Telangana:
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 Telangana 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

Telangana is a young state with an old register. Thirteen of its fourteen handicraft registrations were filed before 2014, under Andhra Pradesh, and several still carry district names that no longer exist. Craft counts, where they exist at all, come from GI applications written to make a case rather than from a survey. The one number that is reported consistently is the number of weavers who have died, which tells you what the state has chosen to count.

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.

Nirmal is a small town in the north of Telangana with a population under sixty thousand. It holds three of the state's fourteen handicraft geographical indications — toys, furniture and paintings — all filed in the same year by the same set of households.

The craft is real and it is old. The Naqqash families were settled here under the Nizams and work poniki, the soft white wood of the duduku tree, which carves cleanly and takes a coat without splitting. The toys are carved, not turned — which is what separates Nirmal from Channapatna and Etikoppaka, where the lathe does the shaping. A tamarind-seed primer goes on, then oil colour, then the gold-toned finish made locally from herbal extracts that is the town's actual signature.

What is worth noticing is the arithmetic. One town of this size holds twenty-one per cent of the state's craft register. Warangal, with about two thousand durrie artisans, holds one entry. Sircilla, the largest weaving town in Telangana, holds none.

That is not evidence that Nirmal filed wrongly. It is evidence that the register records applications, not crafts — and that the ability to make an application is distributed very unevenly.

Four hundred and two weavers are reported to have died by suicide in Sircilla between 2004 and 2014. It is the longest such record attached to any single weaving town in India. Thirty-four more have been reported in the three years to 2026.

Sircilla weaves on power, on contract. A merchant — the asami — owns the loom, supplies the yarn and takes the cloth; the weaver is paid by the metre for running somebody else's machine. At the trade's height around twenty-five thousand people worked that way in a town of under a hundred thousand.

Everything that happens to such a town happens through the order book. Turnover rose from about ₹250 crore to ₹1,000 crore a year when the state placed large orders — Bathukamma sarees, school uniforms, a run of a hundred and fifty thousand national flags in 2015 — and the reporting of deaths stopped. When the uniform orders were cancelled, it started again.

Sircilla holds no geographical indication and cannot hold one. A GI protects a named product made to a specification in a defined place. Sircilla's product is whatever the contract says this month. The craft register is built for weaves; this is a labour market.

A Cheriyal scroll ran three feet wide and forty to forty-five feet long, in around fifty panels separated by a floral border. It was not a painting. It was the visual half of a performance, unrolled one panel at a time over a night, and it has outlived the performance entirely.

The Nakashi painters made the scrolls. The Kaki Padagollu balladeers carried them, travelling in teams of about five — two narrating, the others on harmonium, tabla and castanets — village to village, caste by caste, each community's genealogy painted in its own scroll.

The making is slow before it is anything else. Khadi cotton is coated three times with rice starch, white suddha matti clay, boiled tamarind-seed paste and gum, each coat dried before the next. The outline goes on straight with a brush of squirrel hair tied to a stick — no pencil, no transfer. Colour is ground from sea shell for white, lamp soot for black and turmeric for yellow, with red behind almost everything and no perspective at all.

Television took the audience. The balladeer teams stopped travelling, so the long scroll had no buyer, and the painters moved to single framed panels — one episode, one character, hung on a wall. The technique survived. The form it existed for did not.

Telia means oil; rumal means square. Before any thread is tied, the cotton is worked for weeks in sheep-dung ash and sesame oil — the treatment the cloth is named after, and the reason a coarse cotton can take and hold the deep red it is known for.

Then the hard part. The telia rumal is double ikat: warp and weft are both resist-tied before weaving, a technique practised in only three places on earth — here, Gujarat's patola, and Japan. The weaver's job is to make two independently dyed sets of threads meet in the right places on the loom.

Rumals are tied in sets of eight, folded so all eight take the same binding at once. Large resist areas are wrapped in strips cut from black bicycle inner tubes, because they are cheap, local and reliably waterproof; small areas are bound in cotton yarn. Red is always dyed first, and the ties are then rebuilt to protect the red and the white before the black goes on. Fifteen weft bundles for a simple design, up to a hundred and fifty for a complex one.

The square was worn — a turban or shoulder cloth for men, and under the Nizams, two joined squares as a dupatta for aristocratic women of Hyderabad. By the 1920s the motifs included aeroplanes and clocks. The craft began at Chirala on the Andhra coast and moved here; Chirala has effectively stopped making it.

A sheet of brass will tear if you hammer it in mid-air. Pembarthi's answer, worked out under the Kakatiyas and unchanged since, is to bed the sheet on hot lac spread over a wooden table, so that every blow is supported from underneath.

The design is drawn on paper and transferred to the metal. The artisan then works from the back, raising the form with small hammers and fine chisels, and turns the sheet to chase the detail from the front — repoussé, done without a single mould or die. The piece is warmed until it lifts off the lac, cleaned with ash powder, then washed in tamarind water, filed and buffed.

What the craft made changed with who was paying. The Kakatiyas commissioned temple doors, chariot fittings, lamps and idols — the village sits a short distance from Warangal fort and Ramappa. The Nizams added household silver and brass: paandans, boxes, trays. The trade now makes nameplates, trophies, wall panels and pooja articles, with the same lac bed and the same two tools.

Pembarthi once held close to six hundred working households. What it holds now is not published, which is the first thing a field visit has to establish.

Every craft in this volume is losing to a market, a machine or a change of taste. The gongadi is losing to a breeding decision. The black Deccani sheep whose fleece makes it is being replaced by hair-sheep bred for meat, which grow no usable wool at all.

The blanket is made end to end by one household. The Kuruma or Golla family rears the flock, shears it, picks and hand-spins the fleece on a drop spindle, and weaves it in narrow strips on a pit loom which are then joined. Nothing is dyed. The grey, brown, black and off-white are the animals' own colours, sorted at the picking stage.

It is not a decorative object. A gongadi is a winter cover, a sleeping mat on a stone or mud floor, a rain and wind wrap for a shepherd standing out all night, and the cloth a newborn is wrapped in. Coarse wool repels water and insects in a way that nothing cheap does as well.

The craft holds no geographical indication. It is the clearest unprotected case in Telangana — a named product, a named community, a defined breed — and it is also the clearest demonstration that a registration would not have helped, because the thing failing is upstream of anything a certificate can reach.

Cover and openers

6 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 fifty objects matters more than beauty in any one.

Process sequences

Four to seven frames each for a telia weft bundle being bound at Puttapaka, silver wire coming off the draw plate at Karimnagar, a brass sheet being raised from the back on its lac bed at Pembarthi, and a Cheriyal canvas taking its third coat of tamarind and clay. These four are the volume's highest photographic priority.

Detail macros

The feathered edge of a double-ikat motif at Puttapaka; filigree mesh held against the light; the interlock where two weft colours meet in a Warangal durrie; raw Deccani fleece beside a finished gongadi.

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 Pochampally tying yards in full run, Laad Bazaar on a wedding week, the Sircilla loom sheds at shift change, the Jainoor casting furnaces before dawn, and the Medaram jatara ground.