‘We learnt this from our grandmothers’: Telangana revives a decade-old rain ritual

In Nednur village of Rangareddy district’s Kandukur mandal, women gathered this week to perform ‘kappa aata’, a rain-invoking frog ritual that had not been needed for a decade until Telangana’s current monsoon shortfall brought it back. The village sits barely 48 kilometres from Hyderabad’s IT hubs, yet its farming remains entirely dependent on rainfall that, this year, has not arrived on schedule.

The ritual involved tying a live frog to a small wooden stick, decorating it with turmeric and vermilion, and carrying it in procession through every street of the village while women sang traditional rain-invoking folk songs. Villagers joined the procession as it passed, offering prayers for rainfall, healthy crops and an end to the dry conditions gripping their fields. The custom is built on the belief that frogs serve as messengers to the rain gods; villagers place them on bamboo frames and sprinkle water over them to induce croaking, later gathering rice and other essentials for a shared community feast.

‘We learnt these traditions from our grandmothers. There was no need to perform them over the past decade. Now, we are once again invoking the rain god,’ said Anjamma, one of the women involved in the ritual, describing a custom passed down through generations that had simply not been required in recent years.

The last comparable wave of such rituals across Telangana came in 2016, when recurring droughts and rainfall deficits pushed several communities toward similar prayers. That need eased over the following decade as monsoons stayed largely favourable, until this year’s shortfall — which has crossed 60% in parts of Rangareddy district — brought the tradition back. Maize, Nednur’s principal crop, remains unsown across large stretches of farmland as a result.

Farmers in the village describe real anxiety about what happens if rain does not come soon. ‘We are witnessing a situation like this after a decade. We never had to pray to the rain god as he was kind to us. If rains do not arrive within the next week, it will be a huge loss for us,’ said Mutyal Reddy, a farmer in the area. Another resident, who has two acres of unsown land, said the government should step in to compensate villagers for the agricultural work already completed this season.

Nednur is not alone in reviving these customs. Kappa aata has also returned in villages across Jangaon, Jagtial and Karimnagar districts, while communities in Mulugu have taken up Varadapasham, offering sweet rice on sacred rocks and eating it without hands as an act of humility, and villagers in Suryapet district have performed Vanavasam, gathering in nearby forests to pray together for rain before sharing a communal meal.

Wikimedia Commons/by Vinay kumar malyam upadyaya