Mapping the Intangible: Challenges and Innovations in the Spatial Analysis of Purulia Chhau

Introduction

The study of intangible cultural heritage has gained renewed prominence since the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH). It expanded the focus from tangible heritage, such as monuments, museums, and manuscripts, to living traditions, performances, and practices that communities sustain and maintain. This shift has prompted a need for methods that can meaningfully document and preserve such cultural forms that are dynamic, embodied, and often ephemeral. The growing accessibility of affordable and open-source digital tools and software has encouraged more researchers and communities in the Global South to adopt these technologies. Digital tools also support community documentation, empowering local practitioners to represent their traditions on their own terms. Within the wider digital turn, several studies demonstrated the relevance of tools such as GIS (Geographical Information System) in exploring the interconnectedness of space and culture in cultural heritage research. Taylor and Lennon discuss the utility of GIS in the identification and conservation of cultural landscapes identified by UNESCO. In their review paper, Liu et al. identified three emerging trends in the application of GIS to cultural heritage conservation: offering sustainable conservation strategies, creating proactive conservation models, and enhancing public engagement. While most prior research has chiefly focused on identifying, conserving, and analysing cultural heritage landscapes, the analytical potential in relation to living, performative and intangible practices has rarely been explored. This study, therefore, takes Purulia Chhau, a traditional folk dance-drama of West Bengal, as a case example through which to extend GIS methodology beyond preservation and documentation. It fills a gap in understanding the spatial dimensions of intangible heritage by using GIS visualisation to analyse the evolving geographies and mobility of Purulia Chhau performances within their evolving cultural contexts. This study adopts an exploratory approach to address the methodological challenges and the innovations that emerge through the spatio-temporal analysis of a rural folk intangible cultural heritage.

The introduction is further organised into subsections that contextualise and define the direction of the study.

Cultural Landscape of Purulia Chhau

Purulia Chhau is a folk dance-drama from the Purulia district in West Bengal, India, with deep-rooted ritualistic and cultural significance (see Figures 1 and 2). Purulia Chhau has been traditionally associated with the Chaitra Parva and Shiv Gajan festivals. Shiv Gajan is a festival dedicated to the worship of Lord Shiva, typically observed in the Bengali month of Chaitra (mid-March to mid-April), coinciding with the Chaitra Parva, a celebration of the spring season and renewal. Since the performance is linked to rituals and performed according to the Bengali calendar, the study retains the Bengali months for temporal references (see the appendix for the date conversion from the Bengali year 1429 to Gregorian months). These festivals are rooted in local religious, cultural, and agricultural traditions, serving as the natural context for the performance of Chhau dance. The Chhau performances during these events are deeply intertwined with the worship of deities, particularly Shiva, and are considered a crucial aspect of the ritualistic celebrations. Preparations for the Chaitra Parva begin on the 16th of the month of Chaitra, but the most important rituals occur during the last five days of the month (Kumar 90). The ritualistic Chhau performances also start towards the end of this month and continue till Baishakh and Jaistha. These festivals also mark the connection between the seasonal cycles, as they signify both the end of the harvest season (Chaitra) and the beginning of summer (Baishakh). Given the intense heat in Purulia at this time of the year, community members gather at the end of a hot summer day when the temperature drops, around late at night, for a jagran (spiritual vigil) near the Shiv temple. Chhau serves as an engaging, culturally significant medium that sustains wakefulness during festivals like Shiva Gajan. It combines elements of dance, drama, music, martial arts, acrobatics, mythology, social and moral message and entertainment. After the Bhogtas, or devotees of Shiva, complete the rituals, the Chhau performance begins at night, around 10:00 or 11:00 pm, and continues until dawn. Typically, the village puja committee invites two different Chhau teams to take turns performing various Chhau palas or episodes. At least four to six palas are performed throughout the night, each lasting roughly 45 minutes to 1 hour, with additional preparation time between acts.

Figure 1

Final tableau of a Purulia Chhau pala or episode depicting Goddess Durga’s victory over the demon king, Phasko village, Purulia District, 2023 (Photo by author).

Figure 2

Diagrammatic representation of Purulia Chhau’s core elements and mobility cycle.

Purulia Chhau is often characterised by Veer Rasa (the heroic sentiment). It embodies valour, energy, courage and enthusiasm. The performers’ energy resonates well with the audience, creating an engaging atmosphere. Earlier performances used to stretch beyond an hour, but now they are shorter and so power-packed that the performers require a lot of strength and practice to perform Purulia Chhau. The performers use moves from martial arts and perform several stunts as well. Additionally, the costumes and large, heavily ornamented masks make it more challenging for the Chhau performers to execute different flips, jumps, and stunts. Over the years, like any other folk form, Chhau has evolved and adapted to the shifting preferences of the audience. With the advent of digital technology, a significant shift can be observed in the form and remodulation of traditional performance, which was previously closely tied to ritual (Chattopadhyay and Das). The growing accessibility of smartphones and the internet in Rural Bengal (Sen et al.), as well as the popularity of shorter video formats like Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts, have transformed how Chhau troupes present and share their performances. These platforms have encouraged teams to create shorter, visually striking segments for their performances that resonate with online audiences. The circulation of these clips on social media has boosted the popularity of Purulia Chhau and opened new opportunities for bookings and engagement with urban viewers. The performances are becoming faster and feature numerous stunts, props, sound effects, and lighting. Based on field observation and informal conversations, the performing group that incorporates more of these elements tends to gather more applause and eventually gain more popularity, securing more bookings. The performance duration is getting shorter as it demands more energy and strength. The performance occasion is also no longer limited to the ritualistic festivities of Shiv Gajan or Charak Puja. The shift from ritual-only to year-round bookings explains why mobility is expanding. The reach of the performing groups is widening with better transportation options, as almost every team has its own goods carrier truck with its team banner/board. These mini trucks transport props, costumes, instruments, and performers to various locations. Some budding teams also use hired transport.

