In the southeastern part of Jharkhand, India, forests, rolling hillocks, rivers and reservoirs shape the landscape of Seraikela-Kharsawan district. The region is home to a substantial Scheduled Tribe population—about 35 per cent of the district’s population according to the 2011 Census—and to communities whose cultural practices, languages, festivals, music and performance traditions contribute to its distinctive cultural landscape.

The Living Heritage Festival at Ketunga, Seraikela-Kharsawan, from 30 October to 1 November 2026, aims to build wider awareness of the rich living heritage of the region’s rural and indigenous communities. It will showcase diverse genres of Chhau dance, Baul music and Chadar Badar puppetry, alongside natural-fibre basketry. Performances, films and workshops will create opportunities for engagement with these traditions, while daytime workshops on Kashi grass and bamboo craft will highlight practices rooted in natural materials and generations of knowledge.

The festival is part of Contact Base’s Roots to Prosperity initiative, which seeks greater recognition for cultural practitioners and their traditions, promotes ICH-based cultural tourism and contributes to the continued safeguarding and transmission of intangible cultural heritage.

Seraikela-Kharsawan is an important centre of Chhau, a dance tradition that developed through martial practices, local traditions and community celebrations and was inscribed by UNESCO in 2010 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Chhau brings together movement, music, costume, storytelling and visual expression. Its movement vocabulary draws on martial techniques, animal movements, stylized gaits and everyday actions, while its performances bring to life narratives from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, local folklore and other themes.

Seraikela Chhau is known for its refined, controlled movements and distinctive masks, while Manbhum Chhau has a more vigorous, acrobatic and mask-based style associated with the Purulia-Manbhum region. Kharsawan Chhau has its own movement vocabulary and performance practice, while Mayurbhanj Chhau relies on the dancer’s body, movement and expression rather than masks to create characters and narratives. Bringing these forms together allows the festival to reveal the diversity within the wider Chhau tradition and its continuing evolution through its practitioners.

The programme also showcases other living traditions of eastern India. Baul music brings a distinctive tradition of songs and and spiritual expression transmitted largely through oral and practitioner-based traditions. Chadar Badar, a distinctive puppetry tradition of the Santhal community, combines carved wooden puppets, ingenious mechanical movement, song, music and storytelling to narrate community life and cultural memory.

An illustrated book on Living Heritage of Seraikela-Kharsawan will be launched.

Films on Chhau dance and Chadar Badar puppetry will be screened: https://www.chhaudanceindia.com/gallery/?gallery_type=videos

Programme

• 10 am - 1 pm IST : Craft Workshops
• 3-30 pm - 6-30 pm IST: Song, Dance and Puppetry performances
  

Text as provided by the organiser(s).