Tradition · wood turnery & lacquer craft · India
Channapatna lacquered toys
Also known as Channapatna, gombegala ooru, lacquerware toys
Toys turned from soft ivory-wood on a lathe and coloured with lacquer sticks held against the spinning piece, in a town between Bengaluru and Mysuru — the colour is vegetable dye in lac, so the toys are safe in a child's mouth, which is most of why the craft survived.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 12.650, 77.210
Worth knowing
The trade is credited to Tipu Sultan, who is said to have brought Persian artisans to train local turners in the late eighteenth century, and the town is called gombegala ooru, the town of toys. Cheap plastic and then Chinese imports nearly ended it; a geographical indication in 2005 and a design revival have kept a few hundred workshops going.
Connections (1)
- AnalogueKondapalli toys
Kondapalli in Andhra and Channapatna in Karnataka are the two southern toy towns and they are opposites in method: Kondapalli carves soft tella poniki into figures and joins them with tamarind paste, Channapatna turns hardwood on a lathe and colours it with lacquer held against the spinning piece. Both hold geographical indications, both nearly died to plastic imports, and both are now sustained partly by design intervention and partly by nostalgia.
On these journeys
Sources
GI registry; craft records
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