Research Rationale, Questions and Objectives

Performances in medieval and early modern times often took place outside fixed playhouses. Early examples of travelling performances in the West can be traced to guilds and professional troupes like the Wagon theatre (McKinnell) and Italy’s Commedia dell’arte (Schmitt) etc. However, in the Global South, travelling theatres are mostly community-driven and ritualistic, which thrive even today. Indian travelling forms like Jatra, Nautanki, Tamasha and Purulia Chhau continue to flourish within the community’s ritual, seasonal and agrarian networks. Chhau is a form recognised by the UNESCO ICH list in 2010. Its forms, such as Saraikela and Mayurbhanj Chhau, were sustained by royal patronage, while Purulia Chhau mostly depends on community involvement. Purulia Chhau was selected for its regional proximity, which enabled our iterative fieldwork and trust-based collaborative data reconstruction. However, its potential to bring into focus the lived realities of rural performance ecologies that operate outside courtly institutions and formal archival infrastructure remains significant, positioning this study as a pioneering framework for digitally mapping rural intangible cultural heritage.

Our focus was to understand and document contemporary mobility patterns, occasions and performance sites. This research maps Purulia Chhau in order to understand what happens when digital tools engage with rural heritage systems, revealing both epistemic and infrastructural challenges. Choosing this form also reveals the gap between international recognition and the local realities of documentation and infrastructure— pointing to the absence of such research. As we struggled to map its dispersed and seasonal circuits, the project evolved from documentation alone to a sustained reflection.

The reflections led to the articulation of the research questions that guide the study:

• i. How do digital tools help trace the spatial and temporal rhythms of a living tradition like Purulia Chhau?

• ii. How can the visual representation of Purulia Chhau teams’ spatial movement enrich our understanding of its socio-cultural dimensions?

• iii. What methodological insights do digital approaches offer for studying intangible cultural heritage in the Global South?

To respond to these questions, the study pursues the following objectives:

• i. The study seeks to investigate the temporal and geographical patterns of Purulia Chhau over a Bengali calendar year.

• ii. The research intends to present various visualisations of the spatial movements of the Purulia Chhau teams, to reimagine the performance in the socio-cultural context.

• iii. The research aims to assess the methodological challenges and innovations associated with integrating digital visualisation into studying intangible cultural heritage in the Global South.

Based on these critical questions and objectives, the research is further divided into six sections and corresponding subsections: the literature review foregrounding the study; followed by the methodology explaining the workflow; the next section presents the findings; the discussion critically analyses them in context; the challenges and limitations section reflects on the study’s boundaries; and finally, the conclusion presenting the overall insights.

Literature Review

As the present study investigates a dance tradition, this section reviews relevant literature in the field of dance studies to explore existing methodological practices, critical concerns, the varying viewpoints and subjects of scholarship. It also examines the mapping and visualisation practices in the field of dance studies to identify the gaps.

Critical Concerns and Methodologies of Dance Research

Dance studies is a multidisciplinary field that can be analysed from various perspectives, including historical, anthropological, cultural, and theoretical viewpoints. According to Janet O’Shea, dance scholarship underwent significant shifts in the field during the late 1980s to the early 2000s, no longer limiting itself to dance work and artists’ biographies, but widening its scope to include how it engages with the historical, social, political, and economic contexts of dance (1). Christine Bergman, in her thesis “Becoming Undisciplined: Interdisciplinary Issues and Methods in Dance Studies, a Dissertation from 2007-2009”, presents various disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods prevalent in dance research. The most common are historic, ethnographic, and feminist or practice-based methods (210). Different approaches offer different insights into the study of dance. Historical methods show their origin and change over time. Political studies looks at how dance responds to protest. Ethnographic work reveals how dance is embedded within communities. Feminist and practice-based approaches focus on the dancer’s body, revealing how identity and movement are deeply connected.

Research in the field of dance studies has undergone significant advancements. Among technological advancements, dance studies increasingly utilises digital humanities tools and methodologies. As Blades and DeLahunta note, Harmony Bench proposes a distinction between practice-based development that utilises technology in dance-making, integrating 3D motion capture, wearable devices, robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality applications, and the dance studies research. “From the outset, I want to distinguish digital research in dance studies, which is an emerging area of inquiry, from the long-established field of dance-technology. Each represents different intellectual genealogies, political and philosophical investments, and motivating questions” (Bench 2).

