The show must go on: How a 200-year-old Konkan Art form is finding new patrons

By Manish Dalvi, Chairman, Sindhudurg District Central Co-operative Bank

On a bus purchased under a government scheme and backed by financial support from a district cooperative bank, fifteen artists from a Vengurla-based Dashavatar troupe now travel between performances in a comfort their predecessors never knew. A generation ago, performers walked for miles between villages, costumes and props strapped to their backs.

Doing this kept alive a 200-year old folk theatre tradition rooted in devotion to Ganesha and Vishnu. Today, this folk art form is being sustained by an unlikely institutional ally- the Sindhudurg District Central Cooperative Bank (SDCC).

The bank has sanctioned loans to 15 Dashavatar troupes across the district, specifically to help performers travel to shows. It is, bank officials say, a recognition that Dashavatar is an active, working profession, one that still stages 150 to 200 performances a year across villages in Sindhudurg and the wider Konkan belt. Hence, its economic survival depends on artists being able to reach their audiences. 

“Cooperative banking has traditionally meant crop loans and cattle loans. Extending that thinking to a folk art form’s travel needs is a genuinely new kind of cultural infrastructure.”, said Manish Dalvi, chairman of the bank. 

From Single Owner to Shared Enterprise

The bus itself came through the state’s Sindhuratna Yojana, a scheme that subsidised 75% of the vehicle’s cost. For the Vengurla troupe, the bus was priced at Rs 24 lakh, with the scheme covering Rs 18 lakh, leaving the Dashavatar company to arrange the remaining Rs 6 lakh on its own. This is where the scheme threatened to stall as banks were reluctant to finance a folk-theatre troupe’s contribution, uncertain how to underwrite a performance group with no land, gold or conventional collateral to offer against it.

It was SDCC that stepped in, led by its chairman Manish Dalvi, facilitating the financial support the troupe needed to meet its ₹6 lakh share and ensuring the company could complete its contribution and actually get the benefits of the subsidy rather than lose it to a funding gap. 

The loan reflects a larger shift underway in how Dashavatar sustains itself. For generations, troupes operated under a single owner-manager model: one person held the rights to costumes, masks and bookings, and paid artists a modest honorarium per show. After the pandemic upended the performance calendar and squeezed already-thin margins, a group of 15 artists in Vengurla broke entirely from that structure. They formed an equal-partnership collective, formally registered as a cultural and educational mandal, in which decisions, earnings and risk are shared among the performers themselves.

It was this registered collective that the cooperative bank extended credit to, a detail that matters as much as the loan amount itself. A Cooperative lending to a folk-theatre collective, secured against future bookings rather than land or gold, is a small but telling experiment in what financial inclusion can look like outside the usual categories of farming, small business and housing.

Before the bus, the troupe’s finances were dictated by geography. Shows in interior villages, reachable only by foot or by hired transport the group could barely afford, were often turned down. Not for lack of demand, but for lack of a reliable way to get a dozen artists, their costumes and their musical instruments there and back the same night. With their own vehicle, the troupe can now accept bookings further afield, run more shows in a season and keep artists paid through months that used to go lean.

A Precarious Art, Kept Alive by Its Own

None of this erases the underlying fragility of the form. Honorariums remain modest even in a good season. There is no government subsidy scheme built for Dashavatar the way there is for some other regional art forms. Much of what keeps a performance visually and spiritually authentic- hand-painted mask, elaborate costumes signifying gods, demons and kings, musical instruments- is still paid for out of artists’ own pockets.

Performers describe the late-night shows, which can run until dawn, less as a job than as an inherited devotion: to Ganesha, to the tradition and to audiences who still gather in numbers to watch stories drawn from mythology performed live, as they have been for two centuries. 

What has changed is who else is willing to invest in that devotion. SDCC’s decision to bridge the gap that a state subsidy left open suggests that regional financial institutions can function as cultural infrastructure, simply by treating a folk-theatre collective as a creditworthy enterprise like any other. For a form that has survived without state patronage for two centuries, that kind of ordinary institutional recognition may matter more than any single subsidy.

Other district cooperative banks, and other folk art forms across India facing similar economics, may find in Sindhudurg’s example a model worth borrowing- extending credit to artists as the working professionals they already are.