Warli painting
वारली चित्रकला
Also Varli, Chauk painting.
Painting and drawing The Sahyadri hills of Maharashtra and Gujarat
What it is
Warli painting is the wall art of the Warli Adivasi people, made by women on the mud walls of a house for weddings and harvests, in white rice paste on a red brown ground. Its vocabulary is extremely restricted: a circle, a triangle and a square, from which every figure is built, so a human is two triangles meeting at a point with a circle for a head. It is not a stylisation of something more detailed; the geometry is the language. It came out of the hills into the art market in the 1970s and is now the most recognisable Indian tribal art in the world.
How it is built
The wall is coated with cow dung and red earth. The paint is rice flour and water with a little gum, applied with a bamboo twig chewed at the end to make a brush. There is no colour. The central image for a wedding is the chauk, a square frame enclosing Palaghata, the mother goddess, and the chauk must be painted by a married woman called a suvasini. Around it the rest of life is drawn in no particular hierarchy: hunting, farming, dancing, animals, trees, and the tarpa dance spiralling outward in a line of linked figures.
How it is learnt
The question a family actually has
Learnt at home from mothers and aunts, from childhood, by watching and then being given part of a wall. There is no teaching outside that in the tradition, and no notion of an artist as a separate person. The market changed this: Jivya Soma Mashe, who painted every day rather than only for ceremonies, was the first to be treated as an individual artist, and a generation after him learnt partly from him and partly from the market. Workshops and courses now exist and produce a decorative version.
Whose lineage is whose
Where a claim is contested, by whom
The form was documented in the 1970s when Bhaskar Kulkarni, the same officer who took Madhubani to paper, came looking for tribal art, and Jivya Soma Mashe became its first named practitioner, winning national awards and exhibiting abroad. Before that it was anonymous, ritual and made by women. After it, the best known Warli artists have been men painting on paper and canvas for sale. The tradition has therefore changed hands, medium and gender inside fifty years, which is stated plainly by Warli artists and less often by the people selling the work.
Worth knowing
Three shapes
Everything in a Warli painting is a circle, a triangle or a square. The circle is the sun and the moon, the triangle is the mountain and the tree, and the square is the enclosure, the human made thing. A person is two triangles joined at the waist. A dancing line of fifty figures around a tarpa player is fifty pairs of triangles and fifty circles. The restriction is not naivety; it is a closed vocabulary used with great sophistication, and the figures convey movement better than most detailed drawing does.
The chauk and the goddess
A wedding requires a chauk, a square containing Palaghata the mother goddess, painted on the wall of the room where the ceremony happens, and it must be painted by a married woman of the village, the suvasini. No wedding happens without it. Everything else in Warli painting is optional and this is not, which is why the form survived: the market version is decoration, and the wall version is a requirement of the ritual, and the second is the reason it was still there to be discovered.
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
- Maharashtra
- Palghar and Thane districts are the home, with the chauk painted for weddings and the market work going out from Dahanu.
- Gujarat
- The Warli population extends into southern Gujarat, with the same tradition and some local variation.
Connected to
Related arts