Dance studies research is a multidisciplinary field that amalgamates critical knowledge from cultural studies and various critical theories, combining them with methodologies and tools from diverse disciplines. Including digital humanities methodologies and tools further expands the scope of inquiry and analysis. This interdisciplinary approach enables a more comprehensive examination of dance, providing deeper insights into its cultural, social, and historical dimensions. According to Blades and DeLahunta, digital aptitude is crucial for combining the right questions and frameworks with appropriate digital tools. This skill ensures that the chosen methodologies align with the research objectives, thus enhancing the accuracy and depth of analysis. Understanding this interplay is essential for conducting robust and innovative research in the digital humanities.

This exploratory study brings together perspectives from performance studies, cultural studies, and dance studies, weaving them together into an approach that is both ethnographic and digitally informed. This methodological blend enables a multifaceted exploration of performance as both a cultural practice and a spatially embedded event.

Mapping and Visualisation in Dance Research

Although not yet an integral part of contemporary dance research, mapping and visualisation techniques are increasingly being adopted by researchers. Several dance projects, driven mainly by curiosity, utilise digital tools to investigate the role of digital methods in understanding dance as a practice and in unravelling the choreographic process. The Synchronous Objects project (Shaw), in collaboration with renowned choreographer William Forsythe, utilises visualisation to explore multifaceted aspects of dance, serving as an interactive tool that offers speculative insight into motion paths, spatial relationships, and other choreographic structures. The Motion Bank Project (Bleeker) employs advanced digitising techniques to transform dancers’ movements into data. This project uses visualisation as a tool to analyse movement patterns within the choreography of different guest choreographers. According to U. Hinrichs et al., visualisation in their projects has been an aesthetic provocation, a speculative process, and a mediator in building interdisciplinary discourses, emphasising the “research thinking through the creation of visualization” (i81). Some recent studies have utilised cartographic visualisation to represent and examine different performative cultures. Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit, in their collaborative work “Movement on the Move”, discuss the “dynamic spatial histories of the movement” and document the tours of two performing groups during the two World Wars. They connected the historical travel database and the map adjacent to the narrative interpretation to understand the convergences in travel patterns, audience demographics, and infrastructural elements. A project titled ‘Chhau Mapping in Purulia District’ was undertaken in 2022 by Sidho-Kanho-Birsa University, Purulia, West Bengal, in collaboration with the Department of Information and Culture, Govt. of West Bengal. Under this project, the Chhau teams in the Purulia district were mapped, showing a block-wise distribution of various teams throughout the region. However, the present study takes it further to understand the geographical reach of the different Purulia Chhau teams in contemporary times and analyse the factors facilitating it.

The literature revealed a lack of mapping practices in dance studies that address folk/indigenous dance forms and their geographical mobility patterns in the Global South. Most referenced projects originate from Western institutions and address Euro-American performance histories. Such Western mapping projects have attempted to create a spatial history of the movement of a few popular dance companies. It sparked our curiosity to explore the spatiotemporal aspects of dance, particularly in the Indian context, through the movements of folk dance teams. The existing mapping practices tend to present a static distribution, often limited to mere cataloguing of dance teams on a map. The literature revealed a persistent gap in methodological integration between spatial data visualisation and cultural/ethnographic interpretation. This pioneering study examines how interpretive performance mapping can reflect the socio-cultural realities of the folk performance practitioners and their communities.

Methodology

This study combines ethnographic methods, such as interviews, alongside digital humanities tools such as GIS, to examine the performance ecology of Purulia Chhau. Qualitative insights from interviews link the performance sites with a contextual understanding of mobility patterns and constraints. The quantitative dataset of performance locations and dates enable the detection of the mobility patterns, performance hotspots and temporal dynamics. Together, they offer a layered understanding. The digital humanities tool employed here is “data-assisted”, which, according to Varela, is “closer to a constructivist view of knowledge, where every piece of data is observer dependent” (8). In this study as well, the reconstruction of performance records through interviews, receipts, and diaries exemplifies this co-creative process. The data was not pre-existing but was collaboratively assembled and spatialized with the help of the community.

Below is the detailed workflow pipeline of the methodology (see Figure 3), which can serve as a template for similar performance-mapping studies.

Figure 3

The methodological pipeline of the study.

The methodological pipeline illustrates the overall research process, integrating fieldwork, data processing, and analysis. The subsequent subsections elaborate on these stages, describing how different methods and tools were applied within the broader research framework.

Sampling, Period and Calendar

The temporal scope of the study corresponds to one complete Bengali calendar year, from 1 Baishakh 1429 (14 April 2022) to 30 Chaitra (13 April 2023). This period was chosen because COVID-19 restrictions had largely eased, allowing performances to resume. A year-long dataset was compiled to encompass the full cycle of festivals and seasons that structure the performance calendar. The fieldwork and data collection were conducted in September 2023. The research began with a list of 150 teams shared by the District Information Office of Purulia, along with a few teams from adjacent parts of Jharkhand that practised Purulia Chhau. After a series of outreach efforts and communication, and considering both the availability of the performance record and the team’s willingness to participate, twenty-five teams (including both men’s and women’s teams) were finalised for the study.

Data Collection: Performance Records

Data on each performance included: the date (in the Bengali calendar), location (village, block, district, state) and the teams’ basic information. These were collected via a combination of methods:

• i. Interviews and direct contact with team managers and performers, asking them to reconstruct the performance list.

