Tholu Bommalata: A History

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By Dhanya

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    Introduction

    On a moonless night in a Telugu village, a screen of white cloth glows from behind, lit by an oil lamp or a bulb. Behind it, a family of puppeteers moves large, translucent leather figures against the light, their voices and a Carnatic music ensemble carrying an episode of the Ramayana late into the night. This is Tholu Bommalata, literally "the dance of leather puppets", one of South India's oldest surviving shadow theatre traditions, and among the very few Indian art forms that still exist simultaneously as object, performance, and living oral epic. Long before television or cinema reached rural Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, this was how entire villages encountered their scriptures: not read, but watched, in flickering shadow, across a single unbroken night. Understanding Tholu Bommalata means understanding all three parts at once: the puppet as a crafted object, the performance it was built for, and the community that has carried it, hereditarily, for nearly two thousand years.

    What is Tholu Bommalata?

    Tholu Bommalata is a shadow puppet theatre tradition native to the Telugu-speaking Deccan, primarily practised in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, with related traditions extending into parts of Karnataka. The name breaks down directly from Telugu: tholu means leather, bommalu means puppets or dolls, and attam (or aata) means dance or play, together, "the dance of leather puppets." Its puppets are cut from treated animal hide, painted in vivid natural dyes, and finely perforated so that when held before a backlit screen, light passes through the perforations and colored leather alike, throwing a richly detailed, glowing silhouette rather than a flat black shadow. What sets Tholu Bommalata apart from most other Indian puppet traditions is scale: its figures are unusually large, with principal characters often standing several feet tall, and important figures like Hanuman appearing in multiple sizes across a single performance to suit different dramatic moments. You can browse MeMeraki's Tholu Bommalata collection to see this scale and detail firsthand.

    Yuddha Rama in Tholu Bommalata by Sindhe Siva

    Where is Tholu Bommalata Practised?

    Tholu Bommalata's traditional homeland spans the Telugu-speaking districts of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, with the village of Nimmalakunta in Anantapur district particularly well known today as a center of puppet-making, having received a Geographical Indication (GI) tag for its leather craft. Related shadow puppetry traditions extend the practice's footprint into parts of Karnataka, where Kannada-speaking troupes historically performed similar repertoires under related names. The puppeteer families themselves are traditionally itinerant, historically travelling between villages during festival seasons rather than staying rooted to a single settlement, a lifestyle that shaped both how the tradition spread and how precariously it survived once that itinerant economy broke down. For a closer look at the daily lives of these traveling puppeteer families, our earlier piece, Tholu Bommalata: The Puppeteers of Andhra Pradesh, goes into that side of the tradition in more depth.

    Tholu Bommalata

    Origins and Evolution of Tholu Bommalata

    Ancient and Ritual Origins

    Tholu Bommalata's roots are generally traced back to around the 3rd century BCE, making it one of the oldest continuously practised performing art forms in the Deccan. References in early Telugu and Sanskrit texts suggest that some form of shadow theatre already existed by the time of the Satavahana and Chalukya dynasties, between the 4th and 6th centuries CE, and scholars believe it was from South India that shadow puppetry eventually spread further afield to Southeast Asia, where distinct local traditions later developed in Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, and beyond.

    The Vijayanagara Peak and Its Decline

    The art form is widely considered to have reached its creative peak between the 13th and 16th centuries under the Vijayanagara empire, whose rulers offered puppeteer troupes sustained patronage. During this period, the tradition absorbed outside influence as well: the rise of the Bahmani Sultanate brought Islamic aesthetic elements into the puppets' costuming, adding elaborate garments, jewelry, and long beards to many figures. In the 18th century, a further wave of puppeteers migrated south from Maharashtra into present-day Karnataka, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh, reshaping the tradition further; even today, many puppeteer families speak a Marathi dialect called Aare among themselves, despite performing in Telugu or Kannada. When Vijayanagara patronage collapsed, so did the primary economic support for the craft, and puppeteer families increasingly turned to agriculture and other trades to survive, a decline that scholars have tracked as continuing in waves through the 20th century and into the present.

    Maricha in Tholu Bommalata by Sindhe Siva

    From Village Screen to Contemporary Canvas

    Through the 20th century, Tholu Bommalata's traditional performance economy weakened further as cinema, television, and changing rural life patterns reduced demand for all-night puppet performances. In response, many puppeteer families have adapted their craft into a form more suited to today's market: standalone leather artworks, cut and painted with the same techniques once reserved for performance puppets, now sold and displayed as framed pieces rather than only animated behind a screen. This shift mirrors what many Indian craft traditions have gone through: the same skill, the same iconography, carried onto a new format built for a different audience, while institutions and GI recognition work to keep the underlying craft knowledge intact.

    Why Tholu Bommalata is More Than a Puppet Show

    Tholu Bommalata performances have historically been tied to religious festivals, particularly Shivaratri in honor of Shiva, the deity most closely associated with the tradition, and were treated as considerably more than entertainment. A full performance traditionally ran through the night, often four hours or longer, with a single troupe, typically a family, led by its senior puppeteer, narrating, singing, and manipulating dozens of puppets to bring an entire epic sequence to life before dawn. The primary narrative source for centuries has been the Ranganatha Ramayana, a 16th-century Telugu retelling of the Ramayana composed by Gona Budda Reddy specifically for shadow puppet performance, alongside episodes drawn from the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata Purana. Performing these stories was, for many rural audiences, their primary means of encountering the epics at all, making the puppeteer as much a religious storyteller as an entertainer.

