Cheriyal Scroll Painting

Cheriyal scroll painting is a highly stylized form of Nakashi art, taking its name from Cheriyal village in Siddipet district, Telangana. The Nakashi tradition drew on Deccani visual and temple arts and Kalamkari scroll illustration, with the earliest identified painted scrolls in the region traced to around 1625 under the Qutb Shahi rulers of Golconda (the term naqash, to draw, dating to Nizam rule). Scrolls were commissioned by specific communities, toddy-tappers, shepherds, weavers, each with its own caste heroes and myths to be "programmed" into the scroll, and were carried by itinerant storytellers.

A Cheriyal scroll was never meant to hang on a wall; it was made to move, speak and perform, an early form of cinema or comic strip. A long horizontal scroll was unrolled panel by panel by a storyteller-balladeer troupe, singing epics to non-literate villagers over an entire evening, making the scroll simultaneously mass education, entertainment and the visual memory of a community.

The style is unmistakable: a vivid red background, bold primary colour, exaggerated local iconography and a narrative grammar in which a character's size reflects importance in that scene. Painted by hereditary Nakashi artists on carefully prepared khadi, the scrolls were performed by travelling storyteller communities (the Kaki Padagollu / Patrots / Bhagats), a lead balladeer with supporting singers and scroll-handlers, hung from a tree or bamboo frame and pointed to panel by panel.

Cheriyal's film-roll-like sequential storytelling is frequently likened to an ancestor of cinema and the comic strip, and with the decline of live scroll-narration (television replacing the village bard) artists have adapted the style to smaller framed panels, masks and objects for a craft market.

With traditional storytelling largely gone, Cheriyal survives as a GI-tagged handicraft sustained by a few Nakashi families who have shifted from giant performance scrolls to smaller works, masks and everyday objects, giving the tradition institutional visibility even as its economic base remains fragile.

The tradition is native to Telangana, centred on Cheriyal in Siddipet and now also practised in Hyderabad, with related activity in Jagtial and Nirmal. Cheriyal village is often described as its last surviving outpost, its continuity resting on a small number of Nakashi families.

[Atlas Assessment] Cheriyal is a strong but endangered craft-and-performance node with graph links to Telangana, Hyderabad, Kalamkari and the wider scroll-painting family (Phad, Pattachitra). The Atlas records its GI status and flags its fragile single-village continuity as an active preservation concern.