Chho (Chhau) is the generic name for a group of virile and energetic dances which has its origins in the arid tribal habitat in and around the Chhota Nagpur plateau. Subjected to diverse regional influences over time, three sub genres of the dance developed with varying degrees of sophistication and with stylistic differences. Their names were based on the core locality where the dance evolved - Seraikella in Jharkhand, Mayurbhanj in Odisha and Purulia in West Bengal. Chho festivals held in Chilkigarh, Dubra and Chandri in Jhargram in West Bengal are outside the mainstream Chho tradition and are little known.

The Purulia Chho, a masked dance that incorporates traditional narratives in its performance, emerged as an independent dance form fairly recently – probably not more than a century ago. Its origins go back to the many indigenous forms of dance and martial exercises that were found in the barren Chhota Nagpur plateau among which the Natua Naach is still a living form even though not as popular as the Chho in Purulia today. The rajas of Bagmundi, tribal Bhumij chieftains who acquired kshatriya status, and who had gradually established their supremacy in the tribal habitat, started influencing the lives and culture of the inhabitants of the region. They had a seminal influence on the dance and were responsible for introducing features such as the mask and narrative style from the Hindu epics for which the form is now famous – thus in a way giving Brahminical sanction to the form. After their patronage ceased with the abolition of the zamindari system, the dance moved from being a regional religious ritual to a professional occupation.

Traditionally, Chho dance is a part of the annual Chaitra (mid March) Parab (festival) when one agricultural cycle ends and a new cycle begins. This was a period when there was a lull in agricultural activity after the first ritual sowing of paddy. This is also the time when villagers celebrate the Shiva Gajon, the festival that commemorates the god as an agricultural deity with the power to fertilize the earth and water.

In a Chho dance the theme is always about the triumph of good over evil. The traditional repertoire of the Purulia Chho was restricted to dramatic representations based on different episodes from the Mahabharata and Puranas and in forms that were known through the oral traditions of Bengal and Chhota Nagpur. Continuous experimentation, however, has led to an expansion of the traditional repertoire.  It is the Chho’s ability to adapt to new contexts of performance and absorb other theatrical styles that accounts for its popularity with local audiences. 

This Chho is performed in the open air on the dry hard lateritic ground of the region, usually near the Shiva temple. Petromax lamps are used to illuminate the arena. The space around the arena is left empty for the audience to sit. As the evening progresses and the excitement mounts, more and more people enter the arena, to sit where they can get a better view of the dancers. The machhas – string cots hoisted on long poles, form a semi circular gallery behind the seating area on the ground. 

Chho performances are structured like competitions in which each troupe strives to outdo the ones that have gone before. The performance usually begins at around eleven o’clock at night and carries on until daybreak. Each troupe announces its arrival with a burst of music as it approaches the area where the dance is to be held. The drummers break into frenzied drum beats, the wind instruments wail and the masks are held aloft and shaken till they quiver. The musicians circumambulate the arena, playing their instruments. This is called the taal bhanga. It helps to ‘set’ the mood (ashor jaumano) – to create the necessary excitement for the dances that will follow. The music frames the dance, dissociating the space and the time of the dance from the other activities that are going on side-by-side in the temple precincts. As the musicians enter the arena for the taal bhanga, the dhol players prance backwards and forwards, beating their drums and uttering short, sharp exclamations of “chho”. The dhamsha and shaina players walk around the arena and then either sit or stand on one side and play. After the taal bhanga, the dance performance begins with one troupe following another. At the beginning of each performance, a vocalist appears on the enclosure with folded palms and sings a brief invocation to Lord Ganesha, the lord of intellect and wisdom, who according to tradition is worshipped before any auspicious work is undertaken. This is the only part of a Chho performance where a song is sung in Jhumur style. 

