This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Many of the religious stage traditions in this atlas survive today through a single remaining troupe or a single guardian temple. Yakshagana is the sharp exception. Coastal Karnataka and the neighboring Kasaragod district of Kerala together support an estimated twelve thousand yakshagana performances every year, a scale that puts the tradition closer to a living regional theatre industry than to an endangered ritual art, staged both at temple festivals through the night, in its older devotional form, and increasingly in shorter commercial performances aimed at paying audiences with less time to spare.
That commercial adaptation has not been universally welcomed within the tradition, and performers and scholars differ over how much a shortened, ticketed yakshagana show can preserve of the all night temple original's pacing, its extended improvised philosophical exchanges, and its function as a devotional offering rather than a paid entertainment. What both forms share, and what distinguishes yakshagana from many of its counterparts elsewhere in this atlas, is that the debate is happening inside a thriving tradition rather than around a vanishing one: the earliest firm documentary trace, a 1556 land grant inscription at the Lakshminarayana temple in Kurugodu, describes an art already established enough to warrant institutional endowment, and nearly five centuries later the same regional theatre is still filling twelve thousand nights a year with paying and worshipping audiences alike.