Strings, Shadows and Hands: India's Puppetry Traditions

Long before cinema reached the village square, India watched its epics on strings, screens and hands. A Kathputli showman in Rajasthan makes a wooden Amar Singh Rathore dance on threads; in Andhra Pradesh, a towering leather Rama glows on a white screen lit by oil lamps; in Bengal, three-foot rod puppets enact the Mahabharata; in a Kerala temple, a gloved hand becomes the goddess Bhadrakali. Puppetry, the art of giving life to inanimate figures, is among India's oldest performing arts, at once ritual, entertainment and the village newspaper. UPSC tests it through its four types, string, shadow, rod and glove, and the famous regional form of each.

Puppetry: India's oldest popular theatre

Puppetry is the art of animating inanimate figures, puppets, to enact stories, combining craft, music, dialogue and theatre in a single performer or troupe. In India it is both sacred and popular: puppet shows are performed as temple ritual and as village entertainment, and their stories come from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas, and local legends and hero-ballads. Its antiquity is written into language itself: Sanskrit literature knows the puttalika, the little doll or puppet, and the stage-manager of classical Sanskrit theatre is the sutradhara, literally the 'holder of strings', a title that almost certainly descends from the puppeteer. Few art forms carry their history so plainly in their name.

Indian puppetry divides, by technique of manipulation, into four types, and the exam expects you to know all four with at least one regional form each. String puppets are suspended and worked by threads from above. Shadow puppets are flat leather figures held between a lamp and a translucent screen, so the audience watches coloured shadows. Rod puppets are worked by rods from below or behind, allowing large, sturdy figures. Glove puppets are worn on the hand, the fingers moving head and arms. The comparison table at the end of this article lines them up for revision.

What makes puppetry an exam favourite is its double life. The same art that entertains a fair crowd also serves the temple: Pavakoothu and Ravana Chhaya are religious duties performed as offerings, while Kathputli and Putul Nach are commercial folk theatre. And because puppeteers travel from village to village, their shows carried news, satire and moral instruction across regions centuries before print reached the countryside, a role scholars describe as the village newspaper.

String puppets: dancing on threads

In string puppetry the puppet hangs from threads attached to its head, hands and knees, and the puppeteer, standing above or behind a curtained stage, works them through a wooden control. Because the figure is fully jointed, it can dance, fight and gesture with remarkable life; the puppeteer also speaks every character's dialogue, sings, and cues the drummers.

Kathputli of Rajasthan is India's most famous puppetry and the textbook example of string puppets. The name joins kath (wood) with putli (doll): each puppet is carved from a single piece of wood, dressed in bright Rajasthani costume with large, expressive eyes. The puppeteers belong to the Bhat community of wandering bard-storytellers, who perform at fairs and village squares to the beat of the dholak, speaking all the dialogue themselves in a shrill, penetrating voice. Their repertoire is Rajasthani heroism: the ballads of Amar Singh Rathore (the Rajput noble of Shah Jahan's court), Maharana Pratap, Prithviraj Chauhan and local folk heroes, alongside love stories and moral tales. Kathputli is string puppetry's global face, and the form most likely to appear in a prelims question.

Karnataka's answer is Gombeyata, string puppets shaped by the Yakshagana dance-drama tradition: tall, ornate figures with elaborate crowns, sometimes worked by two puppeteers at once for battle scenes, with a special hing mechanism that makes the crown nod and sway. Where Kathputli is intimate and comic, Gombeyata is grand and theatrical, closer to the stage it imitates.

A Kathputli show is a family enterprise. The Kathputliya, the male puppeteer, crouches behind a small curtained stage working the strings, while his wife sits beside him singing the narrative and playing the dholak; the puppets emerge above the curtain as she sings their entries. The performance is improvised around a memorised skeleton of story and song, so no two shows are identical, and the puppeteer breaks into direct comic banter with the audience between scenes. This partnership of string-work, song and improvisation is why Kathputli feels less like a show and more like a travelling theatre company in miniature.