• ii. Consulting booking receipts, diaries, and the manager’s pocket diaries. (See Figure 4 (a) and (b))

• iii. Cross-referencing multiple sources when the records were fragmented.

Figure 4

(a) Image of the performance record registers maintained by team Jay Baba Locknach Chhau Nach Samiti (Shared by team).

Figure 4

(b) Image of the performance record chart maintained by team Gobindapur Natraj Chhau Nritya Party.

As many teams discarded older records or kept multiple informal notebooks, reconstructing complete annual lists required patience, triangulations, and follow-ups. Some teams had data missing for multiple months, making their yearly records incomplete. In such cases, the records of those teams were excluded. This process took the form of a document-based participatory mapping exercise, where team members themselves contributed by sharing and interpreting their own written traces (receipts, diaries, and notes). Unlike conventional participatory workshops, this method innovatively engages the community documents as spatial data sources, aligning with participatory digital humanities practices.

Alongside spatial data, semi-structured interviews were conducted with team managers, performers, and organisers to collect qualitative data. The interview themes included: decision criteria for accepting bookings, logistical constraints, seasonal and agricultural constraints, and inter-team competition. These data helped interpret the visualisations created.

Geocoding and Spatial Data Preparation

After gathering place names, we standardised spelling and administrative levels (village/block/district/state) to minimise ambiguity. It was also difficult and time-consuming to translate their handwritten records into English. Later, coordinates for each location were manually recorded using tools and websites such as Google Earth, Google Maps, and the Indian Village Directory (https://villageinfo.in/). For ambiguous or incomplete place names, we returned to team contacts for clarification.

Out of 1,400 collected performances, 1,223 could be located and plotted; the remainder were retained in the database but excluded from spatial visualisation. The geocoding step is crucial, but it introduces potential location errors or bias (especially in remote or ambiguously named locations).

Database Curation and Cleaning

Tabular databases were created for each team in .csv format, which formed different layers of the point map (See Figure 5). It involved translating all place names from Bengali to English, standardising administrative hierarchies, and deduplicating entries (removing obvious duplicates).

Figure 5

Tabular dataset created for a Purulia Chhau team in .csv format.

Spatial Visualisation and Analysis

For visualisation, the QGIS 3.22 Białowieża LTR (https://www.qgis.org) version was used. The maps were designed as a layered interface, with OpenStreetMap (OSM) as the reference layer. For layers marking the different levels of administrative boundaries, the shapefiles were sourced from the official mapping agency, the Survey of India (https://onlinemaps.surveyofindia.gov.in). Finally, the .csv file with spatial data was added as a vector layer. Given the nature and granularity of our data, two primary visualisation strategies were adopted:

• i. Point maps: to display individual performance locations across the study region, allowing visual inspection of spatial spread, clustering, and outliers.

• ii. Heat maps: to represent relative density in particular months, highlighting hotspots in performance concentration.

Maps were cropped to the relevant regions (West Bengal and Jharkhand) to focus attention on the core performance zones. For months with more than 100 performances, separate heat maps were generated, with darker tones denoting higher frequency. The kernel radius and classification breaks were chosen according to standard cartographic practice to maintain clarity and avoid over-smoothing.

Validity, Biases and Limitations

The study faced certain limitations. Some teams lacked complete diaries, which could lead to potential recall bias or omissions. There is also a possibility of occasional geolocation errors due to ambiguous place names. The dataset may have a selection bias, as it reflects only those teams that maintained written records and were willing to share them. The lack of precise addresses limited spatial analysis to a village or district scale. Acknowledging the interpretive nature of maps, shaped by visual and cartographic choices, these issues were mitigated through transparent data handling, triangulations and the integration of qualitative insights alongside spatial findings.

Findings

This section brings the living geography of Purulia Chhau performance into focus. Using GIS-based visualisations alongside ethnographic insights, the analysis traces where and when performances occur, the rhythms that shape touring patterns, and the socio-economic factors influencing them.

Spatial Distribution Across the Region

The visual illustration of the performance locations using a point map is presented below.

The spatial distribution revealed strong clusters in Purulia and the adjoining districts of Jharkhand (See Figures 6 and 7). After close observation, it was noted that areas in Jharkhand, including Ranchi, Saraikela Kharsawan, Bokaro, East Singhbhum, Tata, and Khunti, hosted numerous Chhau performances throughout the year. Based on this pattern, speculations can be made on the history of Purulia Chhau. These areas correspond to the former Manbhum district of British India (Bhattacharya 1) or are adjacent to some of these districts. The Manbhum district under British rule comprised Purulia (West Bengal) and some districts of present-day Jharkhand (Dhanbad, Bokaro, Ranchi, Saraikela Kharsawan, and East Singhbhum). Manbhum was a shared cultural zone that was later divided by language into West Bengal and Jharkhand. (See Figure 8).

Figure 6

Point map of Purulia Chhau Performance for Baishakh 1429 to Chaitra 1429 (14^th April 2022 to 13^th April 2023). The map is zoomed in to show areas witnessing a considerable number of performances.

Figure 7

Point map of Purulia Chhau for Baishakh 1429 to Chaitra 1429 (14^th April 2022 to 13^th April 2023) zoomed in to cover the performances within the Purulia region of West Bengal.

