Tourism Products of India I: The Nature of India's Tourism Products, Tourist Attractions and Their Classification, Indigenous and Colonial Heritage, Handicrafts, Fairs and Festivals, Classical and Folk Dance, Indian Music, Museums, Galleries and Libraries, Cuisine, Rituals and Dress

India's tourism product is marked by diversity and by seasonality. Diversity is its selling point: within one country there are the Himalaya and the Thar, tropical beaches and snow, some of the oldest living religious traditions in the world, the monuments of every period from the Harappan to the colonial, and hundreds of languages, cuisines, crafts and festivals, which is why the product can be packaged in circuits of every theme. Seasonality is its constraint, set by the monsoon and the heat and by the festival calendar, most of which follows the lunar months and so moves against the solar calendar from year to year. Like all tourism products it is a composite, largely intangible and perishable; unlike many it is dominated by heritage and by public goods such as monuments and protected areas that are managed by government bodies.

A tourist attraction is any feature of a place, natural, cultural or created, that draws visitors because they want to see or experience it; it is the "nucleus" of the destination in Leiper's phrase, around which the services cluster. Attractions are classified in several ways: by origin, into natural (mountains, beaches, wildlife), cultural and heritage (monuments, religious sites, museums, living culture) and man-made purpose-built (theme parks, resorts, convention centres); by permanence, into sites, which stay in place, and events, which happen at a time (the Kumbh Mela, a music festival, a cricket match); and by drawing power, into primary attractions that are the reason for the trip and secondary ones visited on the way. John Swarbrooke's widely used scheme has four types: natural features, man-made features not originally designed to attract visitors (a cathedral, a fort), man-made features built to attract visitors (a theme park), and special events.

Heritage is what a society inherits from its past and chooses to keep: tangible heritage (monuments, sites, objects, landscapes) and intangible heritage (performing arts, rituals, crafts skills, knowledge, festivals), the latter recognised by UNESCO's Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of 2003. India's indigenous heritage runs from Harappan cities and Buddhist stupas through temple, fort and palace architecture to living traditions such as Vedic chanting, Kutiyattam, Ramlila, the Kumbh Mela, yoga, Durga Puja in Kolkata and the Garba of Gujarat, all inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage lists. Its colonial heritage is the architecture and townscape of the European powers: Portuguese Goa and its churches, Dutch and Danish trading posts (Tranquebar, Serampore), French Puducherry and Chandernagore, and the British hill stations, cantonments and the Indo-Saracenic and neoclassical buildings of Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and New Delhi.

Folk dances belong to regions and seasons: Bhangra and Giddha in Punjab, Garba and Dandiya Raas in Gujarat at Navratri, Ghoomar and Kalbelia in Rajasthan, Lavani in Maharashtra, Bihu in Assam at the spring harvest, Chhau (a masked martial dance) in Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal, Nati in Himachal Pradesh, Rouf in Kashmir, Dollu Kunitha in Karnataka, Karagattam and Kummi in Tamil Nadu, and Cheraw, the bamboo dance, in Mizoram. The theatre forms are as regional: Yakshagana in coastal Karnataka, Theyyam and the Sanskrit theatre Kutiyattam in Kerala, Jatra in Bengal and Odisha, Tamasha in Maharashtra, Nautanki in Uttar Pradesh, Bhavai in Gujarat and Ramlila across the north; the puppet forms include Kathputli string puppets in Rajasthan and Tholu Bommalata leather shadow puppets in Andhra Pradesh. Chhau, Kalbelia and Mudiyettu of Kerala were inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2010, and Kutiyattam and Ramlila earlier.

Indian classical music has two schools that separated in the medieval period: Hindustani in the north and Carnatic in the south. Both are built on raga (melodic framework) and tala (rhythmic cycle). Hindustani vocal forms include dhrupad, the oldest and most austere; khayal, the dominant form today; and the lighter thumri, tappa and ghazal. Its traditions are carried by gharanas, lineages of style: Gwalior, regarded as the oldest khayal gharana, Agra, Jaipur-Atrauli, Kirana, Patiala and Rampur-Sahaswan among them, and in instrumental music the Maihar gharana of Allauddin Khan, teacher of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. Carnatic music is centred on the composition, the kriti; Purandara Dasa is called its father, and its Trinity are Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri. Principal instruments are the sitar, sarod, santoor, shehnai, bansuri and tabla in the north and the veena, mridangam, violin, nadaswaram and ghatam in the south.

For tourism, music is an event product. The Chennai December music season (the "Margazhi" season), anchored by the Madras Music Academy, is one of the largest classical music festivals in the world, with hundreds of concerts over a few weeks; the Tyagaraja Aradhana at Thiruvaiyaru, the Tansen Samaroh at Gwalior, the Sawai Gandharva festival at Pune, the Dover Lane conference at Kolkata and Saptak at Ahmedabad draw audiences from across India and abroad. Indian music reached global audiences through Ravi Shankar, whose collaboration with George Harrison in the 1960s and appearances at the Monterey (1967) and Woodstock (1969) festivals made the sitar known worldwide, and through performers such as Ali Akbar Khan, Zakir Hussain and A. R. Rahman, whose music for a 2008 film won two Academy Awards. The status of classical music today rests on the guru-shishya tradition, the akademis and broadcasters, festivals and a growing audience on digital platforms.

Rituals and dress are part of what visitors come to see. Rituals range from the evening Ganga aarti on the ghats of Varanasi and Haridwar to temple festivals, life-cycle ceremonies such as weddings, and the rituals of the Sufi shrines. Dress is equally regional: the sari in many drapes, the dhoti and the lungi or mundu, the mekhela chador of Assam, the mundum neriyathum of Kerala, the phiran of Kashmir, the ghagra-choli and bandhej of Rajasthan and Gujarat, the turbans (pagri, pheta, safa) whose style marks region and community, and the dress of the tribal communities of the north-east and central India. Responsible tourism asks visitors to respect dress codes at shrines and to seek consent before photographing rituals.