Shadow puppets: epics in light and leather

Shadow puppetry is India's most magical folk theatre. Flat figures cut from leather are pressed against a white translucent screen, lit from behind by oil lamps; the audience sits on the other side and watches luminous, coloured shadows enact the epics, usually through the night, to the music of drums, cymbals and harmonium. Three regional forms dominate the syllabus, and each has a distinct character.

Togalu Gombeyata of Karnataka ('togalu' means leather) is the classic Deccan shadow theatre: leather figures enacting the Ramayana and Mahabharata at village festivals, often in all-night performances sponsored by the whole village as both entertainment and auspicious ritual.

Tholu Bommalata of Andhra Pradesh ('tholu' = leather, 'bommalata' = dance of dolls) is the grandest of the shadow forms. Its puppets are the largest shadow puppets in India, some over a metre tall, cut from translucent leather, painted in vegetable colours and perforated with intricate designs so the light shines through in patterns. They are fully articulated at the shoulders, elbows, hips and knees, allowing expressive movement. Hereditary puppeteer families, notably around Nimmalakunta and Dharmavaram in Anantapur district, perform behind the lamp-lit screen with harmonium, mridangam and cymbals, narrating the epics in Telugu verse and prose. If the exam asks for the largest shadow puppets, answer Tholu Bommalata.

Ravana Chhaya of Odisha, 'the shadow of Ravana', is the most ritualistic of the three. Its figures are small, cut from deer-skin, mostly single-piece and without articulated joints, and nearly opaque, so the drama lives not in movement but in the puppeteer's song and narration. The performance, usually the story of Rama, is staged as a sacred offering in village shrines rather than as commercial entertainment, and the puppeteers regard it as a religious duty. Remember the formula: Odisha, small jointless figures, ritual character.

Setting up a shadow show is itself a ritual. The white screen, traditionally a stretched cotton cloth, is erected at dusk; the oil lamps are lit behind it; the musicians tune up; and only then do the leather gods appear, larger than life, flickering at the edge of visibility. Because the puppets are translucent and perforated, the light does half the acting, glowing through coloured leather and pierced patterns. Villagers often describe the experience as watching the gods themselves move, which explains why shadow puppetry survived longest where it stayed sacred.

Rod puppets: Putul Nach of Bengal

In rod puppetry the figure is worked by rods, a stout bamboo behind the head to carry it and thinner rods joined to the hands, manipulated from below or behind the stage. The puppets can be large and sturdy, three to four feet tall, with a commanding stage presence that glove puppets cannot match.

West Bengal's Putul Nach ('putul' = doll, 'nach' = dance), centred in Nadia and North 24 Parganas districts, is the syllabus form. Its tall rod puppets, worked by puppeteers hidden below the stage, enact the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Krishna-lila and, increasingly, social and moral themes, in a style deeply influenced by Bengal's Jatra folk theatre, with its songs, comic interludes and direct address to the audience. Putul Nach shows how puppetry absorbs the theatre around it: the rods are the technique, but Jatra is the soul.

Working rod puppets is a study in coordination. One puppeteer may handle the head rod and a hand rod of a single figure while a partner works the other hand, and both must move in time with the singer's narration; a mistimed rod breaks the illusion instantly. The puppets' size lets them fill a real stage, which is why Putul Nach troupes could compete directly with Jatra companies for village audiences, offering the same epics with figures no actor could match for colour and scale.

Glove puppets: Pavakoothu of Kerala

Glove puppetry is the simplest and most intimate form: the puppet is worn on the hand like a glove, the puppeteer's fingers working the head and arms directly. Figures are small, movements quick and comic, and a single performer can stage an entire play.

Kerala's Pavakoothu ('pava' = doll, 'koothu' = play) gives the form its ritual dignity. Performed on a small curtained stage in Bhagavati temples of central Kerala during annual festivals, it traditionally narrates the story of the goddess Bhadrakali's victory over the demon Darika, the founding myth of the goddess's worship. The performance is temple ritual as much as theatre: the puppets are handled with reverence, and the show forms part of the festival's religious programme. For the exam, fix the chain: Kerala, glove puppets, Bhagavati temples, Bhadrakali-Darika story.