Most troupes consist of five to nine dancers. The dancers wear earthy and theatrical masks that portray the dominant moods of the characters they are supposed to represent - deities, mythological characters, animals and birds or a thematic idea in a highly stylized manner. Some masks rise over three feet above the dancer’s head while that of the ten-headed Ravana is often over four feet long. The dancers make acrobatic somersaults and high, twisting leaps, wearing these masks. The use of masks forces the performers to express the moods (bhava) of the characters through their bodies rather than through facial expressions. The masks of the gods (devas) are painted in pastel shades and have features that are delicately modelled showing expressions that are serene or benign. The masks of the demons (asuras) have bulging eyes and snarling lips and are painted in colours that are darker than those representing the gods. The hand gestures used by the dancers are natural though exaggerated. They do not express the moods of the characters. Instead they use styles of movement of the torso, the legs and the arms to portray characters. 

The Bir Chala (heroic gait) in which the dancer takes rapid steps in a half crouched position, interspersed with high leaps, somersaults (both movements are referred to by the same term, ulfa) and rotations on one heal (Edi Ghora) is one such style. The great gods like Shiva, Durga and Kali are portrayed through the Deb Chala (the gait of the gods). In comparison with the former gait there is far less emphasis on movement in this one. The dancers enter the dance arena with a stately shuffle and take up statuesque poses modelled on the iconography associated with temple images. There are also various animal gaits, for example, the Bandor Chala or monkey gait. The dancer moves with a half crouching, elongated step, legs stretched out, and arms pushed away from the body and bent at the elbows. The torso juts forward and moves to incorporate the movement of the tail that is attached to the waist, into the dance. This is a difficult gait to perform. The dancer must convey a disjointed grace and yet his movements must not be jerky. This gait is also associated with the comic mood. Each of these gaits (chalas) is associated with a character type and a dance episode will always portray a set of such character types so that there is an interweaving of different styles of movement. The characters are classified on the basis of the moods (bhava) they embody. These are largely the heroic, the godly and the comic.

A character type is not continuous with the personalities found in the sacred narratives. These personalities may display a number of conflicting moods, which may be displayed in different episodes of the dance. Thus Lord Shiva, a great god, is visually portrayed through the godly gait except in one episode in which he is disguised as a hunter, and performs the heroic gait. Although the audience is familiar with the entire corpus of narratives in which Shiva is portrayed as a god, the use of the heroic gait marks out a particular moment in this corpus in which Shiva disguised himself as a hunter in order to test Arjuna, one of the heroes of the Mahabharata. The point is that the audience knows beforehand that at the end of the narrative, the disguised hunter will reveal himself as Shiva, but the dance must portray the character that Lord Shiva adopts for this particular episode rather than portray his godly character which is known to all. Similarly there are demons who are portrayed in the heroic style. In some cases demonic characters may embody the comic type when they bear some resemblance to the animal characters in the disjointed style of their movement. 

Traditionally, the instruments used as accompaniments for the dance are the dhol, a barrel shaped drum played with the palm of the left hand and a stick held in the right; the dhamsha or nagra, a huge kettle drum played with two heavy and blunt sticks and which has a deep and throbbing sound and the shaina or shahnai, a clarinet like wind instrument with a high wailing sound that provides the melody. There are usually two dhols in a particular dance episode. They lead the dancers and there is a conversation between the dhols and the dancers. The shahnai is usually played in the pauses that signal a movement in the narrative – either the exit of one character and the entrance of another or a shift to another phase of the story being enacted. Since no stage sets are used in the performance, shifts in location are marked by a slight pause in the dance that is filled up by the music of the shahnai. The dhamsha is used only during the battle scene or during moments of dramatic climax.  Other instruments that have been added in more recent times are the clarinet and flute.  The singa or horn is sometimes used.  Some scholars think that the singa was the original wind instrument used in the Chho at the time when it was still a ‘war dance’ and that it was replaced later by the shahnai when the dance became more stylised and began to use Puranic and epic themes.

