Tradition · narrative scroll painting
Cheriyal scrolls, Telangana
Also known as Cheriyal, Nakashi, Telangana scrolls, Cheriyal scrolls — Telangana
Long vertical narrative scrolls in strong red grounds painted by Nakashi families at Cheriyal, made not to hang but to be carried and unrolled panel by panel by itinerant storyteller castes who sang the caste-origin epic of their patron community.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 17.910, 78.950
Worth knowing
Each scroll was commissioned for a specific caste — Padmasali weavers, Gauda toddy-tappers, Mudiraj fishers — and told that caste's own origin story, so the painting was a genealogical document as much as an illustration. When the storyteller castes lost their audiences to cinema and radio the scrolls stopped being ordered, and the surviving Nakashi families now paint single panels for sale.
Connections (2)
- Craft tradition ofBurra Kathā
The Cheriyal scrolls were painted for exactly the storyteller castes who perform burra kathā and its relatives — Kaki Padagollu, Gauda Jetti, Mandhecchu — each community commissioning the scroll that told its own caste-origin epic. The painter and the performer were two halves of one trade, and when cinema and radio took the audiences both ends of it collapsed together. The Nakashi families now paint single panels for sale, and the storytellers are gone.
- Patronage networkGolconda
The Cheriyal scrolls were made in the Telangana of the Qutb Shahi and then Asaf Jahi states, for storyteller castes serving the artisan and cultivating communities of the countryside rather than for any court. The painters, Nakashi families, also made the masks and the painted wooden figures the same performers used. The whole complex was invisible to the state and to the city and therefore unrecorded until the twentieth century.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Cheriyal scroll painting”. Geographical Indications Registry (Government of India) filings; Ministry of Textiles and Sangeet Natak Akademi craft documentation.
Open Cheriyal scrolls, Telangana in the repository →