Figure 8

O’Malley, L. S. S. Skeleton Map of Bengal Province. 1917. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:19s_Bengal_province_map.jpg. Accessed 29 May 2025.

Although Manbhum has been effaced from the map, the people have continued to share their love for Chhau. Mahato and Singh titled their edited volume of essays on Purulia Chhau as ‘Manbhoomiya Chhau’, which translates to Chhau of the Manbhum region. The geopolitical boundary does not restrict or limit the reach and reception of Purulia Chhau. The findings affirm that Purulia Chhau is defined by its performative style rather than by its fixed geography. Although Jharkhand has its distinct variety of Chhau, known as Saraikela Chhau, Purulia Chhau continues to thrive across its various regions.

The collected data also indicated that most performance locations are situated in rural areas, suggesting a strong presence and cultural significance in rural landscapes. Data also reveals that most of the performance troupes hail from rural areas. Chhau performers are mostly involved in agricultural activities and gather at day’s end to practice Chhau with their fellow performers. Chhau may not be their main source of livelihood, but their passion for Chhau sustains the art and contributes to its growing visibility and popularity, while several ICH practices face degradation or disappearance due to urbanisation.

Temporal Variations Across Months

While deeply rooted in rural soil, Purulia is far from unchanging. Every folk tradition evolves with its people, adapting to new livelihoods, altered calendars, and shifting performance space. In this context, the temporal rhythms of performances across the Bengali year offer valuable insight into how the form adapts to changing conditions of livelihood and festivity. The month-wise time series of performance reveals a clear seasonal cyclical rhythm (See Figure 9).

Figure 9

Month-wise performance distribution chart for the Bengali year 1429 (14^th April 2022 to 13^th April 2023).

Performances peak during Falgun to Jaistha (spring to summer), following the harvest, decline in Ashadh to Bhadra (monsoon), and rise again in Maagh to Falgun (winter to spring), with fairs and cool weather conducive to outdoor gatherings.

Although Chhau had traditionally been linked to Charak puja and Shiv gajan, the data show that the performances now spans the entire year. After the decline in the monsoon season, notable activity resumes with Durga Puja (Ashwin to Kartik month), a major Hindu festival widely celebrated in West Bengal. According to team managers, bookings are also received nowadays for several other festivals, fairs, awareness programs, and celebratory occasions.

Month-wise heatmaps were created for the months with more than 100 performances to better illustrate clustering. Again, focusing on the areas of Jharkhand and West Bengal, the heatmaps for the months of Baishakh, Jaistha, Maagh, Falgun and Chaitra are presented below as Figures 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14, respectively. In these heatmaps, darker shades indicate a higher density of performances in the region relative to the total number of performances for each month.

Figure 10

Purulia Chhau Performance Map of the select teams for the month of Baishakh 1429 (14^th April 2022 to 14^th May 2022).

Figure 11

Purulia Chhau Performance Map of the select teams for the month of Jaistha 1429 (15^th May 2022 to 14^th June 2022).

Figure 12

Purulia Chhau Performance Map of the select teams for the month of Maagh 1429 (16^th January 2023 to 15^th February 2023).

Figure 13

Purulia Chhau Performance Map of the select teams for the month of Falgun 1429 (16^th February 2023 to 16^th March 2023).

Figure 14

Purulia Chhau Performance Map of the select teams for the month of Chaitra 1429 (17^th February 2023 to 13^th March 2023).

The heatmaps of Baishakh, Jaistha, Maagh, Falgun, and Chaitra clearly display the performance hotspots consistently centred on Purula or the border district. These patterns show a clear regional popularity of Purulia Chhau in the area. Other factors responsible for this pattern can be understood when considered in conjunction with the findings presented in the next subsection.

Mobility, Economy and Cultural Continuity

The interview-based findings presented here substantiate other findings. Interviews with various team managers revealed a tight link between mobility and practical constraints, such as travel distance, time, and vehicle availability. This shapes how often performances occur. Some teams accept bookings at two different venues on the same day, provided the venues are within a few hours’ range from each other. They perform at one event in the evening and at another late at night. Generally, each team owns a mini truck that facilitates their commute, transporting all performers, costumes, instruments and props to each location. Travelling too far reduces the number of possible daily bookings. This reflects in the performance location clustering. However, a few teams accept long-distance bookings, travelling by train to perform in other states for special occasions. In such cases, the travel fare is also added to the booking charges. This is relatively uncommon and limited to a handful of well-established troupes who have the requisite connections to arrange out-of-state performances.

The booking charges vary according to travel distance, performance occasion and public demand for the team. Typically, the fee ranges from 18,000 INR to 25,000 INR for events within a 200-300 km radius, increasing to around 35,000 INR for longer distances. Given that Chhau is a UNESCO-recognised ICH, performance bookings are also facilitated by various government organisations and NGOs. These organisations aim to offer visibility, support and better pay, but the lengthy, complex, and often delayed reimbursement process deters participation. The majority of performers come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and depend on immediate earnings. As a result, they prioritise private bookings over government-sponsored cultural events. However, the Government of West Bengal extends its support to folk art practitioners through the Lok Prasar Prakalpa(LPP) scheme, offering them a monthly honorarium alongside performance opportunities. This helps ensure the sustainability of the art form and of the practitioners.

