Cheriyal Scroll Painting

The Cheriyal Scrolls paintings are made in Hyderabad. They are made by ragi dough that is shaped into scrolls and then hand painted with vegetable colors. The scrolls depict scenes from the Ramayana, Mahabharata or other epic folk stories.

The traditional art form, Cheriyal Scrolls paintings was inseparable from the job of the story-telling, balladeer community known as Kaki Padagollu.

The Cheriyal scroll painting would go up to 40-45 feet long. It would usually be about 3 ft wide and written in vertical format. Traditional scrolls are set horizontally, meaning it shows the story spread across the page.

These canvas scrolls made from Khadi are hand-painted in a style unique to the local motifs and iconography. Characterised by a dominance of the colour red in the background, these brilliantly hued paintings even received Geographical Indication Status in 2007.

Painted in panels as a narrative, these are like comic strips from the past, depicting scenes and stories from Indian mythology and epics. Distinct in their style they immediately convey age-old Indian traditions and customs in a beautiful and engaging manner.

Of which, both the Lords Krishna and Rama are the most prominent and recurring. These Cheriyal scroll painting were what kept the people of that era gone by entertained.

A floral border in the middle separates the two panels, while the linear narrative is demonstrated by holding in both hands or suspending it from a tree or a building and continually rolling it. Like large sized comic strips, each panel of the scroll depicted one part of the story. Hence, a scroll would easily have around 50 panels.