death — there are stories about sati, the immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres. So, NCERT concludes, those who followed the heroic ideal often paid for it with their lives.

If heroic traditions take different forms in different regions, so does dance. Kathak, now associated with several parts of north India, takes its name from katha, a word used in Sanskrit and other languages for story. The kathaks were originally a caste of story-tellers in temples of north India who embellished their performances with gestures and songs. Kathak began to evolve into a distinct dance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the spread of the bhakti movement: the legends of Radha-Krishna were enacted in folk plays called rasa lila, which combined folk dance with the kathak story-tellers’ basic gestures. Under the Mughal emperors and their nobles, Kathak was performed at court, where it acquired its present features and a distinctive style. It then developed in two traditions or gharanas: one in the courts of Rajasthan (Jaipur) and the other in Lucknow. Under the patronage of Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh, it grew into a major art form. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century it was firmly established not only in these two regions but in the adjoining areas of present-day Punjab, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, with emphasis on intricate, rapid footwork, elaborate costumes and the enactment of stories. Like several other cultural practices, Kathak was viewed with disfavour by most British administrators in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; but it survived, performed by courtesans, and was recognised as one of the six ‘classical’ forms of dance after independence.

Miniatures are small paintings, generally in water colour on cloth or paper. The earliest were on palm leaves or wood; some of the most beautiful, found in western India, illustrated Jaina texts. The Mughal emperors Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan patronised highly skilled painters who mainly illustrated manuscripts of histories and poetry, in brilliant colours, showing court scenes, battles, hunts and other aspects of social life. These were often exchanged as gifts and seen only by an exclusive few — the emperor and his close associates. With the decline of the Mughal Empire, many painters moved to the courts of the emerging regional states (gess108). Mughal tastes influenced the regional courts of the Deccan and the Rajput courts of Rajasthan, which kept and developed their own characteristics: portraits of rulers and court scenes followed the Mughal example, and themes from mythology and poetry were painted at centres such as Mewar, Jodhpur, Bundi, Kota and Kishangarh. The Himalayan foothills around present-day Himachal Pradesh also drew miniature painting: by the late seventeenth century a bold, intense style called Basohli had developed, its most popular text Bhanudatta’s Rasamanjari. Nadir Shah’s invasion and conquest of Delhi in 1739 drove Mughal artists to the hills, where they found patrons — leading to the Kangra school. By the mid-eighteenth century Kangra artists had developed a style that breathed new spirit into miniature painting, inspired by Vaishnavite traditions, with soft colours — cool blues and greens — and a lyrical treatment of themes. NCERT adds a reminder: ordinary women and men painted too — on pots, walls, floors and cloth — but their work has only occasionally survived, unlike the miniatures carefully kept in palaces.

We tend to assume that people in Bengal always spoke Bengali. But although Bengali is now recognised as a language derived from Sanskrit, early Sanskrit texts (mid-first millennium BCE) suggest that the people of Bengal did not speak Sanskritic languages. How did the new language emerge? From the fourth–third centuries BCE, commercial ties grew between Bengal and Magadha (south Bihar), which may have increased Sanskrit’s influence. In the fourth century the Gupta rulers took control of north Bengal and began to settle Brahmanas there, strengthening the linguistic and cultural influence of the mid-Ganga valley. In the seventh century the Chinese traveller Xuan Zang observed that languages related to Sanskrit were in use all over Bengal. From the eighth century Bengal was the centre of a regional kingdom under the Palas (gess102); between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries it was ruled by Sultans independent of Delhi (gess103). In 1586, NCERT says, when Akbar conquered Bengal, it became the nucleus of the Bengal suba; Persian was the language of administration, while Bengali developed as a regional language. In fact, by the fifteenth century the Bengali group of dialects had been united by a common literary language based on the spoken language of the western part of the region (now West Bengal). So Bengali, though derived from Sanskrit, passed through several stages, and a wide range of non-Sanskrit words — from tribal languages, Persian and European languages — became part of modern Bengali.