Discussion

The findings presented reveal how folk performance traditions continuously reshape their spatial and temporal boundaries. The GIS-based visualisation revealed that this folk tradition cannot be reduced to a single location or occasion. The variation noted throughout the year requires an understanding of the social, cultural, economic, and agricultural determinants that govern everyday life and influence when and where performance occurs. Although it gives important insights about the folk tradition as well as its practitioners, it raises attention to a more profound methodological tension. What happens when we attempt to map something that is inherently ephemeral and performative?

The practice of mapping has traditionally been associated with tangible cultural assets, such as monuments, archaeological sites, or heritage landscapes. Heritage mapping primarily evolved as a state-driven exercise to catalogue (Taylor and Lennon). The UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage expanded the notion to include oral traditions, performing arts, rituals, and traditional knowledge systems. However, the mapping efforts largely focus on producing lists of folk forms, artisans or cultural clusters. These initiatives promote preservation, but they risk treating living practices as artefacts, thus reproducing the colonial modes of cataloguing. UNESCO adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (CSICH) at its 32nd General Conference in 2003. Brown expresses his concerns regarding it, saying, “The convention portrays intangible heritage as an objectified resource amenable to modern management techniques. In such a legislative vision, heritage cannot be protected until it is thoroughly documented” (48).

The Western framework for ensuring preservation activities often doesn’t sit well with South Asian cultures. Adopting general methods to a diverse range of intangible cultural heritage risks underrepresentation of certain aspects of the form. In their paper, on the mapping of the ICH in the historic city of Nashik, India, Deshpande and Gangopadhyay mention five different domains of ICH mapping: oral traditions and expressions, performing arts, social practices, rituals and festive events, traditional craftsmanship, knowledge and practice concerning nature and the universe (3804). Within the five ICH domains, performing arts constitute the lowest percentage (5%) of total mapping attempts. Lack of studies confirms such underrepresentation. Performance is inherently ephemeral, and existing attempts to map ephemeral events remain limited. A research project titled “Mapping Ephemerality” (Chattopadhyay) maps Durga Puja pandals or pavilions across the city of Kolkata, India, which are set up during the festival. However, such projects largely fall under the domain of urban planning and architectural studies, emphasising logistics and temporary infrastructure rather than cultural practice.

The limited attention to performance and other cultural practices in Indian mapping projects reflects a broader issue: most mapping practices continue to rely on a Western framework. Following a Western framework for preservation extends their epistemic control on defining what is mappable and who maps it. However, participatory mapping allows communities some degree of agency, enabling their knowledge and experience to inform how cultural spaces are represented. La Frenierre discusses various participatory mapping techniques, including sketch mapping, Scale mapping, Photomaps, Participatory GIS (PGIS), and Participatory 3-Dimensional Modelling (P3DM), as well as the advantages of community participation. Participatory mapping typically involves community workshops or collaborative exercises, often facilitated by government agencies or heritage institutions. This study adopted a new approach. Rather than organising a mapping workshop, it employs a document-based participatory method, drawing on the troupe’s own records such as diaries, receipts, charts and even registers. These locally produced documents allow the performance itineraries to be constructed from within the cultural practice itself. This approach retains the participatory ethos of mapping by privileging local temporalities and perspectives, even in the absence of formal participatory sessions. This study demonstrates how archival materials can function as alternative sites of participation and knowledge co-production.

Within the framework of postcolonial digital humanities (Risam), such a methodological choice represents a decolonial intervention into the epistemic structures that shape digital representation. Postcolonial Digital Humanities (PDH) scholars question what is digitised, how it is structured, categorised, and temporally framed. By retaining the vernacular temporality of the Bengali calendar months instead of translating them into the Gregorian system, this study resists fitting into the homogenising framework of Western data regimes. This decision foregrounds local ritual and seasonal cycles as a valid temporal framework, as the festivals, agricultural rhythms and performance itineraries in Purulia are deeply intertwined with the regional calendar.

This discussion now returns to the questions posed earlier: what is mappable and the implications of mapping something ephemeral and performative. These concepts can be understood through the notions of space and place as presented by de Certeau (117), which are often borrowed in the field of performance studies. He defines place as structure and space as practice. The akhra (the village performance arena) can be seen as both a fixed location and a space brought to life each time performers and audience gather and dance. The space holds traces of emotions, energy, and continuity that linger even after the performance ends. This ongoing process gives rise to what might be called ephemeral cultural space. This ephemeral cultural space lives through repetition and shared experience, rather than permanence or physical walls. The ephemeral traces of the Purulia Chhau performance live on in shared cultural experiences and repetition. These living spaces are dynamic and constantly changing. Thus, ephemeral mappings are not attempts to fix or achieve a tradition in permanent form but to capture its rhythms of change. These changes show the fleeting intersections of time, movement and community that sustain the form. Such mapping practices become less about preservation and more about witnessing. The exploration of ephemeral cultural space also reveals the challenges of representing fluid, embodied traditions through digital methods.

