Language, Literature & Arts
The Tulu language, its epics and songs, Yakshagana, Kambala and more. Choose a tab to browse.
Language, Script & Literature
The Tulu Language and the Tigalari Script
Tulu is one of the oldest branches of the Dravidian family, spoken by about 1.8 million people and listed by UNESCO as vulnerable. For centuries Brahmin scribes wrote Sanskrit and some Tulu in its own script, Tigalari, until printing moved Tulu into the Kannada script.
Read moreWritten Tulu Literature: The Palm-Leaf Manuscripts
Tulu is known for its sung epics, but a handful of old books were written down too, on palm leaf, in the Tigalari script. Sources disagree, by centuries, on when they were written.
Read moreThe Koti-Chennaya Paddana: A Fourteen-Hour Epic
Koti and Chennaya is one of only two Tulu oral epics long enough to count as a 'long epic'. It takes about fourteen hours to sing in full, yet it is sung in shrines, fields, wedding rooms and a comic play, in pieces.
Read moreThe Siri Paddana: Tulunadu's Longest Oral Epic
The Siri epic runs to more than 16,000 verses, only five lines fewer than the Iliad. For most of its life nobody had heard it sung from start to finish, until one farmer-singer was recorded doing exactly that.
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Performance, Spectacle & Sport
Kambala: The Coast's Buffalo-Racing Festival
Pairs of buffaloes race through flooded paddy fields, in front of crowds of thousands. Kambala began as a farmers' thanksgiving, and it has become a sport, a spectacle and a long legal argument.
Read moreYakshagana: The Coast's Dusk-to-Dawn Dance-Drama
Singers and drummers, dancers in crowns and painted faces, and a story from the epics told through the night. Yakshagana belongs to the whole Kannada-Tulu coast, and its southern style is centred on Tulunadu.
Read moreTulu Nataka: The Stage-Play Tradition
Alongside Yakshagana and the sung epics, the coast has scripted, directed plays in Tulu. They are thinly documented, but a few names stand out: a tailor who founded a troupe in 1958, a national drama school staging Siri, and a troupe still at work today.
Read morePurusha Vesha: The Comic Koti-Chennaya Play
In one folk theatre, two Gowda men play Koti and Chennaya for laughs, not for worship. It is the epic's comic side, and one of the least documented parts of the tradition.
Read morePili Vesha: The Tiger Dancers of Dasara
Young men, shaved and painted in yellow and black, prowl the streets of Mangaluru and Udupi to the beat of drums at Dasara and Janmashtami. The painting takes hours, the stunts are daring, and the paint itself has raised health questions.
Read moreKori Katta: Cockfighting in Tulunadu
Kori Katta, the cockfight, is still staged on the coast, though it is illegal and the police say they will not allow it. Almost all of what has been written about it is news of raids, so this page is short.
Read moreChennemane and the Games of Tulunadu
When the monsoon kept people indoors, Tulunadu played Chennemane: a wooden board, a handful of seeds and a game with a king, a minister and a tenant. It is the best recorded of the many games the coast once played.
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