NCERT divides early Bengali literature into two categories — one indebted to Sanskrit and the other independent of it. The first includes translations of the Sanskrit epics, the Mangalakavyas (literally ‘auspicious poems’, dealing with local deities) and bhakti literature such as the biographies of Chaitanyadeva, leader of the Vaishnava bhakti movement (gess106). The second includes Nath literature — such as the songs of Maynamati and Gopichandra — stories about the worship of Dharma Thakur, and fairy tales, folk tales and ballads. Texts of the first category are easier to date: several manuscripts show they were composed between the late fifteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. Those of the second circulated orally and cannot be precisely dated; they were particularly popular in eastern Bengal, where the influence of Brahmanas was relatively weak.

Pirs. From the sixteenth century, people migrated in large numbers from the less fertile western Bengal to the forested and marshy south-east. As they moved east they cleared forests and brought the land under rice cultivation; local communities of fisherfolk and shifting cultivators, often tribal, gradually merged with the new peasant communities. This coincided with Mughal control over Bengal, with its capital at Dhaka in the heart of the eastern delta. Officials and functionaries received land and often set up mosques, which served as centres of religious transformation. The early settlers sought order and assurance in unstable new settlements; these came from community leaders who were also teachers and adjudicators and were sometimes believed to have supernatural powers. People called them, with affection and respect, pirs — a term that included saints or Sufis and other religious figures, daring colonisers and deified soldiers, various Hindu and Buddhist deities and even animistic spirits. The cult of pirs became very popular, and their shrines are found everywhere in Bengal.

Temples. Bengal also saw a temple-building spree from the late fifteenth century that culminated in the nineteenth. As NCERT noted in Chapter 2, temples were often built by individuals or groups who were becoming powerful — to demonstrate power and proclaim piety. Many of Bengal’s modest brick and terracotta temples were built with the support of several ‘low’ social groups such as the Kolu (oil pressers) and the Kansari (bell-metal workers). The European trading companies created new economic opportunities; as families from these groups prospered, they proclaimed their status by building temples. When local deities, once worshipped in thatched huts in villages, gained the recognition of the Brahmanas, their images began to be housed in temples — and the temples began to copy the double-roofed (dochala) or four-roofed (chauchala) structure of the huts, giving rise to the typical Bengali style. In the more complex four-roofed form, four triangular roofs on the four walls rise to converge on a curved line or a point. Temples usually stood on a square platform; the interior was relatively plain, but the outer walls of many were decorated with paintings, ornamental tiles or terracotta tablets — reaching a high excellence at Vishnupur in Bankura district, West Bengal.

Fish as food. Traditional food habits are generally based on locally available food. Bengal is a riverine plain producing plenty of rice and fish, so these figure prominently in the meals of even poor Bengalis. Fishing has always been an important occupation, and Bengali literature has many references to fish; terracotta plaques on the walls of temples and viharas (Buddhist monasteries) show fish being dressed and carried to market in baskets. Brahmanas were not allowed to eat non-vegetarian food, but fish was so popular in the local diet that the Brahmanical authorities relaxed the prohibition for Bengal Brahmanas: the Brihaddharma Purana, a thirteenth-century Sanskrit text from Bengal, permitted local Brahmanas to eat certain varieties of fish.

The chapter’s question boxes, in page order, and ‘Imagine’.

‘Let’s recall’ (1–4), ‘Let’s discuss’ (5–8) and ‘Let’s do’ (9–12), pages 92–93.