Mapping takes an uneasy position when applied to ICH. Mapping practices convert the dynamic, embodied and lived practices into spatial data. It risks concretising something that is essentially fluid and performative. This act of fixing dynamic cultural expressions into static representations is not neutral but inherently political. It reflects choices about what, how and whose culture is made visible (Harley). Mapping practices in ICH, therefore, should remain reflexive and dialogic and be utilised as a mode of inquiry into the living textures of culture (Duxbury et al.). This study acknowledges these concerns in its visualisation. The maps produced do not claim to capture the totality of the form but trace the ‘ephemeral cultural space’ that emerges through performance and mobility. The study approaches mapping not as a conclusive representation but as an interpretive act (Harley), where meaning emerges through the interaction between spatial data and its broader social, cultural, and economic context. Thus, visualisation here is not a mere spatial description but a tool for cultural interpretation.

Challenges and Limitations

This study encountered several challenges during different phases. These challenges are particular to rural India and other Global South countries that differ significantly from those faced in data-rich Global North environments. It highlights broader infrastructural, methodological and epistemological issues that arise when DH methods are applied to rural cultural practices.

Digital Humanities (DH) projects in India face significant obstacles due to the uneven development of research infrastructure. Shanmugapriya and Menon point out major underlying infrastructural limitations— such as inadequate training, limited DH laboratories, restricted access to digital tools, and weak institutional, funding and policy support. They also acknowledge improvisation, collaboration, and individual initiative as predominant modes of practice in the absence of institutional systems or support. This absence leads to “double labour” (Bala et al.) involved in the production of Indian DH projects, in which scholars simultaneously conduct humanities research as well as, most often independently, acquire technical expertise to produce, manage, present, and sustain the research output digitally. As a result, we acknowledge that the development of DH projects in India face particular hurdles, where the progress of the projects unfolds unevenly when set against the Global North.

These infrastructural constraints resonate with broader debates within Global South DH, highlighting the uneven distribution of research resources. These constraints compound when we turn to GIS-based studies in the Global South, where access to and quality of spatial data pose distinct challenges. Digital mapping in the Global North operates within well-established geospatial datasets and an interoperable metadata framework that are frequently updated, standardised, and open to the public. However, researchers working in rural India often deal with fragmented, outdated, and non-downloadable spatial data with restricted access. Thus, GIS-based studies in India have largely focused on urban planning, archaeology, urban heritage management and smart city planning, where machine-readable data are more readily available. Unlike scholars working in a rural cultural context, as they first construct the very data infrastructure required for analysis. These infrastructural limitations are not just technical but reflect deeper inequalities in the systems through which knowledge is produced, organised, and made accessible (Malazita). The experience of mapping Purulia Chhau thus illustrates how epistemic infrastructures shape which cultural phenomena can be digitally analysed and have remained underrepresented within spatial humanities research.

A useful comparison can be drawn between a European project and our own study conducted in the rural Global South research landscape. The European project, Mapping the Moment: Performance Culture in Nottingham, 1857-67 (Robinson et al.), studies the geographical performance history of performance culture in Nottingham over a decade using data collected from newspaper reports and advertisements by the performance venues. In contrast, collecting and preparing data suitable for DH research in the rural Indian context requires extensive labour. Due to the lack of archival infrastructure and newspaper coverage, the records are usually fragmented or lost. Moreover, most records were maintained in Bengali and contained variant spellings and phonetic inconsistencies. Collecting, translating, and chronologically arranging year-long performance records required substantial labour and close collaboration, which negatively affected some teams’ interest in participating in our study, thus limiting our dataset. Uncritical reliance on the Western framework can create significant hurdles to the adoption of DH methods aligned with local and indigenous frameworks. Thus, we had to navigate through epistemological challenges arising from the methodological decisions made during data preparation. While we standardised location names in English to ensure compatibility with GIS software and mapping platforms, the temporal records were deliberately not converted into the Gregorian calendar. The Bengali calendar system was retained as it aligned with the vernacular performance cycles, which are closely tied to the agrarian seasons, ritual calendars and festival cycles. This was a crucial decision to disrupt the hierarchical gap between global methods and local knowledge systems. Instead of perpetuating this hierarchy and conforming to the Western framework, our approach inverts the process by adapting it to serve and amplify local knowledge systems rather than the other way around.

The geocoding phase of the study revealed another layer of challenge due to the limitations of geospatial portals and services. Online mapping services like Google Earth and Google Maps are largely optimised for urban centres and administrative locations, and often return incomplete, incorrect or no results for smaller settlements. This challenge led us to the Indian Village Directory website (https://villageinfo.in/), which provided a census-based list of villages and their locations via a Google Maps hyperlink for each village page, enabling quick confirmation and access to the coordinates of the identified village. As this website generates results in village-block-district-state format with standardised spelling, and our study is based on village-level location details provided by performing groups, the website proved useful for geocoding more than 1,200 locations with meticulous effort. However, this website is based on 2011 Census data and needs to be updated. For spatial research on a more granular level, i.e. smaller villages, mauza or cadastral revenue units, and land parcels within the administrative village, one needs to visit the block administrative office to get detailed and updated records. These records are not digitised, often maintained in vernacular languages, and can exhibit inconsistencies when compared across departments. Additional challenges may arise from the limited availability of digitised maps compatible with GIS software. Survey of India is India’s national mapping agency and provides maps at multiple administrative levels. It provides shapefiles that store the location, shape and attributes of geographic features used in GIS software. National, state and district-level downloadable shapefiles are publicly accessible upon formal registration. However, some sub-district-level shapefiles may require an official request or may be unavailable. Further, the Survey of India does not provide publicly downloadable village or mouza-level shapefiles. Researchers working at such a granular level might need to visit State Revenue departments, Land Records departments, or their websites. These divisions also have scanned copies or paper cadastral maps, but those are non-georeferenced or lack coordinate details. In the absence of publicly downloadable shapefiles, research can adopt alternative strategies such as GPS-based (Global Positioning System) site recording or centroid-based spatial approximation to represent village locations. Manual digitisation becomes unavoidable when working at such a micro level, given the lack of infrastructural support. This highlights the infrastructural limitations to spatial data access in Indian rural contexts. Recognising these constraints, the Government of India has announced the National Geospatial Policy 2022, with a long-term goal of democratising and liberalising access to geospatial data, promoting innovation and facilitating its extensive use across industry, academia, and governance by 2035 (Government of India 2022). The data processing phase underscores that scholars working in rural contexts must build the data infrastructure required for analysis. As a result, the research process involves not only interpretation but also the labour of reconstructing a spatial dataset from fragmented sources. The researcher experiences systemic barriers that put them in a position of structural inequality in the knowledge production process.

