Channapatna toys

Channapatna is a town on the Bengaluru to Mysore road that makes wooden toys turned on a lathe and coloured with lacquer, and it has made almost nothing else for two hundred years. The toys are simple on purpose: rattles, spinning tops, stacking rings, little figures, a train of elephants. What distinguishes them is the surface. The colour is not paint but lacquer polished into the wood while it spins, and the dyes are vegetable, which is why the things are given to babies who will put them in their mouths.

The wood is aale mara, ivory wood, soft and close grained and grown locally for the purpose. A piece is turned on a lathe to shape, and then, with the lathe still running, a stick of coloured lacquer is pressed against it: the friction melts the lacquer and the spinning spreads it, and the craftsman polishes it in with a screwpine leaf until it shines. No brush touches it. The colours are laid one at a time in bands, and the pattern of rings a Channapatna toy carries is a record of how it was made rather than a decoration applied afterwards.

Learnt in the workshop, usually from a parent, beginning in the early teens with sanding and finishing and moving to the lathe after a year or two. The lacquer stage is the skill: too little pressure and the colour does not take, too much and it burns, and the judgement is in the hands rather than in anything that can be written down. Two or three years makes a competent turner. Most households that make them have made them for generations, and the trade is organised through cooperatives that buy the wood and sell the output.

The craft is credited to Tipu Sultan in the late eighteenth century, who is said to have brought artisans from Persia to teach lacquer turning to the local woodworkers, and the Persian ancestry of the technique is visible. It held a geographical indication tag from 2005. The trade has had a hard forty years against plastic and then against cheap imported wooden toys, and the number of working households has fallen a long way; what has kept it is the safety of the dyes, which has made it the toy middle class Indian parents buy on principle, and a design revival that put the old technique to new shapes.

Karnataka

The town of Channapatna in Ramanagara district, its ivory wood plantations and its cooperatives; the Dasara gombe display is where the figures are used.

Tamil Nadu

The Dasara doll display, golu, is kept in Tamil houses too, and Channapatna figures are sold for it alongside the local terracotta.

Andhra and Telangana

Kondapalli in Andhra makes a comparable lathe and wood toy with painted rather than lacquered colour, and the two are often sold side by side.

Deities

• Ganesha
• Krishna

Festivals

• Navaratri begins
• Ugadi · Yugadi
• Deepavali

Related arts

• Swamimalai bronze
• Kalamkari