Kondapalli & Etikoppaka: Andhra's Wooden Wonders

Two Andhra villages, two local softwoods, and one living toy tradition that a Vijayanagara emperor patronised, a Bommala Koluvu festival kept alive, and a lawyer named C.V. Raju brought back from chemical dyes to plant dyes.

Kondapalli and Etikoppaka are two Andhra craft villages that have been making wooden toys for at least four hundred years. They are four hours apart and work in opposite ways. Kondapalli carves soft tella poniki wood by hand, assembles the parts with tamarind seed paste, and paints them into dasavatara sets, village scenes, and wedding figurines that fill the Bommala Koluvu doll platforms of South Indian homes every Dasara. Etikoppaka spins soft ankudu wood on a lathe and coats it with coloured lac resin in a single friction pass. Both traditions almost died in the twentieth century. Etikoppaka was rebuilt in the 1980s and 1990s by C.V. Raju, a lawyer born in the village, who replaced the chemical aniline dyes that were quietly poisoning children's toys with plant dyes reconstructed in partnership with India's National Botanical Research Institute. His cooperative Padmavati Associates secured a Geographical Indication tag for Etikoppaka lacquerware in 2017. In August 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi named both villages in a national radio address on local toys, and both saw a wave of new orders. This lesson walks into Raju's Etikoppaka workshop in 1988 and then into the Nakashi carvers' lanes of Kondapalli.

Etikoppaka, Winter 1988

In the winter of 1988, Chandragiri Venkata Raju stood in his Etikoppaka workshop and watched a block of ankudu wood spin on an old lathe. The air smelled of warm lac and varnished sawdust. Outside, the Varaha river moved past palm trees and paddy fields. Inside, an artisan pressed a stick of dyed resin against the turning wood, and the heat of friction melted a thin skin of colour onto the cylinder in one continuous motion. No brush. No second pass. Raju knew the technique by heart. He had grown up watching it. What he did not yet know was that the dye the artisan was using was now a factory aniline, that the plastic toy industry was about to gut his village's market, and that he would spend the next twenty years coaxing plant dyes, a national award, and a Geographical Indication tag out of this single humming lathe.

Two Villages, Two Woods

Etikoppaka is one of two Andhra villages that put Indian wooden toys on the craft map of the twentieth century. The other is Kondapalli, four hours inland from the coast, at the foot of a low hill range near Vijayawada. Both traditions are at least four hundred years old. Both rely on a single local softwood that a child's hand can safely hold. Both once filled temples, courts, and household shrines across the Deccan. But they shape that wood in opposite ways.

One village sculpts. The other turns. Both still breathe.