This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Chhau is not one dance but three related traditions that grew up in neighboring pockets of eastern India and never fully converged, even after all three were inscribed together on UNESCO's Representative List in 2010. Seraikella Chhau, from Jharkhand, developed under regional nobility and is danced in serene, stylized masks whose fixed expressions force the performer's entire meaning into posture and movement, since the face itself cannot change. Purulia Chhau, from West Bengal, favors far more elaborate character masks built up by local potters, vividly colored and often startling in scale, suited to the tradition's heavier emphasis on demons, warriors and combat. Mayurbhanj Chhau, from Odisha, drops the mask altogether, relying on the dancer's own face and a movement vocabulary widely regarded as the most technically refined of the three.
What unites the three despite their differences is a shared vocabulary of martial footwork and acrobatic combat sequences, staged after dark in an open ground called an akhada or asar and built around the Chaitra Parva spring festival, alongside a shared repertoire of Hindu epic material spanning the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas told under Shaiva, Shakta and Vaishnava frames depending on the story. A dancer trained in one Chhau style would find much of another style's footwork intelligible and much of its mask work, or its absence, genuinely foreign.