    Radha Krishna Jhulan Leela – Foldable Tholu Bommalata Scroll Wall Panel by Sindhe Siva

    Understanding the Puppets: Materials and Technique

    Every Tholu Bommalata puppet begins as raw animal hide, traditionally goat, deer, or buffalo skin, with goat hide the most common choice today. The hide is cleaned and treated over a process that can take roughly two weeks, working it until it becomes thin and translucent enough to glow when lit from behind. Once prepared, the puppeteer-artisan cuts the figure's outline and internal details directly into the leather, articulating major joints, arms, sometimes legs, with separate pieces connected by cord, so the figure can be animated with sticks during a performance. Both sides of the puppet are hand-painted using natural dyes in bright, contrasting colors, chosen according to the character's role and nature, and the surface is then finely perforated in dense decorative patterns, particularly around jewelry, clothing, and crowns, so that light escapes in intricate, glowing detail rather than a flat silhouette. Two bamboo splits are typically attached to give the puppet structure and allow it to be held and manipulated. The entire process- treating, cutting, painting, and perforating- is traditionally taught within the puppeteer family itself, making puppet-making and puppeteering a single, inherited skill rather than two separate crafts. For anyone curious to try a version of this process hands-on, artist Kanday Anjanappa's Tholu Bommalata masterclass kit walks through a simplified version of this same technique.

    Materials and TechniqueMaterials and Technique

    Symbols, Characters, and Stories

    Tholu Bommalata's visual language follows conventions distinct enough to be recognizable at a glance. Figures are typically drawn in profile with large, wide, circular eyes, and the color palette, decorative style, and ornamentation are widely understood to draw heavily on the aesthetics of the 16th-century Lepakshi temple in Anantapur district, one of Andhra Pradesh's most celebrated examples of Vijayanagara-era temple art. Because the repertoire draws overwhelmingly from the Ramayana, certain characters recur constantly: Rama, shown with the calm, regal bearing of divine authority; Sita, rendered with graceful, restrained ornamentation as the epic's moral and emotional center; Lakshmana, Rama's devoted brother; and Hanuman, whose importance to the story is reflected in practice, a single troupe's puppet ensemble can include several different Hanuman figures at different sizes, from small hand-held versions to large multi-foot figures, deployed depending on the dramatic weight of the scene. Krishna also appears regularly, often in his gentler Venugopala form as the flute-playing cowherd, alongside episodes drawn from the Mahabharata and Bhagavata Purana. Every puppet's jewelry, crown design, and posture is not arbitrary decoration but a coded visual shorthand; a practiced audience could identify a character on sight, the same way a Kathakali audience reads a performer's makeup and costume. Artist Sindhe Siva's full body of work is a good place to see this shared visual grammar carried consistently across dozens of individual characters, while Kanday Anjanappa has taken the same vocabulary in a more ambitious direction with large-scale narrative works like "The Heroic Deeds of Lord Vishnu and His Incarnations", a single masterpiece panel bringing multiple episodes together in one composition. The craft's reach extends beyond flat wall panels too: artist Sindhe Sriramulu works the same leatherwork and perforation technique into functional decor, including hand-painted lampshades depicting Radha and Krishna, peacocks, and elephants beneath floral vines, where the glow Tholu Bommalata is built for comes from an actual bulb rather than a performance screen.

    The Heroic Deeds of Lord Vishnu and his incarnations: A Masterpiece in Tholu Bommalata by Kanday Anjanappa

    Anantshayanam in Tholu by Kanday Anjannappa

    Jalasandhar in Leather Puppetry by Shinde Chandu

    Conclusion

    Tholu Bommalata has survived nearly two thousand years of political change and shifting patronage, not by staying frozen, but by continually finding a new audience for the same underlying skill. Whether encountered as a flickering shadow across a village screen at Shivaratri or as a framed leather artwork of Hanuman on a collector's wall, the craft itself- the treating of hide, the hand-painting, the dense, glowing perforation- remains unchanged. It is, at its heart, a tradition of turning skin and light into scripture, and browsing MeMeraki's Tholu Bommalata collection is one of the simplest ways to see that same discipline carried, unbroken, onto a piece you could bring home.

    FAQ

    Q1. What does "Tholu Bommalata" mean?

    Tholu means leather, bommalu means puppets or dolls, and attam/aata means dance or play; together, "the dance of leather puppets," referring to the shadow puppet theatre tradition of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

    Q2. How old is Tholu Bommalata?

    Its origins are generally traced to around the 3rd century BCE, with textual references suggesting it was already an established performance tradition by the Satavahana and Chalukya periods (4th–6th centuries CE), and its creative peak came under Vijayanagara patronage between the 13th and 16th centuries.

    Q3. What are Tholu Bommalata puppets made from?

    Traditionally goat, deer, or buffalo hide, cleaned and treated over roughly two weeks until translucent, then hand-cut, hand-painted with natural dyes, and finely perforated so light passes through in detailed patterns.

    Q4. What stories does Tholu Bommalata typically tell?

    Its core repertoire is drawn from the Ranganatha Ramayana, a 16th-century Telugu retelling of the Ramayana written specifically for shadow puppet performance, along with episodes from the Mahabharata and Bhagavata Purana.

    Q5. Why are there multiple puppets of the same character, like Hanuman?

    Major characters are often represented by several puppets of different sizes, deployed depending on the dramatic weight or physical scale required by a given scene in the performance.

    Q6. Is Tholu Bommalata still performed today?

    Traditional all-night performances have become rare, but the craft continues actively through artisans who create standalone leather artworks for collectors, alongside occasional performances at cultural festivals and government-sponsored events.

    Q7. What does the Geographical Indication (GI) tag for Tholu Bommalata protect?

    The GI tag recognizes Nimmalakunta in Andhra Pradesh's Anantapur district as a traditional center of this leather craft, legally tying the name and reputation of the work to artisans from that region.

    Sources

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