The dancers in a Chho dance troupe are not restricted to any one caste or community. The musicians, however, are usually of the Dom and Ghasi castes and the mask makers belong to the Shutradhar community of carpenters and murti makers. The making of the masks is an independent art altogether. It needs a gifted artist to visualize the mask and then give shape to it. Until recently it was the Shutradhars of Chorida village in Baghmundi thana who had the sole responsibility for making the dance masks. During the Chho season almost every house and every member of the household is seen occupied in making masks or assembling head gears for Chho dance. Masks were earlier made of wood, but presently these are made of papier-mache. 

The loss of patronage in 1950 together with the harsh conditions of the terrain left the dancers little choice but to organize themselves as professional troupes, both to keep the tradition going and to sustain themselves somewhat. During the sixties, there were about two hundred troupes in the district with fifteen to twenty five members in each troupe, comprising dancers, drummers, instrumentalists, costumers (dressers) and supervisors. It was Ashutosh Bhattacharyya, the doyen of Bengali folklore, who first ‘discovered’ the form at this time, and introduced the Chho to audiences outside Purulia. He first took a troupe of dancers to Delhi to participate in the Rebublic day parade in 1969 and then collaborated with a European dancer to adapt the dance to the proscenium stage so that it could be performed overseas. Encouraged by the reception received, hundreds of locals formed troupes in the hope of a performance or even better, a sponsored trip abroad. To further promote themselves, head gears got bigger, more ornate (and therefore, more expensive); more “excitement” was added to the dance with plenty of thrilling pirouettes and leaps. These days, these acrobatic feats take precedence over the rest of the dance.

Early urban efforts to promote Chho to foreign audiences have been responsible, in large part, for the exoticization of the dance form. Presented as a tribal war dance that became Hinduized in the course of time, great emphasis was laid on the music of the drums, as if to implicitly link it with tribal dance; the grotesque masks and war themes. Excluded were the many non-tribal aspects such as the singing of a Jhumur song at the start of a performance in a style which does not fit the image of a war dance. Also ignored were the wind instruments as musical accompaniments. Sadly, the dance seems to have conformed to these early representations and it is only on rare occasions that the Chho dance jhumur is sung today. With some scholar activists presenting more nuanced representations of the dance form by locating it within a cultural area that is predominantly adivasi but with influences from Bengal as well and other scholars who, in an effort to recreate a lost classical tradition, have read the Chho against the Natya Shastra (an ancient Indian treatise on the performing arts), Purulia Chho is at the centre of a vibrant public discourse on identity and culture and has been shaped by some of the ideas that circulate through this discourse.   

The Chho has become a showpiece for Indian folk and tribal culture at international festivals making it one of the most popular and well known performative folk art forms in India today. There is also a growing urban audience. Consequently today, Chho dances are often performed outside the seasonal festival and they continue to incorporate many extraneous popular elements to woo the audience.  Many secular themes such as the stories of the adivasi rebels Sidhu and Kanu, the bandit queen, Phulan Devi and the Kargil war have enhanced the popularity of the dance form in recent years. A government sponsored programme has even presented Tagore’s dance drama Chitangada in the Chho dance form.  Some of the new themes were first composed for video transmission – Purulia town is now at the centre of a burgeoning video market which produces and circulates video cassettes and DVDs on local performance styles such as the Chho. 

While growing demand in festival circuits has provided the impoverished folk artists some economic support there are sceptics who mourn the gradual erosion of its traditional and local identity. However, for the struggling artists themselves, such national and international sponsorships are welcome even though it may mean a dilution of their tradition and culture. The fact that there are more than 500 Chho groups in Purulia today – keeping pace with popular tastes and incorporating film music even, is indicative of this phenomenon.

Jeepa Singh and Babulal Mistri were the pioneers in introducing the present form of Purulia Chho. Jeepa Singh’s son, Gambhir Singh Mura went on to contribute immensely in representing Chho to the world arena. He was awarded the prestigious Padmashri award by the Government of India in 1981, as was Nepal Mahato in 1983. But no other artist has been recognised since. 

In 2010, the three styles of Chhau were recognised by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.