Udaya

Kolam

கோலம்

Also Rangoli, Muggu, Rangavalli, Alpana, Mandana.

Painting and drawing Tamil Nadu

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What it is#

A kolam is a pattern drawn on the ground at the threshold in rice flour, by hand, every morning before sunrise, and swept or walked away by the end of the day. It is the most widely practised visual art in India by a very long way and the least collected, because the medium is chosen to be temporary. The usual explanation is hospitality to the small: the rice flour feeds ants, birds and insects, so the household’s first act of the day is to give food away. It is drawn by women, learnt from mothers, and in most houses nobody considers it art.

How it is built#

The ground is swept and sprinkled with water or cow dung wash first. A grid of dots, the pulli, is laid out, and the line is then drawn around them without lifting the hand and usually without crossing itself: the sikku kolam, the knotted kind, is a single unbroken loop enclosing every dot. The flour is held in a fist and released between thumb and finger as the hand moves, which is the skill. Margazhi, the cold month, brings the largest kolams, with the kavi red border and a lump of cow dung with a pumpkin flower at the centre. Festival kolams take colour; daily ones do not.

How it is learnt#

The question a family actually has

Learnt at five or six by watching and then by being given a corner. The hand control for an even line takes months and is practised on the ground, never on paper. A girl traditionally learnt a repertoire from her mother and grandmother and carried it to her husband’s house, which is how regional styles travelled and mixed. Many practitioners can draw several hundred from memory, and competitions in Margazhi run to very large designs completed before dawn. There is no formal teaching, no certificate and no fee anywhere in the tradition.

Whose lineage is whose#

Where a claim is contested, by whom

No lineage in the sense the performing arts have: no schools, no gharanas, no named masters. What exist are household repertoires, transmitted matrilineally in practice if not in theory, and strong regional preferences: Tamil kolam is dot based and linear, Andhra muggu often freehand and floral, Bengali alpana brushed in rice paste rather than dropped, Rajasthani mandana painted on walls as well as floors. Mathematicians have studied the sikku kolam as a formal system and found it generates patterns describable by array grammars, which the women drawing them did not need to be told.

Worth knowing#

Why it is made to be destroyed

A kolam is drawn before sunrise and is gone by evening, walked over by everybody entering the house, eaten by ants and birds, swept away. It is remade the next morning. The tradition offers this plainly as the lesson: the work is in the doing and not in the having, and a person who did it to keep it would have misunderstood. It is also the reason almost none of it is in museums and why a practice done daily by tens of millions of women for centuries has almost no documented history.

The empty threshold

A house that draws no kolam one morning is saying something, and the street reads it. No kolam is drawn on the morning of a tarpanam day, during a death in the family, or in the thirteen days of mourning, and a neighbour who sees the doorstep bare knows to come. On Aadi Amavasai and Mahalaya Amavasai the threshold is left undrawn until the rite is done. A daily practice becomes, by its absence, the way a street communicates grief without anybody being told.

Where the regions differ#

  • Tamil
  • Kerala
  • Telugu
  • Kannada
  • North
  • Maharashtra
  • Bengal
  • Punjab
  • Assam
  • Sri Lanka
  • Nepal
  • Gujarat
  • Odisha
  • Mithila
  • Kashmir
  • Tulu Nadu
  • manipur
  • rajasthan
  • konkani
  • sindhi
  • jharkhand
  • himalayan
  • kodava
Where it is kept: 5 of the 23 traditions this app follows. The filled one is where it is from.
Tamil Nadu
Dot based and linear, drawn daily, with the Margazhi kolams the largest of the year and the kavi border; competitions are held through the month.
Andhra and Telangana
Muggu, often freehand and floral, with the Sankranti muggulu the great ones and the gobbemma dung balls set in them.
Karnataka
Rangoli, drawn at the threshold and in the puja room, with the Sankranti and Deepavali designs the largest.
Bengal
Alpana is brushed with rice paste and a cloth or finger rather than dropped as dry flour, and belongs to the vratas and to Lakshmi Puja.
North India
Rangoli in colour for Diwali, and mandana painted on walls and floors in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh with lime and red ochre.

All the arts