Numbers

One-liners

• The Chera rulers of Mahodayapuram used the Malayalam language and script in inscriptions.
• Manipravalam means ‘diamonds and corals’ — Sanskrit and the regional language.
• Jagannatha means ‘lord of the world’, a name for Vishnu.
• Local tribal people still make the wooden image of Jagannatha.
• Anangabhima III proclaimed himself the ‘deputy’ of Jagannatha in 1230.
• The British called the region of present-day Rajasthan ‘Rajputana’ in the 19th century.
• Stories of Rajput heroes were recited by specially trained minstrels.
• Kathak comes from katha, ‘story’.
• Kathak’s two gharanas: Jaipur and Lucknow.
• Wajid Ali Shah, last Nawab of Awadh, patronised Kathak.
• The earliest miniatures were on palm leaves or wood; western Indian ones illustrated Jaina texts.
• Bhanudatta’s Rasamanjari was the most popular text painted in Basohli.
• Kangra painting used soft colours, cool blues and greens, and Vaishnavite themes.
• Persian was the administrative language of the Bengal suba; Bengali the regional language.
• Mangalakavyas are ‘auspicious poems’ about local deities.
• Dharma Thakur is worshipped as a stone or a piece of wood.
• Pir is a Persian word meaning a spiritual guide.
• The Kolu (oil pressers) and Kansari (bell-metal workers) built temples in Bengal.

Traps to avoid

• Mahodayapuram and the Lilatilakam both match Kerala; Anantavarman matches Orissa, Jagannatha matches Puri.
• Lilatilakam: ‘composed in Manipravalam’ (NCERT) — most references call it a Sanskrit treatise on Manipravalam.
• ‘Rajputana’ was a British 19th-century name — not proof that only Rajputs lived there.
• Kathak gharanas: Jaipur and Lucknow (not Delhi or Agra in NCERT).
• Classical dances: NCERT says six; the Sangeet Natak Akademi today recognises eight (Mohiniyattam, Sattriya added).
• Basohli (late 17th c.) came before Kangra (mid-18th c., after 1739).
• Kangra = soft cool colours; Basohli = bold and intense.
• Kalighat painting was not shaped by Mughal painting (UPSC 1995).
• Akbar’s conquest of Bengal: NCERT 1586, most books 1576.
• Mangalakavyas are Sanskrit-indebted; Maynamati–Gopichandra songs and Dharma Thakur stories are independent and oral.
• Dochala = two roofs; chauchala = four roofs.
• Bengal temples were often built by ‘low’ social groups grown rich through European trade — not only by kings.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Classical dances and their states: UPSC 1983 (Kathakali–Kerala, Odissi–Orissa, Bharatanatyam–Tamil Nadu, Kuchipudi–Andhra Pradesh) — the box on page 84; learn also the two added since (Mohiniyattam, Sattriya). Questions on dancers (1984, 2001, 2007), Kuchipudi’s features (2012), Sattriya (2014) and Manipuri Sankirtana (2017) go beyond this chapter.
• Schools of painting: UPSC 1995 (which style was not affected by Mughal painting — Kalighat). Learn the court-to-court sequence and Basohli vs Kangra. ‘Bani Thani’ — Kishangarh (1990, 1992, 2018) is Beyond NCERT but rests on this chapter’s list of Rajput centres.
• Likely statement material: Manipravalam and the Lilatilakam; Anangabhima III, 1230; Jagannatha’s tribal links; Kathak gharanas; dochala/chauchala, Vishnupur; Brihaddharma Purana; Mangalakavyas; pirs. Watch NCERT’s own dates: Bengal 1586 vs 1576; ‘six’ classical dances.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS1 2022 (‘How will you explain that Medieval Indian temple sculptures represent the social life of those days?’): Bengal’s terracotta plaques — fish being dressed and carried to market, Krishna with the gopis at Vishnupur — and the dance class at Khajuraho (Fig. 5); add the patrons (Kolu and Kansari) and kefa106 for wider examples.
• For GS1 culture answers on regional identity, use NCERT’s frame — regions made over time by intermixing — with the attributed readings (Pollock, Kulke, Eaton, Coomaraswamy, Goswamy, Chakravorty). Keep regions and communities described historically, without ranking or present-day framing.

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