Glove puppetry's speed is its signature. Because the figure lives on the hand, entrances and exits are instant, fights are slapstick, and the puppeteer can turn the puppet to face the audience for asides and jokes, a directness the screen and string forms cannot match. In Kerala this intimacy serves devotion: the small curtained stage, the oil lamp and the goddess's story make Pavakoothu feel like the temple's own whisper, while in secular hands the same technique becomes pure comedy. The exam contrast to remember: glove puppets trade grandeur for immediacy.

Themes, puppeteers and craft

Across all four types the stories rhyme. The great epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, supply the plots; the Puranas supply the gods; and each region adds its own heroes, Amar Singh Rathore in Rajasthan, local deities and demon-slayings in Kerala and Odisha. Puppetry was also the village newspaper: puppeteers wove in satire, news, moral instruction and, in modern times, social messages on health and literacy, speaking to audiences that written pamphlets could never reach.

The art is hereditary. Bhat bards in Rajasthan, leather-puppet families in Andhra and Karnataka, temple performers in Kerala, each community guards its puppets like heirlooms, and some sets are centuries old. The craft itself is demanding: leather must be tanned, scraped thin and translucent, then cut, perforated, painted with vegetable dyes and articulated with string joints; wooden puppets are carved, jointed and costumed. A master puppeteer is simultaneously carver, painter, singer, actor and musician, which is why the tradition is so hard to replace once broken.

Music is the puppet's other body. The dholak and sarangi drive Kathputli's rapid dialogue, the harmonium, mridangam and cymbals carry Tholu Bommalata's Telugu narration through the night, and Jatra-style songs lift Putul Nach's scenes. The puppeteer is also the entire cast: switching between a shrill falsetto for the heroine, a booming bass for the demon and a nasal comic for the jester, often speaking through a small bamboo reed that gives the dialogue its piercing, otherworldly tone. One throat, many voices, that is the puppeteer's oldest trick.

Decline and preservation

Puppetry is in decline almost everywhere. Cinema and television emptied the village square, urban migration scattered the audiences, and the old patronage, fairs, festivals and landlord sponsorship, thinned out; in many families the younger generation has taken other work, and puppet sets lie unused. The art's very strength, that one hereditary performer does everything, became its vulnerability when the economics failed.

What is being lost is not only performance but craft knowledge. Tanning leather to translucency, carving a Kathputli figure from a single block, voicing five characters in one throat: these are embodied skills that die with the practitioner. Revival therefore means apprenticeship, not just archiving. The most hopeful signs are troupes that tour schools and international festivals, state academies that fund training workshops, and young performers who film their shows for new audiences, carrying the strings into the digital age on their own terms.

Preservation efforts run on two tracks. The Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's national academy of music, dance and drama (established 1953), recognises puppetry as a major traditional art and honours master puppeteers with its awards; state cultural and tourism departments, notably in Rajasthan and West Bengal, sponsor troupes, festivals and training programmes. Puppetry festivals, school demonstrations and museum collections keep the forms visible, and some troupes have adapted, staging social-message plays for government campaigns. The exam's takeaway: decline from mass media and lost patronage, preservation through the Akademi system and state support.

Beyond the big five: more regional forms

The four types cover the syllabus, but India's puppet map is denser. Tamil Nadu has Bommalattam, among the most sophisticated string-puppet traditions: tall, heavy wooden figures, some over a metre high, worked by strings attached to an iron ring worn on the puppeteer's hand, enacting the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Puranic stories to Carnatic music; its home is the Kanchipuram region. The weight and the ring-control make Bommalattam the most technically demanding of the string forms.

Odisha's Kundhei are string puppets of carved wood, dressed in the bright costumes of the region's theatre and performing stories of Krishna and local legends. Bihar's Yampuri are rod puppets of carved wood, worked from below the stage, enacting folk tales and epics at village gatherings. Kerala holds a second glove tradition in Pavakathakali, glove puppets that perform the stories, gestures and characters of Kathakali dance-drama in miniature, a puppet Kathakali for temple courtyards.

These forms repeat the same lesson: every region of India built its own puppet theatre from local materials, local music and local gods. For the exam, the four types and their star forms are the core; these extra names are insurance for list-based questions that ask you to match a form to its state.