These constraints illustrate how spatial humanities research in a rural context requires substantial preparatory labour before analytical mapping is possible. It highlights how digital knowledge production depends on underlying epistemic infrastructures-the systems through which spatial data are produced, organised, and made accessible (Malazita). As we moved into the analysis, we realised that simply plotting coordinates on a map risked stripping the practice of its depth. Purulia Chhau is shaped by relationships, rituals and moments that cannot be fully captured as dots on screen. This understanding pushed us beyond the technical map. It draws on ideas from different disciplines to explain what the map is actually doing in this study and how it helps us engage with a cultural space that is fluid, lived, and temporary. We discussed this imperative grounding more fully in the discussion section, where we explain how the maps should be read not as literal representations but as one way of understanding an inherently ephemeral cultural world.

The study began with the hope of collecting complete records from numerous troupes to gain a deeper understanding of their performance culture and compare regional popularity and audience engagement factors. However, several well-known teams were unwilling or unable to share their complete datasets, and relying on partial information, such an analysis would have led to misleading conclusions. Meaningful comparisons of this kind will only become possible when communities have the support and tools to maintain clearer records of when, where, and what they perform. Such documentation can reveal how audience engagement is changing, how groups navigate the space between ritual and commercial practices, and the pressures of commercialisation. While grounded in the case of Purulia Chhau, the methodological strategies developed in this study illustrate how spatial humanities research can adapt to work within rural cultural landscapes where granular geospatial datasets remain unavailable. In the end, what began as a curious exploration of performance locations grew into a deeper understanding of how the community lives, shapes and sustains its performance culture and space.

Conclusion

This exploratory case study on the spatio-temporal patterns of Purulia Chhau performance highlights the complexities of mapping folk/indigenous traditions in the Global South. This study demonstrates that mapping the performance ecology reveals far more than the geographical spread, unravelling the relationship between performance, place and community. ICH has no existence independent of the communities it represents. This study promotes active community participation and collaborative mapping practices as acts of the knowledge-making process rather than as detached documentation of culture. The conceptual articulation of ephemeral cultural space offers a theoretical lens for future cultural mapping projects. It invites a shift from a preservationist approach to understanding heritage practice as a living and evolving process. The study represents mapping movement across time and space as a means of interpretation rather than a paradoxical act of fixing movement. Such a perspective opens possibilities for reimagining how intangible heritage can be represented, safeguarded and studied in the digital era. For the study of intangible cultural heritage in the Global South, this pioneering work affirms that innovation lies not merely in technological adoption but also in rethinking how knowledge is co-produced, visualised, and valued.

Methodologically, the study advances an innovative document-based participatory mapping approach. By documenting the mobility of Purulia Chhau, this study proposes a methodological framework for spatial humanities research in a data-scarce context. By reconstructing performance locations from fragmented local records, retaining vernacular temporal frameworks, and employing centroid-based spatial approximation in the absence of village-level shapefiles, the study demonstrates how spatial metadata can be built from the ground up in rural cultural landscapes. This approach shifts digital mapping from reliance on institutional datasets to a participatory, document-based reconstruction of intangible networks. This has a broader relevance for research across the Global South, where granular datasets are often unavailable. Similar strategies could be applied to map the itineraries of different travelling theatres, pilgrimage routes, ritual circuits or seasonal cultural gatherings or processions that remain poorly documented within formal archives.

The scope of future research lies in extending this research through long-term datasets to trace how folk cultures evolve, how their geographies expand and contract and how various socioeconomic factors, cultural shifts and technological influences contribute to these changes. Such long-term insights, however, depend on stronger documentation practices among the folk performing troupes. Government-supported workshops and training initiatives can help practitioners understand and adopt systematic record-keeping methods. With consistent, detailed data, policymakers would be better equipped to design informed strategies to support, sustain, and revitalise intangible cultural heritage. Strengthening these collaborative infrastructures can significantly transform the study and safeguarding of ICH in the Global South.

Appendix

Date Conversion chart for Bengali year 1429 to Gregorian months:

Acknowledgement

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.