Rangoli and kolam
The pattern drawn at the threshold at dawn: draw one on a dot grid, see how each region makes it, and find the festival days it is drawn for.
Draw a kolam
Tap a dot, then a neighbouring dot, and keep going without lifting the pen; or take the loop pen and curl a line through the gaps round the dots. Whatever you draw is mirrored.
Grid: rows of 1-3-5-7-5-3-1 dots.
Nothing you draw leaves this page unless you save it.
Read more Show less
A real kolam is drawn by hand in flour, and its line curves round every dot. The straight pen joins dot to dot; the loop pen draws a smooth curve through the gaps you tap, and the weave follows one stated rule. Either way this is a way to see how a grid of dots and a mirror make a pattern, not a copy of the art.
One pattern, many names
Known as Rangoli, Muggu, Rangavalli, Alpana, Mandana, and drawn differently in each place.
Kolam 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.
Muggu Andhra and Telangana
Muggu, often freehand and floral, with the Sankranti muggulu the great ones and the gobbemma dung balls set in them.
Rangoli Karnataka
Rangoli, drawn at the threshold and in the puja room, with the Sankranti and Deepavali designs the largest.
Alpana 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.
Rangoli and mandana The north and the west
Rangoli in colour for Diwali, and mandana painted on walls and floors in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh with lime and red ochre.
How it is made
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.
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.
The days it is drawn for
Every festival whose page says a kolam or rangoli belongs to it, soonest first once your place is known.
- Bhogi
Old mats, broken furniture and the year's rubbish go on a bonfire before dawn, the house is whitewashed and the kolam redrawn.
- Deepavali
On the eve, clean the house, draw a large kolam, and lay the new clothes, the crackers and the sweets on a plate before the gods, with a dab of turmeric on the corner of each garment.
- Mattu Pongal
In the morning take the cattle to the pond, the river or the yard tap and wash them well, hide and hooves; wash out the cattle shed, smear its floor with cow dung and draw a kolam before it.
- Navaratri begins
The nine evenings belong to the women: they go from house to house, sing, are given thamboolam and are honoured as forms of the goddess, and the girls learn the family's songs and kolams this way.
- Pongal · Thai Pongal
Rise before dawn, bathe, put on new clothes, and draw the pongal kolam in the yard: a large one in rice flour with the kaavi border, often with a pot, the sun and sugar cane drawn into it.
- Thiruvathirai · Arudra Darshanam
For the ten mornings before the star, rise before dawn, draw the Margazhi kolam and sing a Tiruvempavai song; many girls keep these days as the Pavai nonbu.
- Aadi Amavasai
Many homes leave the threshold without a kolam that morning and draw it only after the tarpanam is done.
- Aadi Perukku · Pathinettam Perukku
Bathe early, draw a kolam, and cook the kalanda sadham, the mixed rices, packing them into vessels to carry to the river.
- Aadi Pooram
Clean the house and draw a kolam, and in the pooja arai set a picture of Andal, with her parrot and her kondai tilted to one side, or of the family's Amman.
- Amavasai · Amavasya · New moon
In many Tamil homes the day has its own quiet: no kolam is drawn until the tarpanam is done, and nothing new is begun, because the house is in the ancestors' keeping.
- Annapurna Puja
Clean the kitchen and the thakurghar, and draw an alpana of rice paste at the door with ears of paddy and a filled pot.
- Balipratipada · Diwali Padwa
Draw a rangoli at the door, and in many houses shape an image of Bali and his queen from cow dung or rice flour and worship it with flowers and a lamp.
Why it is made to be erased, and when it is left undrawn
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.
More on the art itself: the kolam page, the goddess it welcomes, Lakshmi, and the other arts.