The four types at a glance

Key Terms

• Puppetry: Puppetry is the performing art of animating inanimate figures, puppets, to enact stories, combining craft, music, dialogue and theatre in a single performer or troupe. In India it is among the oldest performing arts, functioning simultaneously as temple ritual, village entertainment and popular communication, with stories drawn from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas and local legends.
• Puttalika: Puttalika is the Sanskrit word for a little doll or puppet, found in classical Indian literature. It matters as linguistic evidence of puppetry's antiquity in India: the art is old enough to have named itself into the classical language.
• Sutradhara: Sutradhara, literally 'holder of strings', is the stage-manager and narrator of classical Sanskrit theatre. The title almost certainly descends from the puppeteer who held the puppets' strings, and it matters as the most elegant proof that puppetry predates and shaped India's formal theatre.
• String puppets: String puppets are puppets suspended and manipulated by threads attached to the head, limbs and joints, worked from above or behind through a wooden control. The fully jointed figure can dance, fight and gesture with great liveliness while the puppeteer speaks all dialogue. India's great examples are Kathputli (Rajasthan) and Gombeyata (Karnataka).
• Kathputli: Kathputli, from 'kath' (wood) and 'putli' (doll), is Rajasthan's celebrated string-puppet tradition and India's most famous puppetry. Puppets are carved from a single piece of wood and dressed in bright Rajasthani costume; Bhat community puppeteers perform hero-ballads of Amar Singh Rathore, Maharana Pratap and Prithviraj Chauhan at fairs, speaking every part in a shrill voice to the dholak's beat.
• Bhat: The Bhats are the wandering bard-storyteller community of Rajasthan who are the traditional Kathputli puppeteers. They matter because they embody puppetry's hereditary character: the performer is simultaneously carver, singer, actor and musician, and the art passes within the community.
• Gombeyata: Gombeyata is Karnataka's string-puppet tradition, shaped by the Yakshagana dance-drama: tall, ornate figures with elaborate crowns, sometimes worked by two puppeteers at once, with a hing mechanism that makes the crown move. It matters as the grand, theatrical counterpart to Rajasthan's intimate Kathputli.
• Shadow puppets: Shadow puppets are flat leather figures held between a light source, traditionally oil lamps, and a translucent white screen, so the audience watches luminous coloured shadows rather than the figures themselves. Performances typically run all night with drums, cymbals and harmonium. India's three great forms are Tholu Bommalata, Togalu Gombeyata and Ravana Chhaya.
• Togalu Gombeyata: Togalu Gombeyata ('togalu' = leather) is Karnataka's classic shadow-puppet theatre, enacting the Ramayana and Mahabharata in all-night village-festival performances that are both entertainment and auspicious ritual. It matters as the Deccan's representative shadow form.
• Tholu Bommalata: Tholu Bommalata ('tholu' = leather, 'bommalata' = dance of dolls) is Andhra Pradesh's grand shadow-puppet tradition and home to India's largest shadow puppets, some over a metre tall. Cut from translucent leather, painted in vegetable colours, perforated with designs and fully articulated, they are worked by hereditary families around Nimmalakunta and Dharmavaram (Anantapur district) to Telugu verse and music.
• Ravana Chhaya: Ravana Chhaya, 'the shadow of Ravana', is Odisha's shadow-puppet tradition, the most ritualistic of the three. Its small, nearly opaque deer-skin figures are mostly single-piece and jointless, so the drama lives in the puppeteer's song; the Rama story is performed as a sacred offering in village shrines. It matters as puppetry at its most devotional.
• Rod puppets: Rod puppets are puppets manipulated by rods, a stout rod behind the head and thinner rods joined to the hands, worked from below or behind the stage. The technique allows large, sturdy figures of three to four feet with a commanding stage presence. India's syllabus form is West Bengal's Putul Nach.
• Putul Nach: Putul Nach ('putul' = doll, 'nach' = dance) is West Bengal's rod-puppet tradition, centred in Nadia and North 24 Parganas districts. Its tall puppets enact the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Krishna-lila and social themes in a style deeply influenced by Bengal's Jatra folk theatre. It matters as the exam's definitive rod-puppet example.
