Under the Kakatiya dynasty in Andhra Pradesh, poet Gona Buddha Reddi was commissioned by his father Vithala Natha to write a script for a play, based on the oral version of Valmiki’s Ramayana, to be performed exclusively by shadow puppeteers. Later, religious texts like the Bhagavata purana, Ramayana and Mahabharata began to be narrated in poetic verse. Traditionally, the plays were performed in Bhajana, a form of congressional worship involving song and dance. As the Vijayanagara empire and Bahmani Sultanate fell, royal patronage to the tradition shrank significantly, and performances became restricted to temple villages, as is still prevalent today. We see a lack of references from the 16th to 20th centuries in shadow puppet performances. In the mid-14th century, the establishment of the Bahmani Sultanate increased the influx of an Islamic population in the region, which in turn led to the wonderful influence of Turkish puppetry on the art form, lending us colourful garments and sumptuous jewellery, as well as long beards on male puppets. Tara, the Queen of Kishkinda and wife of King Vali and later Sugreeva from the Ramayanaīetween the 13th and 15th centuries, under the Vijayanagara Empire, shadow puppetry reached its peak.
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