Andhra Pradesh:
A Journey
Through Crafts

What counts as a craft here

A skill that shapes material by hand, transmitted within a community or a workshop rather than through a syllabus, and still practised by someone in Andhra Pradesh today. That definition lets in quarry carving and gold-foil beating, and keeps out revived hobby practice with no inherited line.

Where the entries come from

Three layers. The GI Registry's state list, which is authoritative but narrow. State ODOP, handloom and handicraft cluster records, which are broader but commercial in framing. And published documentation — craft council surveys, museum and university records, and reporting on individual clusters.

What this document cannot yet claim

It has no artisan headcount. Loom censuses, cluster registers and co-operative rolls disagree with each other and with the ground, and publishing a wrong number is worse than publishing none. It has no verified list of living practitioners — that is Volume II.

The known gaps

Andhra is the hardest state in this series to document, for a reason that has nothing to do with its crafts: the map has changed twice in ten years. The 2014 bifurcation moved the capital, the emporium headquarters and most of the record-keeping to a city now in another state, and the 2022 reorganisation renamed or recut almost every district a craft sits in. Twelve entries here carry a field-check flag, and the household crafts — palm leaf, mat weaving, coir, Agency basketry, forest fibre — are certainly undercounted, because they are made by women and by adivasi households for use rather than sale.

Significant crafts with no protection

These are practised, documented and commercially significant, and hold no geographical indication of their own.

The raw material squeeze

Gold, silver, coloured stone, natural indigo and good quarry stone have all risen faster than the price a finished object commands. When a printer switches from madder to a synthetic, the craft has not been abandoned — it has been priced out of its own specification.

The margin the maker never sees

Between the cluster and the shelf sit anywhere from one to four intermediaries. In a tourist economy a fifth appears: the shop that pays a commission to whoever brought the customer through the door.

What actually shortens the chain

Direct selling at fairs. Producer companies that hold their own stock. Authorised-user registers under a GI. Workshop visits and craft tourism at the cluster itself. None of these is a subsidy; all of them are structure.

Ponduru spins the finest handspun cotton made in India, on a single-spindle charkha that is used in almost no other cluster in the country. About nine hundred and fifty women spin across thirty-five villages; two to three hundred of them are in Ponduru itself.

The cotton is combed before spinning with the jaw bone of the valuga fish, taken from the Godavari. Nothing else gives the same separation without breaking a short fibre, and no substitute has been proposed.

Then the part that nobody planned. A single-spindle charkha needs a short-staple cotton; a mill and a motorised Amber charkha need a long one. Short staple costs two hundred to two hundred and fifty rupees a kilo against fifty to sixty for long. Because Ponduru kept spinning by hand, two indigenous short-staple varieties — kondapatti and errapatti — kept being grown. Twenty-eight others did not survive.

A spinner earns about a hundred and fifty rupees a day and produces one hank. The Sangham buys every Sunday. Of a hundred and fifty weavers on its rolls, sixty are in Ponduru, and three of them still weave jamdani.

A Bobbili veena is cut from a single log of jackwood. The round kunda body is hollowed to about a quarter of an inch, and the dandi neck is carved out of the same piece, so there is no joint anywhere in the instrument. The makers hold that the joint is what kills the tone.

Forty-five families in Bobbili and the nearby village of Gollapalli have made it since the seventeenth century. They are Viswa Brahmins of the Sarvasiddi line, and the craft was court work before it was trade.

The arithmetic is now against them. A good six-to-eight foot log costs about ten thousand rupees; a finished full-size veena sells for about twenty-two thousand; and most makers complete one a month. Felling restrictions mean nobody buys wood directly any more — it comes through middlemen. Gourds large enough for the second resonator have become scarce enough that aluminium is substituted. The strings come from Mumbai.

Lepakshi, the state handicrafts corporation, is the largest buyer, and has been the reason the craft held when private orders thinned.

In 1844 a Scottish couple at a mission station taught crochet to women around Narsapur. It was relief work. It became an export trade that carried the delta through the famine of 1899 and the depression of 1929, and it is now the largest single craft workforce in this volume.

About fifteen thousand women work it today, across nineteen mandals of West Godavari and Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Konaseema, with Narsapur, Palakollu, Razole and Amalapuram as the trade points. Almost all of it is piecework done at home, between other work, with a hook and a reel of thread.

Which is exactly why it is invisible. Home-based piecework does not show up as employment; it shows up, if at all, as a household's second income. The wage has never been published. The craft has a geographical indication, granted in 2020 and applied for by a women's cooperative federation, an exporters' association and the state handicrafts corporation together — a filing explicitly intended to revive a dwindling craft.

Chinese machine lace took the volume. The pandemic took the orders. The fifteen thousand are still there.

Kalamkari is not one tradition. Four hundred kilometres apart, two entirely different crafts carry the name, were registered separately, and are routinely sold as the same thing.

Srikalahasti draws. The kalam is a bamboo or date-palm stick bound with a bundle of hair that holds the dye and releases it under finger pressure; the work is freehand, the subjects are the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and it was made for temples — chariot banners and backdrops to be read aloud from.

Pedana and Machilipatnam print. Carved teak blocks lay mordant and resist in register, three blocks to a repeat; the vocabulary is Persian — tree of life, lotus, parrot, peacock — because this was an export trade through the Qutb Shahi port to Persia and then to Europe, and Hindu figures were kept out of it.

Both prepare cloth in myrobalan and buffalo milk. Both use fermented iron for black and alizarin for red. Both wash in running river water between stages. Srikalahasti was filed in 2005, Machilipatnam in 2007. What is sold as Kalamkari in most shops is screen print.

Tholu Bommalata is shadow theatre: translucent hide figures lit from behind against a cotton screen, performed through the night, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata episode by episode, by a troupe of seven or eight who were paid in grain.

The making is exacting. Goat and sheep hide is soaked, scraped clear of flesh and hair, cured in myrobalan and dried until light passes through it. The figure is drawn freehand, outlined, grooved and then perforated — which is the point of the whole craft, because the holes are what let the lamp throw the ornament as colour rather than as silhouette. Limbs are cut separately and stitched on so they articulate. Figures run to six and seven feet.

About sixty families at Nimmalakunta still do it. The performances have very largely stopped. What the craft did instead was turn the puppet into a lampshade, a wall panel and a room partition — the same hide, the same perforation, lit from inside instead of behind.

A full-size puppet sells for forty to fifty thousand rupees. A lampshade runs from six hundred. D. Chalapathi Rao received a Padma Shri in 2020.

Cover and openers

5 region openers need one horizontal hero each: a working hand, not a finished object. Shoot at the printing table, the lathe, the kiln, the pit loom, the quarry face.

Every craft card

One object frame, square, plain mid-grey ground, single soft key light from the left, no props. Consistency across forty-three objects matters more than beauty in any one.

Process sequences

Four to seven frames each for the kalam drawing an outline at Srikalahasti, a three-block repeat going down in register at Pedana, a veena body being hollowed from a single log at Gollapalli, and lac meeting the turning wood at Etikoppaka. These four are the volume's highest photographic priority.

Detail macros

Myrobalan-stiffened cloth before the first wash; the perforation of a Nimmalakunta puppet lit from behind; a Ponduru hank against the light; the interlock of a Chirala kuppadam border.

The people

Portraits at the workplace, environmental, eye level. Name, age, years at the craft and consent recorded for every single frame — no exceptions, including for children in shot.

The places

The Pedana dye yard in full run, the Uppada loom street, the Nimmalakunta workyard, a Ponduru spinning house on a Sunday when the Sangham buys, and Dharmavaram's silk market at dawn.