• Jatra: Jatra is Bengal's popular folk theatre of song, dialogue, comic interludes and direct address to the audience. It matters for puppetry because Putul Nach absorbed Jatra's performance style: in Bengal's rod puppetry, the rods are the technique but Jatra is the soul.
• Glove puppets: Glove puppets are puppets worn on the hand like a glove, the puppeteer's fingers directly working the head and arms. The form is the simplest and most intimate of the four types: small figures, quick comic movement, and a single performer staging a whole play. India's great example is Kerala's Pavakoothu.
• Pavakoothu: Pavakoothu ('pava' = doll, 'koothu' = play) is Kerala's glove-puppet tradition, performed on a small curtained stage in Bhagavati temples of central Kerala during annual festivals. It traditionally narrates the goddess Bhadrakali's victory over the demon Darika, and is temple ritual as much as theatre. It matters as puppetry at its most sacred and intimate.
• Bhadrakali: Bhadrakali is the fierce goddess whose victory over the demon Darika is the traditional story of Kerala's Pavakoothu glove puppetry, performed in her temples during festivals. She matters here as the link between puppetry and temple ritual: the puppets enact her founding myth as an act of worship.
• Sangeet Natak Akademi: The Sangeet Natak Akademi, established in 1953, is India's national academy of music, dance and drama. It recognises puppetry as a major traditional art and honours master puppeteers with its awards. It matters as the institutional backbone of puppetry's preservation, alongside state cultural and tourism departments.
• Bommalattam: Bommalattam is Tamil Nadu's sophisticated string-puppet tradition, centred in the Kanchipuram region: tall, heavy wooden figures, some over a metre high, worked by strings attached to an iron ring on the puppeteer's hand, performing the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Puranic stories to Carnatic music. It matters as the most technically demanding of India's string forms.
• Kundhei: Kundhei are the string puppets of Odisha, figures of carved wood dressed in bright regional costume, performing stories of Krishna and local legends. They matter as proof that string puppetry is not confined to Rajasthan and Karnataka: Odisha practises the string, shadow and (elsewhere) rod-adjacent forms too.
• Yampuri: Yampuri are the rod puppets of Bihar, carved wooden figures worked from below the stage, enacting folk tales and epics at village gatherings. They matter as the eastern counterpart to Bengal's Putul Nach within the rod-puppet family.
• Pavakathakali: Pavakathakali is Kerala's glove-puppet Kathakali: glove puppets performing the stories, gestures and characters of Kathakali dance-drama in miniature for temple courtyards. It matters as the meeting point of two great Kerala traditions, puppetry and Kathakali.
• Yakshagana: Yakshagana is the spectacular dance-drama tradition of coastal Karnataka, with elaborate costumes, towering crowns, all-night mythological performances and vigorous dance to drums and song. It matters for puppetry because Karnataka's Gombeyata string puppets are modelled directly on Yakshagana's figures and stagecraft: the puppet is a miniature Yakshagana actor.
• Nimmalakunta: Nimmalakunta is a village in Anantapur district, Andhra Pradesh, home to the most famous hereditary families of Tholu Bommalata shadow puppeteers. It matters as the geographic anchor of India's grandest shadow-puppet tradition: when the exam names a place for leather shadow puppetry, this is it.
• Dholak: The dholak is the double-headed hand drum that drives Kathputli performances and much North Indian folk theatre. In puppetry it matters as the puppeteer's metronome: the Kathputliya's wife plays it while singing the narrative, and its beats cue every entrance, battle and dance of the wooden figures.
• Hing: The hing is the special mechanism in Karnataka's Gombeyata string puppets that makes the figure's elaborate crown nod and sway. It matters as the signature technical refinement of the grandest Indian string-puppet tradition.
• Kathputliya: The Kathputliya is the male Kathputli puppeteer of Rajasthan, who crouches behind the curtained stage working the strings while his wife sings the narrative and plays the dholak. He matters as the centre of puppetry's family-enterprise model: string-work, song and improvisation in one partnership.

Prelims practice: five exam-style questions

The puppet map: regional forms by state