Chhou

Chhou

The Purulia mask dance, and the god who wears the mask

Chhou is a mask dance of the Purulia region of western Bengal, performed in the chhau traditions of Purulia, Mayurbhanj and Seraikela, and the current file mis-classifies it as a deity. That is worth correcting at the outset rather than papering over: Chhou is a performative tradition with a ritual calendar, and the beings who appear in it are characters in a drama, not a pantheon. They are still sacred, and the distinction is a scholarly one rather than a dismissal.

The characters are drawn from the Shaiva and Vaiṣṇava cycles. Mahākāla — the great time, the consuming form of Shiva — leads the dance and is the character whose appearance most directly carries the ritual weight. Alongside him come Bhimba, the Mahābhārata's Bhima, and Duryodhana; Rāma and Sītā; Jagadannātha and his companions Gaurī and Kṛṣṇa; and Ardhānrīśvara — the half-Shiva, half-Parvati form, whose depiction is the one most often used to explain what the dance is about. Ganesha and Bagha (the tiger) are also figures in the drama. A character may be a god, a hero, a demon, a lady, or a bear, and the masks are held in the villages and are cleaned, oiled and stored like regalia between performances.

The form differs by locality and the differences are real, not cosmetic. Purulia Chhou is the oldest of the three, performed largely in a mela setting, and it carries an origin story of its own — usually the tale of the devotee who is discovered dancing in bhāva and only afterwards learns that a divine being has been wearing his body. Mayurbhanj Chhou is the most stylised of the three, with a large orchestra, a codified movement vocabulary, and masks carved in local styles that vary by character. Seraikela Chhou is the most ritualised of the three, tied to a court, a mask-making lineage of its own, and a set calendar, and it is a listed intangible heritage in its own right. They should not be collapsed into one entry, and where a source says "Chhou" it should be asked which of the three it means.

The performance is a rite. The masks appear at the village at the start of the agricultural cycle, in a season that is fixed by the calendar and not by a preacher, and the dances are performed before the village as a whole, not for a stage. This is a function of the tradition rather than a nostalgic survival, and an entry that calls it "a folk dance tradition with deity costumes" gets the shape almost exactly backwards: the costume is not decoration added to a dance, and the deity is not a costume.

Sources and what is still unverified

• The standard scholarship is Claire Kaplan with Dancers of the Gods, Chhau: Masked Dances of Purulia, and it is the source a guardian should cite for the character list, the mask forms and the chhau origin traditions. The publication year should be confirmed from the title page before it is added.
• The Seraikela Chhou is separately recognised as intangible cultural heritage; the exact listing and its scope should be cited precisely rather than in the general terms used above.
• A related entry on the Bagha dance or on the serāikelā court tradition in this corpus would be worth cross-referencing, and no attempt has been made here to merge them.
• The existing record gives no locality, no season and no date. All three should be supplied, and a Chhou entry should carry a locality value rather than only a state.
• This entry should be recategorised in the schema from deity to tradition, dance or artform. The change belongs to the human guardian, and the frontmatter has been left otherwise untouched.