Channapatna & Kinhal: Karnataka's Lacquered Toys

A small town on the old Mysore highway where a soft local wood called hale mara is turned on a simple lathe and coloured with sticks of melted lac and vegetable dye, a much smaller and much older hill town to the north that paints larger wooden temple dolls in the same lac colours, a 2006 Geographical Indication registration that gave the first tradition a legal name, and a pair of Bangalore-based cooperative and designer ventures that now carry Karnataka's lacquered wooden toys into the nurseries and living rooms of modern Indian homes.

In a workshop off a narrow lane in the town of Channapatna, about sixty kilometres south-west of Bangalore on the old Mysore highway, the master toy-turner Gururaja Bhat steadies a block of pale ivory wood in a hand lathe and brings a chisel down against the spinning wood. Within minutes the block becomes a small spinning top. He presses a stick of lac, melted with turmeric and indigo, against the surface, and the toy takes on its colour from the friction heat of the lathe itself. A last polish with a folded piece of dried screwpine leaf, and the top is done. This is the six-hundred-year-old sequence of Channapatna gombe, the lacquered wooden toys that have made this small Karnataka town one of the most famous toy-making centres in India. Three hundred kilometres to the north, in the much quieter hill town of Kinhal, a handful of Chitragar families still carve larger wooden temple dolls and paint them in the same lac colours. The lesson walks into both towns and traces their story from the late-eighteenth-century Persian craftsmen who are said to have seeded the Channapatna lathe, through the 2006 Geographical Indication registration that gave the craft its legal name, to the Bangalore cooperatives and designer brands that now keep the lathes of Ramanagara district turning.

A Workshop in Channapatna

In a workshop off a narrow lane in the town of Channapatna, about sixty kilometres south-west of Bangalore on the old Mysore highway, on a bright weekday morning in the early 2020s, Gururaja Bhat steadies a block of pale wood in the headstock of a simple wooden lathe. The lathe is hand-powered. A rope belt wound around the spindle runs out to an apprentice, who pulls the rope back and forth with an even rhythm. The block begins to spin.

Bhat picks up a small metal chisel in his left hand and rests it on the tool support. As the wood spins, he brings the chisel down against it. Curls of soft pale wood peel off and fall to the floor. The air in the workshop smells of warm wood and drying resin. Within two minutes, the shape of a child's spinning top has emerged in the middle of the lathe.

Now he reaches for what looks like a short stick of coloured wax. It is not wax. It is lac, the natural resin of the lac insect, melted, purified, blended with a plant dye, and pressed into a solid rod. The rod in Bhat's hand is bright yellow, dyed with turmeric. As the top keeps spinning, he presses the rod against the surface of the wood. The friction heats the lac on contact. The resin softens, melts, and spreads across the spinning surface in an even yellow coat. A second rod, dyed with indigo, comes down on one band of the top. A third rod, dyed with lac-madder red, comes down on another. In under five minutes, the raw pale block has become a three-colour lacquered spinning top, still warm to the touch.

Bhat then takes a folded piece of dried screwpine leaf, presses it flat against the still-spinning top, and runs it across the full length of the toy. The leaf polishes the warm lac to a high shine. He lifts the chisel. The lathe slows. The top is done.